Abstract

In my dissertation I explore the idea of conceptual divergence through a careful examination of Wittgenstein's treatment of scenarios depicting communities with apparently bizarre or eccentric practices. I argue that his consideration of such scenarios, when properly understood, can be seen to undermine the most common philosophical responses by revealing the confusions that attend all three. ;Wittgenstein's interest in the consideration of divergent linguistic communities must be seen as part of his concern to understand the significance of Frege's distinction between logic and psychology. Readings that take his treatment of imaginary scenarios as evidence for attributing to him a philosophical view of the nature of logic fail to appreciate the fact that Wittgenstein offers such scenarios, and encourages reflection upon them, in order to undermine a particular philosophical inflation of Frege's basic distinction. ;I therefore consider in detail Wittgenstein's response to Frege's imagined case of beings "whose laws of thought flatly contradict our own," and argue that he questions its coherence. In order to understand such beings as described we would have to see them as consistently misapplying our concepts; but nothing imagined merits that description because anything that looks like consistent misapplication can be understood as a situation in which our concepts are simply not present. If we do not understand such beings, we cannot take them to be violating any laws of logic or to represent the possibility of alternatives to those laws. ;Wittgenstein's response to Frege leaves open the possibility of conceptual divergence. Relativist readings exploit just this feature, but in doing so they cannot, I argue, make a principled distinction between logical and conceptual divergence. Transcendental idealist readings, in overreacting to the threat of relativism, also run together the two kinds of divergence, declaring both to be impossible. In both cases, there is a failure to account for the differences in Wittgenstein's assessment of logical divergence on the one hand and conceptual divergence on the other, for although Wittgenstein regards the former as unintelligible, there is a definite sense in which he is willing to allow for the latter. Ultimately, both interpretations misunderstand what Wittgenstein means by saying that our concepts are something we find to be "natural". ;The role of this notion of naturalness in evaluating his imaginary scenarios shows that Wittgenstein allows for the possibility of conceptual divergence. But to understand such possibilities we must imagine alterations in the "very general facts of nature" or in "natural history". The point of imagining such differences is not to advance hypotheses about the possible development of different concepts, but to show how our concepts, as Wittgenstein puts it, "stand in the middle of our lives." Imaginary scenarios therefore serve to reveal and reinforce the authority of our concepts and so to expose the difficulties involved in regarding them as absolutely necessary and without alternatives or as entirely arbitrary. These scenarios are not to be seen as supporting any particular conception of logic or of our relation to the world: As part of a grammatical investigation of our concepts, they serve instead to diagnose the confusions that attend our forming such conceptions in the first place