Wittgenstein's Poetics.

Abstract

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is an unconventionally written sequence of about 700 short remarks which often contain brief dialogues between the author and many unidentified voices. This unconventional form poses major difficulties to interpretation, particularly together with Wittgenstein’s professed intentions of criticizing the very activity of philosophy, maybe to the point of ending it. Between two broad camps of interpretation—readings attempting to paraphrase the book into standard argumentative forms, and ‘therapeutic’ readings which see the book’s criticism of philosophy as an achievement of certain of its elements fundamentally resistant to paraphrase—this dissertation supports the latter, arguing that the Investigations lacks a complementary relationship between its formal structure (distinct, non-hierarchicallyordered remarks) and its rhetorical structure (in its use of ‘signposting’ at salient structural locations to guide the reader’s progress). Failing to satisfy these conventions, the book does not permit an argumentative reading, and thus lacks a structure permitting paraphrase into argumentative form. This reading begins with a survey of ‘signposting’ rhetoric through the entire text, then selects four key locations for suggesting argumentative structure: §1, §65, the ‘philosophy sections’ 89–133, and the final remark. A close reading of each shows that the text permits a conventional, ‘argumentative’ interpretation only when the reader distorts the text; and that it permits an unconventional, ‘therapeutic’ interpretation when the reader attends more carefully to his own role in identifying what happens in the text, using its formal and rhetorical features as checks on interpretation. After this argument concerning large-scale structure, an objection that the book’s many brief dialogues constitute arguments is addressed with an interpretation of the unusual dialogue in §28. The dissertation concludes with two essays in practical criticism. The first concerns textual features and critical concepts which must be at the forefront of any attempt to capture a stronger sense of resistance to paraphrase—that the reader has to read the Investigations ‘for himself’. The second considers how a paraphrase-resistant reading and a focus on ‘therapeutic’ criticism of philosophy are reinforced by a different perspective on the Investigations’ place in the history of philosophy.