False Attribution to Wittgenstein?: Philosophy Forums

False Attribution to Wittgenstein?
Wittgenstein's core concepts "borrowed" from a little known paper

False Attribution to Wittgenstein?

scarborough
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Posted 06/10/08 - 12:58 AM: Subject: False Attribution to Wittgenstein?	#1
Reading Friedrich Waismann this week, it would appear that certain key concepts of his may be falsely attributed to Wittgenstein. Here are two examples. Family Resemblances: "...a word is used on many different levels and with many different shades of meaning. It has a systematic ambiguity. At the same time there is a sort of family likeness between all these uses,..." Language Games: "Far from identifying identifying the meaning of a statement with the evidences we have for it, the view I tried to sketch leads to a sort of many-level-theory of language in which 'every sort of statement has its own logic'." The two quotes are Waismann's, not Wittgenstein's, and they are dated 1945 (a paper that Waismann delivered to the Aristotelian Society). Wittgenstein was of course famous for failing to note his sources. He also had personal contact with Waismann. While he might have coined the popular phrases, it would seem that he "borrowed" these and other concepts. Are they not therefore falsely attributed to him? Thomas.

Caldwell
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Posted 06/10/08 - 02:29 AM:	#2
I wonder, Wittgenstein had pages of lectures, published afterwards by former students (?). I briefly had a copy of that hardbound book, rather thin, too. I think the lectures were given before 1945.
The standard view is that doctors are not at fault if they deceive their patients for their health's sake, and that fathers are not at fault if they deceive their children for their own good. For the crime of deception consists not in the falsity of what is said but in the harm done by the deceiver. -- Thomas Hobbes, 3rd set of objections on The Sixth Meditation, Descartes.

papadoi1
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Posted 06/27/08 - 07:36 AM:	#3
The discussion about family resemblances can not be attributes firstly to either Waisman or Wittgenstein. The philopher to postulate this problem (or concept) was Plato in Theaetetus.

MacJ
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Posted 06/29/08 - 03:26 AM:	#4
In any case, it is undeniable that Wittgenstein used these before 1945. The blue and brown books were written between 1933-1935 and extensively cover these concepts (I suspect it is very likely that Waisman was one of those to whom Wittgenstein showed the blue book and he may well have read the brown book as well). Further, a good portion of Philosophical Investigations, notably including the builder "language-game" (first use of it in the investigations) was taken from manuscripts also written in the thirties. I am not totally sure when the family resemblances section was written, but certainly he discusses this in the blue book 10 years prior to the paper you are referring to. Also it should be noted that Waissman's attitude to Wittgenstein was nothing short of hero worship, where as Wittgenstein's to Waissman bordered upon disdainful. Many things have been falsely attributed to Wittgenstein. This is not one of those things.

scarborough
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Posted 10/22/08 - 11:27 AM:	#5
My postgraduate supervisor cautions me about who influenced whom. My original post was off the mark -- but after the above responses, I sought to go back in time. In the book "Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Waismann", author Daniel D. Hutto notes re Wittgenstein's writings which "originated in the early 1930's" that "in one sense, then, Waismann is appropriately regarded at the author..." Just having skimmed the surface of this, it looks as though it may be an open question as to what Wittgenstein might have borrowed from Waismann.

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