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willow
might be a solution but it isn’t an answer :)
willow
(also, it may not be a solution at all. i could simply say “that’s the wrong question, but i don’t have a right one for you”)
willow
raymond geuss, changing the subject 268-269 the mental cramp). Once you understand where the terms used to formulate the question really belong, you see that they have no application in the purported 'philosophical' examples, and the question or problem disappears. The philosopher as therapist causes these problems to dissolve by pointing out their origin in a misapplication of terms in a context that is inappropriate for them. He or she does this on a case-by-case basis; there would be no other way, given the nature of the difficulties he or she is trying to treat. Each case may be slightly different. The 'album' which Wittgenstein presents may be a kind of dossier of previous cures: perhaps one can learn from studying it, but that learning does not consist in general-ising because each case in the album is different. So on this second view about philosophy, the goal is not to get an 'image' (Bild) of the landscape but to learn to get around in (a variety of) landscapes. The model of a 'solution' is (S$153ff.) 'Jetzt 268 WITTGENSTEIN weiß ich weiter-Now I know how to go on-which, despite the use of the apparently cognitivist term 'know', actually means not that I have a theory but merely that I can confidently and successfully go on; I know how-to-do it. To do this might require any number of things, some of them being connected with having the right kind of theory but others being of a different status altogether, such as learning to attend to certain features of the world. Being musical does not mean knowing which keys have three flats, but is chiefly a question of being able to hear when the singer is flat, the rhythm is off, and the players are not quite together, and perhaps being able to sing on key and in time oneself, and that is a question of complicated forms of attention, discrimination, and cultivated talent, not of conceptual mastery of a theory.
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