Was Wittgenstein a disjunctivist avant la lettre?

Abstract

In this chapter I argue that the ideal that Wittgenstein puts forward in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics – what one might call ‘realism without empiricism’ – is a form of disjunctivism, where disjunctivism is just the philosophical name for our ordinary thought that perception provides us with knowledge of our environment in the good case. I argue that such a conception may look like a substantial philosophical theory, but that this is only because adherence to a bad picture – what I call the Cartesian picture of our evidential situation – has turned our ordinary, pre-theoretical notion into something that seems dubious and epistemologically inflated. To someone who rejects this picture, on the other hand, disjunctivism is just the name philosophers give to our ordinary way of thinking about the world. If my reading is correct, Wittgenstein was not only one of the first proponents of a disjunctivist view, he also gives us good reasons to resist its converse, the Reasons Identity Thesis (the thought that even in the good case my perceptual reasons can be no better than in the bad case), which one might call the fourth or last dogma of empiricism.

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