Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths

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Frequently, a genuine understanding of a thinker’s ideas is possible only by following them further than he did himself. Wittgenstein’s Viennese contemporary Karl Kraus spoke in a similar context of one-and-a-half truths in contradistinction to half-truths. In this volume of essays, Jaakko Hintikka examines the two grand visions concerning the interrelations of language, self and the world that guided Wittgenstein’s thought at the different stages of his philosophical development. He seeks to show how one of them, the so-called picture theory of language, was in reality a combination of several independent assumptions, while the other, the idea of language-games as the vehicles of meaning, was the end product of an intriguing development. Hintikka asserts that many of Wittgenstein’s best-known ideas can, and must, be understood as defences or rationalizations of his overall visions. In several essays, Wittgenstein’s ideas are illuminated through comparisons with other philosophers, including Russell, Husserl and Carnap.