Abstract

Although many of the reoccurring topics in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy can be traced back to Wittgenstein, current trends toward naturalizing epistemology mark a sustained shift away from the analytic tradition that Wittgenstein’s philosophy spawned. This paper examines Paul Feyerabend’s relationship to Wittgenstein, which exemplifies both how Wittgenstein inspired controversial ideas that continue to dominate discussions in philosophy of science, as well as why current trends toward naturalizing philosophy have turned away from Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy.

The first part of the paper focuses on how Wittgenstein’s insights into language, meaning and perception contributed to Feyerabend’s development of the notion of incommensurability. Feyerabend understood Wittgenstein to have argued that the meaning of a word is a function of the theoretical context in which it occurs, and to have clarified the distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘seeing as’. Inspired by these lessons (and some other sources), Feyerabend developed a contextual account of meaning, according to which the meaning of a term is not an intrinsic property of it, but depends on how the term is used in a theory. This is the basis of Feyerabend’s notion of incommensurability, a special form of conceptual incompatibility, which he used to attack positivist and empiricist accounts of testing scientific theories, as well as other forms of conceptual conservativism rampant both in philosophy and science.

The second part examines Feyerabend’s rejection of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy as limited to the method of conceptual analysis, and whose goal is mere clarification, and not innovation. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus promoted a new conception of the aims and methods of philosophy, which culminated in an analytic tradition that dominated Western Philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s. According to this analytic tradition, the method of philosophy is the logical and linguistic analysis of propositions, through which the content of scientific propositions is clarified, while pseudo-propositions of metaphysics are exposed as meaningless. On this view, the task of philosophy is not to contribute to human knowledge, but merely to clarify it. Wittgenstein’s Investigations extended this conception of philosophy into a kind of therapy, which dissolves rather than solves philosophical problems. As Wittgenstein put it; “the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.” Foreshadowing the current trend toward naturalized epistemology, Feyerabend rejected Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy, and its conception of the relationship between philosophy and science, according to which philosophy must stand above or below science, but not on a par with it. Moreover as a champion of normative philosophy, according to which the task of philosophy is to promote progress, he rejected Wittgenstein’s view that “philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. . . It leaves everything as it is.” Feyerabend championed a pluralistic philosophy that attempts to advance our understanding, primarily by exposing and challenging conceptual conservativism, which unjustifiably favors entrenched concepts over potential incommensurable improvements.