The dissertation begins with an examination of four interpretations of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's so-called later writings; each of these interpretations is commonly thought to have significant bearing upon the philosophy of education. The interpretations in question are Brose's developmental theory of learning, Macmillan's normative model of rational teaching, Bloor's social theory of knowledge and Winch's putative science of rule following. I show how each of the four faces textual and philosophical difficulties and that all of these difficulties flow from a single hermeneutic source, the fallacy of descriptivism, the presupposition that statements of meaning are made true by an extralinguistic but linguistically-structured reality. / The descriptivists, those scholars who commit the fallacy of descriptivism, tend to see Wittgenstein as having stepped out of metaphysics and into a successor discipline which is an armchair version of a natural or social science. According to the four interpreters, Wittgenstein was seeking after a species of truth about language which would ultimately constitute a field of knowledge and which can be discovered through scientific processes of investigation such as observation and data collection. A large part of the goal of such processes will be to describe language correctly and sincerely. / What emerges from the critique of descriptivism is a new interpretation of Wittgenstein which does not suffer from the descriptivist fallacy. The new perspective holds a number of ideas in store for philosophy of education, among them the concepts of the human symbol, of elucidation as a means of explanation, of structural knowledge as more fundamental than propositional knowledge and of the coercion of language. Lastly, my perspective contains the outline of a solution to the paradox of rule following which has consequences for critical thinking and of the standing conception of rationality and belief. / One of the goals of the new interpretation is to take inspiration not so much from differences between Wittgenstein's early and later work but from their many points of similarity. From this point of view, themes appear which run throughout Wittgenstein's writings--from Tractatus through On Certainty--foremost of which is the emphasis upon elucidation. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 51-07, Section: A, page: 2311. / Major Professor: C. J. B. Macmillan. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1990.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_78274 |
| Contributors | McCarty, Luise Prior., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 315 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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