Wittgenstein e a gramática da consciência

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to point out and solve certain difficulties concerning the private-language argument as it is approached in Wittgenstein s later philosophy. These difficulties arise because the private-language argument rests upon the view that our learning a language relies on practices that function as drills. Based on this view, when it comes to explain how it could be possible for our psychological vocabulary to have sense, Wittgenstein criticizes the idea that words such as pain and cold acquire their meanings thanks to acts of introspection and claims that the philosophical conceptions that assume that language works in a barely descriptive way are pervaded by several philosophical misunderstandings. Contrary to these theories, Wittgenstein argues that the techniques of employment of our psychological vocabulary draw on some trainings that lead us to replace our natural or pre-linguistic behaviour by a linguistic one, e.g. the replacement of a shouting by the uttering of a proposition like I have pain . My point is that Wittgenstein s view, which I call here the thesis of the expressive use of language , is adequate to account for the grammar of words like pain and cold , but that it may not hold for an explanation of the grammar of a word whose meaning is not attached to any particular behaviour. A clear example of such a word is the expression consciousness , so current in the ordinary language and so precious to the traditional studies of epistemology and metaphysics. Having pointed to this problem and shown that it lacks a solution in the Philosophical Investigations, I advance the thesis that one may solve it if one considers Wittgenstein s last work, called On Certainty. In this writing, he develops new ideas concerning the undoubtedness of particular propositions in some language games and the possibility of enunciation of rules that may bring light to the difficulties presented here.