True Dat

   Yet, one ‘can' also apply the proposition to itself and try to depict it in its turn.


    One ‘can’ do that,  just as one can walk on one’s hands and stand on one’s head , though this is contrary to the ‘grammar,” as it were , of heads, hands and feet.


    We ‘can’  of course do such a thing by way of experiment, to see what happens, and the result may be interesting for some specialized branch of knowledge.  But what we must not do is to generalize the result and derive from it new rules of grammar about those modes of behavior.  Yet this is precisely what is involved in the attempt to evaluate such an experiment philosophically.  

 

Text:  Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein,  Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1957, p.  102.


Paintings by Eliot Hodgkin.  Top:  Two Large Flints, 1963.  Bottom: Four Flints, 1939.


Dreams: The Kinks (Link).