All Philosophical Problems Caused by Sloppy Reasoning Essay

All Philosophical Problems Caused by Sloppy Reasoning - Essay Example Clearly, philosophical problems remain, though Wittgenstein had felt that he had solved them finally enough to retire after publishing the Tractatus (Richter, 2004). But by solving the issue of language, one can make sure that one is not making a mountain out of a molehill, asking absurd issues or creating issues where there are none. Anyone who has had the unpleasant experience of talking at cross-purposes with someone else knows that many problems are simply caused by poor assumptions as to what terms mean. Kripke suggests that Wittgenstein's work boils down to a â€Å"sceptical challenge†. The terms of this challenge doubt that anything said can be unequivocally meaningful. The strongest case against the sceptical position would be mathematics. Philosophers since the sceptical revolution of epistemology that Hume led have largely agreed that complete, rigorous knowledge of the empirical world is impossible. But math and logic are sometimes held to be beyond this. Yet Wittge nstein's work, being semantical and semiotic, actually impugns even math. 2 + 2 = 4 is straight forward enough, but to be sensible, one has to assume that it is meant that the symbol 2 matches the concept of â€Å"two†, that the plus sign means an addition, and that the equals sign indicates an equation (Kusch). Strictly speaking, in Kripke's view, one cannot make those assumptions. â€Å"The 'sceptical challenge' is thus ontological rather than epistemic; the sceptic seeks to show not that you are somehow unable to track the facts of what you mean, but that there are no facts for you track†. To decode 2 + 2 = 4 requires more than the rules of mathematics, no matter how rigorous: It requires socially agreed-upon assertability conditions, like â€Å"2 is two, + indicates the mathematical function of addition and = means the equal function†. In strict Chinese or any non-Arabic numeral language, 2 + 2 = 4 is gibberish; in Roman, the closest one would get would be I I + II = IV.