Logical Forms and Ways of Life: The Distinction between Logical and Empirical Propositions and the Showing-Saying Distinction in On Certainty

Abstract

In the conference “Las lógicas y las cosas “ (2014), Alberto Moretti argues that approaches that focus on the phenomenon of interpretation to account for the problem of meaning have a problem, namely, they do not support the transcendental conditions that make significance possible. Thus, in the context of interpretation, distinguishing others as speakers involves the possibility of distinguishing others as related objects in the (non-linguistic) world. Not only is this distinction possible because specific logical principles expose the basic structure for discourse and thought but they also expose the elementary structure of the world or reality (Moretti, 2016, p.1). In other words, the logical forms or the logical principles that structure our language are also principles of things (cf. Moretti: 1:23:14). This argument can be considered a transcendental argument as it establishes, through pointing out certain necessary conditions, the intimate world-language connection that accounts for significance, and as it insinuates itself as a response to the problem of the external world (cf. Moretti, 2014: 1:39:13).
I propose discussing the scope of this argument from the idea of language autonomy that Wittgenstein develops in On Certainty, which entails an alternative dissolutional strategy against the skeptical challenge. To account for this strategy, I will focus on the distinction between logical and empirical propositions. I will also analyze the distinction show-say that, in its relation with the notion of “forms of life”, allows for illuminating aspects of its praxiological focus on language. Thus, I will defend an approach that does not omit but rejects the possibility of an external (transcendental) point of view both to account for language and to respond to the skeptic.