Cora Diamond: Wittgenstein and the Realistic Spirit in Philosophy

Abstract

At the end of her paper on ‘The Question of Linguistic Idealism’, Anscombe considers the question of whether what one knows, in what Norman Malcolm called ‘the strong sense of know’, is guaranteed by the language-game in which, like Moore, one says ‘I know’ in this sense. This, she says, ‘would be linguistic idealism with a vengeance’, but that here Wittgenstein succeeds in his difficult enterprise and attains ‘realism without empiricism’. This expression is used by Wittgenstein in his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematic. (third edn., VI, §23). The actual words of Wittgenstein are: ‘Not empiricism and yet realism in philosophy, that is the hardest thing.’