Abstract In his article ‘Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language and Poeticity’, David Hommen addresses the apparent inconsistency in the role that ordinary language or ‘language of everyday life’ plays in the later Wittgenstein’s works. While dissolving this inconsistency Hommen provides an inspiring account of what he calls Wittgenstein’s poetics and its role in the perspicuous representations that the later Wittgenstein’s sought. According to Hommen, Wittgenstein’s analogies and metaphors are deployed to let us see language in a new light that dissolves the puzzles that had a grip on us. But Hommen gives it too much weight. Though important, the poetic approach cannot alone dissolve the puzzles that concerned Wittgenstein. Seeing new connections between previously unrelated familiar phenomena can both be illuminating and misleading. Wittgenstein distinguished between helpful and misleading analogies, and he did so not by measuring their aesthetic qualities, but through observation and the implications of those observations. Furthermore, Hommen’s interpretation of ‘ordinary language’ is problematic and it forms an important underlying assumption for both the apparent inconsistency and the resolution of it. Although his interpretation might appear to respect what Wittgenstein wrote, at least on certain occasions, it cannot be reconciled with Wittgenstein’s practice, what he did. Adopting a different, prevalent interpretation of ‘ordinary language’ that accommodates some of these challenges and thereby arguably fits better to Wittgenstein’s use of the term also has the consequence that the initial inconsistency is removed.
Keld Stehr Nielsen (Wed,) studied this question.