The Calculus Metaphore in Wittgenstein's Intermediate Period

Abstract

This paper investigates some uses of the metaphor of language as a
calculus in Wittgenstein. The calculus metaphor emerges in the 1930s in a
dialogue with the referentialist, and is instrumental on the turning of the philosophical
attention towards the extant uses of linguistic symbolism. However, it
has gone too far, by suggesting an image of language as composed only of inferences
in the manner of the closed systems of rules. This would hinder a pragmatic
expansion of the criterial context of conceptual analysis. The metaphor will be
reactivated in latter manuscripts, whenever it can serve the same purposes of its
inception in the intermediary period, as the dialogic scenes invoke new, dogmatically
referentialist voices. Still, it is in the intermediate manuscripts that its
operation can be best understood. Finally, such movement exemplifies a philosophical
method which doesn’t proceed through the overcoming of problems in a
scientific fashion.