Understanding Misunderstanding

Abstract

Forthcoming in Intercultural Understanding: Wittgensteinian Approaches, ed. by Carla Carmona, David Pérez Chico and Chon Tejedor, Anthem Press (2023) Penultimate Draft. Please do not cite without permission.Wittgenstein seeks to throw light on our concept of understanding by looking at how misunderstandings arise and what kinds of failure they involve. He discerns a peculiar kind of misunderstanding in the writings of the social anthropologist James Frazer. 2 In Frazer's hands, the anthropological project of enabling us to understand human behaviour seems to yield the paradoxical result that there are certain forms of human behaviour that simply cannot be understood. The source of Frazer's misunderstanding, according to Wittgenstein, is that he places narrow requirements on what could count as meaningful, prior to, and independently of, his encounter with the subjects of his interpretation. Frazer, similar to some of the philosophers who Wittgenstein addresses in his other works, succumbs to nonsense in his very attempt to draw the limits of sense.My aim in this paper is to clarify the connections between Wittgenstein's criticism of Frazer and his criticism of his fellow philosophers, in particular of Frege. The materials I draw on stem from various periods in Wittgenstein's career, and they reveal, in my mind, an important 1 Work on this paper was supported by a Minerva Fellowship of the Minerva Stiftung Gesellschaft für die Forschung mbH. 2 Wittgenstein (1993a). Henceforth abbreviated as RFGB.