“Nothing is Shown”: A ‘Resolute’ Response to Mounce, Emiliani, Koethe and Vilhauer

H. O. Mounce published in this journal two years ago now a Critical Notice of the The New Wittgenstein, an anthology (edited by Alice Crary and Rupert Read) which is evenly divided between work on Wittgenstein’s early and later writings. The bulk of Mounce’s article was devoted to those contributions primarily concerned with the Tractatus. There is a straightforward sense in which this selective focus is natural. The pertinent contributions – most conspicuously those by Cora Diamond and James Conant – describe a strikingly unorthodox interpretation of Wittgenstein’s early book on which it is depicted as having an anti-metaphysical aim. Mounce takes an interest in this interpretation because he believes that, in characterizing the Tractatus in anti-metaphysical terms, it misrepresents the central Tractarian doctrine of ‘saying and showing’ – a doctrine which he understands in terms of the idea that “metaphysical truths, though they cannot be stated, may nevertheless be shown” (186). Mounce argues that Diamond and Conant et al. fail to treat this doctrine as “one that Wittgenstein himself advances,” and he claims that they therefore make Wittgenstein’s thought “less original than one might otherwise suppose” (186) by implying that it is “indistinguishable from positivism” in the sense of “not even attempt[ing] to provide positive knowledge [and] confin[ing] itself to removing the confu-