The Delusions of Paradox

Vollständiger Abstract

Worum geht es in dieser Arbeit?

Abstract: This manuscript undertakes an interdisciplinary investigation, inverting Louis Sass's noted comparison in The Paradoxes of Delusion between philosophical confusion and schizophrenic delusion. While Sass used Wittgenstein to illuminate psychopathology, we use psychopathology to clarify a strand in one of Wittgenstein's most notoriously difficult arguments: The rule-following considerations. Framed as a semantic-phenomenological paradox, the investigation addresses the tension between meaning as a practice and the intuition of subjectively grasping meaning. If the subjective experience of understanding is not semantically constitutive, what is lost when that experience vanishes? By analyzing anomalous experiences of meaning-blindness, it is argued that while linguistic competence may remain intact, the evaporation of the feeling of understanding leads to alienation. Drawing on Ratcliffe, the experience of understanding is seen not as a semantic constituent but an existential feeling—a world-touch that hitches the individual to a shared form of life. This perspective, furthermore, reveals that the initial state of language acquisition described in intellectualist traditions criticized by Wittgenstein resembles a pathological endpoint. Ultimately, the ambition is to contribute to the cross-pollination envisioned by Sass: Clarifying a difficult philosophical problem through lived experience while demonstrating the value of Wittgenstein's insights as a descriptive resource for contemporary psychopathology.