A Gesture of Understanding: Wittgenstein, Moore, and "Therapy�

Wittgenstein scholarship appears currently to be engaging
in a deepening debate over the role of nonsense in
Wittgenstein"s later philosophical work. For one party to
this engagement, Wittgenstein"s later work pursues the
project of exposing nonsense when it emerges during the
course of philosophical discussions, and thereby provides
a kind of therapeutic assistance to those philosophers who
might otherwise have defended positions whose tenets
include nonsensical remarks that "do not say anything�
(Crary 5). This therapeutic reading argues in The New
Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein in America particularly in the
hands of James Conant that an austere interpretation of
the role of nonsense in the Tractatus can be successfully
extended to account for the project of Wittgenstein"s later
writings as well. Opposing this therapeutic reading of
Wittgenstein, P.M.S. Hacker has argued that Wittgenstein
sees nonsense as arising from our attempts to deny
grammatical rules by forming "nonsense which violates the
grammar� (Baker 279).