EN 0003 Bronzo on Context, Compositionality and Nonsense (continuation)

# EN 0003

I did not mean to make further comments on this article, but maybe the following is worth mentioning:

If we leave out the rather useless debate about contextualism and compositionalism as defined by the author, which takes up the bigger part of the paper, what is going on in this essay? I should perhaps also mention this: Glock in his A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Blackwell; Oxford; 1996) does use these terms, but he doesn´t define their meaning as Bronzo does.

Bronzo presents further an extended argument against Glock's "weak version" of the context principle; we may take note from a reference to page numbers in a footnote that he takes Glock's notion from comments on the later Wittgenstein rather than on the Tractatus, but for his argument this doesn't seem to make any difference. In any case, it doesn't seem either that his discussion of Glock's view would have a lot to do with the main argument of the paper.

If we leave all this out, what we are left with, it seems, would be the following:

If Wittgenstein in fact endorses the austere concept of nonsense, then there is room for the possibility that he also holds a strong version of the context principle; now, if Wittgenstein indeed holds the strong version of the context principle, it would imply the austere version of nonsense, since this is the definition of "strong version of the context principle".

That Wittgenstein indeed endorses the austere concept of nonsense, Bronzo seems to assume following an argument from Conant (which I personally find little convincing).

Besides this, we are also told that thanks to this strong version of the context principle and the principle of compositionality as used in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein

can maintain, quite literally, (1) that words have meaning only in the context of significant propositions; and (2) that propositions are essentially articulate—which means that their sense is complex, that they are made up of semantic parts that they share with one another, and that we understand them when we understand how each of their parts contributes to the complete thoughts they express.

Though at the end, it is not necessarily a version of the context principle "strong enough" to imply the austere conception of nonsense:

On this Tractarian understanding of the two principles, the context principle and the principle of compositionality articulate two necessarily interdependent aspects of our linguistic capacity. Nothing is recognizable as an exercise of the capacity to use words (i.e., sub-propositional elements), without its also being recognizable as drawing on the capacity to make sense (i.e., to express propositional senses); and vice versa.

Bronzo concedes that nothing of this excludes other readings of the Context Principle, The Principle of Compositionality and several versions of the conception of nonsense. But it contains a promise for a new proposal of how we might conceive of our language capacity. I am looking forward to it.