Ludwig Wittgenstein

Austrian-British philosopher (1889–1951). His later work — Philosophical Investigations (1953/2003), Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (1980, Vols. 1–2) — engages problems of perception, depiction, aspect-seeing, and the relation between thought and vision in ways that intersect with phenomenological and Gestalt-psychological concerns. His treatment of seeing as, aspect-dawning, the duck-rabbit, and the standard metre makes Wittgenstein a recurrent reference in 20th-century philosophical psychology.

In Taddio 2025 Wittgenstein is invoked at three structurally distinct points:

  1. §1 — the standard metre (Philosophical Investigations §50): the painting establishes a "second nature" providing the tools for its own evaluation, like the standard metre that defines the unit of measurement and cannot itself be measured against another metre. The argument grounds Taddio's claim that art lacks any external model; it is art itself that supplies the standard for its own interpretation.

  2. §3 — the pierced animal (PI p. 173): "I see that an animal in a picture is transfixed by an arrow. It has struck it in the throat and sticks out at the back of the neck. Let the picture be a silhouette. – Do you see the arrow – or do you merely know that these two bits are supposed to represent part of an arrow?" Wittgenstein's point is that we see the arrow, not merely know-of-it. Cardinal anchor for Taddio's amodal-completion argument.

  3. §5 — Köhler's interpenetrating hexagons (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology §§ 641, 644, 645): Wittgenstein invokes Köhler's example of two hexagons that interpenetrate visually. We do not see three juxtaposed regions but two hexagons, one passing behind the other. Reinforces the amodal-completion argument from a different angle.

Wittgenstein's Significance for Taddio

Wittgenstein supplies three distinct kinds of argumentative leverage:

  • The standard-metre argument (§1) is Taddio's anchor for the autonomy of art's standards: a successful work "has the strange power to teach its own lesson" (MP). Wittgenstein's standard-metre passage makes this rigorous: any unit must be defined within a system; an external metre cannot measure it. So with art: there is no external rubric of evaluation; the work supplies its own.
  • The pierced-animal argument (§3) is Taddio's most direct anti-cognitivist anchor: vision is not interpretation; we see what is shown. The argument cuts against intellectualist accounts of pictorial perception (we infer from atomic sensations to recognized objects) and supports phenomenal autonomy.
  • The hexagons argument (§5) reinforces the third point under different geometric conditions, generalizing the lesson.

Taddio reads Wittgenstein as a fellow phenomenologist of perception — even though Wittgenstein never claimed the title — because the late Wittgenstein's treatment of seeing-as and aspect-dawning operates at the same phenomenal level as the Gestalt analyses Taddio uses.

Wittgenstein and Gestalt

The convergence is real but selective. Wittgenstein engages Gestalt psychology in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology through Köhler explicitly, and his treatment of aspect-seeing (the duck-rabbit) parallels Gestalt-style figure-ground analyses. But Wittgenstein resists the theoretical-explanatory ambitions of the Gestalt tradition: he describes phenomena, but he is wary of the move from phenomenal description to causal-mechanical explanation. Taddio elides this caution; the Wittgenstein invoked is the descriptive Wittgenstein, not the therapeutic or deflationary one.

Wittgenstein and Aesthetics

Taddio's earlier paper La misura dell'abitare: osservazioni sull'estetica di Wittgenstein (2019) — cited in Art and Psychology — develops the standard-metre application to aesthetics in detail. The bridge between Wittgenstein's Remarks on Aesthetics (the lectures published posthumously) and Taddio's phenomenology of pictorial representation runs through the autonomy of art's standards.

Connections

  • anchor for the standard-metre application to art (§1, citing PI §50): art establishes a "second nature" that is its own standard.
  • cardinal anchor for amodal-completion via the pierced-animal example (§3, citing PI p. 173).
  • reinforcing anchor for amodal completion via Köhler's hexagons (§5, citing RPP §§ 641, 644, 645).
  • paralleled by Kanizsa in the Italian experimental-phenomenology register — both treat the autonomy of phenomenal-organizational facts from cognitive interpretation.
  • paralleled by MP — both anti-intellectualist, both phenomenological-descriptive, but MP commits to ontology while Wittgenstein resists.
  • cited via Taddio 2019 La misura dell'abitare (Italian) for the aesthetics application.

Sources

  • taddio-2025-art-and-psychology — Wittgenstein cited at §§ 1, 3, 5.
  • Indirect via Taddio: Wittgenstein 2003 Philosophical Investigations (trans. Anscombe); Wittgenstein 1980 Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (Vols. 1 and 2, ed. Anscombe and von Wright). Not ingested as primary sources.
  • Indirect via Taddio: Taddio 2019 "La misura dell'abitare: osservazioni sull'estetica di Wittgenstein," Estetica. Studi e ricerche, IX, 2/2019, pp. 537–554.