期刊名称：European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy
电子版ISSN：2036-4091
出版年度：2016
卷号：8
期号：1
出版社：Associazone Pragma
摘要：At the center of one of the most famous anecdotes involving a famous philosopher,we encounter what is commonly called in English a gesture, in fact, a Neapolitangesture, though one made by a Turinese Jew at an English university. While gesturescarry meaning (9, 69-70),1 they are themselves carried across various borders,geographical, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and otherwise. Unquestionably, they arereadily portable carriers of various meanings, not least of all those bound up with awide array of human judgments (ranging from contempt and disgust to solicitude andreverence). Whether or not the gesture to which I am alluding would count as onein Giovanni Maddalena’s sense is questionable (a point to which I will return).2 Butthere is no dispute about how we would ordinarily identify the animated response bythe Italian economist Piero Sraffa to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s intransigent insistenceregarding meaning necessarily being a function of logical form. For speakers of Englishat least, Sraffa’s response is a gesture, indeed, the paradigm of such a communicativeor expressive act. So, unlike the incident involving Wittgenstein’s poker (Edmonds& Eidinow; also Monk), that concerning Sraffa’s gestural counterexample directed atWittgenstein’s adamantine position is enfolded in hardly any controversy. There is littledoubt the incident occurred, even less what significance it carried for Wittgenstein.
