Does (the former) “Part II” of the Philosophical Investigations represent departures for new directions toward the “philosophy of psychology”? In this article, we will go back to Wittgenstein's pre-Investigations writings and see that the examination of the concept of meaning experiences, together with the examination of other “peculiar” psychological experiences, constitutes a driving force within his later philosophy. In particular, we will note that Part II of the Brown Book deals predominantly with themes from the philosophy of psychology, and how Wittgenstein attempts therein to represent descriptions of experiences in terms of the grammar of expression, thereby shunning the Augustinian conception of description. Such interest in meaning experiences and related psychological experiences is not fully reflected in the last sections of “Part I” of the Investigations. In view of Wittgenstein's prior concern, the possibility strongly remains that the now severed “Part II” forms in some way an indispensable part of his unfinished masterpiece.

    Saul Kripkeʼs skeptical solution to the rule-following paradox has often been characterized as self-refuting. In this paper, I will attempt to reconstruct it into a consistent position. Alexander Miller, in a recent paper, showed that Kripkeʼs solution can be interpreted as a kind of quasi-realism about meaning, and pointed out its difficulties (Miller 2020). I will rather characterize the skeptical solution by comparing it to global expressivism, and show that such a reformulation can clear up the difficulties Miller points out.

    The following statements represent an example of external world skepticism: (1) I know that I have hands only if I know that I am not a brain in a vat. (2) I do not know that I am not a brain in a vat. (3) Therefore, I do not know that I have hands. The first premise implies the closure principle. So, anti-skeptics argue that external world skepticism is false, as there are several counterexamples of the closure principle. This study aims to examine these counterexamples, contend their invalidity, and argue that external world skepticism is an attempt to transcend the everyday world, showing that its statements are not necessarily nonsense or false in terms of analogy and metaphor.

    This study discusses the usages of independent and dependent variables. Independent variables are used in two ways: to denote the input to a function and to define a function. Correspondingly, dependent variables are used to hold the output of a function and to describe the relationship between the inputs and outputs of a function. When translating independent variables and dependent variables of mathematics into predicate logic, mathematical variables are mapped onto both variables and function symbols of predicate logic.

    The concept of “trans-science” has been widely used thanks to contributions from science, technology, and society scholars but sometimes interpreted arbitrarily. I examine original and current usage of the concept and then propose a new definition of it. “Trans-scientific questions” were originally defined as questions of facts which cannot be answered by science, while the standards of unanswerability in science were not definite. Nowadays Japanese scholars invoke “transscience” to claim that scientists should not answer political questions. My proposal is to remake the definition of “trans-scientific questions” in order to accept both original and current usage.