On Floyd and Putnam on Wittgenstein on Gödel

In a recent discussion piece, Juliet Floyd and Hilary Putnam present a new analysis of Wittgenstein’s “notorious paragraph” on Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem. Textually, they claim that Wittgenstein’s remarks have been widely misunderstood, and they argue that Wittgenstein had a better understanding of Gödel’s theorem than he has often been credited with. Substantively, they find in Wittgenstein’s remarks “a philosophical claim of great interest,” and they argue that, when this claim is properly assessed, it helps to vindicate some of Wittgenstein’s broader views on Gödel’s theorem. Here, I address the second of these two arguments (while disclaiming the scholarly credentials required to assess the first, the purely textual, one). I begin by examining the central claim which Floyd and Putnam attribute to Wittgenstein, showing that their argument for this claim is inadequate and that the claim itself is almost certainly false. I then argue that, even if Wittgenstein’s central claim were true, it would not lead to the conclusions Floyd and Putnam think it does. At the end of the day, I conclude that Floyd and Putnam provide no new insights into Gödel’s theorem by way of their reading of Wittgenstein.