HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF LOGIC, 31 (May 2010), 185–192

Book Reviews

K. D. JOLLEY, The Concept ‘Horse’ Paradox and Wittgensteinian Conceptual

Investigations: A Prolegomenon to Philosophical Investigations. Ashgate Wittgen-
stein Studies. Aldershot, UK/Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. xii þ 109
pp. £50.00. ISBN-13:978-0-7546-6045-3.

Reviewed by JULIET FLOYD, Department of Philosophy, Boston University, 745

Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, USA
Downloaded By: [University of Leipzig] At: 19:57 1 June 2010

ª 2010 Juliet Floyd

This is a concise, thoughtful and unusually well-written book of significant

philosophical and literary power. The author argues that the Frege–Kerry exchange
over the absoluteness of Frege’s fundamental distinction between concepts and objects
– a primary place where emerge the themes of saying versus showing, the ultimate role
of a Begriffsschrift, and the temptation to ground distinctions of logic in something
other than logic – crucially shaped Wittgenstein’s idea of philosophical method, not
only in the Tractatus but also in his later Philosophical Investigations. As Jolley sees it,
consideration of Kerry’s attack on the absoluteness of the concept/object distinction
and the history of responses to it provide us with a ‘skeleton key’ or primary ‘object of
comparison’ for unlocking a major theme in Philosophical Investigations, namely, the
distinction between conceptual as opposed to objectual investigations (pp. 80ff), even if
the later Wittgenstein departs from Frege in taking the distinction between concepts
and objects to be operative only within the context of a language-game.
Historians of logic will find this work primarily and purely philosophical: its
interest is in an exploration of the idea that, in a certain sense, there are no paradoxes
attending the most fundamental logical notions and distinctions. Yet the so-called
‘paradoxes’ are hardly trivial, and they are also not uniquely reconstructible or
resolvable mathematically. Instead, philosophical ‘prestidigitation’ is needed to make
the appearance of paradox appear and disappear (p. 43).
Neither Kerry, nor Frege, nor Jolley, nor Wittgenstein-as-Jolley-reads-him think
Kerry unearthed a real paradox deserving of straightforward theoretical or semantical
solution (pp. 50, 64, 71): paradoxes are not real in and of themselves, but relative to our
own demands and representations. The fundamentality of the attempt to draw a
distinction between concept and object emerges only dialectically, through a kind of
tenacious faith in the use of apparent paradox. Jolley connects this view with Frege and
with Kierkegaard, aiming to provide a compelling train of thought designed to show
how strong is the impulse to describe, tame, and rationalize what lies behind the
appearance of ‘paradox’ in terms of a categorical theory, and how even in quite
sophisticated responses to Kerry there is an underlying temptation to convert the
concept/object distinction into a substantial ontological divide between terms and/or
entities, when this cannot be stably done. Elucidation, in something like Frege’s sense,
is the only route to grappling with fundamental notions. As Jolley sees it, the making to

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