The Wittgenstein´s legacy in von Wright’s philosophy of action

Abstract

In a series of papers, the finish philosopher, Georg Henrik von Wright, one of the most prominent of Wittgenstein’s pupils and heir of his manuscripts, developed a multi-descriptive theory of human action: the understanding of behavior as action is derived from its description as intentional and thus different assignments of intention to the agent imply different action descriptions to the same observed behavior. The resulting theory challenges Weber’s well known distinction between the understanding of which action was performed, on the one hand, and the understanding of the reasons by which the action was performed, on the other, since in von Wright’s theory to understand the reasons by which an action was performed (attribution of intentionality) means the very conceptualization of it as action and of which action was performed. Parallel to such action theory von Wright has attempted to build a model of practical syllogisms to ground the activity of explanation in social sciences, as a definitive alternative to the deductive model of natural sciences. These were the touchstones of his methodological dualism. This paper presents a reconstructed version of von Wright’s theory of understanding human action and identify its source in some notes within the Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein.