On Wittgenstein's remarks about the standard metre

Abstract

AbstractIn a notorious passage from his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes that one can state of the standard metre neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long. While many commentators have rejected this claim, it has been commonly assumed that Wittgenstein himself endorsed it. In a recently published article, Thomas Müller not only provides a novel argument against Wittgenstein's claim about the standard metre but also claims that Wittgenstein did not actually endorse that claim. In this paper, I argue that Müller's exegetical thesis is false and that his novel argument against Wittgenstein's claim about the standard metre is unsound.