Wittgenstein argued that traditional philosophy questions are incoherent and a kind of nonsense. For example, Descartes asks in The First Meditation if the world he is experiencing is an illusion. How does he know he is not dreaming or that an evil demon isn’t deceiving him?
To this Wittgenstein responds: “What nonsense! There is no such thing as experiencing the whole world as an illusion. There are particular illusions: experiencing an oasis in the desert, seeing the stick as bent in the water, etc. But in these cases we can recognize the illusion because overall we know we are experiencing the world. To show someone the bent stick is illusion, you take the stick out of the water. The doubt Descartes considers has no such grounding, and so is ill conceived: it has the outward form of a legitimate doubt, but that itself is an illusion. The doubt is only a confusion. The job of philosophy is to uncover this confusion, and free us from it.”
To see the flaw in this response, let’s distinguish between, what I will call, a status-quo context and a transformative context. A status-quo context is one in which a person feels at home in the prevailing social structures. A transformative context is one in which a person dislodges from prevailing social structures and feels that significantly new structures are needed.