Wittgenstein, Ludwig

"If a lion could talk, we could not understand him," Wittgenstein said. "It's clear that Wittgenstein hadn't spent much time with lions." commented  John Aspinall . Philosophers of *realism from Plato to Hegel have interpreted the world as if it were a mirror of human thinking. Heidegger and   Wittgenstein went further, and claimed that the world is a construction of human thought.

In Philosophical  Investigations, Wittgenstein gave up the idea that language could mirror the world. He denied that any sense could be given to the idea of a world existing apart from thought and language. This led him to give up his early mystical belief, expressed in the Tractatus that there are some things that cannot be expressed in words. In later Wittgenstein's there is nothing that cannot be said.

Postmodernists believe there is no such thing as nature, only the world of our own constructions. All talk of human nature is ignored. They are rejecting any limit on human ambitions. This goes back to the fact that Plato was a realist; he believed that abstract names describe intellectual entities as really existing.

Some nominalists, like John Gray opposes realism with Chinese thought. *Nominalism is realising that abstract terms are only names for things in the world.