Wittgenstein

To Follow a Rule

S HOLTZMAN, C M LEICH

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317831280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2005. The essays and replies in this volume represent, with some modifications, the proceedings of a colloquium held in Oxford in Trinity Term, 1979. With occasional exceptions, critical response to the Philosophical Investigations following publication focused on a limited range of topics - an unsystematic book was discussed in an unsystematic fashion. This book employs a different approach, one that interprets disconnected discussions of Wittgenstein's as united by a single underlying set of powerful arguments.

PART ONE

FOLLOWING A RULE:
THE BASIC THEMES

I

FOLLOWING WITTGENSTEIN:
SOME SIGNPOSTS FOR PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS §§ 143–242¹

Gordon Baker

---

Long ago I was asked to start the ball rolling for this symposium. My brief was a modest one. I was to lay out a detailed exegesis of Philosophical Investigations §§ 185–242 and to complement this with an analysis of §§ 143–84, a synopsis of the private language argument (§§ 243–315), and a systematic comparison with the related material published as Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Parts I and II. En passant I was to give a critical examination of existing expositions of Wittgenstein's account of rule-following, at the very least discussing the interpretations presented by Saul Kripke and Crispin Wright.² Finally, I was to round off the whole composition with a coda demonstrating whether or not the Philosophical Investigations proves the impossibility of constructing a theory of meaning for a language on the lines suggested by such philosophers as Donald Davidson and Michael Dummett. Hardly enough grist here to keep the millstones from grinding each other to splinters!

Alas, in this case, as so often, the finished edifice has only the remotest resemblance to the specifications issued to the architect by the client. Like any well-trained architect, I shall excuse my performance by the twin pleas of ‘force of circumstances’ and ‘the logic of the building’.

1 The original invitation and my acceptance of it both presupposed that I would be in a position to deliver the goods contracted for. This rested on the expectation of progress in completing the relevant parts of the commentary on the Philosophical Investigations which I am writing jointly with Peter Hacker. In the event, the first volume terminated after § 184, and detailed research on the subsequent remarks has yet to begin. Hence there is no question of giving an authoritative exegesis of this material or a fully informed account of the development of Wittgenstein's thinking about rules and rule-following. Much of this paper is programmatic and provisional. Many comments, in spite of their surface form, should be understood as incorporating the problematic mood in their depth structure.

2 My original brief also presupposed the feasibility of at least the central part of the programme. The central remarks on rule-following (§§ 185–242) are the keystone of the argumentative structure of the Investigations, Part I. They have multiple logical connections with preceding and subsequent remarks, and they are themselves dense with argument. They cover such major topics as necessity and possibility, identity and difference, the autonomy of grammar, avowals, criteria and the distinctions explanation/training, cause/reason, and rules/regularities/hypotheses. Light will bathe the phenomena of rule-following only after dawn has broken over a vast terrain. The difficulty of giving an illuminating and systematic analysis of this material is obvious. A vague optimism disguised from me the impossibility of this task. What seemed impossible would just take a little while. It seemed reasonable to expect something to turn up which would act as a nucleus for crystallizing out Wittgenstein's diffused ideas. All this is a pernicious illusion. Clarity about rules and rule-following will not miraculously emerge from some artful reshuffling of the pieces in the jig-saw of §§ 185–242. What stands in the way of our grasping these remarks is the same thing that blocks our understanding of the phenomena of rule-following, namely the desire to discern some simple pattern in the midst of what seems superficially chaotic. The profundity of Wittgenstein's reflections depends precisely on his avoiding the oversimplifications that generate our perplexity. To the extent that his method is appropriate for investigating what it is to follow rules, any concise systematic synopsis of rule-following is impossible. Moreover, to the extent that his remarks conform to his method, there is no hope of forcing them into a single pattern that will embody the bulk of their insights. Any quick survey of Investigations §§ 185–242 must be an impressionistic sketch of a few aspects of Wittgenstein's thought. Though self-conscious simplification may foster insight, unacknowledged simplification is falsification.

For these two reasons the finished product falls far short of the original specifications. Instead of definitive answers to important questions, there is little more than an outline of the proper approach to elaborating correct answers together with some clarification of a few of the most pressing questions. Though somewhat disappointing, this is not an altogether trivial harvest. It is a precondition of any lasting satisfaction of our more ambitious aspirations for achieving an understanding either of Wittgenstein's remarks or of the phenomena of rule-following that he investigated. Even if there is no gold and little enough ore laid up here, this fact will ensure a dramatic contrast between this paper and the rest of the contributions to this symposium.

1 METHODOLOGICAL ORIENTATION

An initial question, as obvious as it is fundamental, is what is the point or purpose of the discussion of rule-following in Investigations §§ 185–242. A natural response is to plead for postponement of this issue. Is it not reasonable to answer this question only at the end of a detailed analysis of this set of remarks? This general consideration might be reinforced in this case by the contention that the Investigations consists of a string of remarks most of which are at best only loosely related even to their immediate neighbours, and many of which have an epigrammatic style that positively invites us to interpret each one in isolation from the rest. Wittgenstein castigated all forms of theory-construction in philosophy. He is alleged to have secured his own later reflections from this vice by writing self-contained remarks the totality of which displays no more structure than the molecules of a gas. The conclusion to be drawn must be that it is in principle mistaken to begin an examination of §§ 185–242 from any consideration of Wittgenstein's strategy, at least to the extent that his own remarks conform to his conception of proper method in philosophizing.

This approach is widespread. It is sanctioned by both the theory and the practice of most exegeses of Wittgenstein's writings. It justifies eclecticism as the appropriate procedure of interpretation. But, however natural and expedient, it is profoundly misguided. From the very outset we should take a wider look around §§ 185–242. Not to discern the contours of some hidden theory, but to clarify Wittgenstein's strategic purpose in locating these remarks where they occur. Only in this way can detailed scrutiny bear sound fruit. To ignore the context of his remarks is to throw away the key to understanding what he meant to convey.

It would be a lengthy and intricate undertaking to demonstrate the truth of the general claim that context is of paramount importance for proper understanding of Wittgenstein's remarks. But before applying this principle to the interpretation of §§ 185–242, I must at least marshal three reasons in support of the heresy.

1 In the ‘Preface’, Wittgenstein stressed the importance that he attached to the ordering of his remarks. The principal source of his dissatisfaction with the various versions of the Investigations was the feeling that he had not found a way so to organize the remarks ‘that the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks’. He ultimately despaired of achieving this goal. But this retreat manifests a continued recognition of the relevance of different remarks to each other. The upshot was not complete chaos, but chains of remarks that criss-crossed at many points. Linearity was sacrificed, but not order. The history of the composition of the text of the Investigations suggests that §§ 1–421 are a structured, complex, and many-pronged campaign of argument. The remarks up to § 189 are a stable nucleus. From his papers we can still identify at least three distinct continuations. A rearrangement of the first was published as Part I of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. The second serves as the backbone of the third, which is the published version up to § 421. The fact that Wittgenstein made repeated attempts to weld together remarks on the nature of rules and rule-following is of crucial importance. It suggests that especially here we ignore at our peril what so preoccupied him, namely the foreign relations among his separately numbered remarks.

2 In practice, attention to argumentative context allows an authoritative solution of many mysteries and a definitive resolution of many controversies about remarks in Investigations §§ 1–421. Conspicuous examples are § 79 on proper names and § 22 (together with p. 11n.) on Frege's conception of assertion and supposition (Annahme). Ripped from their contexts and truncated, these have filled the heads of philosophers with many ideas, the most celebrated of which, the cluster theory of proper names and the analysis of sentences into mood operators plus sentence-radicals, are commonly ascribed to Wittgenstein even though demonstrably antithetical to his thought.³ A parallel blindness to context supports the widespread idea that §§ 65–88 argue for the importance of vagueness in constructing a theory of meaning, and suggest some initial steps towards the construction of a semantics for vague predicates.⁴ As if the main error in Frege and in logical atomism had been to treat language as being definite and precise!⁵ The prevalence of such caricatures among reputable interpretations of the Investigations should recommend adherence to the principle that a philosophical remark has significance only in the context of an argument. In particular, we should be alert to the possibility that current interpretations of §§ 185–242 may be very wide of the mark. To perceive in Wittgenstein's remarks concern with a form of scepticism or a denial of the objectivity of judgments about rule-following may be to parody his thought by directing attention to matters peripheral or even altogether alien to his line of argument.

3 Most of the remarks of Investigations §§ 1–421 do not occur only in this setting, but rather are repetitions or reformulations of remarks occurring in various earlier texts. A proper study of argumentative context should therefore include a close examination of these texts, with particular attention to the integration of the recurring remark into the chain of reasoning. Taking a wider look around requires detailed scrutiny of texts other than the Investigations. Used with due caution, this method too clarifies many obscurities. Typically the printed text was arrived at by many stages of sifting out and pruning remarks from manuscript notebooks and earlier typescripts. ‘Scissors and paste’ is close to a literal description of Wittgenstein's procedure. His passion for succinct and pithy expression, together with a tendency to impatience about detailed explanations of his ideas, often led to radical truncation of a remark and drastic excisions of material connecting remarks. Restoring what has been sifted out or pruned away can yield definitive solutions to problems of interpretation. In the Investigations, this method is conspicuously successful in clarifying many of the dicta about philosophy (§§ 89–133).⁶ It is, of course, subject to two major caveats. First, the same remark may occur in different contexts of argument in different texts, and hence establishing its significance in one text does not eo ipso settle its significance in another. This point is of great importance in practice, for it is not generally recognized how substantial the evolution of ideas is within what is called ‘Wittgenstein's later philosophy’.⁷ The second caveat is that Wittgenstein may have failed to modify a remark to fit it properly into a new sequence of remarks, and therefore expressions that apparently explicitly link one remark with an immediate predecessor or successor (e.g. ‘hence’, ‘therefore’, ‘consider this example’) may sometimes be misleading.⁸ Textual modifications sometimes get out of step with argumentative deletions and accretions. In spite of these caveats the study of parallel texts promises to be especially important for the interpretation of §§ 185–242, because of Wittgenstein's repeated attempts to treat the topic of rule-following. An appreciation of his strategy in the Investigations might be the product of trying to map out some of this tract of seemingly alien territory.

These three reasons indicate the fundamental importance of the question ‘What is the purpose of Investigations §§ 185–242?’; i.e. the question ‘To what campaign of argument do these remarks on rule-following belong?’ At the same time, these reasons also point towards methods for arriving at a satisfactory answer to this question; i.e. methods for coming to see these remarks aright. Much of the answer that I will now start to sketch is certainly tentative. Only part of it is grounded in a rigorous application of these methods to the Investigations and other parallel texts. But even if my answer is implausible or grotesque, this fact should not distract attention from the importance of the question and from the delineation of the methods appropriate to answering this question.

2 ÜBERSICHT OF INVESTIGATIONS §§ 1–421

The first task is to locate the chain of remarks on rule-following (§§ 143–242) in the grand strategy of Part I of the Investigations. Since the text was presumably designed to be read from the beginning, the main guide to correct identification of the argumentative setting of these remarks must be the campaign expressly initiated in the preceding remarks (§§ 1–142). If we were to fail to fathom it, or later to lose sight of it, we might react to §§ 143–242 as unpercipiently as somebody who guffaws throughout Othello under the erroneous impression that he is witnessing the performance of a farce.

The strategic purpose of §§ 1–142 is transparent, being explicitly stated at the outset. Wittgenstein cited a quotation from Augustine to introduce a critical discussion of what he called ‘Augustine's picture of language’.⁹ The core of this picture is a pair of theses: all words are names, and all sentences are combinations of names. In a more developed form, the first thesis is expressed by the claim that every word has a meaning which is the object with which this word is correlated and for which it stands. The leading ideas of Augustine's picture of language were frequently associated in earlier texts with the pair of theses that ostensive definition is the basic form of explanation (the foundation of language) and that all sentences are really descriptions. Naming and describing are conceived to be the essence of language. The importance of Augustine's picture for Wittgenstein is not that it represents one theory of language among others, but that it is a proto-theory or Urbild that shapes a vast range of philosophers' theorizing about language, like what Kuhn calls a scientific paradigm. Russell's account of language and the Tractatus both obviously fit within this framework. Frege's semantics is arguably just a more baroque version of the same underlying paradigm.¹⁰ Hence, in confronting Augustine's picture of language, Wittgenstein did not see himself as tilting at a windmill. Rather he meant to engage the combined forces mustered by the most a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Library Editions
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• International Library of Philosophy
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on the Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introductory Essay: Communal Agreement and Objectivity
• Part One: Following a Rule: The Basic Themes
• Part Two: Following a Rule: Objectivity and Meaning
• Part Three: Following a Rule and Ethics
• Part Four: Following a Rule and the Social Sciences
• Index