Wittgenstein: rule-following

As always, comments welcome (but not mandatory):

Without sharing certain attitudes towards the things around us, without sharing a sense of relevance and responding in similar ways, communication would be impossible. It is important, for instance, that nearly all of us agree nearly all the time on what colors things are. Such agreement is part of our concept of color, Wittgenstein suggests. Regularity of the use of such concepts and agreement in their application is part of language, not a logically necessary precondition of it. We cannot separate the life in which there is such agreement from our concept of color. Imagine a different form or way of life and you imagine a different language with different concepts, different rules, and a different logic.

This raises the question of the relation between language and forms or ways of life. For instance, could just one person have a language of his or her own? To imagine an individual solitary from birth is scarcely to imagine a form of life at all, but more like just imagining a life-form. Moreover, language involves rules establishing certain linguistic practices. Rules of grammar express the fact that it is our practice to say this (e.g. “half past twelve”) and not that (e.g. “half to one”). Agreement is essential to such practices. Could a solitary individual, then, engage in any practice, including linguistic ones? With whom could he or she agree? This is a controversial issue in the interpretation of Wittgenstein. Gordon Baker and P.M.S. Hacker hold that such a solitary man could speak his own language, follow his own rules, and so on, agreeing, over time, with himself in his judgments and behavior. Orthodoxy is against this interpretation, however.

Norman Malcolm has argued that rules are only ever followed, given, and enforced against a background of instruction and acceptance. An individual who was solitary from birth would not have such a background, and hence would not follow rules. He or she might behave in a regular way, but would not thereby be guided by, or really follow, any rules. Mere regularity of behavior does not constitute following rules, whether they be rules of grammar or any other kind. A car that never starts in cold weather does not follow the rule “Don’t start when it’s cold,” nor does a songbird follow a rule in singing the same song every day. Whether a solitary-from-birth individual would ever do anything that we would properly call following a rule is at least highly doubtful. How could he or she give himself or herself a rule to follow without language? And how could he or she get a language? Inventing one would involve inventing meaning, as Rush Rhees has argued, and this sounds incoherent. (The most famous debate about this was between Rhees and A.J. Ayer. Unfortunately for Wittgenstein, Ayer is generally considered to have won.) Alternatively, perhaps the Crusoe-like figure just does behave, sound, etc. exactly like a native speaker of, say, English. But this is to imagine either a freakish automaton, not a human being, or else a miracle. In the case of a miracle, Wittgenstein says, it is significant that we imagine not just the pseudo-Crusoe but also God. In the case of the automatic speaker, we might adopt what Daniel Dennett calls an “intentional stance” towards him, calling what he does “speaking English,” but he is obviously not doing what the rest of us English-speakers–who learned the language, rather than being born speaking it, and who influence and are influenced by others in our use of the language–do.

The best known work on Wittgenstein’s writings on this whole topic is Saul A. Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Kripke is struck by the idea that anything might count as continuing a series or following a rule in the same way. It all depends on how the rule or series is interpreted. And any rule for interpretation will itself be subject to a variety of interpretations, and so on. What counts as following a rule correctly, then, is not determined somehow by the rule itself but by what the relevant linguistic community accepts as following the rule. So whether two plus two equals four depends not on some abstract, extra-human rule of addition, but on what we, and especially the people we appoint as experts, accept. Truth conditions are replaced by assertability conditions. To put it crudely, what counts is not what is true or right (in some sense independent of the community of language users), but what you can get away with or get others to accept.

Kripke’s theory is clear and ingenious, and owes a lot to Wittgenstein, but is doubtful as an interpretation of Wittgenstein. Kripke himself presents the argument not as Wittgenstein’s, nor as his own, but as “Wittgenstein’s argument as it struck Kripke” (Kripke p.5). That the argument is not Wittgenstein’s is suggested by the fact that it is a theory, and Wittgenstein rejected philosophical theories, and by the fact that the argument relies heavily on the first sentence of Philosophical Investigations Sect. 201: “This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.” For Kripke’s theory as a reading of Wittgenstein, it is not good that the very next paragraph begins, “It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here…” Still, it is no easy matter to see just where Wittgenstein does diverge from the hybrid person often referred to as ‘Kripkenstein’. The key perhaps lies later in the same paragraph, where Wittgenstein writes that “there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation“. Many scholars, notably Baker and Hacker, have gone to great lengths to explain why Kripke is mistaken. Since Kripke is so much easier to understand, one of the best ways into Wittgenstein’s philosophy is to study Kripke and his Wittgensteinian critics. At the very least, Kripke introduces his readers well to issues that were of great concern to Wittgenstein and shows their importance.