JOHN MCDOWELL
WITTGENSTEIN ON FOLLOWING A RULE*
These things are finerspun than crude hands have any
inkling of. (RFM VII-57.)1
.
We find it natural to think of meaning and understanding in, as it were,
contractual terms. 2 Our idea is that to learn the meaning of a word is to
acquire an understanding that obliges us subsequently - if we have
occasion to deploy the concept in question - to judge and speak in
certain determinate ways, on pain of failure to obey the dictates of the,
meaning we have grasped; that we are 'committed to certain patterns
of linguistic usage by the meanings we attach to expressions' (W, p.
21). 3 According to Crispin Wright, the burden of Wittgenstein's
reflections on following a rule, in his later work, is that these natural
ideas lack the substance we are inclined to credit them with: 'there is in
our understanding of a concept no rigid, advance determination of what
is to count as its correct application' (ibid.).4
If Wittgenstein's conclusion, as Wright interprets it, is allowed to
stand, the most striking casualty is a familiar intuitive notion of
objectivity. The idea at risk is the idea of things being thus and so
anyway, whether or not we choose to investigate the matter in question,
and whatever the outcome of any such investigation. That idea requires
the conception of how things could correctly be said to be anyway whatever,
if anything, we in fact go on to say about the matter; and this
notion of correctness can only be the notion of how the pattern of
application that we grasp, when we come to understand the concept in
question, extends, independently of the actual outcome of any investigation,
to the relevant case. So if the notion of investigationindependent
patterns of application is to be discarded, then so is the
idea that things are, at least sometimes, thus and so anyway, independently
of our ratifying the judgement that that is how they are. It
seems fair to describe this extremely radical consequence as a kind of
idealism. 5
Synthese 58 (1984)325-363. 0039-7857/84/0583-0325 $03.90
 1984 by D. Reidel Publishing Company
326 JOHN MCDOWELL
We may well hesitate to attribute such a doctrine to the philosopher
who wrote:
If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them,
because everyone would agree to them. (PI §128.)6
Notice that the destructive effect of the doctrine goes far beyond
Wittgenstein's hostility to the imagery of mathematical platonism, in
which mathematics is pictured as 'the natural history of mathematical
objects' (RFM II-40). The remarks about rule-following are not
confined to mathematics; on Wrighťs reading they would undermine
our ordinary intuitive conception of natural history, literally so called the
very model on which that suspect platonist picture of mathematics is
constructed.
More specific grounds for doubting the attribution might be derived
from passages like this (1'1 §195):
"But I don't mean that what I do now (in grasping a sense) determines the future use
causally and as a matter of experience, but that in a queer way, the use itself is in some
sense present." - But of course it is, 'in some sense'! ReallYthe onlythingwrongwith
whatyou say is the expression"in a queerway".The restis all right .... 7
What this suggests is something we might anyway have expected: that
Wittgenstein's target is not the very idea that a present state of
understanding embodies commitments with respect to the future, but
rather a certain seductive misconception of that idea.
Not that Wright merely ignores such passages. His claim (see W, p.
21) is that Wittgenstein seems almost to want to deny all substance to
the 'pattern' idea; what he attributes to Wittgenstein (see W, p. 227) is
not an outright abandonment of the idea but a reinterpretation of it.
Wrighťs view is that the intuitive contractual picture of meaning and
understanding can be rendered innocuous - purged of the seductive
misconception - by discarding the thought that the patterns are
independent of our ratification. Later (§§5, 7, 10) I shall suggest that
this purged version of the intuitive picture is not recognizable as a
picture of meaning and understanding at all, and is not correctly
attributed to Wittgenstein. But for the present, let me note only that
Wrighťs reinterpretation, precisely by denying the ratificationindependence
of the patterns, leaves the intuitive conception of objectivity
untenable, in the way I described above. So we are bound to wonder
whether the concession that Wright envisages Wittgenstein making to
the 'pattern' idea can account satisfactorily for Wittgenstein's reassuring
tone in his response to the interlocutor of PI §195.
FOLLOWING A RULE 327
.
In Wrighťs view, then, the butt of Wittgenstein's reflections on
rule-following is the idea that understanding an expression is 'grasp of
a pattern of application, conformity to which requires certain determinate
verdicts in so far unconsidered cases' (W, p. 216). But:
We have to acknowledge ... that the 'pattern' is, strictly, inaccessible to definitive
explanation. For, as Wittgenstein never wearied of reminding himself, no explanation of
the use of an expression is proof against musunderstanding; verbal explanations require
correct understanding of the vocabulary in which they are couched, and samples are open
to an inexhaustible variety of interpretations. So we move towards the idea that
understanding an expression is a kind of 'cottoning on'; that is, a leap, an inspired _guessat
the pattern of application which the instructor is trying to get across. (W, p. 216.)
The pictured upshot of this 'leap' is something idiolectic. So the
suggestion is that the 'pattern' idea comes naturally to us, in the first
instance, in the shape of 'the idea that each of us has some sort of
privileged access to the character of his own understanding of an
expression; each of us knows of an idiolectic pattern of use, for which
there is a strong presumption, when sufficient evidence has accumulated,
that it is shared communally' (W, p. 217).8
What is wrong with this idea? Wrighťs answer is this:
ˇ.. whatever sincere applications I make of a particular expression, when I have paid due
heed to the situation, will seem to me to conform with my understanding of it. There is no
scope for a distinction here between the fact of an application's seeming to me to conform
with the way in which I understand it and the fact of its really doing so.9
Now we are naturally inclined to protect the intuitive view that
thoughts and utterances make sense by virtue of owing, or purporting
to owe, allegiance to conceptual commitments. So, given that idiolectic
understanding cannot make room for the 'pattern' idea, it is tempting to
appeal to communal understanding. But (the argument that Wright
ascribes to Wittgenstein continues) this cannot rehabilitate the 'pattern'
idea. For (W, p. 218):
Suppose that one of us finds himself incorrigibly out of line concerning the description of
a new case. We have just seen that he cannot single-handed, as it were, give sense to the
idea that he is at least being faithful to his own pattern; that is, that he recognises how he
must describe the new case if he is to remain faithful to his own understanding of the
relevant expressions. How, then, does his disposition to apply the expression to a new case
become, properly speaking, recognition of the continuation of a pattern if it so happens
328 JOHN MCDOWELL
that he is not out of line, if it so happens that there is communal agreement?
The trouble is that there is a precise parallel between the community's
supposed grasp of the patterns that it has communally committed itself
to and the individuaĺs supposed grasp of his idiolectic commitments.
Whatever applications of an expression secure communal approval, just
those applications will seem to the community to conform with its
understanding of the expression. 1° If we regard an individual as aiming
to speak a communal language, we take account of the possibility that
he may go out of step with his fellows; thus we make room for an
application of the notion of error, and so of right and wrong. But it is
only going out of step with one's fellows that we make room for; not
going out of step with a ratification-independent pattern that they
follow. So the notion of right and wrong that we have made room for is
at best a thin surrogate for what would be required by the intuitive
notion of objectivity. That would require the idea of concepts as
authoritative; and the move away from idiolects has not reinstated that
idea. In sum (W, p. 220):
None of us unilaterally can make sense of the idea of correct employment of language
save by reference to the authority of securable communal assent on the matter; and for
the community itself there is no authority, so no standard to meet.
.
According to Wright, then, Wittgenstein's reflections are directed, in
the first instance, against the idea that a determinate practice can be
dictated by a personal understanding - something that owes no allegiance
to a communal way of going on. On the surface, at least, there
is a point of contact here with Saul Kripke's influential reading of the
remarks on rule-following, which I shall now outline. 11
Suppose one is asked to perform an addition other than any one has
encountered before, either in the training that gave one one's understanding
of addition or in subsequently trying to put one's understanding
into practice. 12 In confidently giving a particular answer, one will
naturally have a thought that is problematic: namely - to put it in terms
that bring out the point of contact with Wrighťs reading - that in
returning this answer one is keeping faith with one's understanding of
the 'plus' sign. To show how this thought is problematic, Kripke
introduces a sceptic who questions it. The natural idea is that one's
FOLLOWING A RULE 329
understanding of 'plus' dictates the answer one gives. But what could
constitute one's being in such a state? Not a disposition: no doubt it is
true that answering as one does is an exercise of a disposition that one
acquired when one learned arithmetic, but the relation of a disposition
to its exercises is in no sense contractual - a disposition is not something
to which its exercises are faithful.13 But nothing else will serve either:
for - to quote Kripke's summary of a rich battery of argument - 'it
seems that no matter what is in my mind at a given time, I am free in the
future to interpret it in different ways' (K, p. 294). That is, whatever
piece of mental furniture I cite, acquired by me as a result of my training
in arithmetic, it is open to the sceptic to point out that my present
performance keeps faith with it only on one interpretation of it, and
other interpretations are possible. So it cannot constitute my understanding
'plus' in such a way as to dictate the answer I give. Such a state
of understanding would require not just the original item but also my
having put the right interpretation on it. But what could constitute my
having put the right interpretation on some mental item? And now the
argument can evidently be repeated.
The upshot of this argument is a 'sceptical paradox,, which, according
to Kripke, Wittgenstein accepts: there is no fact that could constitute
my having attached one rather than another meaning to the
'plus' sign (K, pp. 272-273).
It may well seem that if Wittgenstein concedes this much to Kripke's
sceptic, he has renounced the right to attribute meaning to expressions
at all. According to Kripke, however, Wittgenstein offers a 'sceptical
solution' to the 'sceptical paradox'. (A 'sceptical solution' to a sceptical
problem is one that 'begins... by conceding that the sceptic's negative
assertions are unanswerable' (K, p. 270).) The essentials of this 'sceptical
solution' are as follows.
First, we must reform our intuitive conception of meaning, replacing
the notion of truth conditions with some notion like that of justification
conditions. Kripke quotes with approval (K, p. 274) a claim of Michael
Dummetťs: 'The Investigations contains implicitly a rejection of the
classical (realist) Frege-Tractatus view that the general form of
explanation of meaning is a statement of the truth conditions.' 14 The
'sceptical paradox', which we are to accept, is that there is no fact that
could constitute my having attached one rather than another determinate
meaning to the 'plus' sign. We are inclined to understand this as
a concession that I have attached no determinate meaning to the 'plus'
330 JOHN MCDOWELL
sign: but the suggestion is that this is only because we adhere, naively,
to the superseded truth-conditional conception of meaning - applied, in
this case, to the claim 'I have attached a determinate meaning to the
"plus" sign'. (See K, p. 276.)
Second, when we consider the justification conditions of the statements
in which we express the idea that someone attaches some
determinate meaning to an expression (the conditions under which we
affirm such statements, and the roles they play in our lives), we see that
we can make sense of them in terms of their use to record acceptance of
individuals into the linguistic community. (The thesis that we can make
sense of the idea of meaning only in that connection is the core of
Kripke's interpretation of the Private Language Argument.)
Now there is room for doubt about how successful this 'sceptical
solution' can be. The exegetical framework within which it is constructed
- the Dummettian picture of the transition between the
Tractatus and the Investigations - is not beyond dispute. But without
opening that issue (which I shall touch on below: §§10, 11, 14), we can
note that when Dummett expresses his doubts about the 'realisť
(truth-conditional) conception of meaning (which are supposed to be in
the spirit of the later Wittgenstein's doubts about the Tractatus), it is
typically by pressing such questions as this: 'What could constitute
someone's possession of the sort of understanding of a sentence that
"realism" attributes to him?' The implication is that, failing a satisfactory
answer, no one Could possess that sort of understanding.15 It is
natural to suppose that ff one says 'There is no fact that could constitute
its being the case that P', one precludes oneself from affirming that P;
and this supposition, so far from being a distinctively 'realisť one, plays
a central role in the standard arguments against 'realism'. Given this
supposition, the concession tfiat Kripke says Wittgenstein makes to the
sceptic becomes a denial that I understand the 'plus' sign to mean one
thing rather than another. And now - generalizing the denial - we do
seem to have fallen into an abyss: 'the incredible and self-defeating
conclusion, that all language is meaningless' (K, p. 273). It is quite
obscure how we could hope to claw ourselves back by manipulating the
notion of accredited membership in a linguistic community.
.
In any case, Kripke's thesis that Wittgenstein accepts the 'sceptical
FOLLOWING A RULE 331
paradox' seems a falsification. Kripke (see K, p. 241) identifies the
'sceptical paradox' that he attributes to Wittgenstein with the paradox
that Wittgenstein formulates in the first paragraph of PI §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. The answer was: if everything
can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it.
And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.
But §201 goes on with a passage for which Kripke's reading makes no
room:
It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course
of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at
least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is
that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited
in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases.
What could constitute my understanding, say, the 'plus' sign in a way
with which onl~y certain answers to given addition problems would
accord? Confronted with such questions, we tend to be enticed into
looking for a fact that would constitute my having put an appropriate
interpretation on what I was told and shown when I was instructed in
arithmetic. Anything we hit on as satisfying that specification contents
us only 'for a momenť; then it occurs to us that whatever we have hit on
would itself be capable of interpretation in such a way that acting in
conformity with it would require something quite different. So we look
for something that would constitute my having interpreted the first item
in the right way. Anything we come up with as satisfying that
specification will in turn content us only 'for a momenť; and so on: 'any
interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and
cannot give it any supporť (PI §198). Kripke's reading has Wittgenstein
endorsing this reasoning, and consequently willing to abandon
the idea that there is anything that constitutes my understanding an
expression in some determinate way. But what Wittgenstein clearly
claims, in the second paragraph of §201, is that the reasoning is vitiated
by 'a misunderstanding'. The right response to the paradox, Wittgenstein
in effect tells us, is not to accept it but to correct the
misunderstanding on which it depends: that is, to realize 'that there is a
way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation'.
The paradox of §201 is one horn of a dilemma with which the
misunderstanding presents us. Suppose we are not disabused of the
332 JOHN MCDOWELL
misunderstanding - that is, we take it that our problem is to find a fact
that constitutes my having given some expression an interpretation with
which only certain uses of it would conform. In that case, the attempt to
resist the paradox of §201 will drive us to embrace a familiar mythology
of meaning and understanding, and this is the second horn of the
dilemma. My coming to mean the expression in the way I do (my
'grasping the rule') must be my arriving at an interpretation; but it must
be an interpretation that is not susceptible to the movement of thought
in the sceptical line of reasoning - not such as to content us only until
we think of another interpretation standing behind it.
What one wants to say is: "Every sign is capable of interpretation; but the meaning
mustn't be capable of interpretation. It is the last interpretation." (Blue Book, p. 34.)16
Understanding an expression, then, must be possessing an interpretation
that cannot be interpreted - an interpretation that precisely
bridges the gap, exploited in the sceptical argument, between the
instruction one received in learning the expression and the use one goes
on to make of it. The irresistible upshot of this is that we picture
following a rule as the operation of a super-rigid yet (or perhaps we
should say 'hence') ethereal machine.
How queer: It looks as if a physical (mechanical) form of guidance could misfire and let in
something unforeseen, but not a rule! As if a rule were, so to speak, the only reliable form of
guidance. (Zettel §296.) 17
One of Wittgenstein's main concerns is clearly to cast doubt on this
mythology. But his attacks on the mythology are not, as Kripke
suggests, arguments for acceptance of the 'sceptical paradox'. TM That
would be so if the dilemma were compulsory; but the point of the
second paragraph of PI §201 is precisely that it is not. The mythology is
wrung from us, in our need to avoid the paradox of the first paragraph,
only because we fall into the misunderstanding; the attack on the
mythology is not support for the paradox, but rather constitutes, in
conjunction with the fact that the paradox is intolerable, an argument
against the misunderstanding.
It is worth noting two points about the second horn of the dilemma
that correspond to two aspects of Wrighťs reading of Wittgenstein.
First, if we picture an interpretation that would precisely bridge the
gap between instruction and competent use, it seems that it can only be
one which each person hits on for himself - so that it is at best a
, fortunate contingency if his interpretation coincides with the one
FOLLOWING A RULE 333
arrived at by someone else subjected to the same instruction, or with
the one intended by the instructor.
"But do you really explain to the other person what you yourself understand? Don't you
get him to guess the essential thing? You give him examples, - but he has to guess their
drift, to guess your intention." (PI §210.)
This is clearly the basis in Wittgenstein for Wrighťs remarks (quoted in
§2 above) about 'the idea that understanding an expression is a kind of
"cottoning on"; that is, a leap, an inspired guess at the pattern of
application which the instructor is trying to get across' (W, p. 216).
Second, a concomitant of the picture of the super-rigid machine is a
picture of the patterns as sets of rails. (See, for instance, 1°1 §218.) At
each stage, say in the extending of a series, the rule itself determines
what comes next, independently of the techniques that we learn in
learning to extend it; the point of the learning is to get our practice of
judging and speaking in line with the rule's impersonal dictates. (An
omniscient God would not need to do mathematics in order to know
whether '777' occurs in the decimal expansion of 7r; see RFM VII-41.)
Now this conception figures regularly in Wrighťs formulations of the
'pattern' idea:
... the pattern extends of itself to cases which we have yet to confront...
ˇ.. the investigation-independent truth of statements requires that their truth is settled,
autonomously and without the need for human interference, by their meanings and the
character of the relevant facts. 19
It is clear, again, that these formulations have a basis in Wittgenstein's
polemic against the second horn of the dilemma. A remark like 'I give
the rule an extension' (RFM VI-29) is meant as a corrective of the
inclination to say 'The rule extends of itself'. (And 'even God can
determine something mathematical only by mathematics': RFM
VII-41.)
.
In Wrighťs reading, as I said (§§1 and 2 above), Wittgenstein's point is
that the natural contractual conception of understanding should not be
discarded, but purged of the idea - which it must incorporate if the
intuitive notion of objectivity is to have application - that the patterns
334 JOHN MCDOWELL
to which our concepts oblige us are ratification-independent. I expressed
a suspicion (in §1 above) that this purging would not leave a residue
recognizable as a conception of meaning and understanding at all, or
recognizable as something that Wittgenstein recommends. I want now
to begin on an attempt to back up this suspicion.
At PI §437 Wittgenstein writes:
A wish seems already to know what will or would satisfy it; a proposition, a thought, what
makes it true - even when that thing is not there at all! Whence this determiningof what is
not yet there? This despotic demand? ("The hardness of the logical must.")
Note the parenthesis: clearly he thinks that the discussion in which this
passage occurs - dealing with the relation between wishes or expectations
and their fulfilment, and the relation between orders and their
execution - raises the same issues as his reflections on the continuation
of a series. (See K, p. 300, n. 17.) We can bring out the connection by
focusing on the case of orders and their execution: it is natural to say
that the execution of an order is faithful to its meaning, and in saying
this we clearly express a version of the idea that we express when we say
that the competent continuation of a series is faithful to its principle.
What would Wrighťs reading of Wittgenstein be like, transposed to
this case? Something on these lines (cf. §2 above). The temptation to
say that my execution of an order conforms with my understanding of it
arises primarily out of a conception of my understanding as idiolectic something
that cannot be definitively conveyed to someone else, so that
it is at best a happy contingency if it coincides with the understanding of
the order possessed by the person who issued it. On reflection, however,
we should realize that this is an illusion: we cannot make sense of
anything that would constitute an essentially personal understanding of
an order, but would nevertheless impose genuine constraints on what I
did in 'execution' of it. For whatever I 'sincerely' did would seem to be
in conformity with my supposed personal understanding of the order.
We naturally want to protect the intuitive notion of an action's fulfilling
an order; so we are tempted at this point to appeal to the idea of my
membership in a linguistic community. This does make room for my
going wrong. But all that my going wrong can amount to is this: my
action does not secure the approval of my fellows, or is not what they
would do in attempted fulfilment of such an order. When the community
does approve, that is not a matter of its collectively recognizing
FOLLOWING A RULE 335
the conformity of my action to an antecedent communal understanding
of the order: for this supposed communal understanding would be in
exactly the same position as my supposed idiolectic understanding. We
cannot hold, then, that the community 'goes right or wrong', by the
lights of its understanding, when it awards my action the title 'execution
of the order'; 'rather, it just goes' (W, p. 220).
Given the correspondence (noted in §4 above) between aspects of
Wrighťs reading and aspects of Wittgenstein's polemic against the
second horn of the dilemma, it is not surprising that part, at least, of this
transposed version of Wrighťs reading should neatly fit parts of
Wittgenstein's discussion. Consider, for instance, PI §460:
Could the justification of an action as fulfilment of an order run like this: "You said 'Bring
me a yellow flower', upon which this one gave me a feeling of satisfaction; that is why I
have brought it"? Wouldn't one have to reply: "But I didn't set you to bring me the flower
which should give you that sort of feeling after what I said!"?
It seems correct and illuminating to understand this as an attack on the
idea that the understanding I act on is essentially idiolectic.2°
Taken as a whole, however, I think this reading gets Wittgenstein
completely wrong. I can perhaps begin to explain my disbelief with this
remark: it would have been fully in character for Wittgenstein to have
written as follows:
Could the justification of an action as fulfilment of an order run like this: "You said
'Bring me a yellow flower', upon which this one received approval from all the
bystanders; that is why I have brought it"? Wouldn't one have to reply: "But I didn't set
you to bring the flower which should receive approval from everyone else after what I
said!"?
In his later work, Wittgenstein returns again to trying to characterize
the relation between meaning and consensus. If there is anything that
emerges clearly, it is that it would be a serious error, in his view, not to
make a radical distinction between the significance of, say, 'This is
yellow' and the significance of, say, 'This would be called "yellow" by
(most) speakers of English' (see, for instance, Zettel §§428-431). And
my transposed version of Wrighťs reading seems to leave it mysterious,
at best, why this distinction should be so important.
It may appear that the answer is both obvious and readily available to
Wright: 'To say "This would be called 'yellow' by speakers of English"
would not be to call the object in question "yellow", and that is what
336 JOHN MCDOWELL
one does when one says "This is yellow".' But this would merely
postpone the serious question: does Wrighťs reading of Wittgenstein
contain the means to make it intelligible that there should so much as be
such an action as calling an object 'yellow'? The picture Wright offers
is, at the basic level, a picture of human beings vocalizing in certain
ways in response to objects, with this behaviour (no doubt) accompanied
by such 'inner' phenomena as feelings of constraint, or
convictions of the rightness of what they are saying. There are
presumably correspondences in the propensities of fellow members of a
linguistic community to vocalize, and to feel comfortable in doing so,
which are unsurprising in the light of their belonging to a single species,
together with similarities in the training that gave them the propensities.
But at the basic level there is no question of shared commitments
- of the behaviour, and the associated aspects of the streams of
consciousness, being subject to the authority of anything outside
themselves. ('For the community itself there is no authority, so no
standard to meeť: W, p. 220.) How, then, can we be entitled to view the
behaviour as involving, say, calling things 'yellow', rather than a mere
brute meaningless sounding off?
The thought that is operative here is one that Kripke puts by saying:
'The relation of meaning and intention to future action is normative,
not descriptive' (K, p. 257). It is a thought that Wright aims to respect.
This is the point of his aspiration not to discard the contractual conception
of meaning, but only to purge it of the idea of ratificationindependence.
But the purging yields the picture of what I have been
calling 'the basic leveĺ; and at that level Wrighťs picture has no room
for norms, and hence - given the normativeness of meaning - no room
for meaning. Wright hopes to preserve a foothold for a purified form of
the normativeness implicit in the contractual conception of meaning, by
appealing to the fact that individuals are susceptible to communal
correction. It is problematic, however, whether the picture of the basic
level, once entertained as such, can be prevented from purporting to
contain the real truth about linguistic behaviour. In that case its freedom
from norms will preclude our attributing any genuine substance to the
etiolated normativeness that Wright hopes to preserve. The problem
for Wright is to distinguish the position that he attributes to Wittgenstein
from one according to which the possibility of going out of step
with our fellows gives us the illusion of being subject to norms, and
consequently the illusion of entertaining and expressing meanings.
FOLLOWING A RULE 337
.
Moved by the insight that meaning relates normatively to linguistic
behaviour, Kripke - like Wright - reads Wittgenstein as concerned to
preserve a role for the intuitive contractual conception. But Kripke's
Wittgenstein locates that conception only in the context of the 'sceptical
solution' - a response to a supposedly accepted 'sceptical paradox'.
Applied to the case of orders and their execution, Kripke's 'sceptical
paradox' will take this form: there is nothing that constitutes my
understanding an order in a way with which only acting in a certain
determinate manner would conform. And, here as before (cf. §4 above),
it is open to question whether, once that much is conceded to
scepticism, a 'sceptical solution' can avert the destructive effect that the
concession threatens to have.
In any case, this line of interpretation gets off on the wrong foot,
when it credits Wittgenstein with acceptance of a 'sceptical paradox', so
that a 'sceptical solution' would be the best that could be hoped for. Just
as in the case of the continuation of a series, the reasoning that would
lead to this 'sceptical paradox' starts with something that Wittgenstein
aims to show up as a mistake: the assumption, in this case, that the
understanding on which I act when I obey an order must be an
interpretation. The connection with the thought of PI §201 is made
clear by this juxtaposition (RFM VI-38):
How can the word "Slab" indicate what I have to do, when after all I can bring any action
into accord with any interpretation?
How can I follow a rule, when after all whatever I do can be interpreted as following it?
The parallel can be extended (see §4 above). If we assume that
understanding is always interpretation, then the need to resist the
paradox of PI §201 drives us into a fantastic picture of how understanding
mediates between order and execution. Consider, for instance,
PI §431:
"There is a gulf between an order and its execution. It has to be filled by the act of
understanding."
"Only in the act of understanding is it meant that we are to do THIS. The order - why,
that is nothing but sounds, ink-marks. - ,,Zl
The act of understanding, conceived in terms of hitting on an interpretation
that completely bridges the gulf between an order and its
execution, demands to be pictured as setting up a super-rigid connection
between the words and the subsequent action (hence the
338 JOHN MCDOWELL
allusion, in PI §437, to 'the hardness of the logical musť). It is this idea
that Wittgenstein is mocking in PI §461:
In what sense does an order anticipate its execution? By ordering just that which later on is
carried out? - But one would have to say "which later on is carried out, or again is not
carried out." And that is to say nothing.
"But even if my wish does not determine what is going to be the case, still it does so to
speak determine the theme of a fact, whether the fact fulfilsthe wishor not." We are - as
it were - surprised, not at anyone'sknowing the future, but at his being able to prophesy at
all (right or wrong).
As if the mere prophecy, no matter whether true or false, foreshadowed the future;
whereas it knows nothing of the future and cannot know less than nothing.
And the parallel goes further still. When we are tempted to conceive
the understanding of an order in this way, what we have in mind is
something essentially personal: a guess at the meaning of the person
who issued the order. This idea is Wittgenstein's target in, for instance,
PI §433:
When we give an order, it can look as if the ultimate thing sought by the order has to
remain unexpressed, as there is always a gulf between an order and its execution. Say I
want someone to make a particular movement, say to raise his arm. To make it quite
clear, I do the movement. This picture seems unambiguous until we ask: how does he
know he is to make this movement? - How does he know at all what use he is to make of
the signs I give him, whatever they are? - Perhaps I shall now try to supplement the order
by means of further signs, by pointing from myself to him, making encouraging gestures,
etc.. Here it looks as if the order were beginningto stammer.
As if the signswere precariously trying to produce understanding in us. - But if we now
understand them, by what token do we understand?
If we read Wittgenstein in Kripke's way, we shall take Wittgenstein's
mockery of these ideas as argument in favour of the °sceptical paradox'
- the thesis that there is nothing that could constitute my understanding
an order in a determinate way. That is what the mockery would amount
to if there were no options besides the paradox and the ideas that
Wittgenstein mocks. But Wittgenstein's point is that this dilemma seems
compulsory only on the assumption that understanding is always
interpretation; his aim is not to shift us from one horn of the dilemma to
the other, but to persuade us to reject the dilemma by discarding the
assumption on which it depends.
.
Having diagnosed the dilemma as resting on the mistaken idea that
FOLLOWING A RULE 339
grasping a rule is always an interpretation, Wittgenstein goes on,
famously, to say (PI §202):
And hence also 'obeying a rule' is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to
obey a rule. Hence it not possible to obey a rule 'privately': otherwise thinking one was
obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.
The diagnosis prompts the question 'How can there be a way of grasping
a rule which is not an interpretation?', and I think the thesis that
obeying a rule is a practice is meant to constitute the answer to this
question. That is, what mediates the inference ('hence also') is this
thought: we have to realize that obeying a rule is a practice if we are to
find it intelligible that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an
interpretation. (The rest of §202 - the crystallization into two sentences
of the Private Language Argument - is offered as a corollary.)
There is another formulation of the same line of thought in PI §198:
"Then can whatever I do be brought into accord with the rule?" - Let me ask this: what has
the expression of a rule - say a sign-post - got to do with my actions? What sort of
connexion is there here? - Well, perhaps this one: I have been trained to react to this sign
in a particular way, and now I do so react to it.
"But that is only to give a causal connexion: to tell how it has come about that we go by
the sign-post; not what this going-by-the-sign really consists in." - On the contrary; I
have further indicated that a person goes by a sign-post only in so far as there exists a
regular use of sign-posts, a custom.22
This passage opens with an expression of the paradox formulated in the
first paragraph of §201. Then Wittgenstein introduces the case of
sign-posts, in order to adumbrate the diagnosis that he is going to state
more explicitly in §201. When I follow a sign-post, the connection
between it and my action is not mediated by an interpretation of
sign-posts that I acquired when I was trained in their use. I simply act as
I have been trained toy This prompts an objection, which might be
paraphrased on these lines: 'Nothing in what you have said shows that
what you have described is a case of following a rule; you have only told
us how to give a causal explanation of certain bits of (what might as well
be for all that you have said) mere behaviour.' The reply - which
corresponds to the first sentence of §202 - is that the training in
question is initiation into a custom. If it were not that, then the account
of the connection between sign-post and action would indeed look like
an account of nothing more than brute movement and its causal
explanation; our picture would not contain the materials to entitle us to
speak of following (going by) a sign-post. 24
340 JOHN MCDOWELL
Now how exactly is this to be understood?
Wittgenstein's concern is to exorcize the insidious assumption that
there must be an interpretation that mediates between an order, or the
expression of a rule given in training, on the one hand, and an action in
conformity with it, on the other. In his efforts to achieve this, he is led to
say such things as 'I obey the rule blindly' (P! §219). This is of a piece
with his repeated insistence that the agreement that is necessary for the
notion of following a rule to be applicable is not agreement in opinions:
"So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?" - It is
what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use.
That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life. (PI §241.) 2s
I take it that at least part of the point of this passage is that an opinion is
something for which one may reasonably be asked for a justification;
whereas what is at issue here is below that level - the 'bedrock' where 'I
have exhausted the justifications' and 'my spade is turneď (PI §217).
The thought is clear in RFM VI-28:
Someone asks me: What is the colour of this flower? I answer: "red". - Are you absolutely
sure? Yes, absolutely sure! But may I not have been deceived and called the wrong colour
"red"? No. The certainty with which I call the colour "red" is the rigidity of my
measuring-rod, it is the rigidity from which I start. When I give descriptions, that is not to
be brought into doubt. This simply characterizes what we call describing.
(I may of course even here assume a slip of the tongue, but nothing else.)
Following according to the rule is FUNDAMENTAL to our language-game. It
characterizes what we call description.
Again (RFM VI-35):
How do I know that the colour that I am now seeing is called "green"? Well, to confirm it
I might ask other people, but if they did not agree with me, I should become totally
confused and should perhaps take them or myself for crazy. That is to say: I should either
no longer trust myself to judge, or no longer react to what they say as to a judgement.
If I am drowning and I shout "Help!", how do I know what the word Help means? Well,
thaťs how I react in this situation. - Now that is how I know what "green" means as well
and also know how I have to follow the rule in the particular case? 6
What Wittgenstein is trying to describe is a use of language in which
what one does is 'to use an expression without a justification' (PI §289;
compare RFM VII-40). One may be tempted to protest: when I say
'This is green', in the sort of case he envisages, I do have a justification,
namely that the thing in question is green. But how can I justify the use
of an expression by repeating it? It is thoughts of this sort that lead
Wittgenstein to say (On Certainty §204):
FOLLOWING A RULE 341
Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; - but the end is not
certain propositions' striking us immediatelyas true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeingon our
part; it is our acting,which lies at the bottom of the language-game,z7
Now there is a temptation to understand this on the following lines. At
the level of 'bedrock' (where justifications have come to an end), there
is nothing but verbal behaviour and (no doubt) feelings of constraint.
Presumably people's dispositions to behaviour and associated feelings
match in interesting ways; but at this ground-floor level there is no
question of shared commitments - everything normative fades out of
the picture.
This is the picture of what I called 'the basic leveĺ that is yielded, in
Wrighťs reading, by the rejection of ratification-independence (see §5
above). I expressed disbelief that a position in which this is how things
are at the basic level can accommodate meaning at all. If it is true that a
failure to accommodate meaning is the upshot of the position, then it
can be attributed to Wittgenstein only at the price of supposing that he
does not succeed in his aims. But we are now equipped to see that the
attribution falsifies his intentions. When he describes the 'bedrock' use
of expressions as 'without justification', he nevertheless insists (to
complete the quotation from PI §289):
To use an expression without a justification does not mean to use it without right.2s
And it seems clear that the point of this is precisely to prevent the
leaching out of norms from our picture of 'bedrock' - from our picture,
that is, of how things are at the deepest level at which we may sensibly
contemplate the place of language in the world. To quote again from
RFM VI-28:
Following according to the rule is FUNDAMENTAL to our language-game.
By Wittgenstein's lights, it is a mistake to think we can dig down to a
level at which we no longer have application for normative notions (like
'following according to tbe rule'). Wrighťs picture of the basic level, so
far from capturing Wittgenstein's view, looks like a case of succumbing
to a temptation that he is constantly warning against:
The difficultthing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground
that liesbefore us as the ground. (RF/v/VI-31.)
Wittgenstein's problem is to steer a course between a Scylla and a
Charybdis. Scylla is the idea that understanding is always interpretation.
342 JOHN MCDOWELL
This idea is disastrous because embracing it confronts us with the
dilemma of §4 above: the choice between the paradox that there is no
substance to meaning, on the one hand, and the fantastic mythology of
the super-rigid machine, on the other. We can avoid Scylla by stressing
that, say, calling something 'green' can be like crying 'Help!' when one
is drowning - simply how one has learned to react to this situation. But
then we risk steering on to Charybdis - the picture of a basic level at
which there are no norms; if we embrace that, I have suggested, then
we cannot prevent meaning from coming to seem an illusion. The point
of PI §198, and part of the point of §§201-202, is that the key to finding
the indispensable middle course is the idea of a custom or practice. How
can a performance both be nothing but a 'blinď reaction to a situation,
not an attempt to act on an interpretation (avoiding Scylla); and be a
case of going by a rule (avoiding Charybdis)? The answer is: by
belonging to a custom (PI §198), practice (PI §202), or institution
(RFM VI-31).
Until more is said about how exactly the appeal to communal practice
makes the middle course available, this is only a programme for a
solution to Wittgenstein's problem. But even if we were at a loss as to
how he might have thought the programme could be executed (and I
shall suggest that we need not be: see §§10 and 11 below), this would be
no ground for ignoring the clear textual evidence that the programme is
Wittgenstein's own.
.
What I have claimed might be put like this: Wittgenstein's point is that
we have to situate our conception of meaning and understanding within
a framework of communal practices. Kripke's reading credits Wittgenstein
with the thesis that the notion of meaning something by one's
words is 'inapplicable to a single person considered in isolation' (K, p.
277). The upshot is similar, then; and it cannot be denied that the
insistence on publicity in Kripke's reading corresponds broadly with a
Wittgensteinian thought. But it makes a difference how we conceive
the requirement of publicity to emerge.
In my reading, it emerges as a condition for the intelligibility of
rejecting a premiss - the assimilation of understanding to interpretation
- that would present us with an intolerable dilemma. So there are three
positions in play: the two horns of the dilemma, and the community-
FOLLOWING A RULE 343
oriented conception of meaning that enables us to decline the choice.
Kripke conflates two of these, equating the paradox of PI §201 - the
first horn of the dilemma - with Wittgenstein's conclusion; only so can
he take it that when Wittgenstein objects to the 'superlative facť of PI
§192, he is embracing the paradox of §201. 29 But this is quite wrong.
The paradox that Wittgenstein formulates at §201 is not, as Kripke
supposes, the mere 'paradox' that if we consider an individual in
isolation, we do not have the means to make sense of the notion of
meaning (something we might hope to disarm by appealing to the idea
of a linguistic community). It is the genuine and devastating paradox
that meaning is an illusion. Focusing on the individual in isolation from
any linguistic community is not the way we fall into this abyss; it is,
rather, an aspect of the way we struggle not to, so long as we retain the
assumption that generates the dilemma. (See §4 above, on the idiolectic
implications of the second horn.) The fundamental trouble is that
Kripke makes nothing of Wittgenstein's concern to reject the assimilation
of understanding to interpretation; and the nemesis of this oversight
is the unconvincingness (see §3 above) of the 'sceptical solution'
on which Kripke's Wittgenstein must rely.
.
Kripke suggests (K, p. 239) that, in the light of P1 §202, we should take
it that the essentials of the Private Language Argument are contained
in the general discussion of rule-following, rather than in the section of
the Investigations that begins at §243, where it has been more usual to
look. I cannot accept Kripke's view that the Private Language
Argument is a corollary of the 'sceptical solution'; but his structural
proposal can be detached from that.
Kripke remarks (K, pp. 277-278) that the lesson of Wittgenstein's
reflections on rule-following is particularly counter-intuitive in two
areas: mathematics and talk of 'inner' facts. This remark is still true
after we have corrected Kripke's account of what the lesson is. In the
case of mathematics, the diffÉculty is that we tend to construe the
phenomenology of proof as a matter of glimpses of the super-rigid
machinery in operation. In the case of talk of 'inner' facts, the difficulty
lies in the temptation to suppose that one knows what one means from
one's own case (PI §347). How can one's linguistic community have
any bearing on the matter - beyond its control over the circumstances
344 JOHN MCDOWELL
in which one gave oneself one's private ostensive definitions? Kripke's
illuminating suggestion is that the passages usually regarded as containing
the Private Language Argument are not rightly so regarded; the
argument is essentially complete by PI §202, and the familiar passages
(§§258, 265,293, and so forth) are attempts to dissipate this inclination
to cite talk of 'inner facts' as a counter-example to its conclusion.
This implies that whether those familiar passages carry conviction is,
in a sense, irrelevant to the cogency of Wittgenstein's argument. If the
inclination to regard talk of 'inner' facts as a counter-example persists
through them, that by itself cuts no ice. And we are now in a position to
see what would be needed in order to undermine the argument. One
would need to show either that one or the other of the horns of the
dilemma can be comfortably occupied, or that it is not the case that the
assimilation of understanding to interpretation, which poses the
dilemma, can be resisted only by locating meaning in a framework of
communal practices.
If the target of Wittgenstein's reflections is the assimilation of
understanding to interpretation, we should expect the areas where his
conclusion is peculiarly counter-intuitive to be areas where we are
strongly inclined to be comfortable with that assimilation. In the
mathematical case, we are particularly prone to the assimilation
because - as I remarked above - we are especially inclined to accept
its natural accompaniment, the picture of the super-rigid machine.
What about talk of 'inner' facts? We are strongly tempted, in this
context, to think that there could be a private grasp of a concept something
by which, for all its privacy, it would make sense to think of
judgements and utterances as constrained. What Wittgenstein's
argument, as I read it, requires is the diagnosis that we are here toying
with the picture of an interpretation (placed by us on a private ostensive
definition) - that it is only so that we can contrive to conceive the
matter in terms of concepts and judgements at all. It is true that this
pictured interpretation does not readily succumb to the softening effect
of the sceptical reasoning - 'one interpretation after another, as if each
one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another
standing behind iť (PI §201). We imagine that in this case we can
picture an interpretation that stays hard - one that comprehensively
bridges the gap between the private ostensive definition and the
judgements that we picture it as dictating. But there cannot be
exceptions to the thesis that no interpretation can bridge the gap
FOLLOWING A RULE 345
between the acquisition of a concept and its subsequent employment. It
is this, I think, that Wittgenstein is trying to make vivid for us in the
battery of passages of which this might stand as an epitome:
Always get rid of the idea of the private object in this way: assume that it constantly
changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives
you. (PIp. 207.) 30
The idea that a private interpretation can be immune to the softening
effect must be an illusion. If we conceive such an interpretation as
comprehensively filling the gap, whatever the gap turns out to be, we
deprive of all substance the hardness that we picture it as having.
It may be tempting to locate a weakness, in the argument I attribute
to Wittgenstein, in the claim that we can steer between Scylla and
Charybdis only by appealing to the practice of a community. If it is the
notion of a practice that does the work, can we not form a conception of
the practice of an individual that would do the trick?31 But if one is
tempted by this thought, one must search one's conscience to be sure
that what one has in mind is not really, after all, the picture of a private
interpretation; :in which case one is not, after all, steering between
Scylla and Charybdis, but resigning oneself to Scylla, leaving oneself
fully vulnerable to the line of argument that I have just sketched.32
10.
Wrighťs reading of Wittgenstein hinges on this conditional: if possession
of a concept were correctly conceived as grasp of a (ratificationindependent)
pattern, then there would be no knowing for sure how
someone else understands an expression. This conditional underlies
Wrighťs conviction that, when we entertain the 'pattern' idea,
... the kind of reflective grasp of meaning appealed to is essentially idiolectic - it is a
matter of each of us discerning the character of his own understanding of expressions.
There is no temptation to claim a reflective knowledge of features of others' understanding
of a particular expression - except against the background of the hypothesis that it
coincides with one's own.33
We can summarize Wrighťs reading by saying that he takes Wittgenstein
to propound a modus tollens argument with the conditional as
major premiss. Thus: the idea of knowledge of idiolectic meaning is an
illusion; therefore possession of a concept cannot be correctly conceived
as grasp of a (ratification-independent) pattern.
346 JOHN MCDOWELL
The basis of this argument is, as Wright points out, 'the fundamental
anti-realist thesis that we have understanding only of concepts of which
we can distinctively manifest our understanding' (W, p. 221). Wright
would ground both premisses of the modus tollens argument on
'anti-realism'. The justification for the minor premiss (see §2 above) is
that the picture of an idiolectic rule makes no room for a distinction
between actually conforming and merely having the impression that
one is conforming. In Wrighťs reading the thought here is an 'antirealisť
one: that in an idiolectic context one could not distinctively
manifest - not even with a manifestation to oneself - a difference in
one's understanding of 'I am actually conforming' and 'I have the
impression of conforming'.34 What underlies the major premiss - the
conditional - is the 'anti-realisť conception of what it is to manifest
understanding to others.
According to that conception, the behaviour that counts as manifesting
understanding to others must be characterizable, in such a way as
to display its status as such a manifestation, without benefit of a
command of the language in question. Without that proviso, the
'manifestation challenge' that 'anti-realists' direct against the truthconditional
conception of meaning would be trivialized.35 The challenge
would hold no fears for the truth-conditional conception if one
were allowed to count as satisfying the requirement of manifestation by
such behaviour as saying - manifestly, at least to someone who
understands the language one is speaking - that such and such is the
case. So the distinctive manifestations allowed by 'anti-realism' consist,
rather, in such behaviour as assenting to a sentence in such and such
circumstances .36
Now what - besides itself - could be fully manifested by a piece of
behaviour, or a series of pieces of behaviour, described in accordance
with the 'anti-realisť requirement? 37 Perhaps the behaviour would
license us to attribute a disposition; but how can we extrapolate to a
determinate conception of what the disposition is a disposition to do?
Our characterization of the manifesting behaviour is not allowed to
exploit understanding of the language in question; so even if, in our
innocence, we start out by conceiving that as grasp of 'a network of
determinate patterns' (W, p. 220), we are debarred from extrapolating
along the pathways of the network. It seems clear that within the rules
of this game any extrapolation could only be inductive, which means that
if we accept the requirement that understanding be fully manifested in
FOLLOWING A RULE 347
behaviour, no extrapolation is licensed at all. The upshot is this: the
'anti-realisť requirement of manifestation precludes any conception of
understanding as grasp of a network of patterns. And this is precisely
the conclusion that Wright draws.38
The obstacle to accepting this argument is the normative character of
the notion of meaning. As I have granted, Wright aims to accommodate
that: he would insist that his conclusion is not that concepts have no
normative status, but that the patterns they dictate are not independent
of our ratification. But the trouble is (see §§5 and 7) that the denial of
ratification-independence, by Wrighťs own insistence, yields a picture
of the relation between the communal language and the world in which
norms are obliterated. And once we have this picture, it seems
impossible simply to retain alongside it a different picture, in which the
openness of an individual to correction by his fellows means that he is
subject to norms. The first picture irresistibly claims primacy, leaving
our openness to correction by our fellows looking like, at best, an
explanation of our propensity to the illusion that we are subject to
norms. If this is correct, it turns Wrighťs argument on its head: a
condition for the possibility of finding real application for the notion of
meaning at all is that we reject 'anti-realism'.
I think this transcendental argument against 'anti-realism' is fully
cogent. But it is perhaps unlikely to carry conviction unless supplemented
with a satisfying account of how 'anti-realism' goes wrong.
(Providing this supplementation will help to discharge the unfinished
business noted at the end of §7.)
11.
According to 'anti-realism', people's sharing a language is constituted
by appropriate correspondences in their dispositions to linguistic
behaviour, as characterized without drawing on command of the
language, and hence not in terms of the contents of their utterances. The
motivation for this thesis is admirable: a recoil from the idea that
assigning a meaning to an utterance by a speaker of one's language is
forming a hypothesis about something concealed behind the surface of
his linguistic behaviour. But there are two possible directions in which
this recoil might move one. One - the 'anti-realisť direction - is to
retain the conception of the surface that makes the idea natural, and
resolutely attempt to locate meaning on the surface, so conceived. That
348 JOHN MCDOWELL
this attempt fails is the conclusion of the transcendental argument. The
supplementation that the argument needs is to point out the availability
of the alternative direction: namely, to reject the conception of the
surface that 'anti-realism' shares with the position it recoils from.
According to this different view, the outward aspect of linguistic
behaviour - what a speaker makes available to others - must be
characterized in terms of the contents of utterances (the thoughts they
express). Of course such an outward aspect cannot be conceived as
made available to just anyone; command of the language is needed in
order to put one in direct cognitive contact with that in which
someone's meaning consists.39 (This might seem to represent command
of the language as a mysterious sort of X-ray vision; but only in the
context of the rejected conception of the surface.)
Wittgenstein warns us not to try to dig below 'bedrock'. But it is
difficult, in reading him, to avoid acquiring a sense of what, as it were,
lies down there: a web of facts about behaviour and 'inner' episodes,
describable without using the notion of meaning. One is likely to be
struck by the sheer contingency of the resemblances between individuals
on which, in this vision, the possibility of meaning seems to
depend, and hence impressed by an apparent precariousness in our
making sense of one another. 4° There is an authentic insight here, but
one that is easily distorted; correcting the distortion will help to bring
out what is wrong with the 'anti-realisť construal of Wittgenstein.
The distorted version of the insight can be put as a dilemma, on these
lines. Suppose that, in claiming a 'reflective knowledge' of the principle
of application of some expression, I claim to speak for others as well as
myself. In that case my claim (even if restricted to a definitely specified
other: say my interlocutor in a particular conversation) is indefinitely
vulnerable to the possibility of an unfavourable future. Below 'bedrock'
there is nothing but contingency; so at any time in the future my
interlocutor's use of the expression in question may simply stop
conforming to the pattern that I expect. And that would retrospectively
undermine my present claim to be able to vouch for the character of his
understanding. So I can claim to know his pattern now only 'against the
background of the hypothesis that it coincides with [my] own' (W, p.
354). If, then, we retain the conception of understanding as grasp of
patterns, the feeling of precariousness becomes the idea that what we
think of as a shared language is at best a set of corresponding idiolects,
with our grounds for believing in the correspondence no better than
FOLLOWING A RULE 349
inductive. The only alternative - the other horn of the dilemma - is,
with Wright, ~o give up the conception of understanding as grasp of
(ratification-independent) patterns. This turns the feeling of precariousness
into the idea that I cannot know for sure that my interlocutor
and I will continue to march in step. But on this horn my present
claim to understand him is not undermined by that concession: my
understanding him now is a matter of our being in step now, and does
not require a shared pattern extending into the future.
What is wrong with this, in Wittgensteinian terms, is that it conflates
propositions at (or above) 'bedrock' with propositions about the contingencies
that lie below. (See, for instance, RFM VI-49.) Its key
thought is that, if I claim to know someone else's pattern, I bind myself
to a prediction of the uses of language that he will make in various
possible future circumstances, with these uses characterized in sub'bedrock'
terms. (That is why coming to see the contingency of the
resemblances, at this level, on which meaning rests is supposed to
induce appreciation that knowledge of another person's pattern could
at best be inductive.) But when I claim understanding of someone else,
and construe this as knowledge of the patterns to which his present
utterance owes allegiance, what I claim to know is not that in such and
such circumstances he will do so and so, but rather at most that that is
what he will do if he sticks to his patterns. 4~And that is not a prediction
at all. (Compare RFM VI-15.)
It is true that a certain disorderliness below 'bedrock' would undermine
the applicability of the notion of rule-following. So the underlying
contingencies bear an intimate relation to the notion of rule-following a
relation that Wittgenstein tries to capture by saying 'It is as if we had
hardened the empirical proposition into a rule' (RFM VI-22). But
recognizing the intimate relation must not be allowed to obscure the
difference of ]evels.42 If we respect the difference of levels, what we
make of the feeling of precariousness will be as follows. When I
understand another person, I know the rules he is going by. My right to
claim to understand him is precarious, in that nothing but a tissue of
contingencies stands in the way of my losing it. But to envisage its loss is
not necessarily to envisage its turning out that I never had the right at
all. The difference of levels suffices to drive a wedge between these;
contrast the second horn of the above dilemma, on which inserting the
wedge requires abandonment of the idea that mutual understanding is
mutual knowledge of shared commitments.43
350 JOHN MCDOWELL
'Anti-realists' hold that initiation into a common language consists in
acquisition of linguistic propensities describable without use of the
notion of meaning. They thereby perpetrate exactly the conflation of
levels against which Wittgenstein warns; someone's following a rule,
according to 'anti-realism', is constituted by the obtaining of resemblances,
describable in sub-'bedrock' terms, between his behaviour
and that of his fellows. Not that 'anti-realists' would put it like that: it is
another way of making the same point to say that they locate 'bedrock'
lower than it is - not accommodating the fact that 'following according
to the rule is FUNDAMENTAL to our language-game' (RFM VI-28;
see §7 above). If, by contrast, we satisfy the motivation of 'anti-realism'
in the different way that I distinguished above, then we refuse to
countenance sub-'bedrock' (meaning-free) characterizations of what
meaning something by one's words consists in, and thus respect
Wittgenstein's distinction of levels.
We make possible, moreover, a radically different conception of what
it is to belong to a linguistic community. 'Anti-realists' picture a
community as a collection of individuals presenting to one another
exteriors that match in certain respects. They hope to humanize this
bleak picture by claiming that what meaning consists in lies on those
exteriors as fhey conceive them. But the transcendental argument
reveals this hope as vain. A related thought is this: if regularities in the
verbal behaviour of an isolated individual, described in norm-free
terms, do not add up to meaning, it is quite obscure how it could
somehow make all the difference if there are several individuals with
matching regularities.44 The picture of a linguistic community degenerates,
then, under 'anti-realisť assumptions, into a picture of a mere
aggregate of individuals whom we have no convincing reason not to
conceive as opaque to one another. If, on the other hand, we reject the
'anti-realisť restriction on what counts as manifesting one's understanding,
we entitle ourselves to this thought: shared membership in a
linguistic community is not just a matter of matching in aspects of an
exterior that we present to anyone whatever, but equips us to make our
minds available to one another, by confronting one another with a
different exterior from that which we present to outsiders.
Wittgenstein's problem was to explain how understanding can be
other than interpretation (see §7 above). This non-'anti-realisť conception
of a linguistic community gives us a genuine right to the
following answer: shared command of a language equips us to know
FOLLOWING A RULE 351
one another's meaning without needing to arrive at that knowledge by
interpretation, because it equips us to hear someone else's meaning in
his words. 'Anti-realists' would claim this right too, but the claim is
rendered void by the merely additive upshot of their picture of what it is
to share a language. In the different picture I have described, the
response to Wittgenstein's problem works because a linguistic community
is conceived as bound together, not by a match in mere
externals (facts accessible to just anyone), but by a capacity for a
meeting of minds.
When we had no more than an abstract characterization of Wittgenstein's
response, as an appeal to the notion of communal practice,
there seemed to be justice in this query: if the concept of a communal
practice can magic meaning into our picture, should not this power
be credited to the concept of a practice as such - so that the practice of
an individual might serve just as well? (See §7 above.) But if Wittgenstein's
position is the one I have described in this section, it is
precisely the notion of a communal practice that is needed, and not
some notion that could equally be applied outside the context of a
community. The essential point is the way in which one person can
know another's meaning without interpretation. Contrary to Wrighťs
reading, it is only because we can have what Wright calls 'a reflective
knowledge of features of others' understanding of a particular expression'
(W, p. 354) that meaning is possible at all.45
12.
Wittgenstein's reflections on rule-following attack a certain familiar
picture of facts and truth, which I shall formulate like this. A genuine
fact must be a matter of the way things are in themselves, utterly
independently of us. So a genuinely true judgement must be, at least
potentially, an exercise of pure thought; if human nature is necessarily
implicated in the very formation of the judgement, that precludes our
thinking of the corresponding fact as properly independent of us, and
hence as a proper fact at all.46
We can find this picture of genuine truth compelling only if we either
forget that true:h-bearers are such only because they are meaningful, or
suppose that meanings take care of themselves, needing, as it were, no
help from us. This latter supposition is the one that is relevant to our
concerns. If we make it, we can let the judging subject, in our picture of
352 JOHN MCDOWELL
true judgement, shrink to a locus of pure thought, while the fact that
judging is a human activity fades into insignificance.
Now Wittgenstein's reflections on rule-following undermine this
picture by Undermining the supposition that meanings take care of
themselves. A particular performance,-'inner' or overt, can be an
application of a concept - a judgement or a meaningful utterance - only
if it owes allegiance to constraints that the concept imposes. And being
governed by such constraints is not being led, in some occult way, by an
autonomous meaning (the super-rigid machinery), but acting within a
communal custom. The upshot is that if something enters into being a
participant in the relevant customs, it enters equally into being capable
of making any judgements at all. We have to give up that picture of
genuine truth, in which the maker of a true judgement can shrink to a
point of pure thought, abstracted from anything that might make him
distinctively and recognizably one of us.
It seems right to regard that familiar picture as a kind of realism. It
takes meaning to be wholly autonomous (one is tempted to say 'out
there'); this is reminiscent of realism as the term is used in the old debate
about universals. And it embraces an extreme form of the thesis that the
facts are not up to us; this invites the label 'realism' understood in a way
characteristic of more recent debates. But if we allow ourselves to
describe the recoil from the familiar picture as a recoil from realism,
there are two points that we must be careful not to let this obscure.
First: the recoil has nothing to do with rejection of the truthconditional
conception of meaning, properly understood. That conception
has no need to camouflage the fact that truth conditions are
necessarily given by us, in a language that we understand. When we say
' "Diamonds are hard" is true if and only if diamonds are harď, we are
just as much involved on the right-hand side as the reflections on
rule-following tell us we are. There is a standing temptation to miss this
obvious truth, and to suppose that the right-hand side somehow
presents us with a possible fact, pictured as a unconceptualized
configuration of things in themselves. But we can find the connection
between meaning and truth illuminating without succumbing to that
temptation.
Second: the recoil is from an extreme form of the thesis that the
facts are not up to us, not from that thesis in any form whatever. What
Wittgenstein's polemic against the picture of the super-rigid machine
makes untenable is the thesis that possession of a concept is grasp of a
FOLLOWING A RULE 353
pattern of application that extends of itself to new cases. (See §4 above.)
In Wrighťs reading, that is the same as saying that it deprives us of the
conception of grasp of ratification-independent patterns. But rejection
of ratification-independence obliterates meaning altogether (see §§5, 7,
10 above). In effect, the transcendental argument shows that there
must be a middle position. Understanding is grasp of patterns that
extend to new cases independently of our ratification, as required for
meaning to be other than an illusion (and - not incidentally - for the
intuitive notion of objectivity to have a use); but the constraints
imposed by our concepts do not have the platonistic autonomy with
which they are credited in the picture of the super-rigid machinery.
As before (compare §11 above), what obscures the possibility of this
position is the 'anti-realisť attempt to get below 'bedrock'. Wright
suggests (W, pp. 217-220) that the emergence of a consensus on
whether, say, to call some newly encountered object 'yellow' is subject
to no norms. That is indeed how it seems if we allow ourselves to picture
the communal language in terms of sub-'bedrock' resemblances in
behaviour and phenomenology. But if we respect Wittgenstein's injunction
not to dig below the ground, we must say that the community
'goes right or wrong' (compare W, p. 220) according to whether the
object in question is, or is not, yellow; and nothing can make its being
yellow, or not, dependent on our ratification of the judgement that that
is how things are. In Wittgenstein's eyes, as I read him, Wrighťs claim
that 'for the community itself there is no authority, so no standard to
meeť (W, p. 220) can be, at very best, an attempt to say something that
cannot be said but only shown. It may have some merit, conceived in
that light; but attributing it to Wittgenstein as a doctrine can yield only
distortion.
Wittgenstein writes, at RFM II-61:
Finitism and behaviourism are quite similar trends. Both say, but surely, all we have here
is .... Both deny the existence of something, both with a view to escaping from a
confusion.47
The point about finitism is this. It recoils, rightly, from the mythology of
the super-rigid machinery - the patterns that extend of themselves,
without limit, beyond any point we take them to. But it equates this
recoil with rejecting any conception of patterns that extend, without
limit, beyond any such point. This is like the behaviourist idea that in
order to escape from the confused idea of the mental as essentially
354 JOHN MCDOWELL
concealed from others behind behaviour, we have to reject the mental
altogether. The idealism that Wright reads into Wittgenstein seems to be
another similar trend. (Clearly the remark does not applaud the trends it
discusses.)
13.
In this section I want to mention two sets of passages in Wittgenstein of
which we are now placed to make better sense than Wright can.
First: in Wrighťs reading, the 'pattern' idea is inextricably connected
with the picture of idiolectic understanding. But this does not seem to be
how Wittgenstein sees things. Wittgenstein does not scruple to say that
a series 'is defined.., by the training in proceeding according to the
rule' (RFM VI-16). And at Zettel §308 he writes:
Instead of "and so on" he might have said: "Now you know what I mean." And his
explanation would simplybe a definitionof the expression"following the rule +1"...
Again, PI §208 and the remarks that follow it contain a sustained attack
on the idea that successfully putting someone through the sort of
training that is meant to 'point beyonď the examples given (see §208) is
getting him 'to guess the essential thing' (PI §210). For Wright, when
these passages reject the picture of a leap to a personal understanding,
they should be eo ipso rejecting the 'pattern' idea. But Wittgenstein
combines criticism of the 'leap' picture with conceding (§209) how
natural it is to think of our understanding as reaching beyond all the
examples given. (Wright would construe this concession in terms of his
purged version of the 'pattern' idea. But we can make sense of what
Wittgenstein says without saddling him with the problems generated by
denial of ratification-independence.)
Second: Wittgenstein sometimes (for instance at PI §151) discusses
the idea that one can grasp the principle of a series, or a meaning, 'in a
flash'. Wright suggests (W, pp. 30-31) that the idea of this 'flash' can be
nothing but the idea of a leap to a purely personal understanding. But I
see no reason to accept that Wittgenstein intends this identification. In
fact, the suggestion casts a gratuitous slur on his phenomenological
perceptiveness. The idea that the meaning of an expression can be
present in an instant is just as tempting about someone else's meaning
as it is about one's own; and Wittgenstein is perfectly aware of this:
When someonesaysthe word"cube" to me, for example,I knowwhatit means.But can
FOLLOWING A RULE 355
the whole use of the word come before my mind, when I understand it in that way?(PI
§139; cf. §138.)
Wrighťs view must be that the intended answer to this question is 'No' that
Wittgenstein intends to show up as an illusion the idea that one can
grasp someone else's pattern in a flash. But the only illusion that
Wright explains to us in this neighbourhood is the illusion of supposing
that one could have an idiolectic grasp of a pattern. So Wrighťs
Wittgenstein owes us something for which we search the writings of the
actual Wittgenstein in vain: an explanation of how it is that we not only
fall into that illusion but misconceive its character - mistaking what is in
fact the supposition that we can guess at someone else's pattern for
(what seems on the face of it very different) the supposition that we can
hear it in his utterances.
We are now placed to see that this latter supposition is not, in
Wittgenstein's 'view, an illusion at all. 'Grasping the whole use in a flash'
is not to be dismissed as expressing an incorrigibly confused picture the
picture of a leap to an idiolectic understanding - but to be carefully
understood in the light of the thesis that there is a way of grasping a rule
which is not an interpretation. In that light, we can see that there is
nothing wrong with the idea that one can grasp in a flash the principle of
a series one is being taught; and equally that there is nothing wrong
with the idea that one can hear someone else's meaning in his words.
The 'interpretation' prejudice insidiously tempts us to put a fantastic
mythological construction on these conceptions; the right response to
that is not to abandon the conceptions but to exorcize the 'interpretation'
prejudice and so return them to sobriety. ('Really the only
thing wrong with what you say is the expression "in a queer way" ': PI
§195.)
At PI §534, Wittgenstein writes:
Hearing a word in a particular sense. How queer that there should be such a thing!
Phrased like this, emphasized like this, heard in this way,this sentence is the first of a
series in which a transition is made to these sentences, pictures, actions.
((A multitude of familiar paths leads off from these words in every direction.))4s
What are these 'familiar paths'? Presumably, for instance, continuations
of the conversation that would make sense: not, then, 'patterns' in
precisely the sense with which we have been concerned (which would
be, as these paths would not, cases of 'going on doing the same thing'),
but they raise similar issues. Suppose that, in describing a series of
356 JOHN MCDOWELL
utterances that in fact constitutes an intelligible conversation, we
conform to the 'anti-realisť account of how meaning must be manifested.
We shall have to describe each member of the series without
drawing on command of the language in question. Such a description
will blot out the relations of meaning between the members of the
series, in virtue of which it constitutes an intelligible conversation; what
is left will be, at best, a path that one could trace out inductively
(whether predicting or retrodicting).49 Wrighťs demonstration that
'anti-realism' cannot countenance ratification-independent patterns
should work for these 'familiar paths' too. An 'anti-realisť cannot
extrapolate, from what is done in his presence on an occasion, along
paths marked out by meaning; and inductive extrapolation is against
the rule that we must restrict ourselves to what is fully manifested in
linguistic behaviour. It is obscure to me what interpretation of the
passage I have quoted is available to Wright. What seems to be the case
is that 'anti-realism', by, in effect, looking for 'bedrock' lower than it is,
blocks off the obvious and surely correct reading: that hearing a word
in one sense rather than another is hearing it in one position rather than
another in the network of possible patterns of making sense that we
learn to find ourselves in when we acquire mastery of a language.
14.
We can centre the issue between Wrighťs reading and mine on this
question: how does Wittgenstein's insistence on publicity emerge? In
my reading, the answer is this: it emerges as a condition of the
possibility of rejecting the assimilation of understanding to interpretation,
which poses an intolerable dilemma. In Wrighťs reading, the
answer is this: it emerges as the only alternative left, after the notion of
idiolectic understanding has been scotched by a self-contained
argument that is epitomized by this passage (PI §258):
ˇ.. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only
means that here we can't talk about 'righť.
Wright takes the thought here to be an 'anti-realisť one, to the effect
that the distinction between being right and seeming right is shown to
be empty, in the idiolectic case, by the impossibility of manifesting a
grasp of it, even to oneself. (See §10 above.) Given this, I suppose
Wright takes it that sheer consistency requires construing the appeal to
FOLLOWING A RULE 357
the community, shown to be obligatory by virtue of being the only
remaining possibility, in an 'anti-realisť way.
Now it is true that the idiolectic conception of understanding is a
corollary of the second horn of the dilemma. (See §4 above.) So my
reading need not exclude a self-contained argument against that idea,
constituting part of the demonstration that the dilemma is intolerable.
On such a view, the insistence on publicity would emerge twice over:
first as a direct implication of the self-contained argument, and second,
indirectly, as required by the rejection of the dilemma. In fact I think
this complexity is unnecessary. Wittgenstein has plenty to say against
the second horn of the dilemma - the picture of the super-rigid machine
- without needing, for his case against it and therefore against accepting
the dilemma, the envisaged self-contained argument against this
corollary. And I have explained (in §9 above) how passages like the one '
I quoted above fromPI §258, which Wright takes as formulations of the
self-contained argument, are intelligible in the context of the second,
indirect route to the requirement of publicity. But the real flaw in
Wrighťs reading, in my view, is not that it countenances the first route,
but that it omits the second. Like Kripke (see §8 above), Wright makes
nothing of Wit~genstein's concern - which figures at the centre of my
reading - to attack the assimilation of understanding to interpretation.
This oversight shows itself in Wrighťs willingness to attribute the
following line of thought to Wittgenstein:
ˇ.. the investigation-independent truth of statements requires that their truth is settled,
autonomously and without the need of human interference, by their meanings and the
character of the relevant facts. For a complex set of reasons, however, no notion of
meaning can be legitimised which will play this role.., the meaning of a statement, if it is
to make the relevant autonomous contribution towards determining that statemenťs
truth-value, cannot be thought of as fully determined by previous uses of that statement
or, if it is a novel statement, by previous uses of its constituents and by its syntax; for those
factors can always be reconciled with the statemenťs having any truth-value, no matter
what the worldly facts are taken to be. The same goes for prior phenomenological
episodes - imagery, models - in the minds of the linguistically competent. Nothing,
therefore, in the previous use of the statement, or of its constituents, or in the prior
streams of consciousness of competent speakers, is, if its meaning is in conjunction with
the facts to determine its truth-value, sufficient to fix its meaning. So what does?s°
This is essentially the argument that generates the paradox of PI §201;
and it can be attributed to Wittgenstein only at the cost of ignoring, like
Kripke, that section's second paragraph.
The result of the oversight is that, whereas Wittgenstein's key
358 JOHN MCDOWELL
thought is that the dilemma must be avoided, Wrighťs reading leaves
the dilemma unchallenged. Wittgenstein obviously attacks the second
horn of the dilemma - the picture of the super-rigid machinery. The
consequence of leaving the dilemma unchallenged is thus to locate
Wittgenstein on its first horn - embracing the paradox of §201. This
disastrous upshot does not, of course, correspond to Wrighťs intentions
in his interpretation of Wittgenstein. (Contrast Kripke, who can be
content to attribute acceptance of the paradox of §201 to Wittgenstein
because he misses its devastating character.) Nevertheless, it is where
his reading leaves us (see §§5, 7, 10 above): a fitting nemesis for its
inattention to Wittgenstein's central concern.
The villain of the piece - what makes it impossible for Wright to
accommodate Wittgenstein's insistence that understanding need not be
interpretation - is the 'anti-realisť conception of our knowledge of
others. (See §§11 and 12 above. Contrary to what, at the beginning of
this section, I took Wright to suppose, the cogency of a passage like PI
§258, against the picture of idiolectic understanding, is quite unconnected
with the 'anti-realisť view of what it is to manifest understanding
to others.) From Wrighťs reading, then, we can learn something
important: that there cannot be a position that is both 'anti-realisť
and genuinely hospitable to meaning, and that the construal of Wittgenstein
as the source of 'anti-realism', often nowadays taken for
granted, is a travesty.
NOTES
* This paper originated in an attempt to respond to Simon Blackburn's 'Rule-Following
and Moral Realism', in Steven Holtzman and Christopher Leich (eds.), Wittgenstein: To
Follow a Rule, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, Boston and Henley, 1981, pp.
163-187; I was stimulated also, in writing the first draft, by an unpublished paper of
Blackburn's called 'Rule-Following'. I have been greatly helped by comments on the first
draft from Margaret Gilbert, Susan Hurley, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Christopher
Peacocke, Philip Pettit, David Wiggins, and Crispin Wright, who also kindly let me see a
draft of his 'Kripke's Wittgenstein', a paper presented to the Seventh Wittgenstein
Symposium at Kirchberg, Austria, in August 1982, and forthcoming in the Journal of
Philosophy.
1 I shall use 'RFM' for the third edition of Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Foundations.of
Mathematics, edited by G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe, and
translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Blackwell, Oxford, 1978.
2 See p. 19 of Crispin Wright, Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics,
Duckworth, London, 1980; hereafter referred to by 'W'.
FOLLOWING A RULE 359
3 This idea of commitment to patterns must be treated with care if we are not to falsify the
intuition. The most straightforward sort of case, on which it is familiar that Wittgenstein
concentrates, is the continuation of a numerical series. Here it is natural to think of the
correct expansion of the series as constituting a pattern to which understanding of its
principle commits one. In the general case, the 'pattern' idea is the idea of a series of
things that, given the way the world develops, it would be correct to say if one chose to
express a given concept; outside the series-expansion case, this idea is obviously
metaphorical at best, since what it is correct to say with the use of a given concept, even
supposing a determinate state of affairs one aims to describe, depends on what other
concepts one chooses to express in the same utterance. (The non-metaphorical kernel is
simply the idea that the meaning of what one says is a matter of the conditions under
which it would be true.) It is important, also, not to falsify the connection between the
patterns and meaningfulness - for instance, by suggesting that the idea is that making
sense depends on conforming to the appropriate commitments.Tracing out the patterns is
what the 'pattern' idea takes consistently speaking the truth to be; to make sense (in an
affirmation) one needs to do no more than felicitously make as if to be doing what one
takes that to require. (See, further, n. 41 below.)
4 'Rigiď will call for comment: see n. 19 below.
5 Wright does this at p. 252 of 'Strict Finitism', Synthese 51, 1982. See also pp. 246-247 of
his 'Anti-Realist Semantics: the Role of Criteria', in Godfrey Vesey (ed.), Idealism: Past
and Present, CUP, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 225-248.
6 I shall use 'PI' for Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe,
Blackwell, Oxford, 1953. Stanley Cavelĺs correction of the usual reading of this passage,
at pp. 33-34 of his The Claim of Reason, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1979, does not make it
any easier to reconcile with Wrighťs view of Wittgenstein.
7 See also, e.g., PI §§187, 692, 693.
See also W, pp. 32, 354.
9 See also W, p. 36. Compare PI §258: 'One would like to say: whatever is going to seem
right to me is right. And that only means that here we can't talk about "right".' (See §14
below.)
1o One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to us is right. And that only
means that here we can't talk about 'righť.
11 See Saul A. Kripke, 'Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: an Elementary
Exposition', in Irving Block (ed.), Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein,
Blackwell, Oxford, 1981, pp. 238-312; hereafter referred to by 'K'. Wright notes the
point of contact at p. 249 of 'Strict Finitism'; though he takes issue with Kripke in
'Kripke's Wittgenstein'.
12 Where I say 'other', Kripke has 'larger'. This makes the scepticism perhaps more
gripping, but the difference is inessential.
~3 This is the gist of the excellent discussion at K, pp. 250-57.
14 'Wittgenstein'sPhilosophy of Mathematics', Philosophical Review 68, 1959, 324-348,
at p. 348.
15 See especiallyMichael Dummett, 'What is a Theory of Meaning? (II)', in Gareth Evans
and John McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1976, pp.
67-137.
16 The Blue and Brown Books, Blackwell, Oxford, 1958. Compare Zettel, edited by G. E.
360 JOHN MCDOWELL
M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, and translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Blackwell,
Oxford, 1967, §231.
17 There is a good description of the mythological ideas expressed here, with a wealth of
citations of relevant passages, in Gordon Baker, 'Following Wittgenstein: Some Signposts
for Philosophical Investigations §§143-242', in Holtzman and Leich, To Follow a Rule,
pp. 31-71.
18 See K, pp. 269, 272: Kripke cannot distinguish rejection of the 'superlative facť of PI
§192 - rejection of the mythology - from refusing to countenance a fact in which my
attaching a determinate meaning to 'plus' consists - acceptance of the paradox.
~9 W, p. 216, and 'Strict Finitism', p. 250; both with my emphasis. 'Rigiď, at W, p. 21
(quoted in §1 above), is an expression of the same idea - Wright does not mean 'rigiď as
opposed to, say, 'vague' (see Baker, 'Following Wittgenstein', pp. 40-41).
20 That is, the passage is of a piece with the passage from PI §258 quoted in n. 9 above.
This suggestion does not compete with, but rather complements, Kripke's suggestion (K,
p. 300, n. 17) that the passage refers obliquely to Russelĺs treatment of desire in The
Analysis of Mind, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1921.
21 Compare the passage from Blue Book, p. 34, quoted in §4 above.
22 I have ventured to change the punctuation in the second paragraph, in order to make
the dialectical structure of the passage clearer.
23 Compare PI §506: 'The absent-minded man who at the order "Right turn!" turns left,
and then, clutching his forehead, says "Oh! right turn" and does a right turn. - What has
struck him? An interpretation?'
24 Compare RFM VI-43.
25 See also RFM VI-30, VI-49.
26 With 'Well, that!s how I react in this situation', compare P! §217: '... I am inclined to
say: "This is simply what I do."'
27 On Certainty, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, and translated by
G. E. M. Anscombe and Denis Paul, Blackwell, Oxford, 1969. It is worth noting how
paradoxical 'it is not a kind of seeing' can seem in the case of such uses of language as
saying that something is green. For an illuminating discussion of Wittgenstein's stress on
acting as lying 'at the bottom of the language-game', see Peter Winch, 'Im Anfang war
die Tať, in Block, Perspectives, pp. 159-178.
2s Or 'wrongfully' (RFM VII-40). For a discussion of the translation of 'zu Unrechť, see
K, p. 306, n. 46.
29 See n. 18 above.
30 See, e. g., PI §§258, 265,270. See Anthony Kenny, 'The Verification Principle and
the Private Language Argumenť, in O. R. Jones (ed.), The Private Language Argument,
Macmillan, London, 1971, pp. 204-228.
31 Simon Blackburn presses what is in effect this question, in the unpublished paper
mentioned in n. * above. See §11 below.
3z In this section I have aimed to describe only the structure of the Private Language
Argument. A fuller account of how it works would require, in addition, discharging the
unfinished business noted at the end of §7 above. See especially §11 below.
33 W, p. 354. A footnote adds: 'Or with one's understanding of another specified
expression.'
34 This is how Wright thinks the Private Language Argument is to be understood. Note
that the requirement of manifestation is not initally imposed, in this line of thought, as a
FOLLOWING A RULE 361
requirement of public manifestation: we are brought to see that public manifestation is
what is required in consequence of an independent (non-question-begging) critique of the
idea of idiolectic understanding. On the structure of Wrighťs reading, see §14 below.
35 For the terminology 'manifestation challenge', see Wright, 'Realism, Truth-Value
Links, Other Minds and the Pasť, Ratio 22, 1980, 112-132, at pp. 112-113. For the
substance of the challenge, see, e.g., Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language,
Duckworth, London, 1973, p. 467.
36 It is actually an illusion to think that this kind of characterization of behaviour
conforms to the 'ante-realisť reqmrement: see my 'Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of
Understanding', in Herman Parret and Jacques Bouveresse (eds.), Meaning and Understanding,
De Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 1981, pp. 225-248, at pp. 244-246. But in
the course of arguing, as I am, that the programme is misconceived in principle, there is
no point of jibbing at the details of its purported executioň
37 For 'fully', see Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, p. 467.
38 At least in W. Contrast 'Strawson on Anti-Realism', Synthese 40, 1979, 283-299, at p.
294: '... suppose [someone] has this knowledge: of every state of affairs criterially
warranting the assertion, or denial, of "John is in pain", he knows in a practical sense both
that it has that status and under what circumstances it would be brought out that its status
was merely criterial; that is, he knows the "overturn-conditions" of any situation
criterially warranting the assertion, or denial, of "John is in pain". No doubt we could not
know for sure that someone had this knowledge; but the stronger our grounds for thinking
that he did, the more baffling would be the allegation that he did not grasp the assertoric
content of "John is in pain"ˇ' (My emphasis.) Here Wright contemplates maintaining a
version (formulated in terms of criteria) of the idea that understanding is grasp of a
pattern of use, and accordingly opts - as his overall position indeed requires - for the
other horn of this dilemma: the thesis, namely, that one cannot have certain knowledge of
the character of someone else's understanding. What is remarkable is Wrighťs insouciance
about this move: it openly flouts the fundamental motivation of 'anti-realism',
which is what Wright is supposed to be defending against Strawson. It seems clear that the
contrasting position of W is the only one an 'anti-realisť can consistently occupy.
39 See my 'Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of Understanding', especially pp. 239-
244.
4o See K, p. 290: of. Stanley Cavell, Must we Mean What We Say?, Scribner, New York,
1969, p. 52: and pp. 145-154 of my 'Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following', in Holtzman
and Leich, To Fol;ow a Rule, pp. 141-162.
41 Even this is too much. It passes muster where the 'pattern' idea is least metaphorical,
namely in the case of continuation of a series; but in the general case, the idea of a corpus
of determinate predictions to which a claim of present understanding would commit one is
absurd. (See n. 3 above.) The point I am making here is a version of one that Rush Rhees
makes, in terms of a distinction between the general practice of linguistic behaviour and
the following of rules, at pp. 55-56 of 'Can there be a Private Language?', in his
Discussions of Wittgenstein, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1970, pp. 55-70. It
disarms, as an objection to Wittgenstein, the insightful remarks of Jerry A. Fodor, The
Language of Thought, Harvester, Hassocks, 1975, pp. 71-72.
42 The difference of levels is the subject of Wittgenstein's remarks about 'the limits of
empiricism': RFM III-71, VII-17, VII-21. (The source of the phrase is Russelĺs paper of
362 JOHN MCDOWELL
that name, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 36 (1935-6), 131-150.) See W, p.
220. I think the point of the remarks is, very roughly, that empiricism can deal only with
what is below 'bedrock': the limits of empiricism (which 'are not assumptions unguaranteed,
or intuitively known to be correct: they are ways in which we make
comparisons and in which we acť: RFM VII-21 - cf. On Certainty §204, quoted in §7
above) live above it (outside its reach), at 'bedrock' level. Wright, by contrast, seems to
interpret the passages as if Wittgenstein's view were that for all its limits empiricism
contained the truth.
43 Christopher Peacocke, at p. 88 of 'Rule-Following: the Nature of Wittgenstein's
Arguments', in Holtzman and Leich (eds.), To Follow a Rule, pp. 72-95, implies that
statements about rule-following supervene, in Wittgenstein's view, on sub-'bedrock'
statements. There may be an acceptable interpretation of this; but on the most natural
interpretation, it would make statements about rule-following vulnerable to future loss of
mutual intelligibility in just the way I am objecting to.
44 Simon Blackburn, at p. 183 of 'Rule-Following and Moral Realism', writes: '... we
can become gripped by what I call a wooden picture of the use of language, according to
which the only fact of the matter is that in certain situations people use words, perhaps
with various feelings like "that fits", and so on. This wooden picture makes no room for
the further fact that in applying or withholding a word people may be conforming to a
pre-existent rule. But just because of this, it seems to make no room for the idea that in
using their words they are expressing judgments. Wittgenstein must have felt that
publicity, the fact that others do the same, was the magic ingredient turning the wooden
picture into the full one. It is most obscure to me that it fills this role: a lot of wooden
persons with propensities to make noises is just more of whatever one of them is.' It will be
apparent that I have a great deal of sympathy with this complaint. Where I believe
Blackburn goes wrong is in thinking that it tells against Wittgenstein himself, as opposed
to the position that Wittgenstein has been saddled with by a certain set of interpreters
(among whom I did not intend to enroll myself in my 'Non-Cognitivism and RuleFollowing',
the paper to which Blackburn is responding).
45 If I am right to suppose that any merely aggregative conception of a linguistic
community falsifies Wittgenstein, then it seems that the parallel that Kripke draws with
Hume's discussion of causation (independently proposed by Blackburn, 'Rule-Following
and Moral Realism', pp. 182-183) is misconceived. Wittgenstein's picture of language
contains no conception of the individual such as would correspond to the individual
cause-effect pair, related only by contiguity and succession, in Hume's picture of
causation.
46 The later Wittgenstein may have (perhaps unjustly) found a form of this picture in the
Tractatus. On the relation between the later work and the Tractatus, see Peter Winch,
'Introduction: the Unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy', in Peter Winch (ed.), Studies in
the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969, pp. 1-19,
especially the very illuminating discussion at pp. 9-15.
47 Kripke discusses this passage at K, pp. 293-294; but I believe his attribution to
Wittgenstein of the 'sceptical paradox' and the 'sceptical solution' prevents him from fully
appreciating its point.
48 The last sentence is quoted from PI §525. A related passage is PI IIxi: the connection
between the topics of seeing an aspect and 'experiencing the meaning of a worď is drawn
FOLLOWING A RULE 363
explicitly at pp. 214, 215.
49 At pp. 130-131 of 'What is a Theory of Meaning? (II)', Dummett writes: 'We do not
expect, nor should we want, to achieve a deterministic theory of meaning for a language,
even one which is deterministic only in principle: we should not expect to be able to give a
theory from which~ together with all other relevant conditions (the physical environment
of a speaker, the utterances of other speakers, etc.), we could predict the exact utterances
of any one speaker, any more than, by a study of the rules and strategy of a game, we
expect to be able to predict actual play.' But in the context of the 'anti-realisť restriction,
all that this can mean is that we must content ourselves with weaker relations of the same
general kind (inductively traceable, not meaning-dependent) as those that would be
involved in a theory of the deterministic sort we are to renounce.
5o 'Strict Finitism', p. 250. Note also W, p. 22, where Wright identifiesthe second speaker
in the dialogue of RFM 1-113 ('However many rules you give me - I give a rule which
justifies my employment of your rules') with Wittgenstein himself; and W, p. 216 (a
passage quoted in §2 above), where it is the susceptibility of alI explanations to
unintended interpretationsthat is said to push us into the idea of understanding as
essentially idiolectic.
University College
Oxford
England