Ludwig Wittgenstein · Philosophy
Beneath meaning lies the puzzle of what it is to follow a rule. Any rule can be interpreted in endless ways, so no interpretation can fix correct use; rule-following must be a practice, a custom, grounded not in further rules but in shared training and agreement - in ‘forms of life’, the bedrock where justifications end and we simply act.
Underlying everything in the later Wittgenstein - meaning as use, the language-games, the private language argument - lies a deceptively simple question that turns out to reach to the foundations of meaning itself: what is it to follow a rule? When I learn the rule ‘add 2’ and apply it - 2, 4, 6, 8 … - I produce the ‘right’ answers; the rule seems to determine, in advance, what counts as going on correctly at every step, even steps I have never reached. The meaning of a word, the use of a sign, the steps of a calculation, all seem governed by rules that fix in advance what is correct. But Wittgenstein asks: how does a rule do this? How does the rule ‘add 2’, grasped at a moment, reach out and determine the right answer at the ten-thousandth step, or at a step in the trillions I will never actually compute? It seems the rule must somehow already contain all its applications, like rails laid down to infinity that my future steps merely trace. But what is this containing? Where and how is it done?
The puzzle sharpens into a paradox. Suppose I teach someone the series ‘add 2’ and they go ‘… 996, 998, 1000, 1004, 1008 …’. They have, let us say, been doing fine up to 1000 and now jump by fours. I say: ‘Look at what you’re doing - you should add 2!’ They reply: ‘But I am! I am doing it the same way - this is how I understood “add 2”: add 2 up to 1000, then 4 up to 2000, then 6 …’. We are inclined to say they have misunderstood the rule. But on what grounds? Whatever rule I formulated, whatever examples I gave, were finite, and they are compatible with the deviant continuation - the person can claim they are applying the very same rule, just interpreting it differently. And here is the deep point: any rule can be interpreted in indefinitely many ways, each interpretation making different future steps ‘correct’. So how can the rule itself, or my grasp of it, single out one continuation as the right one? Whatever further rule or interpretation I add to fix the meaning can itself be interpreted in deviant ways, and so on without end. The rule, it seems, cannot by itself determine its own correct application - and this threatens to dissolve the very idea of meaning, since to mean something is precisely to be committed to a standard of correct use.
Wittgenstein resolves the paradox not by finding the magic interpretation that fixes meaning, but by rejecting the assumption that generated the regress: the assumption that grasping a rule must consist in an interpretation. ‘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.’ The mistake was to think that between the rule and its application there must always stand an act of interpretation; but if that were so, no rule could ever be applied (the regress). The truth is that following a rule is, at bottom, not a matter of interpreting but of acting - of a practice, a custom, a regular way of going on that we are trained into and that we simply carry out, without an intervening interpretation, ‘blindly’. When I follow the signpost, I do not interpret it and then act; I just go that way, as I was trained to. When I continue the series, at some point I exhaust my reasons and simply act: ‘When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly.’
Crucially, this means that rule-following is not a private, inner, one-off achievement but an essentially public practice, woven into a shared way of life. ‘It is not possible to obey a rule “privately”: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.’ (Here is the deep root of the private language argument: there too, the problem was the absence of a genuine standard of correct application, which requires a public practice.) A rule exists as a rule only against the background of a custom, a regular practice in a community, in which there are established ways of going on, of training, of correcting, of agreeing in what counts as the same. The standard of correctness is not fixed by the rule plus an interpretation (which floats free), nor by a private feeling of ‘this is right’ (which gives no real standard), but by the shared practice - what we, as a community trained in this technique, do and count as correct. To follow a rule is to be initiated into and to participate in such a practice; it presupposes regular use, a custom, agreement in action. The determinacy of meaning that seemed to require a metaphysical mechanism (the rule containing all its applications like rails to infinity) is in fact secured by something humbler and more solid: the regular practice of a community, the agreement in how we act, the shared training that makes ‘going on in the same way’ a determinate matter.
The rule-following considerations are the deepest stratum of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, and they reach to the foundations of meaning, knowledge, logic, and mathematics. The conclusion is at once humbling and liberating: the determinacy and objectivity of meaning, which seemed to demand some metaphysical mechanism (rules as rails to infinity, meanings as self-interpreting objects in the mind, a Platonic realm fixing correctness), rest in fact on the shared practices and natural reactions of human beings - on agreement in a form of life. There is no deeper foundation, and none is needed. When we ask ‘but what really makes this the correct continuation?’ and dig beneath the practice for a further justification, we find bedrock: this is simply what we do, how we have been trained, how we go on together. The spade turns; the justifications end; and what is left is not a void but the solid ground of shared human practice.
This transforms several great philosophical questions. The objectivity of mathematics - why 2+2 must equal 4, why the proof compels - is, on Wittgenstein’s controversial view, not the reflection of a Platonic realm of numbers nor a matter of pure logic floating free of us, but is grounded in our shared mathematical practice, our agreement in calculating, the techniques we are trained into and the form of life in which counting and calculating have their point; mathematical necessity is the hardness of a rule we hold fast to in our practice, not a fact about abstract objects. The foundations of logic and the compulsion of inference are similarly rooted in what we do. The objectivity of meaning rests on public practice, not private interpretation or inner mechanism. And the regress of justifications that threatens to make all knowledge groundless is stopped not by a self-justifying foundation but by the recognition that justification has an end in action - a theme Wittgenstein develops in his final work, On Certainty, where the ‘hinge’ propositions we never doubt are shown to be not known truths resting on evidence but the unquestioned framework within which doubting and knowing themselves take place. The whole picture is one in which the bedrock of meaning, knowledge, and reason is not a foundation of indubitable truths or metaphysical mechanisms, but the shared, practical, trained life of human beings acting together. We have reached the floor of Wittgenstein’s philosophy: beneath the language-games and the rules lies the form of life, and beneath that, only what we do. The final lesson draws together the man and the legacy of this most extraordinary of modern philosophers.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Wittgenstein’s rule-following puzzle: any rule admits endless interpretations, so interpretation cannot fix correct application; following a rule is therefore a public practice or custom, resting on shared training and agreement in a ‘form of life’ - the bedrock where ‘my spade is turned’ and I simply act.…
Leads to David Hume.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.