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.’
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.
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