Wittgenstein's Argument that one cannot Obey a Rule Privately

Abstract

These premisses do validly yield the conclusion that it is not possible to obey a rule privately. (II) seems to be asserted as if it were obvious without argument. But it has been doubted by reasonable people, by Judith Jarvis Thomson [31 and H.-N. Castafieda [21, for instance, who have offered rules that they regard as counter-examples to the principle that for any rule it must be possible that a person should think he is following it and not in fact be following it. My principal aim in this paper is to demonstrate (II) and deal with these alleged counter-examples. But first I want to say enough