Wittgenstein’s Account of Rule-Following

Abstract

Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule-following in Philosophical Investigations is compelling but enigmatic. It gives people a strong sense of the direction in which it is moving and yet there is no general agreement either about its starting-point or about its destination. The theory on which he turns his back is agreed by all to be Cartesianism, but there are many versions of that picture of the mind, and anyway, much depends on the question which it is taken to be answering. Is the problem the threat of scepticism about constancy of meaning? Or, is it the difficulty of understanding what gives meaning a stability which is not in doubt? Or perhaps, what needs to be explained is the credence generally put in a person’s own account of what he means. The divergence between the different views of Wittgenstein’s destination is equally striking. Some take his conclusion to be that meaning is fixed solely by agreement in judgements. Others think that he neither sought nor claimed to have found any single criterion of the correct use of language, but treated it as a system with many different ways of maintaining its stability, none of which would serve in sufficiently adverse circumstances.