Wittgenstein's critique of the Tractatus view of rules

Abstract

Of the three main doctrines of the Tractatus, namely, the picture theory of meaning, the truth-functional thesis, and the theory that all logical truths are tautologies, at least the truth-functional thesis was un equivocally repudiated by Wittgenstein by 1930.1 Motivated by the desire to provide an account of the definiteness of sense contained in the seemingly vague sentences of ordinary language, the truth-functional thesis held that on any occasion when a sentence of ordinary language was meant and understood, the sentence was analyzable into the elementary propositions of which it was a logical product. Implicit in it was a view of rules which, when made explicit, can be seen to be the target of several of the themes about rules propounded in the Philoso phical Investigations. The purpose of this paper is to relate Wittgenstein's dissatisfaction with the truth-functional thesis (early statements of which appear in 1930 when he returned to philosophy) to the critique of the Tractatus view of rules which can be discerned in the Philosophical Investigations. The topic of rules is not so prominent in the text of the Tractatus as it is in Wittgenstein's published works from the Philosophical Grammar to the Philosophical Investigations. During the period in which the Trac tatus was conceived and written, Wittgenstein was aware of no special philosophical problem attaching to the concept of "rule". He used the term in an unselfconscious and unreflective way. It achieved importance for him as a problematic concept2 only after he had made some attempts in the early thirties to correct what he had come to believe were fundamental errors in the Tractatus philosophy. In the Philosophical Grammar, the Blue and Brown Books, and in the seven parts of the Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics written form 1937 through 1945, can be seen the trail of the development of his thought on rules up until the version that is found in various clusters of remarks in the text of