Blind Obedience: The Structure and Content of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy 9781135203221, 1135203229

Table of contents :
BOOK COVER
TITLE
COPYRIGHT
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
1 STRUCTURE AND CONTENT OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS
2 PLAYING THE GAME
3 THE DOMESTICATION OF REFERENCE
4 LOGICAL FORM AND THE PARADOX OF THOUGHT
5 RULES AND THE PARADOX OF INTERPRETATION
6 NORMATIVITY AND THE THREAT OF REGULARISM
7 NECESSITY AND THE THREAT OF PSYCHOLOGISM
8 SENSATION AND THE PARADOXES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
9 CONCLUDING REMARKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

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B L I N D OB E D I E N C E

There is considerable debate amongst philosophers as to the basic philosophical problem Wittgenstein is attempting to solve in the Philosophical Investigations. In this bold and original work, Meredith Williams argues that it is the problem of “normative similarity.” In Blind Obedience Williams demonstrates how Wittgenstein criticizes traditional, representationalist theories of language by employing the “master/ novice” distinction of the learner, arguing that this distinction is often overlooked but fundamental to understanding philosophical problems about mind and language. The book not only provides revealing discussions of Wittgenstein’s corpus but also intricate analyses of the work of Brandom, Dummett, Frege, Sellars, Davidson, Cavell and others. These are usefully compared in a bid to better situate Wittgenstein’s non-intellectualist, non-theoretical approach and to highlight its unique features. Meredith Williams is Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, USA. Her areas of research are the later Wittgenstein and philosophy of mind and psychology.

BLIND OBEDIENCE Paradox and Learning in the Later Wittgenstein

Meredith Williams

This edition published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Meredith Williams All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-203-87081-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-55300-8 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-87081-6 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-55300-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-87081-5 (ebk)

FOR MICHAEL WILLIAMS

One must start out with error and convert it into truth.

That is, one must reveal the source of error, otherwise hearing the truth won’t do any good. The truth cannot force its way in when something else is occupying its place.

To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazier’s Golden Bough”

CONTENTS

1

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

ix x

Structure and content of the Philosophical Investigations

1

Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy 3 The method of description 9 Wittgenstein’s theoretical diagnosis: from mistake to paradox Two domains: linguistic mastery vs initiate learning 19 The structure of the book 22 Notes 23 2

12

Playing the game

26

The Fregean picture of language 27 Wittgenstein’s rejection of “Frege’s idea” 31 The builders game: rudimentary language or animal signaling? Dummett’s challenge: sense vs force 52 Conclusion 68 Notes 69 3

The domestication of reference

77

The problem of normative similarity 1: ostensive definition Rejection of Quine’s picture of language 89 Objects and paradigms 97 Ostensive teaching and social practices 104 Notes 108 4

43

Logical form and the paradox of thought The subliming of logic 112 Frege’s Idea and the paradox of thought

vii

77

112 117

CONTENTS

Davidson’s challenge: meaning and logical form The limits of systematicity 132 Notes 140 5

125

Rules and the paradox of interpretation

145

The problem of normative similarity 2: rules and interpretation 146 Two pleas for interpretation 160 The community view and reductionism 171 The individualist view and mystification 177 Notes 183 6

Normativity and the threat of regularism

189

Rules and regularities 189 The public basis of normativity 195 The social basis of normativity: the negative argument 204 The social basis of normativity: the positive argument 210 Notes 220 7

Necessity and the threat of psychologism Two forms of holism 227 Stage-setting: conventions without decisions 234 Background technique: necessity without metaphysics Normativity and “psychologized” necessity 247 Learning, trust and certainty 254 Notes 262

8

226

240

Sensation and the paradoxes of consciousness

267

The problem of normative similarity 3: consciousness 268 The epistemology of subjectivity: paradox of self-knowledge 269 The ontology of subjectivity: paradox of sensation 283 Cartesian thought experiments and the expressivist view 289 Criteria, deception and the new problem of other minds 299 Notes 309 9

Concluding remarks

313

Bibliography Index

316 325

viii

AC KNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have been working to understand the later Wittgenstein for well over 20 years. Blind Obedience is the culmination of this study. I have learned much from others, both individuals and books, though I can no longer remember them all. Much of the material, theoretical and argumentative, is to be found in earlier form in previously published articles. All have been reworked in light of the line of argument developed in Blind Obedience. These are the following: Chapter 1 relies on “Method and Metaphilosophy in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations,” in Pasquale Frascolla, Diego Marconi and Alberto Vololini, (eds), Wittgenstein: Minds, Meaning and Metaphilosophy (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). The discussion of Quine in Chapter 3 has its origins in “The Etiology of the Obvious,” in Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning (London: Routledge, 1999). Chapters 4 and 5 contain discussions of Davidson that draw upon “Wittgenstein and Davidson on the Sociality of Language,” The Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Vol. 30 (2000). Discussion of Brandom’s work, primarily in Chapter 5, draws upon material in “The Social Basis of Normativity in Wittgenstein and Brandom: Interpretation or Agreement,” in R. Haller and Klaus Puhl, (eds), Wittgenstein and the Future of Philosophy: A Reassessment after 50 Years (Vienna: Öbvhpt, 2002). Chapters 5 and 6 draw upon “Rules, Community and the Individual” and “The Philosophical Significance of Learning in the Later Wittgenstein,” both reprinted in my Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning (London: Routledge, 1999). I would like to thank those from whom I received lively criticism when presenting any of these papers at conferences and universities. I also found the critical reviews of the manuscript for Routledge very helpful, and hope that I have adequately addressed their concerns. In addition I want to thank Alexander James for putting together the bibliography and the index, and editing the final version of the manuscript, which he pursued in his characteristically careful and thorough way. Finally, and most importantly, I thank Michael Williams for his critical insight, helpful editing, and years of support. ix

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Below are the abbreviations used to refer to works of Wittgenstein cited in this book. BB CV LFM

LW I

LW II

OC PI RFGB

RFM

RPP I

RPP II

(1958), The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford, Basil Blackwell). (1980), Culture and Value, ed. G.H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). (1974), Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics Cambridge 1939, ed. Cora Diamond (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). (1982), Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. I, ed. G.H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans C.G. Luckhardt and M.A.E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell). (1982), Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. II, ed. G.H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C.G. Luckhardt and M.A.E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell). (1969), On Certainty, trans. D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). (1953), Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edition, trans. G.E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell). (1993), “Remarks on Frazier’s Golden Bough,” in James C. Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, (eds), Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951 (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.). (1978), Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, revised edition, ed. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Oxford University Press). (1980), Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. I, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). (1980), Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. II, ed. G.H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. C.G. Luckhardt and M.A.E. Aue (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). x

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

TLP Z

(1961), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul). (1967), Zettel, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

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1 STRU CTURE A ND CONTENT OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL I N V E S T I G A T IO N S

Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy 3 The method of description 9 Wittgenstein’s theoretical diagnosis: from mistake to paradox Two domains: linguistic mastery vs initiate learning 19 The structure of the book 22

12

One of the fundamental debates over how to understand Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations concerns whether he is developing theories of language and mind that are alternatives to traditional theories. His explicit metaphilosophical remarks state otherwise. Famously Wittgenstein insists that he offers no theories, provides no explanations of the phenomena with which philosophers have been preoccupied. Still less can philosophy reform language. Rather “philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it” (PI §124). Yet much in Wittgenstein’s later writings can plausibly be taken to offer an alternative conception of language and mind. So, on the one hand, we find constructive interpretations that can only downplay the significance of the metaphilosophical remarks. And, on the other hand, we find “the new Wittgenstein” of the resolute reader, who privileges the metaphilosophical remarks.1 The constructive reader tends to view Wittgenstein’s style of philosophizing as something more idiosyncratic to the man and so not essential to pursuing his critical and positive insights. Wittgenstein’s thought is seen as continuous with the philosophical tradition, though offering radically new theories. The quietist, on the other hand, takes the style of arguing to be the essential feature of Wittgenstein’s task, which is to change in a profound way our entire attitude towards the philosophical project. We are to replace the theoretical drive of traditional philosophy with a piecemeal struggle to overcome the urge to theorize. The struggle ends only for the individual philosopher who comes to recognize how misplaced the drive to theory really is. The constructive reader tends to ignore the structure of the Investigations in favor of finding whatever passages support the theory of language or mind 1

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that he finds in the text. The quietist is sensitive to the order of the passages and the importance of accommodating them as steps in the dissolution of philosophical puzzlement, but he misses the content of Wittgenstein’s later thought. So it seems that we have either a carefully structured sequence of passages designed to lead the philosopher out of the fly-bottle or we have an alternative contentful theory that renders the structure of the work of a decidedly secondary importance. Yet we need not be forced to choose between these two interpretations. A therapeutic methodology of the sort emphasized by Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical remarks does lie at the heart of his project. But the way in which the quietist privileges such remarks obscures the content of Wittgenstein’s theoretical diagnosis of philosophical illusion, a diagnosis that reveals very different pictures of language and mind. The Philosophical Investigations (especially Part I) is a carefully structured diagnostic work that defends, as part of that diagnostic work, an alternative positive picture of our situation in the world. Structure alone leads to a gnostic reading of Wittgenstein. Content alone leads to submitting to the very philosophical illusions Wittgenstein seeks to dispel. The quietist correctly suggests that Wittgenstein is at his best when confronting an enemy. The constructivist is correct in finding positive views insinuated in and through the diagnostic critique. Wittgenstein, like the great philosophers of the philosophical canon, introduces a new philosophical problem and a new argumentative strategy. Indeed new modes of argument create recognition of problems that could not be seen before. The Socratic method both reveals the inadequacies of common-sense reliance on particular examples and shows what is required to address this defect, namely, to identify the essences that unite particulars. Descartes’ method of doubt shows the singular importance of answering the opening question of the Meditations—What are the firm and constant foundations of knowledge?—as well as providing the key for answering this question. Locke’s “plain and historical method” is intimately tied to his project of identifying the scope and limits of human understanding. Kant’s new question—What are the conditions necessary for the possibility of experience?—itself opens space for the transcendental deduction as a solution. Each new philosophical question is tied to a potent new form of argumentation. Wittgenstein has also achieved this. Wittgenstein’s targets are the representationalist theory of language and its close ally the Cartesian theory of mind. Wittgenstein’s arguments are not only therapeutic, they are diagnostic. He aims to show how philosophers are in the grip of certain pictures of language and mind and the consequences this has for their theories. At the foundation of philosophical theorizing are confusions about the role normative similarity plays in our language games. Whether asserting that the ball is red or continuing with the natural number sequence, the philosopher is blind to his assumptions of sameness that make such assertions and continuations transparent. The Cartesian theory of mind 2

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suffers from a similar blindness, whether we are expecting someone to tea or feeling pain. Wittgenstein’s diagnostic method is tied to his use of two powerful arguments. The first are what I call his “conflation arguments.” The representational picture and the Cartesian picture are ushered in through grammatical errors. The most important of these errors is that of conflating the means of representation with the object of representation. These arguments pair, diagnostically, with “paradox arguments.” Paradox arguments reveal the hidden contradictions that result from the confusions. Wittgenstein uses four pairs of these arguments in his examination of representationalist and Cartesian theories. The structure of Part I is thus more complex than has been appreciated. In the process of diagnosing and refuting representationalist theories, Wittgenstein removes these theories from view, revealing an alternative picture of how we are situated in the world. In the clearing, many things that had a secondary significance, if any at all, are now seen to be vital and important. Three important positive themes will be developed. First, Wittgenstein’s critique is not directed solely against representationalist theories of language and mind. He is critical of overly intellectualized theories in general. So, Davidson’s interpretation-based theory of meaning is one that succumbs to Wittgenstein’s critique of interpretation. Brandom’s inferentialist semantics, though not representational, nonetheless is a highly intellectualized picture of our use of language. Secondly, Wittgenstein takes the situation of initiate learning as having central methodological and explanatory importance. Every major problem and line of argument begins with a description of the child learning, whether it is the acquisition of a first language or initiation into arithmetic. The learning situation provides a window onto the structure of normativity, particularly the normativity of our very basic judgments of world or mind. Recognizing this entails recognition of the social character of language and mind. This leads to the third main theme of the book. Language and mind are visible only against a background that cannot itself be representational. Wittgenstein identifies three dimensions of this background: stage-setting, mastery of techniques, and certainty. Representational uses of language, indeed any use of language, requires a context in which a particular use of language occurs, the exercise of techniques for going on in the same way, and a shared sense of the obvious and the certain.

Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy Since I think that the Philosophical Investigations is a highly structured argumentative text directed to pursuing a fundamental new problem in philosophy, let me begin with Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical remarks. These remarks PI §§89–133 occur in the interlude between the discussion of representationalist theory of meaning and rule-following passages.2 It is my 3

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view that most commentators misinterpret Wittgenstein on this issue, but that is not a culpable misinterpretation so much as one that results from a certain failure of self-understanding on Wittgenstein’s own part. I am going to pursue this issue by way of two questions: one interpretative and the other textual. The interpretative question asks whether Wittgenstein’s explicit metaphilosophy coheres with his actual method. I shall make two points here. First, I shall bring out the ways in which Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical remarks are more complicated than they are often presented as being. Second, I shall argue that some of the most emphasized passages do conflict with Wittgenstein’s actual methods of argument. Wittgenstein’s arguments are in the service of a theoretical diagnosis of philosophical error that relies on the careful structuring of Part I of the Investigations. This structure, I shall argue, provides an answer to the textual question: Why do the metaphilosophical remarks occur where they do, that is, after a full examination of the relation of words to objects and before the rule-following considerations? Neither the constructive reader nor the quietist reading has an answer to this question. Most sketches of Wittgenstein’s later method draw heavily on these passages. Let me highlight the elements of this familiar approach.3 Wittgenstein’s new philosophy is an activity, not a set of theses, doctrines or theories. It is an activity that aims at showing that traditional philosophical theory-building is “a house of cards,” constructed with illusory materials in pursuit of ends that are themselves the result of confusion and mistaken understandings of the grammar of our language. The aim of the new philosophy is to bring philosophy to an end by disclosing these confusions and mistakes. The primary method for achieving this end is a method of description. Through the perspicuous display of timely reminders and descriptions of language in use, the theoretical and explanatory aspirations of traditional philosophy are revealed to overshoot the limits of language and so say nothing. The philosophical point of the descriptions and reminders is given by their relation to purported philosophical problems. Philosophy for the later Wittgenstein is thus wholly critical and reactive. It gets its point from the entanglement in confusion and illusion that results when individuals make reflective use of language to misguided ends. The metaphor of disease or mental illness is a crucial component of this reading. As with neurosis, the only way to free oneself from the trap is by coming to realize that its problems and solutions are illusory, grounded in a willful and intellectualized imagination. There is nothing positive for philosophy to do, even though it will remain an ineradicable part of human life.4 There is no question that the target of this dismal assessment is the scientistic optimism of the logical positivist movement in Anglo-American philosophy, the twentieth-century embodiment of perennial philosophical error. Much in this sketch is certainly to be found in Wittgenstein, both in his metaphilosophy and in his actual method. But if we have only this, much of the structure of the Investigations is missed and the content of the work 4

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remains unassimilated. So, let’s look more closely at these passages. PI §§89– 133 has three major stages. It opens with an initial contrast between the logical method of the Frege–Russell–Tractatus approach and Wittgenstein’s new grammatical method (§§89–91). The second stage characterizes the new method at work (PI §§92–120). This grammatical investigation aims at providing a theoretical diagnosis of how traditional philosophy goes wrong. These passages describe a dialectical structure, in which an initial diagnosis of mistake (§§92–6) is followed by a closer examination of the phenomenology of philosophical puzzlement (§§97–103), which then permits a deeper diagnosis of philosophical error, one showing how the mistake and phenomenology of puzzlement connect (§§104–20). The final stage is a summing-up of the tools by which error can be removed (PI §§121–33). Stage 1. Preliminaries: logical investigation vs grammatical investigation (PI §§89–91). The opening passages contrast the “logical investigation” of contemporary philosophy that “explores the nature of all things” (PI §89) with the new “grammatical investigation” that “sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstanding away” (PI §90).5 A logical investigation sees “logic at the bottom of all the sciences” (PI §89); it is the science, as it were, of “the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena” (PI §90). As such, no empirical matters bear upon its success or failure. “It is of the essence of our [logical] investigation,” Wittgenstein tells us, “that we do not seek to learn anything new by it” (PI §89). A logical investigation seeks to give an account of the possibilities of phenomena in terms of logic. A grammatical investigation aims to show that this very goal is a mistake, one that can be cleared away by reminding ourselves “of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena” (PI §90). Demonstrating grammatical confusion is one of the motivations that inform logical investigation as well as Wittgenstein’s new method. Central to the philosophical project of the Tractatus and logical positivism is the elimination of metaphysics as nonsense, by revealing misunderstandings concerning the use of words. Some misunderstandings, Wittgenstein agrees, “can be removed by substituting one form of expression for another; this may be called an ‘analysis’ of our forms of expression” (PI §90). Wittgenstein must distinguish his own new project, a grammatical investigation, from the analytic project of a logical investigation. Both purport to undermine certain forms of philosophical theorizing by showing how such theorizing is grounded in a misunderstanding of the grammar of our ordinary language. The difference, Wittgenstein tells us, is that in using analysis as the means for displaying misunderstandings, “it may come to look as if there were something like a final analysis of our forms of language, and so a single completely resolved form of every expression” (PI §91). In this way, the method for revealing misunderstandings itself becomes the key component of the very philosophical project under attack. At the end of these passages, Wittgenstein will express the difference between logical and grammatical 5

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investigations by replacing the goal of “complete exactness” (PI §91) with one “aiming at … complete clarity” (PI §133). We see that in the opening passages Wittgenstein distinguishes his new grammatical investigation from the logical investigation exemplified in the Tractatus while acknowledging similarities that might obscure the key differences. For both methodologies, no new empirical facts are to be uncovered (PI §89). Both seek to clear misunderstandings away by means of a philosophical investigation of language (PI §90). And both “are trying to understand the essence of language” (PI §92). But, and here is the difference that makes all the difference, a grammatical investigation aims to show that the logical (or analytic) investigation itself is ensnared in the very misunderstandings that it purports to clarify. To show this requires considerable diagnostic work. Yet it is the key to Wittgenstein’s critique of the Tractatus. Where the Tractatus sees confusion in metaphysical statements, the Investigations sees the same confusion at work in the method of analysis.6 This means that Wittgenstein’s explanation of philosophical mistake is quite different from the explanation offered by the positivists including the author of the Tractatus. Stage 2. diagnosis: misunderstandings and bewitching pictures (PI §§92– 120). The logical investigation of the Tractatus identifies the mistake of metaphysical theorizing with its trying to say what cannot be said. Its method of logical analysis “eliminates misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact” (PI §91). The success of this method supports the idea that we can achieve “a state of complete exactness,” that will reveal the limits of thought. This eliding of the limited success of logical analysis with an ideal of complete exactness for any possible system of representation is the initiating mistake. It leads to seeing “in the essence [of language], not something that already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement, but something that lies beneath the surface” (PI §92). This misunderstanding of the scope of logical analysis, combined with the “enormous importance attaching” to language, leads to a search for “a pure intermediary between the propositional signs and the facts” (PI §94)—the proposition.7 This “seduces us into thinking that something extraordinary, something unique, must be achieved by propositions” (PI §93). The analysis of language, the means by which illusory theory building was to be eliminated, is taken to require a hidden logical structure that ensures that “[t] hought, language, now appears to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world” (§96). This illusion can only be dispelled by recognizing that “when we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this—is—so” (PI §95). This requires turning the apparent inadequacy of this remark into disillusionment with the method of logical analysis. This explains why we find the first of Wittgenstein’s distinctive paradox arguments occurring in these metaphilosophical reflections. The method of logical analysis incurs paradox of its own. 6

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The logical positivists and, arguably, the author of the Tractatus explained the mistake of metaphysicians in terms of their violating the logical form of language or failing to meet necessary conditions of meaningfulness. The positivist account of metaphysical error, in terms of a theory of meaning and logical form, is itself made the object of critical scrutiny. The move from taking the new logic as a useful critical tool to its being the fundamental explainer is initiated by a misunderstanding of “the role of the ideal in our language” (PI §100). Wittgenstein explains philosophical error in terms of conflating norms of linguistic practice with moves within practices. This is the same kind of mistake as that made by traditional metaphysicians. It is the mistake of treating norms as categorical properties of things. Such grammatical misunderstandings engender philosophical illusions that are intimately tied to the phenomenology of philosophical puzzlement and conviction (PI §§97–103).8 Logical analysis supports an ideal of exactness that, as Wittgenstein puts it, “absorbs us … We think it must be in reality; for we think we already see it there” (PI §101). This phenomenology of conviction is tied to the character of the misunderstanding that supports the philosophical quest. The logic of Frege, Russell and the Tractatus is a powerful new notational system. As such it is a new game added to the repertoire of games we play, not the condition of all possible games. At PI §104 Wittgenstein identifies more precisely the grammatical mistake philosophy makes on its way to transforming the new logical method into the a priori order of language: “We predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it” (PI §104). The Tractatus transforms a notational system by which to make certain features of language perspicuous into an idealizing notation that is identified with the hidden structure of ordinary language itself. In this way, we predicate of ordinary language what lies in the method of representing (part of) it. This mistake, and the grammatical illusions produced in making this mistake, engender the belief that “[l]anguage (or thought) is something unique” (PI §110). For Wittgenstein, this belief has the status of superstition: “[it] proves to be a superstition (not a mistake!), itself produced by grammatical illusions” (PI §110). Further, the impressiveness of the new logic now “retreats,” as Wittgenstein puts it, “to these illusions.” In understanding Wittgenstein’s view, it is important to note that the superstition or picture that holds the philosopher captive is not itself a mistake. Expanding the scope of the method of logical analysis and attributing features of the notational system to what it represents are both mistakes. But the picture is fueled by something more potent than a scope fallacy or a confusion of metalanguage and objectlanguage. Through misinterpreting our forms of language by identifying them with our idealizing descriptions, the problems that subsequently arise “have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as 7

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the importance of our language” (PI §111). The importance and depth of philosophical problems are genuine. It is nothing short of the significance of language for our human form of life. To break free of the mistakes that produce the picture requires rejecting the picture, a picture that has become identified with our very form of life. In this way, the picture holds us captive (PI §115). Taking seriously the phenomenology of philosophical puzzlement is a crucial component of the philosophical project. The mark of being in the grip of a picture is a tolerance for contradiction and anomaly (PI §125). For, the disquietudes that the picture itself incurs are to be solved only with the resources of the picture. It is this that Wittgenstein thinks explains the uncanny sense of depth that the emergence of contradiction creates. In sum, Wittgenstein’s diagnosis of philosophical mistake is an account of what is involved in misunderstanding the role of an ideal (PI §103): it produces a superstitious conviction (PI §110) that holds in place a picture of how things must be (PI §115), despite contradiction and anomaly.9 Stage 3. Summing up: philosophy as therapy. The final set of passages (PI §§121–33) characterizes the method to be used in achieving a diagnosis that dispels picture-driven theorizing. Here we have a description of philosophical perplexity from the outside as it were, as a kind of mental disturbance, characterized by disorientation with respect to the ordinary and familiar, for which therapy, not theory, is the only method that can free the philosopher from his perplexity. The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness. (PI §255) A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense. (CV, p. 44, 1944) “It is high time for us to compare these phenomena with something different”—one may say.—I am thinking, e.g., of mental illness. (CV, p. 55, 1946)10 Therapy, rather than a better theory of the ordinary and familiar, is required because the problems calling for theoretical solution are themselves illusions, created by the misuse of language. The proper method of philosophy must be a method of description, descriptions that provide “a clear view of the use of our words … A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connexions’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases” (PI §122). Clearly this passage alludes to the earlier diagnostic remarks concerning the subliming of logic and the mystifying of the proposition. We don’t need to find a special object 8

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to mediate sign and use, but a way to array cases perspicuously such that we see the connections between words and their use. The point of describing such cases, whether found or invented, Wittgenstein emphasizes, derives from the philosophical problem being addressed. The method of description “may in no way interfere with the actual use of language” (PI §124); it “neither explains nor deduces anything” (PI §126). The aim is “complete clarity” (PI §133). This is not the clarity of a totalizing theory, but a therapeutic clarity in which “the philosophical problems should completely disappear” (PI §133). Certain features of being in the grip of a picture need to be emphasized at this point. Again, being in the grip of a picture is not making a mistake. That is why argument or proof, as typically understood in philosophy, cannot be effective against an entire philosophical problematic. Unlike mistakes, a philosophical picture has such power that even contradiction, if a consequence of the picture, may be tolerated. Indeed, Wittgenstein suggests, contradiction can be seen as an indicator of just how deeply the philosopher is committed to the picture and how deep an insight the picture intimates. Second, Wittgenstein’s account of his diagnostic strategy is in the service of diagnosing the errors of the method of logical investigation. In this way, his metaphilosophical remarks about the nature of philosophical perplexity and theory building are themselves philosophical engagements. Unlike the relation between history and historiography, metaphilosophy is part of philosophy (cf. PI §121). Third, the final summing up passages seem to support the resolute reading. The aim of philosophy is to bring problems to an end, dissolving the problems by describing our actual use of words (both found and invented). Achieving such complete clarity about the grammar of our language brings “thoughts that are at peace. That’s what someone who philosophizes yearns for” (CV, p. 43). What I shall argue in the next section is that Wittgenstein’s actual method of diagnosis and argument does not support this resolute reading. These final passages distort the way in which Wittgenstein structures his arguments in the Investigations. The most important passages are those describing (as well as implementing) his diagnostic strategy (PI §§92–120).

The method of description Let’s take the summing-up passages and the familiar sketch those passages support of Wittgenstein’s method as our starting point. Philosophy’s proper task is to dissolve philosophical problems through description, with an emphasis on the motley of language, and through the use of timely reminders and homely examples (cf. PI §§124, 127, 593). In pursuing this task, it develops no theories or theses of its own (cf. PI §§124, 128, 599). The reminders and examples get their point from the philosophical claim or picture they investigate. Such a description would make Wittgenstein an ordinary language philosopher par excellence. Yet Wittgenstein’s actual reminders, timely 9

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examples, and descriptions of ordinary use seem inadequate to the task his metaphilosophy assigns them. Consider the following frequently cited cases. Against the search for the essence of language, Wittgenstein asks “But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command?— There are countless kinds. … And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all … ” (PI §23). Against denotational theories of meaning, Wittgenstein describes a simple grocers game, though the actions of the buyer and the grocer hardly seem to describe what we do when buying apples (P1 §1). Against the ideal of determinate sense, Wittgenstein points out that the use of a word “is not everywhere circumscribed by rules; but no more are there any rules for how high one throws the ball in tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a game for all that and has rules too” (PI §68). And against the private ownership of experience, Wittgenstein reminds us of the following: Look at the blue of the sky and say to yourself “How blue the sky is.”—When you do it spontaneously—without philosophical intentions—the idea never crosses your mind that this impression of colour belongs only to you. (PI §275) By describing the grammar of various language games and the concepts implicit in them, we are to defuse the power that philosophical pictures exert. Yet these timely reminders and descriptions do very little to dissuade philosophers from taking their theories seriously. Why should the problem of other minds dissolve at being instructed to look at a wriggling fly (PI §284) or reminded that one reacts immediately to the pain or fear of another (PI §303)? Why should the claim that sensations are private be repudiated because our everyday responses to colors take them to be public and shared? And why should the differences in the ways that the expressions “five”, “red” and “apples” are used convince us to give up the search for a theory of meaning? It is important to ask these questions since the method of description is supposed to free philosophers from pursuing these problems. Yet the method as characterized so far seems inadequate to its task. That task is to show that our ordinary linguistic practices are in order as they are and do not need philosophical buttressing or underpinning. To make this point more sharply, let us compare Wittgenstein’s descriptions of ordinary language with those provided by J.L. Austin, who also uses a method of description to attack philosophical theories.11 In Sense and Sensibilia, for example, Austin gives nuanced descriptions of words typically used interchangeably by philosophers. His discussion (in chapter 4) of the differences among “looks,” “seems” and “appears” discredits A.J. Ayer’s proposed univocal use of these expressions. Ayer’s theory of perception looks crude, his arguments fallacious, and his categorizations simplistic. This kind of careful description of the use of English words seems to be just what 10

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Wittgenstein ought to be doing when he says that a grammatical investigation should describe our ordinary uses of words. Yet it is notable that this isn’t what Wittgenstein does. He rarely gives such fine-grained descriptions of ordinary usage. He does on occasion offer Austin-like descriptions, but they are not as convincingly done. More to the point, they are not found in the Investigations, but in his manuscript writings about the differences between, say, perception and imaging or the complexities of our concept of thinking. And, as we can see from the cases canvassed above, where he does offer descriptions, they are schematic, suggestive, concerned with what Stanley Cavell calls the “generic object” (that is, objects that are stand-ins for any medium size physical object or any sensation or any perceptual state) rather than particular objects (such as glimpsing a finch rather than observing a warbler). His descriptions are closer to the examples and reminders of the sort used traditionally in philosophy. Indeed his engagement is at the same level of abstraction as the theories he targets for destruction. Wittgenstein’s own particularism—that is, his emphasis on the plurality of cases that resist any form of essentialist categorization or explanation—looks to have a theoretical backing that does not reduce to descriptions of particular cases. One cannot but draw the conclusion that it is a mistake to try to assimilate Wittgenstein’s method to that of ordinary language philosophy of the type exemplified by Austin, even though the summing-up passages strongly suggest that this is just what Wittgenstein ought to be doing. The persuasive power of Wittgenstein’s mode of argument does not lie with perspicuous nuanced descriptions of our ordinary expressions, but elsewhere. If Wittgenstein’s descriptions are not Austinian, how are they to be characterized? If we “look and see,” we will find that they are of two kinds. The first serve as reminders to the philosopher that his theoretical claims conflict with what we all accept in the ordinary course of events. Though not a decisive argument against the philosophical claim, such conflict is symptomatic of possible misunderstanding. Wittgenstein’s distinctive mode of argument gets under way only with the second kind of description. These used throughout Part I of the Investigations are his descriptions of languagegames. Indeed the language-games he introduces exemplify what he has in mind by pursuing a method of description, even though they are, for the most part, invented. They provide the medium in which the arguments of the Investigations are constructed. Early in the Investigations, Wittgenstein introduces the idea of a languagegame, which he characterizes in three ways. A language-game is a simplified “primitive language” like that of the builders (PI §2) and can be used to “study the phenomena of language in primitive kinds of application in which one can command a clear view of the aim and functioning of the words” (PI §5). They are also “the games by means of which children learn their native language” (PI §7). And, finally, the language-game is “the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven” (PI §7). In sum, a 11

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language-game can be a methodological tool for the philosopher, a teaching device, or a descriptive/explanatory notion that resists the contemporary urge to treat language as a relatively formal linguistic structure in abstraction from its use in situ. While all three uses are in play in the Investigations, the methodological dominates.12 The method of description is first and foremost the use of language-games in constructing arguments against philosophical theories. There are six important language games in Part I of the Investigations. These are the builders game (PI §2) and variations on it (PI §§8, 19–22); the simple color chart of PI §48; the standard meter stick in Paris (PI §50); the pupil learning the natural number sequence (PI §143); the private diary (PI §258); and the beetle-in-the-box (PI §293).13 Wittgenstein imposes two constraints on the construction of a language-game. The first requirement is that the language-game meet the requirements of the traditional philosophical theory under scrutiny, if any use of language does.14 In other words, he introduces these cases as exemplary of the way language (or some aspect of language) is supposed to function according to some philosophical theory. The second constraint is that a language-game, though simplified and primitive, must involve recognizably ordinary uses of words. Implicitly (in his choice of games), he disallows the use of language-games that can only be described using the technical vocabulary of the theory in question. This is his way of insisting that, if a philosophical theory of language is correct, we must be able to see how it explains the use of ordinary words. This concern is something that is strikingly missing in the Tractatus, where he cannot identify any elementary proposition or simple object except through the use of his proprietary vocabulary and the theory of which it is a part. This insistence can be thought of as placing the burden of proof on the philosopher to show the relevance, for example, of “being directly acquainted with sense data” to ostensive definition,15 or “asserting a proposition radical”16 to meaning something, or “applying the successor operator”17 to learning or continuing the natural number sequence. But there is a further reason for this restriction. It is that the problem of normative similarity becomes obscured once we have entered into philosophical theorizing. We become blind to it, and so it remains hidden.

Wittgenstein’s theoretical diagnosis: from mistake to paradox Wittgenstein’s new philosophical problem is the problem of normative similarity. The Investigations is structured around making this problem visible in four areas of philosophical concern: word–object relations and rule-following (in the philosophy of language) and the nature of self-knowledge and the ontology of sensations (in the philosophy of mind). Each of these areas— naming and going on, experiencing and experience—is normatively 12

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structured. What we do can be assessed for correctness. The language–reality relation is governed by semantic norms. Rule-following practices are governed by practice norms. The special character of experiencing is governed by epistemic norms; and experience is governed by ontological norms, norms for what is experientially real. Wittgenstein’s new argumentative strategy shows a failure to understand the normative character of the area of inquiry. The representationalist theory of meaning results in a loss of any distinction between true and false. The interpretationist theory of rule application collapses the distinction between correct and incorrect. The private object as the epistemic standard for signs within a private language eliminates any distinction between seems right and is right. And treating the experiences of consciousness as the ontological measure of mind renders sensation itself irrelevant to having a mind. Wittgenstein’s new strategy uses two argument forms, each having origins as old as Plato, and each reworked in original ways: the regress and the reductio ad absurdum. His first argument form is identified explicitly in his metaphilosophical remarks: “[w]e predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it” (PI §104). The mistake is one of confusing the means for representation with what is represented. We find this argument, which I shall call Wittgenstein’s “conflation argument,” playing a central role in his examination of the relation between words and objects and words and mental states in the first part of the Investigations. This replaces the positivist explanation of metaphysical error as that of confusing the surface grammar of a sentence with its deep logical form. The second and more distinctively Wittgensteinian argument occurs in four places in Part I of the Investigations: the paradox of thought (PI §95), the paradox of interpretation (PI §202), the private diary argument (PI §258), and the beetle-in-the-box argument (PI §293). These arguments draw attention to what Wittgenstein calls “paradoxes,” and so I shall call them. The emergence of paradox and the willingness to tolerate contradiction mark philosophical bewitchment. This is the point at which the picture demands that matters must be a certain way, no matter what the consequences. This argument can be seen to replace the positivist account of metaphysical nonsense in terms of violating verificationist strictures on meaning. It is not that the limits of meaningfulness have been violated, but that the philosophical theory implodes in a very special way. Indeed, as already suggested, the analytic method of positivism makes the very mistakes, Wittgenstein argues, that they seek to identify in traditional metaphysics. Indeed this is the first of the four paradoxes. The positivists are blind to this since they are looking entirely in the wrong place to explain the illusions of metaphysics—it is their very method that has led them astray. We need to understand these two argument-forms, and importantly the relation they have to each other. There are four conflation arguments paired with four paradox arguments, one pair for each dimension of normativity. 13

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The first pair differs from the others in the method of arguing and in the location of the argument. I’ll come back to this pair—focusing on Frege’s idea and the primacy of assertoric form—after discussing the other three pairs of arguments. Of the six methodologically central language-games, three occur before the metaphilosophical remarks (the builders and their modifications, the color chart, and the standard meter stick) and three occur after these remarks (the counting game, the private diary, and the beetle-inthe-box). It’s not the symmetry in number per se that I am emphasizing, but that the first three language-games are all part of conflation arguments while the second three are implicated in paradox arguments. Conflation arguments reveal mistakes that initiate explanatory regress. These mistakes involve, in some way, confusing the means of representation with what is being represented. The normativity of our practices, particularly those concerning the identity conditions for norms, is not understood. Objects and ideals are conflated in a way that gives rise to illusions of explanatory advance. The paradox arguments, on the other hand, reveal the special way in which theories, guided by a bewitching picture, are self-defeating. The theoretical explanations eliminate the phenomena to be explained, and they do so in virtue of the explanatory “machinery” of the theory itself. Both arguments are part of a theoretical diagnosis of how the philosophical theorist goes wrong and what motivates him. On Wittgenstein’s diagnosis, grammatical mistake engenders the picture that takes on a life of its own. The picture promises an explanation of phenomena of the greatest importance, namely, ourselves as thinking talking creatures. Being in the grip of a picture is not a mistake: it is akin rather to superstitious belief. To break the grip of a picture requires showing that its promise is illusory. To align these two arguments with the diagnostic content of the metaphilosophy, we need to see conflation arguments directed towards identifying grammatical mistakes and paradox arguments directed against bewitching pictures, that emerge from these mistakes, by showing that the theories they conjure up are self-defeating. First, the conflation arguments. What is it to confuse the means of representation with what is represented? This conflation, Wittgenstein thinks, is the initiating mistake of representationalist theories of meaning. It involves treating an exemplary object, which can be used to explain or justify the application of a term, as a metaphysically special object to which the term applies in some especially strong way. Regress arguments purport to show that such explanations fail because the explanans reproduces, as part of the explanation, the very feature(s) it was to explain. Aristotle’s Third Man argument against Plato is the classic example. Aristotle points out that the problematic relation that unites all particular men in a common class is the same relation that Plato holds obtains between all particular men and the universal form Man, and is equally problematic. Wittgenstein’s conflation arguments are related to explanatory regress arguments, but focus on the mistake that makes such an explanatory move tempting. Where Aristotle 14

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aims to show the inadequacy of the explanation, Wittgenstein would look to understand why Plato thought that the appeal to the universal form Man was explanatory in the first place. This is what makes Wittgenstein’s approach diagnostic. The stage of diagnosis to which conflation arguments are attached is a relatively shallow first stage. It cannot be expected to lead a philosopher to relinquish his project. It leads rather to an attempt to refine his theorizing. The first three language-games each exemplify a philosophical thesis that gains its plausibility from an unrecognized conflation of normative and nonnormative features, for example, being a meter length and being metal. The builders game exemplifies a language in which its expressions are naturally thought to name kinds of objects. The philosophical thesis is that the objects, in being named by the expressions, constitute the meanings of these terms. This thesis, Wittgenstein argues, results from conflating ostensive definition (using an object as an exemplar in the explanation of the meaning of a word) and ostensive teaching (causally effecting an association between a word and a kind of object through training). The simple color chart of PI §48 is used to show that the philosophical ideal of absolute simplicity involves conflating our normal reactions to the elements of the chart with properties intrinsic to those elements. The distinction between simple and complex is relative to our interests and our normal reactions, where both are normatively structured. But the distinction is mistakenly taken to reflect categorical properties of the objects themselves. There are absolutely simple objects. The third conflation argument, using the standard meter stick as its touchstone, examines the thesis that there must be some ultimate simple substance of the world, the measure of reality. Such substance can neither be said to exist nor not to exist. The contradictory flavor that gives profundity to this metaphysical idea results from conflating the means of representation with what it represents. The conflation turns a truism—the standard meter, since it sets the standard for being one meter long, is not itself correctly describable as either one meter long or not one meter long—into a substantive categorical claim about the peculiar properties of the metal bar that is used to set the standard. Wittgenstein’s paradox arguments all reveal the contradictory character of the philosophical theories exposed by the conflation arguments. In another context, Wittgenstein asks “[w]hy should not a calculation made for a practical purpose, with a contradictory result, tell me ‘Do as you please, I, the calculation, do not decide the matter’. The contradiction might be conceived as a hint from the gods that I am to act and not consider” (RFM IV.56, p. 254). Wittgenstein takes this hint in his own treatment of the paradoxes that emerge within philosophical theories of language and mind. These are the paradox of interpretation (learning to count), the paradox of self-knowledge (the private diary argument), and the paradox of sensation (the beetle-in-the-box argument).18 They are reductio ad absurdum arguments of a special sort. Wittgenstein gives these 15

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arguments a special twist that makes them his own. The contradictions that mark these as paradoxes emerge in the same way in each of the arguments. First, just as language-games are constructed that best fit the philosophical theory under scrutiny, so the philosophical theories themselves seem, prima facie, the best able to explain the phenomena under inquiry. Rules determine correct applications because they are interpreted formulae. Selfknowledge is incorrigible because of the subject’s privileged relation to his own mental states. The interiority of the mind is best explained by the existence of private mental objects. Yet, and this is the second feature, these theories that seem best able to explain the phenomena under inquiry result in the elimination of the very phenomena they are to explain. The mechanics of the explanation itself eliminate its target. This is what makes these theories peculiarly self-defeating and worthy of the name “paradox.” It is not just a matter of finding inconsistency within the theory, but that the explanatory features of the theory itself eliminate the phenomena the theory is tailored to explain. Now is the time to discuss, in a preliminary way, the first pair of arguments directed against the representationalist theory of meaning. This pair consists of the conflation argument of PI §22 and the paradox argument of PI §95. Neither involves the construction of a special language game, beyond using modified versions of the builders game, and, surprisingly, for reasons that will become clear, the paradox of thought (the first of the paradox arguments) is situated in the second stage of the metaphilosophical comments (PI §§92–120). This is surprising because there are reasons why the paradox arguments should come after the metaphilosophical passages. Wittgenstein’s first pair provides a diagnostic critique of the representationalist theory of meaning. He takes Frege’s principle of the primacy of assertoric form to be the key element in this theory. He refers to this as “Frege’s idea.” The conflation argument of PI §22 holds that Frege’s idea results from a failure to keep straight the differences between the sentences “it is asserted that p” and “it is asserted: p.” Confusing propositional function with assertoric shape gives rise to the “discovery” of the proposition, which is tailored to do the necessary explanatory work. The peculiar metaphysical features attributed to the proposition in order to assure its explanatory success lead to the elimination of the contrast between true and false. This argument occurs in the metaphilosophical passages that are concerned with the rise of bewitching pictures. Frege’s idea is such a picture. As the exemplar of what Wittgenstein has in mind, it is only appropriate to display its self-defeating character. A language-game is not required. Here Frege’s simple idea itself will do. There are further reasons for this, having to do with the introduction of the grammatical method displacing the method of logical analysis that is part of Frege’s idea. So, though there are special reasons to consider this first pair of arguments separately from the remaining three, nonetheless the argumentative strategy remains the same: expose grammatical error and 16

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reveal the internal contradiction of the philosophical theory that arises from error. Now to the remaining three pairs, united in argumentative strategy, methodological use of specially tailored language-games, and occurrence after the metaphilosophical passages. Interpretation seems best suited to explain how we use a rule or formula to go on in the same way, for it selects one method of projection among the many possible ones. But paradoxically it is interpretation that obliterates the very distinction between correct and incorrect, and so the intelligibility of going on in the same way. The contrast between correct and incorrect continuation collapses. This is the paradox of interpretation. Merely having a sensation should set the standard for recognition (or self-knowledge), but the hypothesis that the sensation itself sets the standard renders us mute: “one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound” (PI §261). What is “easiest to know” in Descartes’ phrase (namely, the contents of one’s own mind) is rendered unknowable.19 Cartesian transparent subjectivity eliminates self-knowledge. The contrast between is and seems collapses. This is the paradox of self-knowledge. And the appeal to sensations as private objects eliminates sensations altogether. The contrast between something and nothing collapses. This is the paradox of sensation. The completion of each paradox argument shows the failure of a philosophical theory to account for a dimension of normativity. The four dimensions of normativity aligned with the four pairs of arguments are semantic normativity, normativity of practices, epistemic normativity, and ontological normativity. Each concerns its own judgments of normative similarity. From the considerations so far, the resolute reader can accommodate this structure of argumentation to her strongly therapeutic interpretation, one that accommodates the complexity of Wittgenstein’s ways of arguing, while nonetheless insisting that Wittgenstein offers no theses. She can urge, correctly, that Wittgenstein, in showing the self-defeating character of philosophical theories, does not endorse any philosophical conclusions, e.g., that meaning is indeterminate or interpretation is inherently unstable. Nor does Wittgenstein endorse any claim to the effect there is nothing special about avowals or that there are no sensations. These negative conclusions are the consequences of the theories Wittgenstein rejects. Thus, it could be argued, if these two argumentative strategies – the conflation argument and the paradox argument – were the whole story of Wittgenstein’s actual method, this would support the resolute reading of the later philosophy. Problems internal to philosophical theories result in their implosion. Nothing positive from the outside is involved in their destruction. In self-destructing, they leave the terrain of our ordinary language untouched and in no need of philosophical comment. But the sophisticated resolute reader must admit that there is conflict between the metaphilosophical remarks and the method of argument. Wittgenstein does not use a method of description only. (Or the resolute reading requires a very elastic notion of what counts as description, so elastic as to be of little use in 17

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contrasting Wittgenstein’s method with other methods.) But the conflict between method and metaphilosophy goes deeper than this. First, Wittgenstein’s longing for complete clarity, achieved through a perspicuous “surview” of language, is itself an illusion. Indeed it is the expression of the very conception of philosophy Wittgenstein seeks to overcome. His metaphilosophy replaces the ideal of a complete and final theory of language with the ideal of complete clarity. But his actual argumentative and diagnostic arguments make complete clarity as unobtainable as a complete theory. Secondly, and most importantly, there is need for further diagnosis of why and how philosophical theorizing goes wrong. Why is the reification of logic a mistake rather than a discovery? Because it has paradoxical results? What further diagnosis does Wittgenstein offer that allows the philosopher to make the intellectual shift from “discovery” to mistake or from identifying a “necessary constraint” on intelligibility to acknowledging philosophical illusion? As we have seen, living with anomaly and contradiction is a mark of being in the grip of a philosophical picture. That diagnosis of the power of this picture comes with recognizing the depth and pervasiveness of the problem of normative similarity, and the significance of Wittgenstein’s own treatment of our judgments of normative similarity. Wittgenstein’s theoretical diagnosis is rooted in an alternative understanding of the normativity and necessity of our language-games. This alternative requires making visible the background against which we make our explicit linguistic moves. The final conflict between metaphilosophy and method comes with the very success that Wittgenstein has in undermining the pictures that inform philosophical theorizing. This success opens the door to other issues and questions, centering on normativity, necessity and certainty, rather than representation, reality and knowledge. The philosophical problematic is not eliminated, it is changed. Without the theoretical diagnosis of philosophical error, which involves an alternative understanding of the normativity of language, the arguments cannot fully persuade the philosopher to give up his project. The paradox arguments go deeper than the conflation arguments. They are constructed in such a way that they leave no room for assigning the problem to something other than the philosophical theory itself. The arguments reveal the nonrational commitment to the picture itself. In doing so, they force the philosopher to consider alternative conceptions of language and mind, which is precisely what Wittgenstein offers. Yet against constructive interpretations, Wittgenstein does not offer a replacement theory of language or mind to rival that of Russell or Carnap. Certainly, relative to the totalizing theories of language and mind the logical positivists present, Wittgenstein does not offer a theory of either. Language is not a totality, having the recursive formal structure of a logical language. Analysis, as a method for revealing the implicit structure of propositions, is at best a tool that is effective in an ad hoc and piecemeal fashion. And Wittgenstein’s conception of bedrock judgments of sameness, e.g., “This is 18

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red” or “1, 2, 3 … ” cannot be construed as isolable sentences standing over and against reality. In his rejection of a scientistic conception of theorybuilding, there is complete harmony between his metaphilosophy and his actual method. Others have made this point, and so I won’t pursue it any further. The point I want to emphasize is that there is agreement between his actual method and the first two stages of his metaphilosophical comments. Relative to the theorizing of a logical investigation, Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigation can look descriptive. Wittgenstein’s reminders of ordinary practice and descriptions of languagegames are part of his more general argumentative and diagnostic strategy. His actual method fits the diagnostic sketch he offers in the second stage of his metaphilosophical remarks. Wittgenstein’s very understanding of philosophical perplexity and theorizing involves the philosopher’s move from grammatical misunderstanding to being in the grip of a picture. Wittgenstein’s account of philosophical entrapment explains why the metaphilosophical remarks occur where they do. They occur at the point at which the Investigations shifts from the conflation arguments directed against grammatical mistakes to the paradox arguments directed against theories. At the same time, this methodological shift itself does substantive philosophical work in displaying the conflation at work in logical investigations. It is appropriate for Wittgenstein to take on this substantive critical task in the very passages in which he comments on his own method, since he holds that the method of the Tractatus is the final crystallization of the picture bewitching Western philosophy. His critique of logical investigation becomes an exemplar of his own grammatical investigation. The remarks, then, are intended to prepare the reader for this double shift in both target and argument, a shift in diagnostic target (from conflation to paradox) and the use of a new method of argumentation, a grammatical method that assigns to language games the role once played by analysis.

Two domains: linguistic mastery vs initiate learning Wittgenstein identifies a problem with normativity that runs deeper than the Tractatus problem of accounting for the representationality of language and thought. This reassessment of the key philosophical issue has profound implications for the philosophical priorities set in the early work. What Wittgenstein took to have minimal or no relevance to a theory of representationality is re-evaluated as having pivotal significance for understanding the normativity of our practices. In reassessing what is peripheral and what is central to our understanding of language and mind, he also revises dramatically the order of explanation offered in the Tractatus. What was explanatorily fundamental in the Tractatus becomes problematic in the Investigations. The Tractatus treats the pictorial relationship as transparent or obvious20 and the irrelevance of mind to representation is the device by which the metaphysical rift between realism and idealism is dissolved. The 19

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pictorial relationship is the Achilles’ heel with which the Investigations begins. The sublime power of logic to explain the orderliness required for representation is diagnosed as an imposition of a mistaken picture on language use, an elegant notational system taken for reality itself. The stage-setting, mastery of technique, and background certainty that are essential to reference, inference and experience are obscured by our conviction that logical form is the only necessary background to representationality and so thought: “We think [the logical ideal] must be in reality; for we think we already see it there” (PI §101). Nothing could be further removed from the intellectual atmosphere and philosophical content of the Tractatus than the fact that we learn language, that we are initiated into our language-games, our skills, our values as novices guided by the authority of those who already have achieved competence. It is impossible even to imagine a place within the Tractatus where a sentence concerned with learning could occur even as an example of an unwanted contingency. A central contention of this book is that Wittgenstein reverses the implicit Tractatus judgment in his mature work. This reversal is accompanied with replacing the picture of ordinary language as having a deep underlying logical form that is “not humanly possible to gather immediately” (TLP 4.002) with non-ratiocinative ways of acting “as a matter of course” or “blindly” (cf. PI §219). For Wittgenstein, this is coming to see that “commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing” (PI §25). Our human world is a normatively structured one, entry to which is achieved through learning. The features of the learning situation have as much to do with understanding the place of language in the world as logic was alleged to explain the logical form of reality. The features of the learning situation enable us to dissect the structure of normativity in our various language-games. The fundamental feature of our human life is that it is so fully immersed in normative structure that even our natural reactions and ways of seeing are normatively shaped in ways that are shared: “the common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by which we interpret an unknown language” (PI §206). The medium of entry is initiate learning. Wittgenstein uses the learning situation both methodologically and substantively. The initiate learner is one who does not have the basic skills or competence to participate in language. Such an initiate learner requires a master of the practice or technique to shape the learner’s environment and behavior so that he can acquire mastery of the practice as well. The initiate learner is the novice, the one who is first acquiring a skill, technique or competence. The novice is the very young child just acquiring a natural language or the pupil just learning mathematics or history. It is important that the novice does not have the linguistic ability to engage in these practices autonomously. The importance of this central fact about all human beings, that we learn language, leads Wittgenstein to distinguish (though not in these terms) the domain of the 20

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novice and the domain of the master. The domain of the master concerns those who are linguistically competent; they are the skilful participants of language games. The domain of the novice is that of the initiate learner. That Wittgenstein uses these two domains methodologically in connection both with his conflation arguments and paradox arguments is undeniable. The three great cornerstones of the Investigations – the critique of ostensive definition, the rule-following considerations, and the private language passages – open with language-games describing a novice learning the game.21 That he also uses the learning situation as a substantive part of what he calls, in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, “radical explanations” of necessity and normativity is more controversial and must be developed with care. I will argue that how we learn, as initiates into a practice, is constitutive of what we learn. This genetic thesis does not extend to all forms of acquiring new beliefs. The genetic thesis, I shall argue, holds only for bedrock practices and judgments, those practices and skills that constitute the hidden medium in which we engage in our various linguistic activities. These background practices and skills are hidden, not in the sense that their effects are impotent, but in the doxastic sense that we are unaware of them. Indeed we are blind to these ubiquitous features of our lives to which we nonetheless are obedient. They serve us precisely in being hidden. There are two methods for examining the implicit normativity of the background of our practices. The first context in which these normative skills and competences can be seen is in initiate learning situations. Wittgenstein’s use of the domains of novice and master reflects his recognition that understanding normativity requires understanding the background against which reference and representation, hypothesis formation and checking, knowledge and justification, opinion and surmise, self-knowledge and perception, pretence and honesty, can occur. The domain of the novice opens the background to inspection in a way that is hidden by the very proficiency of the master of the practice and the ubiquity of its occurrence among human beings. Failure to recognize the difference in these two domains is an important part of Wittgenstein’s diagnosis of philosophical error as well as being the touchstone by which to explore his more positive views. The second way that these implicit norms call for blind obedience becomes clear when, for one reason or another, they are violated. These are the features of stage-setting, mastery of technique, or background certainty. Such violation has reverberations throughout an individual’s practice. And as we shall see, these norms cannot be lost by the community, but only broken for the individual by others or happenstance, or some combination of these. The loss in these cases is a loss of some aspect of what we take as matter of course. To be blind to what is a matter of course in this way is not the blindness of those who are competent in language use and the exercise of their cognitive skills. It is the blindness of a deficit. Eliminate some of the crucial features of initiate or child learning, and deformation occurs, deformation that 21

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highlights, through their absence, the skills that are missing. If a child loses any of these, full competence in the relevant language-games becomes impossible. Wittgenstein uses the method of loss when he considers various forms of linguistic blindness, and inquires into the consequences of such a loss. Loss of a background skill or competence leaves the child only with the devices of explicit hypothesis formation or belief acceptance. The deficits Wittgenstein considers are form-blind perception, meaning-blind language use, and soul-blind relations to others. The losses are catastrophic. To manage while blind in any of these ways is to live on the precipice of madness. The theme of blind obedience will be pursued in three interrelated ways, the first two are the most important since Wittgenstein only rarely addresses the third. First, there is the blind obedience of everyday life, a matter-of-course way of carrying on linguistically and cognitively that is implicit in every use of language we engage in. Here what we are blind to is the implicit normative structuring of our everyday life. It is hidden from us by its very ubiquity. Second, there is the blind obedience of the novice to the authority of the master. It is the form that innocence takes in the linguistically and cognitively uninitiated. The implicit trust and certainty with which the novice accepts the structuring of the adult is displayed through Wittgenstein’s use of the learning situation as the locus of his “radical explanations” of phenomena like normativity, necessity and certainty. Finally, there is the pathological blindness of those without that which is ordinarily acquired in initiate learning. Wittgenstein characterizes these cases by constructing thought experiments in which a person is blind in one way or another. What he shows is that such deficits in experiencing the world or others cannot be righted by explicit theory construction or interpretation.

The structure of the book This book readily divides into three parts. The first part, consisting of Chapters 2–4, focuses on Wittgenstein’s critiques of reference and logical form as explanatorily basic in the philosophy of language. The second part, consisting of Chapters 5–7, focuses on Wittgenstein’s views of normativity, necessity and certainty as diverse dimensions of the background against which moves within language-games are made. The final part, consisting of Chapter 8, focuses on his critique of the Cartesian picture of mind. It develops Wittgenstein’s critiques of infallible self-knowledge and the conception of phenomenal experience as ontologically aloof from behavior and circumstance. Wittgenstein’s critiques require a fresh look at the fantasia of philosophy of mind and a reassessment of the problem of other minds. The metaphor of “blind obedience” can be misleading insofar as it suggests rules that are followed in a mechanical way. This is far from the case. The point of the metaphor is to resist all attempts to reinvest the background or bedrock of our linguistic practices with reasoning, rules, interpretation or 22

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knowledge. The challenge Wittgenstein faces is how to understand this background, aspects of which are clarified through his foundational examinations of reference, logical form, and mathematics. With the change in conception of language must come a change in conception of mind, for the two are completely intertwined. The human mind is the mind of the linguistically competent human being, and the competent human being is through and through normatively informed. There is a form of blind obedience in the background of all our practices that reveals we are much closer to the builder than the logician in our relation to the world, to the skilled actor rather than the theoretician in how we act, and to the animal rather than the subject in how we suffer the world’s effects on us. As Wittgenstein sums up his view: “[the language-game] is there – like our life” (OC §559).22

Notes 1 This debate has been decisively shaped, if not created, by the resolute reading of Wittgenstein, especially the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Cora Diamond and James Conant are the primary architects of this interpretation, but they are joined by many others. See Diamond, The Realistic Spirit; and Conant, “Elucidation and Nonsense”; and “Method of the Tractatus.” For a full presentation of my criticisms of this interpretation, see my “Nonsense and Cosmic Exile” and the critical response, Conant and Diamond, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely.” This interpretation, applied in the first instance to the Tractatus, is also applied to the Philosophical Investigations, and indeed to all of Wittgenstein’s writings. My attitude towards this interpretation is mixed. On the one hand, the close examination of Wittgenstein’s key arguments, leads the resolute reader to insist on a strong form of nonsense, as these arguments are revealed to be self-defeating and so incapable of being meaningful. Though I do not accept the precise way that the resolute reader interprets Wittgenstein’s arguments, I am very much in agreement that key lines of theoretical explanation self-implode. But I cannot follow the resolute reader in denying that there is any positive content in either the Tractatus or Philosophical Investigations. 2 There are a number of other important metaphilosophical remarks scattered throughout Part I: §§254, 255, 309, 371, 373, 392, 464, 593, 599. Also, see Culture and Value, pp. 2, 15, 40, 43, 44. 3 We find interpreters as different as P.M.S. Hacker and Marie McGinn endorsing the basic elements of this sketch. See Hacker, Insight and Illusion, ch. 5; and M. McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations, ch. 1. Also see my “Transcendence and Return.” 4 In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein says, “we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks [ … ] it has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions” (CV, p. 15, 1931). 5 Though Wittgenstein sometimes uses “logical” interchangeably with “grammatical” or “conceptual,” here it is clear that he is contrasting a logical investigation with a grammatical one. 6 This is a matter of considerable importance in coming to understand the Tractatus correctly. It comports with much contemporary interpretation of that early work that emphasizes the new logic as what drives the philosophical work done.

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7

8

9

10

11

This is in contrast to the idea that the pivot on which the argument of the Tractatus turns is the search for a theory of representation. See Ricketts, “Pictures, Logic, and the Limits of Sense in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.” As one reviewer points out, the Tractatus conception of the proposition is that of the propositional sign as projected to a state of affairs. So, the proposition is not an “intermediary” as Wittgenstein later describes it. Nonetheless, there remains the notion of the gap between the sign and the state of affairs which is bridged by the sign’s being projected onto the world. It is that gap that the notion of the proposition is introduced to overcome. I discuss more fully the importance of the phenomenology in the discussion of consciousness in the fourth section of Chapter 8, “Cartesian Thought Experiments and the Expressivist View.” There we examine a series of thought experiments in which Wittgenstein asks what we would lose or cease to be able to do if we were blind to the meaning of words or blind to forms of things or even blind to the emotional lives of others. This fascinating discussion will prove suggestive in a return to the phenomenology of philosophical puzzlement. In these metaphilosophical passages of the Investigations, Wittgenstein is describing his own bewitchment in the Tractatus. The picture that held him captive there is that of language as the unique correlate to reality. The very fact that this picture leads to paradox is exemplary of the power that philosophical pictures exert over those who become enthralled. The austere reader takes the paradox as evidence that Wittgenstein could not have endorsed the picture that leads to the paradox. I think, on the contrary, for the early Wittgenstein, paradox was indicative of the profundity of the picture. This is what Wittgenstein is describing in the metaphilosophical remarks we are now discussing. It is important to note that the two passages from Culture and Value were written in the 1940s. Though the imagery of illness is strong in Wittgenstein, he doesn’t introduce it until the 1940s. A clear change from the early to the later Wittgenstein is the association of philosophizing with mental illness. The Tractatus metaphilosophy is directed to an intellectualized or task-oriented methodology, and with that an intellectualist explanation of philosophical error. The error is the mistaken belief that philosophy is a science, and so the arena of its own problems, phenomena and theories. The limits of the sayable put philosophy outside the cognitive arena. The later philosophy retains the view that traditional philosophy mistakenly aims at being a science, at constructing theories, following a “scientific” methodology, and the like. But the diagnosis of the later philosophy identifies the motivation, not with the intellect, but with the volition: “What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than the intellect” (CV, p. 17). It is an intellectualized willing that things be a certain way. When such a willing becomes disconnected from “any true or false beliefs about natural processes” (CV, p. 44), it becomes pathological. It is arguable that in the very late writings (1949–51), there is a further shift in Wittgenstein’s orientation, one that involves a different assignment for mental illness. Now he tends to apply it to those incapable of being trained into our (human) bedrock practices. We treat such people as suffering from a mental disturbance or mental illness. And he distinguishes the philosopher from this condition. Again, just as philosophy is not science (though philosophers will it to be such), so philosophical puzzlement is not mental illness (though philosophers sound like the mentally disturbed). Stanley Cavell, in The Claim of Reason, ch. 3, brought to our attention important differences between Wittgenstein and Austin. Of particular interest is Cavell’s

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12

13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

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discussion of the contrast between the generic object of traditional philosophical interest and the particular object of Austin’s descriptions. This changes with On Certainty, where language-games are not used methodologically at all but in a philosophically explanatory/descriptive way. Indeed we find that the expression “language-game” is used at least twice as frequently in On Certainty as it is in the Investigations. I shall discuss this shift in Chapter 4, where I shall argue that the learning situation is not just a heuristic alternative to our creating artificial language-games for philosophical purposes, but has an explanatory role of its own to play that is linked to taking the language-game as the basic semantic unit. There are other examples of language-games as well but they do not play the important methodological role that these six cases do. These include the grocers game (PI §1) and the reading game (PI §156) as well as several others. There are language-games listed as evidence of the multiplicity of language-games (PI §23) as well as passages concerned with the language-games of using “true” and “false” (PI §136), lying (PI §249), expressing sensations (PI §§288 and 290), and so on. None of these play the sustained argumentative role that the methodological ones do. Note also that I am including the simple color chart of PI §48 and the standard meter stick of PI §50 as language-games though they are not so identified by Wittgenstein. Nonetheless they are methodologically suitable to Wittgenstein’s task, and so can be included as methodological language-games. David Stern brings out this same constraint on the construction of languagegames. He gives a subtle three-stage account of the “method of 2.” See his Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, ch. 1. Russell, Problems of Philosophy, ch. 5; and “Philosophy of Logical Atomism.” Frege, Begriffsschrift. Frege, Basic Laws of Arithmetic; Wittgenstein, Tractatus 4.1252. There is also the pair of arguments addressed to “Frege’s idea.” These do not make use of specially constructed language-games. We will consider why this might be so shortly. Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Second Meditation, 34ff. Consider the following: “That is how a picture is attached to reality; it reaches right out to it” (TLP 2.1511). “It is laid against reality like a measure” (TLP 2.1512). In Chapter 8, where we shall investigate the private language passages, we shall see that there are two distinct targets: the special access we each are alleged to have to our own mind and the special ontology of consciousness. Each is associated with an aspect of the master–novice contrast. David Pears, in his excellent and succinct Paradox and Platitude, develops a similar interpretation of the Philosophical Investigations. In connection with his discussion of the rule-following passages, Pears holds that “the essential contribution to linguistic regularity … is made by our common human nature” (p. 28). He notes correctly that taking this seriously “raises the question whether there is really a clear line of demarcation between this part of philosophy and science” (p. 28). My only comment on this now is that how the two are related is a philosophical problem, one that cannot be solved by empirical inquiry.

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The Fregean picture of language 27 Wittgenstein’s rejection of “Frege’s idea” 31 The builders game: rudimentary language or animal signaling? Dummett’s challenge: sense vs force 52 Conclusion 68

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The opening passages of the Investigations are typically interpreted as being directed against denotational theories of meaning. This is not incorrect, but it is incomplete. Wittgenstein’s opening arguments are directed against the thesis that assertion or assertoric form is the fundamental unit of thought, and so the fundamental unit of any language. This “primacy of assertion” thesis1 is the starting point of the representationalist theory of language, the view that the essence of language is to represent states of affairs in the world. Crude denotational theories attempt to account for this in terms of a special word–object relation without regard to other systematic features of language. Though Wittgenstein will examine the crude denotational theory, from the outset he is concerned with the word in use and thereby whether it is a simple word or an elliptical sentence having a hidden syntactic complexity. In the background of Wittgenstein’s opening discussion of meaning is the Fregean representationalist theory of language, or as Wittgenstein would prefer, a compelling picture of the relation of language to the world. The explanation for how sentences represent the world is given in terms of the way in which the syntactic structure of these sentences exploits both the meanings of the symbols that constitute a sentence and the logical roles those symbols play within the sentence. A theory of meaning for the constituent words is thus tied to an account of how those words can combine to say that things are thus-and-so. Thus, Wittgenstein’s critique of denotational theories of meaning and the role of ostensive definition is developed against the background concern of how words combine to express a representational thought. The builders game (PI §2) is used both in his critical examination of names and their referents (especially PI §§28–38) and in his treatment of assertoric sentences and their senses (especially PI §§19–22). Wittgenstein aims to show 26

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that the explanatory pretensions of both reference and sense are illusory, embedded in confusions about the normative role each is to play in explaining the meaning of names and sentences. The primacy of assertion is elaborated in a way that permits it to be the model for all language, and is the locus of the core mistake in the Fregean picture of language. The primacy of assertion is associated with the three fundamental principles that Frege identifies as his touchstones in developing a semantics for his logically perfect language: his context principle, a word has meaning only in the context of a proposition; his antipsychologism principle, always keep the psychological distinct from the logical; and his principled distinction between concept and object.2 All three doctrines come under critical scrutiny in Wittgenstein’s attack on the Fregean picture, as well as the representationalist commitment to the idea that the final end of language is that “striving for truth that drives us always to advance from the sense to the reference.”3 Only assertion, it seems, can realize that end.

The Fregean picture of language “Frege’s idea,” as Wittgenstein puts it, is that “every assertion contains an assumption, which is the thing that is asserted” (PI §22).4 This idea carries with it two thoughts: (1) it suggests that the contained assumption can itself be grasped or entertained independently of being asserted. Assertion operates on the assumption, perhaps as a function applied to its proper object. And (2) such a distinction between entertaining and asserting suggests room for other kinds of linguistic and cognitive acts that might be performed on the assumption. These two are the loci of what M. Dummett characterizes as the core theory of sense (the meaning of assertoric sentences, that is, the thing asserted) and the supplementary theory of force (the linguistic act of asserting or commanding, etc.).5 Assertion, that is, asserting that things are thus-and-so, is explanatorily fundamental, in that meaning is explained by way of the sense of the assertoric sentence; and in that the linguistic act of asserting is one of many linguistic acts, all of which take the meaningful assertoric sentence as the object of these acts.6 Thus, the assertoric sentence is fundamental in that its way of being meaningful is presupposed in every other linguistic act. But presupposed how? Frege elucidated his idea “that every assertion contains an assumption” by introducing a notational device, the assertion sign: A judgment is always to be expressed by means of the sign |— This stands to the left of the sign or complex of signs in which the content of the judgment is given. If we omit the little vertical stroke at the left of the horizontal stroke, then the judgment is transformed 27

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into a mere complex of ideas; the author is not expressing his recognition or non-recognition of the truth of this.7 The assertion sign is a formal marker used to distinguish the content of the judgment, marked by the horizontal stroke, from the judging of that content, marked by the vertical stroke. In this way, Frege introduces into the fundamental structure of judgment two distinct components, the content (“a mere complex of ideas”) and judging the truth or falsity of that content (“expressing his recognition or nonrecognition of the truth of this”). The new notational device makes transparent the two components of any judgment (that is, assertion), which Wittgenstein will call “two actions, entertaining and asserting” (PI §22). This is the locus of the grammatical mistake that engenders the Fregean picture. The two-component, or two-action, view of judgment lays the ground for how Fregean sentential sense is to be characterized, such that the distinction between sense and force results. The former, when developed, will provide the semantic theory (the core theory of sense) and the latter, when developed, will provide a theory of linguistic action (the supplementary theory of force). The two work in complete harmony to constitute the representationalist theory of language. The thought is semantically fundamental. According to Frege’s context principle, one should “never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition.”8 Frege distinguishes kinds of words, for which the kind of syntactic shape and function a word has is allied with the semantic contribution that the word makes to the sentence as a whole. Names designate objects while predicates and relations are functions governing variable slots. Function expressions are completed only in a well-formed sentence in which an appropriate name or names are substituted for the variable position(s). The distinction between entertaining and judging depends on the distinction between sense and reference. This comes out most clearly in the case of fictions. A sentence with a nonreferring singular cannot be true or false. The attempt to assert it would misfire. But the sentence can be entertained and must therefore express a thought. The “complex of ideas” represented by the horizontal bar belongs to the realm of sense. In asserting (judging), we advance from sense to reference, i.e., from a thought to a truth value. There are two ways of understanding the relation between the assertoric sentence and its truth value. One is to understand the relation between the sentence and its truth value as something like that between an ordinary proper name and its object. Frege tells us that “[w]e are … driven into accepting the truth value as constituting [the sentence’s] reference. … every declarative sentence concerned with the reference of its words is therefore to be regarded as a proper name, and its reference, if it has one, is either the True or the False.”9 It is very difficult to understand how the totality of truths can be considered an object, but this is apparently achieved by the fact 28

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that the True is reality as a whole. But this whole has many aspects. The significance of judgments, what makes them “peculiar and incomparable” in Frege’s words, is that they are “distinctions of parts within truth values … To every sense belonging to a truth value there would correspond its own manner of analysis.”10 This suggests that the sense of each assertoric sentence is analyzable in some way that carves out a distinctive place within the totality of the True. But this way of individuating the “object”—as that which is analyzable in distinct ways for distinct senses—requires clarification at the least. The danger is that the True, as object of reference, is being replaced with that which corresponds to the “manner of analysis” for each sense: facts in everything but name. This suggests that the individual referents of different sentences would be unique to those sentences—to be determined by analysis—and so the idea of a common reality open to different descriptions may well be lost. This is why the question of how sentences that contain different names for the same object can differ in cognitive value is so central to Frege’s thought. The complexities that open up in trying to understand what it is for the True to be the referent of any (true) sentence-name provides some grounds for turning to a second way of understanding this elusive relationship. This second way of understanding the relation between the sentence and the True is to regard the relation of the thought to the True not as that of sense to reference, but rather as that of subject to predicate. One can, indeed, say: The thought, that 5 is a prime number, is true. On this construal the thought (that 5 is a prime number) is the subject of the predicate expression “is true.” This is a cheap way of getting an account of the relation of thought to the world. Closer examination shows that nothing more has been said than in the simple sentence “5 is a prime number.”11 The problem is that we are trying to understand the relation between thought and the world. Judgment plays an essential role in this relation. Judging is that “quite peculiar and incomparable act” of assigning the thought to the world: advancing from a sense to a truth value. Judging is substantive in a way that predicating “is true” of assertoric sentences is not. Wittgenstein will take up just this issue. Acknowledging the work done by the assertion sign, we can distinguish assertoric form (of what is entertained) from assertion. It is the primacy of assertoric form that is fundamental to Frege’s semantic theory of sense and reference. This semantic theory goes hand in hand with his logico-syntactic account of subsentential structure, and thus of the unity of the sentence in assertoric form. In making assertoric form semantically fundamental, that is, in establishing assertion as bipolar, true or false, it clears the way for a 29

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truth-functional account of the inferential roles sentences have in relation to each other. We can remind ourselves of the fact that Frege introduced the assertion sign in the first instance as a way of identifying individual sentences within a logical or inferential system: “Frege’s assertion sign marks the beginning of the sentence. Thus its function is like that of the full-stop. It distinguishes the whole period from a clause within the period” (PI §22, original emphasis). Thus, Frege’s account gives us a full picture of the meaning of individual sentences and of the logico-inferential relations that obtain among sentences. Both the semantic theory and the logical theory require the primacy of assertoric form. The next step to complete this picture is an account of how the primacy of assertoric form contributes to our understanding of the pragmatics of language use. In answering this question, we note that of the speech acts we can perform, assertion is primary. When considering the pragmatics of language use, the first question concerns how to reconcile the primacy of assertoric form with the ubiquity of nonassertoric uses of language. Questions, commands, exclamations: none seem to involve sentences in assertoric form. So, how could these speech acts be meaningful? There is an ambiguity, it might be said, in the word “assertion.” As a linguistic act, asserting is on the same plane as questioning, reasoning, ordering, intending and the like. These all express psychological acts or intentional attitudes taken toward a content. They may or may not have the syntactic shape of an assertion. But “assertion” is also used by Frege to refer to the content to which different attitudes can be taken. So one can assert that the door is shut, and one can also command it, bring it about: the door is shut. The possibility of failing to keep distinct the notions of assertion as a speech act and assertion as assertoric form was side stepped with the notion of judgment. But the distinction can no longer be avoided, because it secures a solution for a fundamental problem for the representationalist theory of language. “Assertion” is better replaced with “sentence in assertoric form,”a decidedly nonpsychological mode of speaking. From now on we shall speak of Frege’s idea as the primacy of assertoric form. Holding to the primacy of assertoric form requires restructuring our ordinary language to reveal, embedded in any sentence, a hidden assertion.12 But although assertoric form is pure logical syntax, Frege’s idea cannot lose contact with assertion (as asserting), if the problem of meaning is to be solved. Any assertion, hidden or not, must be “directed” to the world. It is in this confused way that assertion comes to be taken to be prior to all other meaningful uses of language. The danger is that in merely insisting on the distinction between sense and force, in order to hold fast to the primacy of assertoric form (demanded by the representationalist view of language), one will slide into thinking that asserting lies at the bottom of all uses of language. A theory of linguistic usage requires both the semantic theory of assertoric form and a theory of the different ways in which assertoric sentences can 30

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be used. In such a conception of use, different kinds of force are applied to assertoric sentences. So, “B brings A a slab” provides the assertoric content of an assertion, a command, a question, an intention and so on. What this calls for is a way of expressing assertoric content that retains its affinity with ordinary assertion while remaining neutral as to what linguistic act is performed with respect to it. Frege identified this with the sense of an assertoric sentence, which he identified with the thought expressed by the sentence. The expression that more readily plays the role needed is “proposition.” This expression has the ring of objectivity that “thought,” with its psychological connotations, does not. Thus, we seem to have a discovery of great importance—the proposition. The proposition is the perfect mediator between assertoric sentences and the world, and so between any use of language and the world.13 In challenging the Fregean picture, Wittgenstein begins with the doctrine of the primacy of assertoric form and its interaction with the systematicity of language. The most significant feature of the Fregean picture is the apparent discovery of the proposition. Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frege’s idea is directed against this “discovery.” He begins his diagnostic critique by showing that it is the result of a grammatical conflation. Ironically, it is a mistake against which Frege himself warns his reader.

Wittgenstein’s rejection of “Frege’s idea” The builders game is the first and most important of Wittgenstein’s primitive language-games.14 It is intended to capture the central features of what Wittgenstein calls the Augustinian picture of language. The Investigations opens with a long quotation from Augustine, in which he describes how he came to learn language: “When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound uttered when they meant to point it out. … ” (PI §1) The builders language-game aims to capture the essential semantic feature of Augustine’s conception of language: words name objects. Chapter 1 identifies two constraints on the methodological use of language-games. First, the builders use “a language for which the description given by Augustine is right” (PI §2), and second it does so without the use of any proprietary philosophical vocabulary. This simple game is played by two participants using “a language consisting of the words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’, ‘beam’.” Each of these words is associated with a kind of building-stone. Builder A calls out one of the words and his assistant B brings a stone of the appropriate sort to him. The words are public labels for objects belonging to clear-cut categories. 31

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In uttering these words, the two builders communicate and so are able to coordinate their behavior. Clearly, if words get their use from being names of objects, how this is so should be clear in this simple language. I want to make two preliminary points before reconstructing Wittgenstein’s argument. First, Wittgenstein reminds the reader that the Augustinian picture cannot apply to all of language. It is at best an appropriate account of a “narrowly circumscribed region.”15 The builders game is constructed to exemplify that region.16 The second point is that the builders game can serve its methodological role only if it is a rudimentary language and not something (merely) animal-like. I shall return to this important issue when considering objections to Wittgenstein’s argument in the third section (“The Builders Game: Rudimentary Language or Animal Signaling?”). As mentioned earlier, the passage from St Augustine is standardly taken to signal that reference is the first item of business.17 But it is not reference that Wittgenstein first takes on but the alleged “chemical” structure of language and linguistic mastery.18 Just as there are chemical-radicals (sets of structured chemicals that, as a block, interact with other sets) that are used in constructing more complex chemical structures, so these sentence-radicals can be used within other more complex sentences. This is Frege’s idea, and this means that issues of systematicity are in play from the outset. This accords with the Tractatus, which endorses Frege’s context principle, according to which names refer only within the context of a sentence. The builders game is delicately poised to bridge the crude genetic denotational theory suggested by the naive Augustinian picture (words mean the objects they denote) and the sophisticated Tractatus theory that ties reference to subsentential structure (words mean the objects they denote only in the context of a sentence). The calls of “Slab!” or “Pillar!” are not just words associated with types of building stones, but are commands integral to the success of the building project. It is natural to treat these calls as holophrastic or elliptical expressions. In PI §22, Wittgenstein identifies three theses that make up Frege’s idea, all of which he claims are mistaken or misleading. These are: (1) Frege’s idea that every assertion contains an assumption, which is the thing that is asserted. … (2) … the assertion consists of two actions, entertaining and asserting (assigning the truth-value, or something of the kind) … (3) and that in performing these actions we follow the propositional-sign roughly as we sing from the musical score.19 We recognize the first two theses as central to Dummett’s account of language. The third thesis introduces something new: It identifies linguistic understanding with a mental mechanism, a kind of reading from a text of linguistic signs. In Wittgenstein’s analysis, the core and supplementary theories are taken to support a mentalistic hypothesis, according to 32

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which the “chemical” structure of speech acts is mirrored in similarly articulated psychological processes and states.20 Though Wittgenstein doesn’t think that it is so easy to put this third thesis to one side, we will do so, to the extent that that is possible, as before, in order to respect Frege’s antipsychologism. Wittgenstein invites us to apply Frege’s idea to the builders game. The structural complexity that results when a Fregean theory of sense and force is applied to the builders is hidden in the builders game both behaviorally and subjectively. It is not shown in the actual behaviors of A and B—in the one-word calls of A or the stone-carrying behavior of B—nor are A and B aware of this complexity. It cannot be observed either from the third-person point of view or the first-person point of view. Indeed the extreme simplicity of the game gives us no reason to read such Fregean complexity back into the game and some grounds for thinking that it is not possible. So, the only reason for doing so is methodological. It is a device for displaying, clearly and economically, the elements of the Fregean picture. According to Wittgenstein, Frege’s theory of sense and force stands on a mistake, one that conflates a banal feature of any natural language with a metaphysically robust entity. The product of this Fregean conflation is the proposition. It is this conflation argument that we want to understand in this chapter. Chapter 4 pairs this argument with the paradox of thought, which completes Wittgenstein’s critique of Frege’s idea, for which the proposition is the stand-in for all that is wrong with this idea. To see the conflation take place, in slow motion as it were, consider the way in which the first two theses apply to the builders. The first step taken in applying Frege’s picture to the builders is to treat A’s call “Slab!” as a holophrastic sentence in much the way that young children’s vocalizations are heard as holophrastic (PI §5). As Wittgenstein says later in diagnosing problems in the philosophy of mind, this “first step is the one that altogether escapes notice … (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent)” (PI §308).21 Later the one word call is described as a “degenerate sentence” (PI §19). PI §19 transforms a philosophically innocent remark into the opening move in Fregeanizing the builders. Wittgenstein’s conflation diagnosis will identify just what goes wrong. Let me note here that we are in the domain of the child when the word is holophrastic; and we are in the domain of the adult when the phrase is degenerate. This second way of characterizing the one-word “sentence” indicates the intervention of Frege’s picture in characterizing the linguistic mastery of the builders. Let us begin with a schematic presentation of a Fregean analysis of A’s call. We can think of this analysis as presenting the logical structure of A’s meaningful call “Slab” and B’s intentional action. We need not think of these as psychologically real though the demands of the theory are made more vivid if we were to do so. Further, it must be understood that the diagnostic 33

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argument to be given tells a story about the path from Frege’s initial account of assertoric content, an account captured in his assertion sign, to the explanatory work to be done by the proposition. As we shall see, the ambiguity in the way “assertion” can be used, as the entertained content and as asserting that content, takes us down the path to the proposition. Let us make the Fregean analysis explicit:

A Slab!

B Picks up a slab

(P1) Bring me a slab!

(P1) B brings A a slab

(P2) |— (B brings A a slab.)

(P2) |— (B brings A a slab)

(P3) Entertain (B brings A a slab) and Assert (B brings A a slab)

(P3) Entertain (B brings A a Slab) and Assert (B brings A a slab)

(P4) Order ((Entertain (B brings A a slab) and Assert (B brings A a slab)

(P4) Intend (Entertain (B brings A a slab) and Assert (B brings A a slab))

(P5) Order (Entertain (B brings A a slab))

(P5) Intend (Entertain (B brings A a slab))

(6) Order (proposition that B brings A a slab)

(6) Intend (proposition that B brings A a slab)

A’s calls are most naturally construed as orders even though, on the Fregean picture, they cannot be orders any more than names in isolation can refer to objects. The context within which these calls are orders that mean something, enabling A and B to coordinate their behavior, must be specified. (P1) The first step in this specification is to take A’s call “Slab!” to mean the lengthened form “Bring me a slab.” In §19 Wittgenstein raises the question “if they mean the same thing—why should I not say: ‘When he says “slab!” he means “Slab!”’”? His interlocutor replies “But when I call ‘Slab!’, then what I want is, that he should bring me a slab!” Here we see that even in this primitive case, meaning is tied to something much more

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sophisticated than it would seem the builders game could support. This something is, of course, propositional content. But we do not have a right to appeal to propositional content this early in the analysis. The point of the analysis is to lead us to the “discovery” of the proposition. (P2) Thus, the second step in the analysis is to translate our elongation of “Slab!”—“Bring me a slab!”—into a technically more precise notation. This enables us to specify a part of the structure that remains hidden in the ordinary holophrastic sentence and its ordinary elongated translation. Frege introduces the assertion sign whose job is to introduce a well-formed meaningful sentence. So: — (B brings A a slab). (P3) The logical analysis of the assertion sign reveals its two components: Entertaining a content (represented by the horizontal dash) and asserting that content (represented by the vertical dash). Specifying assertoric content requires exploiting the explanatory work of both entertaining and asserting. In brief, we are to entertain a content that can only be fixed through asserting. This may look like I am making, or attributing to Frege, a glaring mistake, namely that of confusing what is assertible with asserting. Not every assertible sentence is asserted, nor is asserting required for meaningfulness. Or so it would seem. I ask the reader to withhold criticism until this line of argument is complete. (P4) The requirement that anything meaningful must have assertoric form (the core theory of meaning) brings with it, as a matter of course, the supplementary theory of force. If A really means that B brings him a slab when he calls “Slab!,” the order to B must be affixed externally to the meaningful sentence, the sentence introduced by the assertion sign. For asserting is a force, like ordering, that operates upon meaningful sentences. (P5) Since A is not asserting that B brings A a slab, the correct analysis reveals that what A must be ordering is the entertained sentence “B brings A a slab.” The entertained sentence just is that which means what the asserted sentence means without the assertion. The assertion component is eliminated. But here is where difficulties emerge. The sense of the assertoric sentence is provided by the method for projecting the sentence onto the world. That method of projecting is “the advance from the sense to the referent of the sentence.” The sense is disclosed in asserting. Assertoric form cannot be exhausted by syntactic form alone. It must include assertoric content even if it is not asserted. There can be representational content without its being assertoric. Paintings or a laundry list have representational form without its being assertible. So why should sentences of a certain shape necessarily have the content of assertings (where no asserting is done)? (6) To preserve the explanatory work done by asserting without asserting, the proposition is introduced. The proposition is, in a sense, what an assertoric sentence says, to which we human beings can concur or not. This is a queer notion, as Wittgenstein would put it.

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We need an account of assertoric meaning that is fully independent of linguistic force. Meaning accrues to sentences of the right syntactic shape, the shape to which any linguistic force might be applied. That shape is assertoric. No other sentence type has meaning—unless it can be translated into assertoric form combined with a linguistic force. But orders and questions, exclamations and intentions, don’t make assertions. Questions don’t assert that about which they are questions. Intentions don’t assert as a matter of fact that to which they are directed. None of the syntactic types associated with these various linguistic forces are assertoric in shape. So, merely changing the form from “Bring me a slab” to “order (B brings A a slab)” doesn’t show how assertoric form is semantically primary. Again, the simple point, one that everyone would agree with, is that orders, questions, intentions and many other force operators do not involve assertion. A doesn’t assert “B brings me a slab” for B has not yet brought the slab. B doesn’t assert “B brings A a slab” in intending to pick up a slab. To make that assertion true is the point of A’s calling “Slab!” and B’s action. So if meaning (or sense) only comes with assertoric form, how can these other types of sentence have sense? The only way the translation from “Bring A a slab” to “B brings A a slab” can help is by insisting on the second step in the analysis (P2). This is Frege’s claim that the assertion sign, when applied to a sentence of assertoric form, designates two actions: asserting the assertoric sentence and entertaining that sentence. (P2) is analyzed into (P3), which translates the assertion sign into English. (P4) applies the force operator, order, to the analyzed (P3). (P4) must be reshaped to accommodate the force operator, order (P5). Where one is ordering, one is not asserting. Yet this conflicts with the way in which the force operator of asserting is embedded in the analysis of the assertion sign. This threatens to introduce a psychological dimension to asserting, as well as initiate an explanatory regress. A regress is initiated because the semantics of assertoric sentences requires appeal to asserting as the proper mode of projecting the sense onto the True or the False. There seems to be no other way to specify the sense of an assertoric sentence. It is the mode of presenting a state of affairs. (6) then is the hypothesis to explain (P5). The sense of “B brings A a slab” is not given by the mode of projection provided by asserting. Rather this hypothesis that one entertains the sense of an assertoric sentence without asserting that sentence is the hypothesis that the proposition is the content of the entertained assertoric sentence. The assertoric sentence “says” that things are thus-and-so. The proposition is independent of any particular linguistic act, though it is born out of assertion. It is independent of the particular syntax of any language; yet it mirrors in its own constituent structure the syntactic structure of assertoric sentences in any language. It is that which constitutes the content or meaning of any linguistic act. We can view the thesis of the primacy of assertoric form as ineluctably tied to 36

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the discovery of the proposition as a compensation for the loss of asserting. To make the significance of this more vivid, let’s examine the difficulties in separating entertaining from assertion. P2 introduces the notation sign for assertion deliberately to indicate a more technical notion of assertion, one that specifies the two distinct acts, asserting and entertaining, as required for assertion. As we have suspected all along, we can see that the use of “assertion” is equivocal. It can be used in its ordinary way for any act of asserting, stating, declaring, describing and the like. All such acts are notable in their use of assertoric sentences. One can say quite correctly and unproblematically that the sense of any ordinary assertion is that which is asserted. This is to be understood as a commonplace or truism. But we also see from the introduction of the assertion sign that the expression “assertion” is used in a technical sense since ordinary assertion is analyzed into two linguistic acts, (technical) asserting (or assertingT) and entertaining. We can now examine the primacy-of-assertoric-form thesis by first considering the naive response to the thesis. If assertion is semantically basic, then many if not most of our linguistic acts are meaningless, because no act of asserting is performed (as with builder A). If these linguistic acts are meaningful, it must be because assertion is implicated in the acts in a way that is not marked either by its syntactic shape or by its apparent meaningfulness. Here we see that even ordinary assertion is to be explicated in terms of two acts, assertingT and entertaining. If sense is to be secured by assertionT, assertionT, as a kind of assertion, must itself be explicated in terms of assertionT and entertainment. Clearly we have an explanatory regress. The meaning of an assertion cannot be explained in terms of some other kind of assertion unless something special can be shown to be true of assertionT, yet not true of ordinary assertion, such that the sense of assertion is supplied by assertionT. Thus far, we find nothing in the analysis to explain the meaningfulness of ordinary assertion or why such meaning must extend to all linguistic acts. Perhaps the second act, that of entertaining, will provide the explanation looked for. It will involve assertion in some way that keeps distinct the semantic thesis that assertoric form is primary and the independence of sense and force. And now we have the problem of how to explain the sense or content of entertaining. After all, one can entertain questions, orders, and much else. This difficulty is reflected in our schematic analysis of the builders game by our identifying step (P5) in the analysis with Order (Entertain (B brings A a slab)) but not Order (Assert (B brings A a slab)). So if asserting is essential to entertaining’s having a sense or content, as the primacy of assertoric form requires, then (P5) entertaining must itself be analyzable into, or require as necessary, assertingT. Now we are forced into a circle since the content of assertionT either engenders a regress or it must be explained (in part) in terms of entertainment. We are back to where 37

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we started. So regress or circle seem to be the only options if we insist on assertoric form’s being semantically basic. (In constructing this argument, it must be remembered that we are concerned with the claim that assertoric content is the content of all meaningful linguistic acts. If the “analysis” being considered were restricted to assertions, then of course it would be a redundancy or truism to hold that the meaning of an assertion is that which is asserted.) There would be no need to introduce a technical notion of assertion. This line of argument exploits the equivocation between ordinary assertion and technical assertion. In sum: the basic dilemma arising from our examination of the Fregeanized builders game is that either assertoric sense is not the only kind of meaning (or meaningfulness) – in which case nothing warrants deconstructing our proxy for natural languages into Fregean terms, and the primacy of assertoric form is forfeit – or we must recognize that assertoric sense is fundamental, but it is to be analyzed into two linguistic acts: asserting and entertaining. This appears to permit entertaining a sense or content of an assertoric sentence even if the force being applied is not assertion. If so, A’s entertaining a content without asserting that content must involve assertion in some other way, say, through assertingT of that content. But this, as we have seen, leads to regress or circularity. What drives this argument is the idea that sense is specified through a particular method of projection, namely, asserting. Sense is, for Frege, the mode of presentation. It is at this point that the notion of propositional content is introduced. Propositional content just is that assertoric content that is independent in principle of any asserting. It avoids the threat of regress or circularity by the special properties that accrue to propositions. Propositions are what assertoric sentences say. We shall see a similar line of argument open up in the examination of the private diary argument. There too a deep philosophical problem is covered over by the discovery of something extraordinary—our infallible knowledge. Propositions hide the fact of an intractable philosophical problem about meaning. A Fregean reply to this line of criticism would be twofold. First, a Fregean would insist that much of the apparent plausibility of the objection lies with taking the logical complexity described in our simple language-game as something psychological. Again, in being just to Frege, it is important to resist that temptation and to allow that we are concerned with logical complexity only. It is the logic of any language that requires the primacy of assertoric form. (Of course, this begs the question.) Secondly, a Fregean could argue that assertoric form is semantically fundamental precisely because it does not require that the semantic content of an assertoric sentence be asserted. The problem for the Fregean picture is to show how the semantic primacy of assertoric form and the independence of semantic content from force are compatible. Despite the independence thesis, assertoric form is fundamental, he can argue, since it is only through assertion – understood as an abstract function that assigns truth values to well-formed assertoric strings – that 38

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semantic content is realized. This is a claim as to the metaphysics of content, not the epistemology of content. The issue at hand is not whether anyone actually asserts anything, a psychological matter, but rather what they would mean if they were to make any use of language. Thus, the primacy of assertoric form is really the primacy of an abstract semantic function that operates only on assertoric sentences. Frege uses a distinct noun to describe what I have been calling assertionT. That noun is “judgment,” and judging is “striving for truth that drives us always to advance from the sense to the reference.”22 The content of this function (this “advancing”) can be expressed by a that-clause. A proposition is a that-clause by another name; or perhaps, alternatively, a that-clause names a proposition.23 Obstacles to the primacy of assertoric form are thus removed; and so the threatened regress is blocked. The dilemma, once again, was directed to the primacy-of-assertoric-form thesis. Either assertion is essential to any meaningful linguistic act, in which case it is false, or assertion decomposes into entertaining and asserting, which creates the illusion of the independence of content from force, thus allowing for the alleged ubiquity of assertoric content in all speech acts. As we have seen above, that illusion of independence cloaks an explanatory regress or circularity problem – a threatened regress that a Fregean stops by introducing the notion of the proposition, which shares assertoric content with assertion but preserves the independence of that content from any force operator by allowing for the entertainment of that same content.24 The proposition, thus, takes elements from each component (sense and force) of the analyzed assertion. What, then, is Wittgenstein’s objection to the primacy of assertion (Frege’s formation of the thesis)? Wittgenstein’s diagnostic argument takes us from the Fregean response to the dilemma to the consequences of making Frege’s mistake. We can think of this as the move from Frege’s idea to Frege’s mistake. Wittgenstein’s conflation argument against Frege’s idea is given in PI §§19–22. There he aims to reveal the mistakes that keep assertion at the center of language and cognition. He foreshadows, at this early stage, his alternative picture by remarking that “to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life” (PI §19). The Fregean account hypothesizes epicycles that at best ornament the moves in the language-game, but do not contribute to an explanation or a justification of the game in play. We are thus forewarned that the debate over meaning and meaningfulness concerns the background to linguistic use, whether it is a complex formal structure or a form of life—a logic or a grammar, as these terms are used by Wittgenstein. Most language users are blind to both of these, blind because they are without the means to articulate either. Recognition of logical form requires training into the techniques of logic and other formal systems. So if logical form is indeed the background to our language use, it is no more accessible to us than is our neurophysiology. But with a form of life as the background, there too we are blind, not because we fail to have the requisite logical or other technical 39

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skills but because its very ubiquity in our lives makes it literally unnoticeable (except under special circumstances, and there the price is very high for coming to know). PI §19 informs us that the entry-point for complicating the structure of the builders’ linguistic ability is our natural interpretation of the builder’s call as “Bring me a slab.” Wittgenstein’s strategy (in PI §§20–1) is to argue that although the lengthened sentence is a correct translation for us to make of the builder’s call, it does not thereby show that in order for A to command “Slab!” A must have first thought or presupposed the lengthened sentence “B brings me a slab.”25 The reason for our translating the builder’s call in this way has nothing to do with explaining what the builder does or undergoes in making that call, in short, with what makes the builder’s calls meaningful. The builder’s “language” simply hasn’t the syntactic, lexical and logical complexity to support such a hypothesis. Indeed, if we want to explain the builder’s use of the words of his game, we can appeal to how he was trained in their use and what he goes on to do. But if we want to explain why we translate “Slab!” in the way that we do, we must look elsewhere, namely, to features of our more complicated language. It is because we can say things like “This is a slab,” “The slab is broken,” “Where is the slab?” that we translate A’s call “Slab!” as “Bring me a slab.” Our sentences have a subsentential structure created by patterns of substitution within sentences.26 But this does not require attributing assertoric content to the builders or other language-games that are not asserting games. Insofar as the builders game is a language, it is in virtue of the role the words play within the temporally extended practice, not in virtue of any hidden thoughts on the part of the builders or hidden logical complexity in their use of words: the important thing is that their language, and their thinking too, may be rudimentary, that there is such a thing as “primitive thinking” which is described via primitive behaviour. The surroundings are not the “thinking accompaniment” of speech. (Z §99) We do not need to hypothesize a “thinking accompaniment” to the languagegame in order to recognize its family resemblance to our language. What we must note is that the builder’s game, minimal though it is, is a normative practice: open to sanctions, culturally heritable, and informed by the interests of the participants. This is where we will find the meaningfulness of the linguistic expressions. Meaningfulness is explained in terms of the surroundings, the history of the practice, and the way children are trained into it. It cannot be explained in terms of a hidden mental process that mirrors the demands of Frege’s idea. Nor is the builders’ practical skill in using these words correctly described by means of Frege’s idea. The translations that introduce Frege’s 40

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idea into the builders game prove to be at best a trap, in which Fregean complexities are as idle as Ptolemaic epicycles, required by the theory but explaining nothing. And at worst subject to a dilemma that the theory hasn’t the resources to dissolve. As Wittgenstein’s argument will show, the apparent solution, achieved by appealing to the special role of the proposition, derives from an unnoticed and yet fatal conflation. The confusion that lies behind Frege’s idea is, according to Wittgenstein, remarkably simple. The alleged ubiquity of the proposition in all linguistic interactions is attributed to nothing more than a trivial feature of language: Frege’s idea that every assertion contains an assumption, which is the thing that is asserted, really rests on the possibility found in our language of writing every statement in the form: “It is asserted that such-and-such is the case.”—But “that such-and-such is the case” is not a sentence in our language—so far not a move in the languagegame. And if I write, not “It is asserted that … ,” but “It is asserted: such-and-such is the case,” the words “It is asserted” simply become superfluous. (PI §22) In effect, Wittgenstein urges a deflationary treatment of Frege’s assertion sign and the idea of propositional content that it seems to support. Treating “the thing that is asserted” as a separable component—the content or sense—of an assertion is not an insight into the necessary structure of language, but merely a reflection of the fact that it is always possible to construct a sentence of the form “It is asserted that … ,” whenever an assertion is made.27 This is a banal point. As Wittgenstein points out, we could also write every statement in the form of a question followed by a “Yes,” but this would not show that every statement really contains a question. Equally, the fact that we can add the phrase “It is asserted:” to each statement does not thereby show what it is to grasp the sense of a sentence and then assert it. This banal feature of any language that has the resources of second-order descriptors takes on a different significance when it is confused with or taken to reveal the ontological ubiquity of assertoric form.28 The second stage of the diagnosis reveals that philosophers make a particular kind of mistake, opening them to the plausibility, if not inevitability, of Frege’s idea. As Wittgenstein says, the use of Frege’s assertion sign “is only a mistake if one thinks that the assertion consists of two actions, entertaining and asserting (assigning the truth-value, or something of the kind)” (my italics). He goes on to say that “Frege’s assertion sign marks the beginning of the sentence,” not the introduction of a metaphysically robust content.29 Again, as with the confusion, a deflationary understanding of Frege’s assertion sign as marking the beginning of a sentence does not aim at an explanation for how we manage to assert anything, let alone show that assertion is 41

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implicit in every meaningful linguistic act. It only seems to provide such an explanation when the two components, marked by the assertion sign, are taken for distinct actions. With this mistake we arrive at a metaphysically robust conception of content, propositional content. It is metaphysically robust because it is not to be identified with psychological acts of asserting. The act of entertaining is distinct from the speech act of asserting that advances the speaker from the thought to the truth value. The mistake makes possible the view that “entertaining an assumption” could be found in every linguistic act. It is not something that need be limited to assertions. The final stage that secures the proposition as the robust content of our sentences is the conflation of two sentences: “It is asserted that such-and-such is the case” and “it is asserted: such-and-such is the case.” To treat the two assertion sentences as the same obscures their differences, which is evident once the phrase “it is asserted” is removed from each. The result is a sentence fragment “that such-and-such is the case,” which is “not a move in the game”; and “such-and-such is the case,” for which the appendage “it is asserted” is superfluous. So “it is asserted” either introduces a linguistic fragment (which is not meaningful) or it is superfluous (explanatorily idle). To conflate these two seems to open a new logical space: a “sentence” that isn’t a sentence and yet has meaning; and an ordinary sentence whose meaning is the very meaning that the sentence fragment is alleged to have. What is needed to turn this confusion into the semantic machinery for all of language is the mistake of taking the assertion sign to introduce two acts, an act of entertaining, which now anchors the sentence fragment, and an act of asserting which “advances” us from sense to the world and so anchors the content shared by entertaining and asserting to the world. The confusion (taking “it is asserted that p” and “it is asserted: p” to be the same) and the mistake (taking the notation sign to combine two distinct acts, entertaining and judging) result in assigning a shared semantic sense to assertion and entertainment without shared reference (the True or the False). Shared reference is blocked by the fact that the that-clause is not a sentence. Though not a sentence, the sentence fragment does share a syntactic structure with the assertion. In the confusion, we have shared syntactic structure without sense; and through the mistake, we have shared semantic sense without shared reference (even though sense is identified with an inclining to the world). Distinguishing entertaining and asserting as distinct acts having a sense in common permits a reassessment of the semantic properties of the fragment by drawing on shared syntactic structure between part of the sentencefragment and the assertoric sentence. The result is something like assertion in its constituent structure but unlike assertion in its semantic properties (it has sense, but no reference). The object introduced to play this special role is the proposition. This is a metaphysical conception of the proposition, since its defining features align it both to states of affairs (its content) and to syntactic strings (it is expressible in language). But a proposition is neither a 42

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sentence nor a state of affairs. A proposition is not a sentence though it has the constituent structure of an assertoric sentence. It is not an assertion nor any other linguistic act: Entertaining is not a linguistic act nor a psychological one. Yet the proposition is the content of any linguistic act and indeed any cognitive act. The proposition is that which is asserted, without being asserted. It is that which shares syntactic structure with assertion, without having any syntax. This is the object that has been brought into existence. The final critique of this substantive notion of the proposition comes with the examination of the paradox of thought in Chapter 4. In the very next passage PI §23, Wittgenstein brings out the consequences of rejecting Frege’s idea. We can now acknowledge the open-ended diversity of language. No single kind of linguistic act has explanatory priority over all other uses. Language as a whole can neither be characterized as some systematically ordered totality nor ever be completed. “Language” consists in an open-ended overlapping array of language-games, games that can be identified in different ways. They can be identified in terms of speech act (assertion, question, command; cf. PI §23) or subject matter (colors, mathematics, history; cf. OC passim) or type of activity (grocers, builders, counters; cf. PI §§1, 2, 143). They do not fit together as parts of a single systematically related totality. Some language-games overlap other games (color and object games; counting and buying); some are relatively independent (the builders and the grocers games) while some are dependent on other games (justification and knowledge games on bedrock practices). No exhaustive list or arrangement of games can be given. This is Wittgenstein’s conception of the open texture of language.30 Even more important philosophically than this motley of language point is how we understand the normativity of language. The primitive normativity displayed in the builders game leads some, not to question Frege’s idea, but to urge that the builders game is irrelevant to a discussion of language. It is simply too primitive to bear upon the issue at all. There are three important criticisms of Wittgenstein’s critique of Frege’s idea, each of which urges the irrelevance of the builders.31 The first rejects the claim that the builders game is a language. The second argues that Wittgenstein overly psychologizes Frege’s idea and so misconstrues the kind of explanation provided by a theory of sense and force. The third, which I shall call Dummett’s challenge, argues that the distinction between sense and force is essential to language, and since the builders game is used to object to just this claim, the argument based on the builders game fails. Let’s turn to the first of these objections.

The builders game: rudimentary language or animal signaling? Warren Goldfarb and Robert Brandom—both of them sympathetic to and influenced by Wittgenstein’s later thought—maintain that the builders game 43

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is too simple to count as a language. As Brandom puts it, the builders engage in a practice that is vocal but not verbal:32 “It is not a genuine language game.” For Brandom, the builders may have a primitively normative practice, but they don’t have a discursive linguistic practice. Goldfarb33 asks rhetorically, “If this is the whole of their ‘language’, can we take them to be speaking, to be using words with understanding, to be human?” He urges that the simplicity of the builders’ calls makes it more appropriate to assimilate these calls to the cries of animals, to be explained in causal terms. The practice fails to be normative in any sense. The role of the builders game, according to Goldfarb, is to unsettle the reader and lead to a serious examination of the claims made on behalf of the explanatory work achieved through analysis. For both, however, the very simplicity of the builders game counts against its theoretical or explanatory relevance to our understanding of language. But this, I think, is a mistake. The importance of the builders in challenging Frege’s idea comes with the primitive normativity of that practice. Goldfarb does not see a normative dimension in their behaviors at all. So, the usefulness of the game can only be that of a stimulant to reconsider what philosophical analysis achieves. For Goldfarb, the analysis of “Slab!” into “Bring me a slab” is to be explained in terms of the variant sentences in which the expression “slab” can occur in our language; it is not to be explained in terms of an underlying structure of thought. In making this point, Goldfarb suggests that the builders game is left behind, serving only to initiate the inquiry. To be a language user is to be adept in the use of such variant sentences: language, to count as language, must have a certain degree of subsentential structure and logical interconnectedness and that linguistic mastery is minimally a practical competence that respects this systematicity. Goldfarb’s point on behalf of Wittgenstein is that this syntactic and logical structure does not require hypothesizing an underlying mental structure. This is certainly correct, but on my interpretation the builders play a more direct part in the argument, showing something important about us full-blown language users. Brandom locates the inadequacy of the builders elsewhere, though that inadequacy also concerns systematic features of language. Brandom holds that the builders do not use concepts, the structure of which must be discursive, that is, realized in the ability to ask for and give reasons. Borrowing Sellars’ phrase, it is to be in the space of reasons.34 Both ways of denying that the builders use language implicate the primacy of assertion and systematic features of language. But where Goldfarb emphasizes formal systematicity (logico-syntactic form), Brandom insists on inferential systematicity (patterns of commitments and entitlements). Yet both objections fail to acknowledge Wittgenstein’s central point in using the builders. This is captured by the remark from On Certainty already quoted above: I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a creature in a 44

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primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination. (OC §475) The cost of rejecting the relevance of the builders game to language, I shall argue, is to blind ourselves philosophically to the background of normatively primitive, contextually bound skills that linguistic meaning, formal systematicity and reason-giving presuppose. Such a background cannot be treated as something merely animal and so reducible to behaviors amenable to causal explanation. Thus, both Goldfarb and Brandom open a gulf between language as a normatively and logically complex system and mere behavior that is part of the causal nexus. This is just the picture Wittgenstein combats. What mistake does each make in their rejection of the builders? We’ll use Brandom’s more complicated account to answer this question. Brandom denies that the builders game is a genuine language-game because [w]hat makes something a specifically linguistic (and therefore, according to this view, discursive) practice is that it accords some performances the force or significance of claimings, of propositionally contentful commitments, which can serve as and stand in need of reasons. Practices that do not involve reasoning are not linguistic or (therefore) discursive practices.35 For Brandom, linguistic practices are discursive, or concept-using, practices, and “what distinguishes specifically discursive practices from the doings of non-concept-using creatures is their inferential articulation. To talk about concepts is to talk about roles in reasoning.”36 This requires that the conceptual takes the form of that which is propositionally contentful, that is, it must take the form of assertion. For only an assertion or that which takes assertoric form can play the roles of premise and conclusion in inferences. Assertion thus is fundamental to anything that counts as a language. The propositional content of any assertion is given in terms of further commitments and entitlements incurred by that assertion. Brandom sees linguistic mastery as consisting of the practical ability to keep track of the commitments and entitlements incurred by one’s own assertions as well as those of others. The basic connections of Brandom’s web of belief are not logical or other formal connections, but material inferential connections. Brandom, like Wittgenstein, rejects the explanatory primacy of formal or logical features of language. For Brandom, the logical space of reasons is articulated rather by material inferential connections from which formal logical and syntactic relations can be abstracted. To assert that Leo is a lion is to thereby commit 45

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oneself to accepting that Leo is a mammal. This material inference is not mediated by the formal structure of modus ponens.37 This is a direct material inference (in this case, a substitution inference).38 Thus, Brandom does not deny that the builders game is a language because it fails to display the requisite formal systematic structure. Failure to show the right kind of (abstracted) formal systematicity is, for Brandom, a symptom of why the builders game fails, but it does not explain the failure. The builders don’t speak a language, because they have not entered the space of reasons. Their vocalizations are not open to epistemic challenge. The structure of discursive practices, according to Brandom, is the structure of argumentation, of epistemic challenge and response. Other uses of language are seen by Brandom as being more sophisticated, presupposing this fundamental argumentative, challenge and response, structure. Thus, Brandom, correctly given this view, rejects the motley of language on the grounds that the essential core of (any) linguistic practice is making claims that can serve as or require reasons. This is a deep divide between Wittgenstein and Brandom. For Wittgenstein, the asking and giving of reasons is one kind of practice, very important, but not the condition of any meaningful linguistic practice. The motley of language thesis precisely denies this status to any particular linguistic practice. So, though Wittgenstein could agree with Brandom’s rejection of formal systematicity as explanatorily fundamental—indeed would agree that the use of an expressive logical vocabulary enables us to make explicit inferential commitments that we could otherwise only display in practice—he would nonetheless reject Brandom’s theory of language that makes assertoric form primary and (as we shall see in Chapter 4) leads Brandom to follow Davidson in holding that interpretation goes all the way down. To see more precisely how Wittgenstein could challenge Brandom’s assessment of the builders game, we need a fuller account of the kinds of linguistic practices Brandom acknowledges and the kinds of sanctions these practices support. Brandom denies that the builders game is a languagegame because its “linguistic” moves are not discursive and because sanctioning within the game can only be external. The doings of the builder attain only the first of the practical skills Brandom distinguishes.39 The first, and simplest, of these are differentially responsive reactions to features of the world. This is behavior induced through operant conditioning. Skinner box experiments are replete with examples of pigeons, rats and other animals being trained to differentiate properties in this way. We too are subject to such behavioral modification. This is a causally engendered response to the world.40 For Brandom, a reliable responsive disposition is insufficient for a conceptual capacity. Noting that something is red, as the manifestation of a conceptual capacity, requires embedding one’s responses in the game of giving and asking for reasons. Noting its redness, I conclude that the apple is ripe or seeing the red light, I stop. If you ask me why I ate the apple or 46

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stopped at the light, I say “it was red.” This is using an observation sentence as a reason for one’s action. The conceptual content of any sentence, including simple observation sentences like “It is red,” is fixed through the material inferential moves that the sentence permits or requires. It’s not just a matter of saying “red” where appropriate (say in the presence of a red apple), but being able to use this response to make an inference or give a reason. Only in the context of a discursive practice is the use of the vocable “red” a linguistic act. The builder’s calls do not seem to achieve even this primitive form of giving or asking for reasons. The second level of action is tied to the discursive character of linguistic competence. The meaning of a sentence is its inferential role, which itself is constrained by entry conditions into the game—what initiates a game or linguistic move, e.g., an observation sentence—and exit consequences, quite typically a behavior in the world. The moves that are made within a game are constrained by these two factors. Brandom differs from other inferentialists in that he endorses a “broad inferentialism.” The meaning of a sentence is a function of its inferential connections to other sentences within a game, constrained by the entry and exit conditions that initiate and terminate linguistic action. Our observation reports, as the result of a differential response to the environment, look like mere causal responsiveness. It is causal responsiveness, but not merely so. It is a qualification to play the game. Without our responsiveness to surface reflectance properties, we cannot play our color games. Equally without a discursive context in which the observation is embedded the “observation sentence” is not a move in the language-game of giving and asking for reasons. If I can’t reliably distinguish red from yellow, I won’t be allowed to make moves in talk about the traffic signal. Brandom’s broad inferentialism includes the environmental features that cause the tokening of an observation sentence. This simple discursive practice is the minimal required for a language. A fully discursive practice, complete with the expressive logical vocabulary, which enables one to make explicit the material inferences we draw as a matter of course is the third kind of linguistic practice. This third linguistic practice is the most sophisticated conceptually, epistemologically and logically. Brandom, though not a representationalist, endorses Frege’s idea: Assertoric form embedded in the space of reasons is primary. Our discursive practice is one of asking for and giving of reasons. Though simple discursive games are possible, Brandom identifies discursive linguistic practice with our sophisticated epistemic practice. Whatever the commonalities between Brandom and Wittgenstein, this is a major divide. This difference between Brandom and Wittgenstein can be seen in the way each uses a metaphor comparing language to a city. Wittgenstein says: Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses with additions from various 47

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periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. (PI §18) Compare this with Brandom’s use of the metaphor: By contrast to Wittgenstein, the inferential identification of the conceptual claims that language (discursive practice) has a center: it is not a motley. Inferential practices of producing and consuming reasons are downtown in the region of linguistic practice. Suburban practices utilize and depend on the conceptual contents forged in the game of giving and asking for reasons, are parasitic on it. (Articulating Reasons, p. 14; original italics) For Brandom, the center of the city is the orderly domain of assertoric sentences standing in rational relations to each other. Other uses of language— language in the suburbs—depend upon this center. For Wittgenstein, the relation of city center to orderly suburbs is reversed. The ancient part of the city is a maze of streets and squares. One must go to the suburbs to find the orderly domain of logic and the sciences. Brandom’s commitment to Frege’s idea makes his inferentialism subject to the criticisms that have already been drawn against the representationalist. We are still left with Brandom’s rejection of the builders. Besides objecting to the builders as being nondiscursive, and so not linguistic, he also objects that there is no room for sanctions in the builders game, or more precisely, the builders game cannot have internal sanctions. Internal sanctions are denials of entitlement to make certain moves. These are contrasted with external sanctions, punitive measures that are not tied to questions of entitlement. A referee benches a player, in accord with the rules of basketball. This is an internal sanction: the penalty is part of the rules. A fan could get the same result in benching a player by running down to the court and beating him with a stick. This would be an external sanction. Even if they achieve the same end, beating is external to the game, while the rules of proper conduct and the sanctions for violating them are internal to the game. An internal sanction, thus, is one that cannot be specified independently of norms or the normative statuses of members of the practice. Suppose a tribe has a practice of calling out “Lulu” each morning with the rising of the sun. Those individuals who fail to call out “Lulu” are beaten with sticks and quickly come to conform to this practice. To describe the sanction does not require an appeal to any normative status on the part of the sanctioner or in characterizing the sanction. Members of this tribe express their normative attitudes towards the actions of their fellows (as appropriate or inappropriate) in their disposition to beat fellow members who fail to call out “Lulu” when the sun rises. An internal sanction is one that can only be specified 48

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in normative terms, that is, in terms of the correctness or incorrectness of further performances. If the sanction applied to those who fail to call out “Lulu” can be administered only by those who are authorized to administer it (say the keeper of the Lulu ceremony), then the sanction is internal to the norms of that practice. Thus, if nonauthorized persons were to beat the silent member, that would not count as a sanction even if it is efficacious in producing the desired behavior. Indeed the nonauthorized beating might itself be sanctionable behavior.41 The sanction, as Brandom puts it, is “internal to the system of norms” (p. 44). It’s not the beating with sticks that is the sanction (even if that is what makes sanctioning causally effective); it is rather the authority of the person who does the beating or the authority of some law. What, now, of the builders? According to Goldfarb, theirs are the cries of humanoid animals capable only of the first level of doing, that is, of differentially responding to properties of the world in a reliable fashion. The call of “Slab” may be a reliable stimulus for eliciting the behavior of bringing a slab; it may be a behavior that was achieved by beating B with a stick when he failed to so respond to that call. But useful though this behavior might be, it is not normative behavior. Brandom’s position is more complex. He would accord the builders a normative status, but only that of practical doings. They are not engaged in a discursive practice for which internal sanctioning is essential and unavoidable. Brandom is correct in this basic assessment of the builders game. Goldfarb’s mistake lies in his failure to recognize nondiscursive normative practice. We now need to see what it is about the builders that makes their calls normative in a way that the causally induced peckings of conditioned pigeons are not. It can’t turn, of course, on the superficial difference between the pigeons and the builders, namely, that the builders use vocables while the pigeons do not. Pigeons could be conditioned to coo in a distinctive way whenever a red light goes on in their box. How does the call of “Slab!” differ from a trained cooing pigeon? We can see the difference along three dimensions. The role of “Slab” in the game expresses a norm, that B ought to bring a slab when A calls out “Slab.” That this is a norm can be seen in the fact that B’s behavior can be incorrect or inappropriate. Second, incorrect behavior is sanctionable. And thirdly, and importantly to Wittgenstein, the children of this tribe can be taught the norm. So the builders game is structured by norms, which are enforced by sanctions, and are culturally heritable. Skinner box creatures can obscure the difference between causally conditioned doings and normatively informed doings of a primitive sort. This is because the behavior of Skinner box creatures is informed by norms imposed by the experimenters. They decide what behavior is correct and impose sanctions accordingly, but here both norms and sanctions are fully external to the behaviors of the animals, and it is for this reason that their behavior is taken to support a causal conditioning theory of behavior modification. Remove the experimenters and 49

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the pigeon’s failure to peck in association with a red stimulus cannot be said to be incorrect or inappropriate. It is just a different behavior. The norms of the builders game, on the other hand, are sanctioned within the game: theirs is a normative practice. Nonetheless, Brandom insists that it is not a linguistic practice. Let’s begin with the claim that it is not a discursive practice. On my reading of Wittgenstein, it is important that Brandom is correct on this matter, since for him a discursive practice is one that consists of assertions (claimings) that have a place in the logical and epistemic space of reasongiving. Wittgenstein does use the builders to introduce a nonassertoric practice to examine the primacy-of-assertoric-form thesis. To lessen the weight Brandom assigns to this difference, we need to see how little must be in place to meet the minimal requirements for a discursive practice. Here I will rely on Jay Rosenberg’s lucid account of a simple Brandomian discursive practice.42 Rosenberg describes a tribe whose entire language consists of a very small lexicon. I will simplify it further. This tribe has only four expressions in its language: red, white, yummy and yucky. This vocabulary is used in connection with the berries that the tribe consumes as its sole source of food. Ripe red berries are nourishing while immature white berries are not. To be permitted to play the game requires that the actor is reliable in his calls “red,” that is, he says “red” only in the presence of red berries. “Red” is his entry into the game. Saying “red” thereby commits the speaker to “yummy.” And to say “yummy” commits the speaker to eating the berries. The inferential connections between “red” and “yummy” are asymmetrical, allowing for a more complex inferential structure than might have seemed to be the case. “Red” and “white” are under the control of the color of the berries, and “yummy” and “yucky” are tied to behaviors. Further inferential moves between speakers are warranted as when speaker A says “yummy,” speaker B can infer “red.” Here then is a social dimension of this toy language. These slender linguistic resources are sufficient to describe this practice as discursive. Their utterances can be challenged and can be taken as reasons for other claims. Inappropriate claims or reasons given are sanctioned by rejection. Such rejection of claims cannot be identified with the set of actual rejections community members have expressed nor in terms of their de facto dispositions to reject claims under certain circumstances. Rather sanctions are those rejections the members are entitled to make. So, Rosenberg’s simple tribe meets the conditions for being a linguistic practice that the builders game does not. It is discursive and subject to internal sanctions. If so little is required for a language, then why do the builders not qualify? Consider the following variation on the builders game.43 A calls out “Slab!” B, who is swatting away wasps, picks up a pillar and brings it to A. A pushes the pillar away. B looks crestfallen and offers the pillar again. To which A says “Slab!” once more. B takes the pillar back and picks up a slab. This 50

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cannot be described in fully non-normative causal terms. The second utterance of “Slab” looks like A’s giving B a reason for his rejection of the pillar that B has brought, just as saying “yucky” is a reason for rejecting the claim “red.” The material inference implicated in this scenario does not involve two linguistic expressions, but an expression and an action. It is a practical inference, if one likes, but one that makes room for something akin to reason-based sanctioning. It is at least as open to reason-giving and sanctioning as Rosenberg’s tribe. The difference between the reason-giving of the berry-pickers and the reason-giving of the builders lies with differing rationales, as it were, of the games, whether it is to make reports or to act on the world. The primacy-of-assertoric-form thesis makes giving reports fundamental to linguistic practice while Wittgenstein makes acting on the world fundamental. But both the reporting and the acting are for reasons. Even if one insists that the practical inferences of the builders mark a significant difference from the material inferences of the berry-eaters, the builders game is still normative and its sanctioning is internal. Brandom’s mistake in denying the builders the status of a language-game turns on his use (or misuse) of two contrasts that are important to his discussion of linguistic practice. One is the contrast between the normative and the causal, and concerns issues of explanatory reduction. The other is the contrast between discursive and nondiscursive normative practices, which concerns what counts as a conceptual engagement with the world and others. For Brandom, the builders’ calls are merely vocal because they are not fully discursive. But surely the key difference is the normative–causal divide. That certainly is Wittgenstein’s point. Once that key difference is in place, there is no deep theoretical need to identify just the point at which the nondiscursive becomes discursive or the nonconceptual becomes conceptual. With normatively constrained practice, there will always be a minimal element of discursiveness. Brandom, it seems, is equating discursive practice with sophisticated epistemological practice. The variant builders game, as well as the Brandomian tribe described by Rosenberg, indicates that such a demarcation question is not the philosophically most significant. Rather it is the causal–normative divide that is crucial. Brandom is correct in distinguishing the primitive normativity displayed by the builders from the complex set of norms constituting full-fledged language. But this doesn’t diminish the importance of the builders since their primitive normativity is the background required for participating in the complex inferentially articulated space of reasons. To understand the character of that background requires giving up the primacy of assertion thesis. Assertions (or claimings) presuppose nondiscursive normative responses, for, as we shall see, only the latter can defuse the problem of normative similarity as it arises in several key arenas of human activity.44 Discussion of Brandom’s taxonomy has proved useful in distinguishing what marks off merely causal doing (reliable behavioral response) from 51

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normative doing (appropriate response). Norm-governed practices of any sort can be distinguished from causally explicable behaviors in terms of four features. First, the use of linguistic items or signs is an indispensable part of the behavior of the practitioners and the coordination of their behavior. Second, the behavior is normative in that it is appropriate or not, correct or not. Third, in being normatively constrained, the behavior is evaluable and thus subject to sanctions. And lastly such normatively constrained behavior is culturally heritable; it is not just acquired, it is learned.

Dummett’s challenge: sense vs force Now to Michael Dummett’s challenge. Dummett, who sees himself as defending and further developing the most important ideas of the later Wittgenstein, aims to combine three important ideas.45 First, he insists that a theory of meaning must be a theory of understanding. And yet, secondly, a theory of understanding need not be a theory of psychological processes or mechanisms that underwrite linguistic mastery. Finally, he takes from the later Wittgenstein an insight into what McDowell has called “the epistemology of understanding”: understanding must be publicly manifestable. Dummett’s strategy is to insist that linguistic mastery is an abstract practical skill whose exercise must conform to the constraints of Fregean systematicity. He takes Wittgenstein’s attack on Frege’s idea as a threat to combining these three claims. His project requires, then, undermining Wittgenstein’s objections to the primacy of assertoric form while retaining the best of meaning as use. His first step is to maintain that Wittgenstein wrongly psychologizes Frege’s idea. Wittgenstein’s criticism turns on the apparent necessity of ascribing a complicated and yet hidden (even from the builder) psycholinguistic life to the builder. Dummett (along with Davidson and Brandom) aims to endorse Frege’s idea while rejecting the notion that there must be some mental mechanism or process the structure of which is isomorphic to the structure of language. By psychologizing the assertion sign, Wittgenstein misses the point of introducing the idea of a proposition-radical. It doesn’t matter whether the builder first thought that there are slabs and then issued the command or whether he simply made the command without prior thought at all. The crucial point is Fregean systematicity is fundamental to explaining what linguistic mastery consists in, even if the psychology of linguistic mastery does not mirror that formal structure. Our actual psychology is an empirical issue, and nothing in the philosophical account of linguistic understanding imposes necessary constraints on what empirical inquiry must discover.46 Wittgenstein’s own view is that detaching an abstracted formal description of mature language from a mentalistic account of linguistic mastery undermines the explanatory significance of Frege’s idea. A formalistic description of a part of language use is not an explanation of linguistic mastery and understanding. The full argument for this requires a deeper 52

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diagnosis of the philosophical error in play, a diagnosis in which the paradox arguments play the decisive role. Dismantling Dummett’s objection is the first step in achieving this. A theory of meaning, Dummett maintains, is “a theoretical representation of a practical ability,”47 the ability to use and understand language. Dummett’s position is that this practical ability must consist in knowledge of a theory of meaning: the key to an account of language … is the explanation of an individual speaker’s mastery of his language. … A speaker’s mastery of his language consists, on this view, in his knowing a theory of meaning for it: it is this that confers on his utterances the sense that they bear, and it is because two speakers take the language as governed by the same, or nearly the same, theory of meaning that they can communicate with one another.48 Dummett takes Wittgenstein’s rejection of any attempt to develop a systematic theory of meaning as throwing the baby out with the bath water. The key element of this radical and nihilistic view, Dummett argues,49 is Wittgenstein’s “repudiation of the Fregean distinction between sense and force and particularly, of Frege’s idea that there is such a thing as assertoric force in general.”50 This repudiation eliminates the explanatory role for the “proposition-radical”51 and provides the ground for Wittgenstein’s hostility to any theory of meaning. But Frege’s idea,52 according to Dummett, is essential to any account of linguistic understanding. This, if correct, isn’t a dogmatic rejection of the lessons of the builders game; rather it establishes the inadequacy of the builders as a window onto meaning. This argument stands free of the psychologistic construal discussed in the first section (“The Fregean Picture of Language”). Whether or not one thinks that the psychological processes involved in producing and understanding language mirror the logical syntax or inferential structure of the Fregean picture is independent of Dummett’s argument. Thus, Dummett can be seen as arguing that the builders game hasn’t the complexity to support the tripartite distinction among sense, force and point, and without that complexity it can be no more than a simple system of signals among humanoid animals. Goldfarb’s point is vindicated, and the builders game shows nothing positive about linguistic understanding. How, then, does Wittgenstein go wrong in his rejection of the Fregean picture? One standard objection is the following. Wittgenstein’s mistake, through endorsement of the aphorism “meaning is use,” is to conflate the meaning of a sentence with the point of its use on particular occasions. If meaning is use, then alternative uses of the same sentence-type entail different meanings for each sentence-token, given the different circumstances of use. One person might call out “The ice is thin” to a fellow ice-fisherman to 53

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get him to go to that location; another might call out the same words, urging people to move away from that spot. These different uses would entail different meanings. Yet we can only make sense of the differing effect of these words on different occasions if we can distinguish between the sense of the words (that the ice is thin) and the point in uttering them on a particular occasion (to call a person over or to warn people away). The uniqueness of each occasion of use would leave no place for meaning constancy or shared linguistic conventions. Though this standard objection to the idea that meaning is use might seem initially plausible, Dummett thinks that it is a bad argument, and that there is a deeper issue at stake.53 Patterns of use can be sufficiently rich to distinguish commonly occurring regularities from idiosyncratic features of particular occasions of use. According to Dummett, what is needed to refute the Wittgensteinian picture of meaning as use are “reasons for thinking that we must have a prior understanding of the sentence before we can be in a position to ask what the point of a particular utterance of it may be.”54 This is the point that Wittgenstein puts in mentalistic mode when he says that the mistake is thinking that “the assertion consists of two actions, entertaining and asserting” (PI §22). Here then is the great divide between Dummett’s position and Wittgenstein’s. For Dummett, a theory of meaning should give us “a model of that in which our understanding consists, a model which will be adequate to explain the entire practice of speaking the language.”55 Such a model requires complementary theories of entertaining and asserting; that is, a theory of sense and a theory of force. Wittgenstein argues that the motley of language blocks the attempt to impose such a model on all of language and that such a model cannot explain what it purports to explain. The attack on Frege’s idea initiates, though it does not complete, the Wittgensteinian attack on both of these claims. Dummett’s defense of “Frege’s idea that there is such a thing as assertoric force in general” is developed in many places. But I shall examine two arguments that are explicitly directed against Wittgenstein’s repudiation of Frege’s idea in PI §22. These are the opening argument of chapter 10, “Assertion,” of Frege: Philosophy of Language56 and the complicated and obscure argument of “What Does the Appeal to Use Do for the Theory of Meaning?”57 These arguments are intended to establish, against Wittgenstein, that the tripartite distinction between sense, force and point is essential to the structure of language. Both a theory of sense and a theory of force are necessary for an adequate theory of meaning. We need to be clear about the arguments of both Wittgenstein and Dummett with respect to Frege’s idea. This is a difficult task since both are obscure in places, though for very different reasons. For this reason, it is worthwhile to remind the reader of the main claims I am making with respect to Wittgenstein’s position. On my reading, PI §22 is the first major conclusion that Wittgenstein draws, and it concerns privileging assertoric form within a theory of 54

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meaning. I construe this conclusion as an attack on the explanatory role assigned to sense (as this is construed in the Tractatus) and so propositions. This attack relies heavily on the methodological use of the builders game. So, if the builders game is too primitive to be relevant to language, the argument fails. Lastly, and very importantly since this is a source of misunderstanding, Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frege’s idea is not a denial that mature natural languages display features of systematicity and that idealized parts of it can be formally modeled. Rather it is a rejection of certain philosophical theories of how to explain features of systematicity, say in terms of logical form or intrinsic features of propositions, that in turn figure in a mentalistic account of understanding. Since Dummett rejects this mentalistic codicil, we too are putting it to one side in order to assess the weight of Dummett’s challenge. The argument from Frege is intended to show that a theory of sense and reference is not sufficient for a theory of meaning (linguistic understanding). It must be supplemented with a theory of point, within which assertoric form plays an especially important and fundamental role. Assertion is the only linguistic force that contains its own point. A more general theory of force is thus a consequence of assertoric form. Dummett explicitly rejects Wittgenstein’s attempt to deflate the significance of assertoric force: “the assertion sign is doing much more than merely marking the beginning and end of [a] sentence,” as is claimed by Wittgenstein in PI §22.58 The second argument, developed later, moves in the reverse direction to the same conclusion. Accepting the Wittgensteinian claim that use, including the point and so context of use, is crucial to any account of linguistic understanding, Dummett argues that having a point within a context requires a truth (as assertability)-conditional semantics. The two arguments complement each other, showing (if sound) that a linguistic act can have a point (a use) if and only if it has a sense. Let’s go to the first, and earlier, of these arguments, purporting to show that: sense only if force. Dummett introduces his own version of the situation of radical translation in order to argue that a theory of meaning restricted to explanation in terms of truth and reference could not be an adequate theory of linguistic understanding.59 His thought experiment describes a situation in which Martians are engaged in constructing a theory of meaning for our utterances. Because of the complexities of our practices and the great differences between the Martians and ourselves, the only way in which the Martians can interpret what we are doing is by way of a theory. In other words, not by way of a shared “know-how.” Dummett asks us to leapfrog the initial difficulties in constructing a theory from the meager resources available and to allow that the Martians have hit upon a way to identify the senses of words and so their referents. However, Dummett argues, if the Martians’ knowledge of human language were restricted to this, they would “know only that, when a certain complete expression is uttered, there is a particular means for recognizing an object (or truth-value) to be associated with that expression as its ‘referent’; 55

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but, as one might say, they do not know what anyone is doing in uttering that expression.”60 All the Martians would know are complex procedures for associating certain objects with certain expressions. These are procedures by which every sentence can be assigned to one of two arbitrarily labeled classes, “true sentences” and “false sentences.” Their theory does not enable them to explain why people make the utterances they do nor to identify further consequences of making those utterances beyond those of strict logical entailment. It does not even require them to recognize that the sign “true sentences” designates true sentences. To show the inadequacy of the Martians’ theory, Dummett introduces an analogy with games. Games like chess and checkers can be described formally in terms of the initial positions of pieces, rules for legitimate moves within the game, and terminal positions. Knowing this, however, does not enable one to play or understand the game of chess. One has to know that the game is competitive and that its point is to reach a terminal position by checkmating one’s rival. The point of chess would be undermined if both Martian players aimed at a black checkmate; that is, if they took the competition out of the game. As Dummett puts it, a formal description alone will not “suffice by itself to provide us with a ‘theory’ of chess as an activity.”61 Any number of variant games can be played in accord with this formal description—just as a Turing machine can play any number of computational games.62 Thus, Dummett concludes that one’s theory of the activity must include the point of the activity. It is hard to imagine that anyone would deny that there is a gap between the formal description and what is required to play the game. Force is to fall out of the dynamic relation between the “sense” of the game and its point. In the course of a single game, one may threaten, attack, retreat, develop a queenside initiative, all aiming at checkmating one’s rival within the constraints of the “senses” of the markers. Thus, the strictly semantic theory must be supplemented with a theory of the point of language. But the Martians, since they are not participants of these human activities and by hypothesis do not have such activities themselves, construct a theory of point under rather severe constraints. These constraints were alluded to above, but not explicitly identified as such. Supposing our Martians to have constructed a theory of sense and reference for human language, what they have are rules for associating human language sentences with the categories labeled “true” and “false” and rules for associating human language words with objects or properties. They are still unable to explain the point of linguistic activity. The two important constraints of the thought experiment are, first, the human activity of communication is so far removed from what the Martians do that the Martians cannot assimilate that activity to their own practices; and, second, as a consequence, they do not grasp the significance of the human labels “true” and “false” by which sentences are classified. They are forced to supplement their theory of sense/reference without presupposing either a prior 56

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conception of human communication or that the expressions “true” and “false” concern truth. This is to ensure that the explanation for what the humans are doing is not circular, that is, the Martians do not explain the human linguistic practice of making assertions by appeal to a general human linguistic practice like communicating. A supplementary theory must provide the component that places human utterances into a context that gives them a point. As the formal rules of chess must be understood in the context of winning and losing, so the semantic rules of language must be understood in a context of concrete human practices. Further, in giving an account of chess as a human activity, that theory cannot draw upon knowledge of the activity of playing games in general. Drawing upon knowledge of games is in order when teaching a new game to someone who already understands what games are, but not when trying to explain chess as a human activity. For this latter project, we need a form of explanation that is independent of our understanding of game-playing activities. Equally, for the Martians to explain language as a human activity, they cannot presuppose a prior understanding of that activity’s point. That would be circular. Hence the constraints: no understanding of the point of speaking and no understanding of the significance of the labels “true” and “false.” What supplementary theory could possibly meet these constraints? It must be a theory of the context within which the utterances that are so classifiable have a point. That context, Dummett holds, is the assertoric context, the context of saying that something is true. One might think that this context could be provided by the actual intentions of the speaker, namely, the intention of the speaker to say something true. So speaker intention would provide the missing component. But this won’t do, as individuals’ actual intentions could be far removed from telling the truth. Thus, Dummett argues that the supplementary context is best understood as a general convention, shared among humans and presumably among the Martians as well, of speaking truly. A theory of sense, understood as rules for assigning sentences to the categories “true” and “false,” is supplemented with a theory of assertoric force, understood in terms of a general convention that the fundamental use of language is to say something true. This is Dummett’s argument that a theory of sense must be augmented with a theory of force: together they place assertoric sentences in a privileged position. No sense without assertoric force. And for Dummett, internal to this linguistic force, is speaking truly or falsely, the point of speaking. Reaching this conclusion is not circular because the intention of the speaker to speak truly or not is not playing an explanatory role. The subject need not understand the labels “true sentence” and “false sentence” any better than the Martian. Rather in speaking the subject thereby speaks truly or not. This is Dummettian blindness. There are two crucial features to this argument that Wittgenstein would challenge. First, he would object that the constraints that Dummett imposes upon the Martian theorists cannot be met. These constraints are, 57

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Dummett claims, conditions on what counts as an explanation of linguistic understanding. An explanation of linguistic understanding cannot appeal to our practices of communication, for this would build into the explanans just what was to be explained. The explanation would be circular. Second, Dummett works with the idea of the point to language use. A single unified theory of meaning is tied to the idea that language has an essence; that is, that language has a defining point. Wittgenstein argues that both the reductionist ambitions of Dummettian explanation and the commitment to the point of language are mistaken. For Wittgenstein, a formal theory of meaning of the sort Dummett gives the Martians at the outset requires the meaningfulness of our language-games, a meaningfulness the Martians must recognize if they are to abstract the theory of meaning that Dummett awards them. And meaningfulness does not require privileging assertion. Dummett, as we saw, uses an analogy with games to make his point about the kind of explanation that is required. Ex hypothesi, the Martians do not have any practice of game-playing or of competition or of rivalry. They do have a list of the formal rules defining chess. To explain the game of chess, they must supplement these formal rules with a theory of the point of chess. Wittgenstein’s reply would run as follows. They cannot form the requisite supplementary theory unless they have the requisite techniques or skills for exercising the concepts that inform the supplementary theory. If the Martians have no such practice and so no concepts of play or competition or rivalry, they cannot form a theory that applies these concepts. Thus, on Wittgenstein’s view, the only way the Martians can put themselves into a position to construct a theory of chess is by first learning to play some games. If the Martians know nothing of games, they can only come to understand chess by learning to play it. This is the primacy of action over words. Indeed, Dummett’s Martians can make no headway in explaining linguistic understanding without presupposing certain shared practices, in particular, the practice of saying true. This first argument presupposes privileging the practice of asserting. “He” achieves this by identifying the point of language with a particular linguistic action or force, namely, that of assertion. This is, of course, just what is in contention. Dummett’s second argument addresses this privilege: no force without sense. This second argument against Wittgenstein is given in “What Does the Appeal to Use Do for the Theory of Meaning?” It is complementary to the first argument, thus (if sound) completing the defense of the biconditional claim that a linguistic act has sense if and only if it has force. In effect, Dummett argues that for an utterance to have a force, it must have a truth-evaluable sense. The argument is complicated and obscure. But the main point seems to be that both Wittgenstein and his earlier critics misunderstand where the appeal to use should be made in developing a theory of meaning. The bad argument, reviewed above, identifies use with the particular point of a speech act, rendering meaning (virtually) unique to each particular speech act. It 58

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criticizes the aphorism “meaning is use” for eliminating any place for constancy in meaning. Dummett argues that the aphorism should apply to the sense (as separable from the point or force of particular uses). Wittgenstein himself, Dummett suggests, fails to recognize this because of his repudiation of Frege’s idea. Thus, Dummett sees his argument against Wittgenstein as probing much more deeply than the quick “bad argument.” There are three stages to Dummett’s argument that there is no force without sense. The first stage argues that any language, to be a language, must be able to distinguish between the force and the point of an utterance. (This is striking in light of the argument we just examined, where there was a blurring of force and point, but perhaps that makes this argument all the more important.) Once we have granted this distinction, the distinction between sense and force follows. If correct, this undermines Wittgenstein’s argument, though still in a somewhat superficial way. To get to the deep issue between Wittgenstein and Dummett requires the second stage of his argument in which he purports to show that the explanation of sense, force and point must be given in terms of truth. Assertion thus has a privileged place in the structure of linguistic understanding precisely because it is truth-telling, and from this privileged place it is a short step to identifying sense with truth conditions. The third stage introduces the philosophically interesting point, according to Dummett, at which the appeal to use contributes to a theory of meaning. Understanding the sense of a sentence must be publicly manifestable. Meaning qua sense is tied to publicly manifestable use. Dummett thus appeals to Wittgensteinian use to support his assertability interpretation of truth. In this way, Dummett puts Wittgensteinian ideas to a very un-Wittgensteinian use. Now for a closer look at each of these stages. Dummett argues, in the first stage, that the distinctions between sense, force, and point stand or fall together.63 Two issues are at stake here: first, whether Dummett’s claim is correct and, second, if correct, whether it is significant. Wittgenstein thinks that the fact that the distinction between sense and force can be applied to all statements is shallow, a mere product of the availability of certain expressions, like “It is asserted that … .” It shows nothing deep about the essential structure of language.64 Dummett, on the other hand, argues that the distinction is a deep one. The contrast between force and point is fundamental to the structure of language. And, Dummett holds, if we allow that the contrast between force and point is essential to language, then the contrast between force and sense is “all but inevitable.” It is important to note that it is not just a matter of whether or not this distinction could be applied (as it was even to the builders game), but whether the distinction is essential to linguistic mastery in the sense that the participants themselves must be able to draw or exploit these distinctions in the exercise of their mastery. Must knowledge of these distinctions be (at least) implicit in any speaker’s understanding of language? The question is, why? 59

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Though Dummett is not completely clear in his answer to this, let me suggest the following reconstruction of his thought. The bad argument against the view of meaning-as-use is that meaningas-use renders each utterance unique in its meaning by identifying meaning with the point of each utterance. The reply is that regularities of usage avoid this consequence. So, if Dummett is not simply repeating this bad argument against meaning-as-use, what are his grounds for thinking that any picture of language must accommodate the force–point distinction? Only if logical space for this distinction is part of the structure of language, Dummett suggests, can one distinguish between what is idiosyncratic to the context or the intentions of the speaker (the point of the particular utterance) and what is not (that the speaker made an assertion or a command), and so between what is constitutive of linguistic understanding and what is not (what speech act is performed as opposed to the particular purposes of the speaker). We must be able to distinguish someone’s asserting that the ice is thin in order to warn people away, from asserting that the ice is thin in order to beckon someone over. Dummett argues that this requires a substantive distinction between force and point. We have already seen that if meaning-as-use is identified with the point of particular utterances, then meaning is unique to each utterance. But if we identify meaning-as-use with the force of an utterance, we get a different kind of problem, though Dummett does not put the problem in this way. What Dummett should argue, it seems to me, is that such a theory of meaning-as-use would render idiosyncratic points invisible and/or inadmissible. If meaning-as-use is tied to the force of an utterance (and not to its point on particular occasions), then the meaning of the utterance is tied to the patterns of use in which the paradigmatic pattern of use is identified with the force of the utterance (e.g., questioning or ordering or warning65), rendering all other uses of those words mistakes of meaning. (It must be remembered that at this stage in the argument, we are working with the contrast between force and point. Sense has not yet been introduced as necessary to the structure of language.) The problem is how to identify the paradigmatic pattern of use that would constitute the force. A first suggestion is that it would be the use that most typically occurs, say, the warning use of “The ice is thin.” Just as it is a failure to understand what “horse” means if one calls a cow a “horse” in optimal circumstances, so it would be a comparable mistake to use the expression “the ice is thin” to beckon someone or to do anything with the sentence other than warn others. Every speech act using that sentence warns people away in virtue of the meaning of the sentence. To highlight the contrast with the bad argument in which meaning is rendered unique to the situation, this approach renders every action using these words the same. Any context in which the sentence is used to beckon someone is a context in which the use of the sentence is incorrect on semantic grounds. 60

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What we capture as differences in the point of an utterance is reduced to a single difference between correct usage in which the speaker’s words mean (as we would say) “keep away from the thin ice” and incorrect usage in which the speaker’s words have no proper application. Differences in the point of asserting this can only be treated as semantic errors. On this treatment of meaning-as-use, we provide a univocal meaning for all utterances of a sentence-type (pace the bad argument). But the price is that only one kind of action can be performed using the sentence. But if only one kind of action (e.g., warning) is possible, we have the rigidity of relation between sign and world that is the mark of mere animal signaling. We need the contrast between the force and the point of these utterances in order to explain the differing roles that the same speech act can have in differing contexts.66 If we can successfully introduce the distinction between point and force in this way, “the distinction between sense and point is” indeed as Dummett says, “all but inevitable.” For Dummett, this is because the explanation of the distinction between point and force is given in terms of truth-telling. The reason that assertoric force is fundamental is that it is tied to truth-telling, which contrasts with any other point that the speaker might have. Representing the world is thus our fundamental cognitive relation to the world. Once we introduce truth-telling as our basic cognitive stance, it is a short step to giving the sense of assertions in terms of their assertability conditions. In this way, Dummett thinks he has established the second half of the biconditional: force only if sense. I think that there is actually a step missing from Dummett’s conception of the link from point vs force to force vs sense. The need for a further step in the argument becomes clear when we consider the consequences of taking the privileged force of truth-telling as the meaning-as-use. It would rule out any false or deceptive use of language as nonsensical in a strong sense. What is required to avoid this consequence is that we find something which is not only neutral between warning and beckoning (the differing forces) to which a true assertion could be put but also between speaking truly and not. The only way to achieve this result is to find something that counts as a force and yet can serve as the lowest common denominator among differing forces and points to which an utterance may be put. That lowest common denominator is taken to be a weak neutral force operator, i.e., entertaining a content, one that must be involved in all other force operators. And now force vs sense is all but inevitable. We can summarize Dummett’s position at this stage by echoing Kant’s aphorism: sense without force is (arbitrary) association, while force without sense is (mere animal) signaling. Both arguments turn on the explanatory work to be done by truth-telling. This is the focus of the second stage of Dummett’s argument, the aim of which is to establish that the concept of truth plays an indispensable explanatory role in any adequate account of linguistic meaning and 61

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understanding. As Dummett puts it, “the questions of interest are why we introduce the notion of truth at all.”67 The answer is that truth is essential to an explanation of linguistic mastery. However, here too, we find Wittgenstein providing a very different account for why the appeal to truth is virtually inevitable once we accept the assertoric form as the basic building block of all meaningful language. At PI §136, Wittgenstein says: “At bottom, giving ‘This is how things are’ as the general form of propositions is the same as giving the definition: a proposition is whatever can be true or false … we call something a proposition when in our language we apply the calculus of truth functions to it.” This definition can be misconstrued as a substantive claim about the distinguishing mark of propositions, as though “[w]hat engages with the concept of truth (as with a cogwheel), is a proposition. But this is a bad picture.” The picture turns a mere definition or truism into an apparently substantive metaphysical claim about the relation of propositions to truth. Is the relation between truth and propositions no more than a definitional connection, as Wittgenstein claims? Or is the connection, as Dummett argues, a deep explanatory one? The main reason, according to Dummett, that the concept of truth is explanatorily deep “comes down to this: that our linguistic practice—the language-games in which we participate—involves the process whereby those utterances which we call assertions … are subject to challenge by our hearers … and among these are challenges as to the truth of what is said and challenges as to its point.”68 For Dummett as for Brandom, assertion is the privileged linguistic form because assertions are in the logical and discursive space of reasons, and as such are open to epistemic challenge. Brandom’s emphasis on reason-giving as essential to linguistic understanding is tied to his inferentialist theory of meaning. But Dummett’s emphasis is not simply on the embeddedness of assertions in the space of reasons, but on our strong intuitions concerning the difference between, and relative importance of, challenges to truth and other kinds of challenges. According to Dummett, we place a premium on truth that we do not place on any other value (e.g., reliability, appropriateness, and so on). Indeed Dummett maintains that our concept of truth “gets a large part of its point from the contrast we wish to draw between a statement’s being true and any more primitive, or at least undifferentiated, conception of its being appropriate.”69 This intuition of the singular importance of truth challenges is driven by epistemological concerns. A truth conditional semantics and the primacy of assertion, claiming true, require, on Dummett’s view, an explanatory and so substantive conception of truth, as the third stage of his argument makes clear. It is here, at the third stage, that Dummett breaks with the Fregean picture and draws upon what he sees as best in the appeal to use, namely, his own verificationist construal of truth. A meaning theory, Dummett has already urged, not only says “what a speaker must know in order to know the language, but in what his having that knowledge consists, that is, what 62

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constitutes a manifestation of it.”70 Appeal to use is an appeal to this manifestation requirement: knowing meaning must be publicly manifested (or manifestable). This is what Wittgenstein brings to the theory of meaning, but he goes wrong, according to Dummett, in his failure to recognize the implications this has for our concept of truth. Knowing the truth conditions for a sentence is a recognitional capacity, the exercise of which justifies asserting that sentence. A verificationist construal of truth thus joins the theories of sense and force to meet Dummett’s epistemological concerns. For Dummett, the problem of knowledge, at the deepest level, is answered by an adequate theory of language, not by traditional epistemological theories. In this way, Dummett sees philosophy of language usurping the foundational role assigned epistemology since the seventeenth century.71 This conception of the importance of philosophy of language is the driving force behind Dummett’s more particular arguments for his theory of meaning, including the two that I have been examining. As I shall show, this philosophical commitment contributes indispensably to the shape of his particular arguments. It is this very idea that a theory of meaning, and so a theory of truth, can answer the problems traditionally assigned to metaphysics and epistemology that Wittgenstein rejects as being in the grip of a picture. We can see the work of this picture in what Dummett assumes in his construction of a theory of language. What lies behind his view that assertion is pre-eminently important is that our overriding value in using language is to represent the world accurately. Truth is the ultimate value that gives overall point to our linguistic acts; and truth-telling is our primary cognitive relation to the world. As we have already seen, for Wittgenstein, these substantive views are supported by a banal trick of language (that one can prefix “I assert” or “It is true that” to one’s sentences) that seems to reveal a deep and ubiquitous feature of language provided one is philosophically motivated to find some such unifying underlying structure. These superficial features of grammar support the illusion that a certain theory of meaning applies to all possible languages. Dummett’s picture requires that our practical abilities to do things with words in varying contexts match up with the abstract systematic structure of a fully articulated language as well as verificationist constraints on meaning. This is what Wittgenstein disputes. The primacy of truth-telling, and so assertion, is not shown but is presupposed. Dummett suffers from the same problem that we found with Brandom. He equates linguistic practice as such with epistemically sophisticated practices. Though Dummett’s two arguments share this motivating picture of the work a theory of meaning should do, they also each implicate assumptions that further reveal Dummett’s allegiance to the philosophical tradition against which Wittgenstein argues. The Martian argument is a variation on Dummett’s use of the analogy with games to show that something more than formal rules is required for understanding.72 The significance of the 63

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Martians is that they must provide a theory of language for the humans they study without sharing any human linguistic practice. This is the requirement of a reductionist theory of meaning. But this requirement simply cannot be met.73 Just as one cannot explain the game of chess to someone who has no understanding of any games or any competitive activity, so one cannot explain the point of uttering assertoric sentences to someone with no understanding of any human linguistic practices. The only form of “explanation” available to such a person is to teach him to play a game or to make reports. The learning situation is the only recourse for such ignorance. But the learning situation presupposes the very practice for which Dummett is looking for an explanation that is independent of that practice. Thus, it seems that explanatory gain for the individual comes at the cost of circular explanation for the social practice. That is Wittgenstein’s position. That there can be a fully reductionist explanation is an illusion. Even for Dummett, the Martians do share a practice and value with humans, namely, truth-telling. Without that, they could not discern the significance of allocating sentences to the categories labeled “true” and “false.” So, Dummett begins with the assumptions that assertion is ubiquitous and truth is a universal value, recognized by all language-speaking creatures. Where Dummett’s first argument (sense only if force) focuses on the ubiquity of assertoric form, his second argument (force only if sense) focuses on the explanatory role of truth. This is the kingpin to Dummett’s position. And it is the locus of his misuse of the Wittgensteinian manifestation requirement, one that Dummett ties to a substantive verificationist theory of truth and meaning. Dummett is committed to the views that truth is essential to a theory of meaning and that a theory of meaning will replace epistemology as the fundamental philosophical endeavor. Again we see Dummett equating language with a sophisticated epistemic practice. These commitments lead Dummett to inflate our talk of truth and to transform an acceptable but truistic conception of truth conditional semantics into substantive rules for determining what is true. Wittgenstein endorses a redundancy conception of truth (cf. PI §136 and RFM I.appendix I.6).74 Like the phrase “it is asserted,” the phrase “it is true” adds nothing to the content of what is asserted.75 Truth does not explain meaning or the tripartite distinction nor do our intuitions concerning the importance of truth-telling thereby establish a privileged position for assertion in the structure of language. In order to see just why the builders game is relevant, we must be clear about how the builders game is used by Wittgenstein and what he rejects as Frege’s idea. Wittgenstein rejects Frege’s idea as an explanation of meaning and understanding, whether that explanation is construed psychologistically or epistemologically. The classical conception of truth as evidence-transcendent is in order, but it does not explain meaning. The statements of a truthconditional semantics are truistic, not substantive.76 The truth schema—“p” is true iff p—does not explain meaning so much as specify meaning. Nor 64

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does Wittgenstein deny (or need to deny) that natural languages have important systematic features, some of which can be described or specified using the tripartite distinction advocated by Dummett. But this doesn’t require taking sense, reference and logical form as explanatorily basic as the early Wittgenstein thought in his commandeering of Frege’s idea. More will be said on this in the next two chapters. But now to the status of the builders game. Let’s return to Dummett’s claim that Wittgenstein repudiates the Fregean distinction between sense and force and that, in so doing, he forfeits any chance of drawing a distinction between force (regular use) and point (idiosyncratic context). This was used to impugn the relevance of the builders game. The builders’ practice is so primitive that there is no room, it would seem, to draw these distinctions from within the language-game itself. Insofar as it seems that we can apply these distinctions, we do so by importing our own complex language-games to the case and “discovering” a complicated psychological or epistemological structure hidden beneath the surface. Yet nothing in the game warrants this. Does this show that something is amiss with Frege’s idea or does it impugn the relevance of the builders game? Let’s start with the claim that there is no logical space within the builders’ world to accommodate varying points to uttering the words that are available to them. There thus seems little point of connection between this primitive animal-like game and our language-games. Yet Wittgenstein introduces a variant on the builders game which draws just the sort of contrast Dummett has tried to show Wittgenstein cannot accommodate. Suppose the builders never had any slabs (only pillars, beams and blocks). What would happen when A calls out “Slab!”? Wittgenstein considers the possibility that it might be given a place in the language-game, for example, as a kind of joke between A and B: Let us assume that “X” is such a sign [a name that has never been used in the game] and that A gives this sign to B—well, even such signs could be given a place in the language-game, and B might have, say, to answer them too with a shake of the head. (One could imagine this as a sort of joke between them.) (PI §42) Such a joke introduces a difference between the force of an utterance and its point. This distinction does draw on the original building game. Saying “Slab!” can become a joke only against the background of the practice of getting pillars, beams and blocks when their names are called out. Increasing the complexity of the practice creates the logical space for the distinction between force and point, and it does so without resorting to an explanation in terms of truth-telling or to the participants’ understanding the truth-conditions of assertions. The point of uttering the expression (to 65

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make a joke) differs from its imperative force though the joke depends upon the utterance having that force. Wittgenstein shows that the contrast can be drawn without invoking any of the theses that are part of constructing a systematic theory of meaning. More importantly, this distinction between force and point is implicated in teaching children this game. Here too the point of the utterance differs from its force. The point of uttering commands in the learning situation is to educate the young. This difference between force and point is essential to teaching in a way that cannot be explained in terms of imprinting or simple causal conditioning. It is important to Wittgenstein that the builders game is a culturally heritable game. It requires the participants themselves to exploit the distinction between point and force of expression in training their children into the practice even if they do not, and cannot, make that distinction explicit in their practice. They need not be treated as thinking “Slab,” or “Pillar,” when they make an order or teach a child the practice of following commands. What this points to is the very important difference between Wittgenstein and Dummett concerning the distinctive normativity of linguistic meaning. For Wittgenstein, the normativity of language is to be understood in terms of coordination among participants and cultural heritability. For Dummett, the most important normative dimension of language is truth-telling, reflecting his epistemological motives. It is this that leads to privileging assertoric form in the structure of language and endorsing a substantive truth-conditional semantics. Knowing meaning must enable us to answer epistemological questions. It is this epistemological bias in the interpretation Dummett gives the manifestation requirement that is deeply at odds with Wittgenstein’s view. The builders game is a device for undermining this bias. Dummett takes the manifestation requirement as a vehicle for securing truth claims. Wittgenstein takes it as a constitutive feature of the cultural heritability and social maintenance of language. It is constitutive of language, not an answer to epistemic challenges. The structure required to answer truth challenges is not the structure of language itself, and so the explanation that Dummett offers for the sense–force distinction and the special status of assertion misfires. Though Wittgenstein rejects the idea of a unified theory of meaning,77 he does not reject the idea that the meaning of words and expressions can be explained nor the idea that the normativity of language needs a better and different description than in terms of truth. Words can only be explained in a piecemeal way and then primarily by way of examples. Our knowledge of meaning is given in our explanations of expressions, and these explanations consist, quite typically, in examples: Isn’t my knowledge, my concept of a game, completely expressed in the explanations that I could give? That is, in my describing examples of various kinds of games … . (PI §75) 66

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Understanding a language consists in the ability to exercise the techniques and modes of application that are the background for explaining expressions by way of examples and paradigms. Explanation by way of examples requires that the one receiving the explanation knows how to use these examples as standards for what counts as the same. Such explanations presuppose linguistic mastery. If we are looking for an explanation for how we are to take the example or of what counts as sameness or of what it is to use the word in a regular way, then Wittgenstein answers by appeal to teaching, to how we learn the concepts: if a person has not yet got the concepts [of “regular,” “uniform,” “same”], I shall teach him to use the words by means of examples and by practice.—And when I do this I do not communicate less to him than I know myself. [ … ] I do it, he does it after me; and I influence by expressions of agreement, rejection, expectation, encouragement. I let him go his way, or hold him back; and so on. Imagine witnessing such teaching. None of the words would be explained by means of itself; there would be no logical circle. (PI §208) Appeal to truth-conditions does not explain the regularity or constancy in the use of words. What plays that explanatory role is that we can be taught in such ways, that is, by example and by training.78 Explaining meaning by teaching a practice makes meaning, and so language, dependent upon certain contingent facts about ourselves, namely, that we are so teachable. As Wittgenstein says early on “I say that [ostensive teaching] will form an important part of the training, because it is so with human beings; not because it could not be imagined otherwise” (PI §6). In recognizing that Dummett’s verificationism both fails as a characterization of our explanations of words (and so our knowledge of meaning) and presupposes a background of shared similarity judgments and ways of being trained, we can see that Dummett’s intuition that truth challenges are the fundamental mode of assessment is mistaken. There is a background to the moves we make within language-games. Wittgenstein’s exploration reveals that the background, far from inviting challenges of justification, excludes them. Explanations of words, justifications for assertions, training into practices, and any other linguistic move implicate a bedrock of certainty, trust and necessity, of that for which truth challenges cannot be raised without distorting the role of the background. As we shall see, Wittgenstein’s very account of the place of certainty and necessity within our language-games runs completely counter to Dummett’s epistemological approach. Wittgenstein, in his appeal to blind obedience as integral to our language-games, identifies much that is simply not open to 67

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challenge within the game. There is a great deal that is taken for granted that is part of the background without which the verificationist concerns of Dummett cannot even be expressed. It is a deep philosophical mistake to think that these verificationist concerns apply to the bedrock of our epistemic practices. What philosophers were trying to explain by appeal to the abstract structure of our sophisticated languages can only be achieved by an investigation into the background or foundations of language mastery, mathematics and psychology. And that investigation will not uncover hidden psychological processes or logical/epistemological depth, but the normative structuring that is integral to the human form of life and on display in the situation of initiate learning.

Conclusion In sum, we can see that Wittgenstein’s opening diagnostic argument against the Fregean picture of language is intended to identify the grammatical misunderstandings that support the primacy-of-assertoric-form thesis. The builders game takes the first step in showing that sense and Fregean systematicity are not explanatorily fundamental. The meaningfulness and normative systematicity of the builders game require neither. Certainly not on the surface of the game where all is in plain view, but neither in a hypothesized underlying mentalistic structure. For all that, the builders are engaged in a genuinely normative practice that is culturally heritable, subject to sanctions, and is not reducible to discriminative habit. Though not yet counting as a fully discursive practice, and so not a language on Brandom’s view, only a little needs to be added to create room for what Brandom would accept as the activity of giving reasons. In the slightly modified builders game we considered, reasons could be given for actions though not for claims. The argumentative structure of claim and reason does not fit even the modified builders game, but acting for a reason and correcting an action for a reason are possible. So the builders can move, in a limited way, in the space of reasons, but they do so without requiring the primacy of assertoric form. So, Brandom’s refusal to allow the builders to count as language-users turns on his privileging assertion. Dummett’s objection equally turns on privileging assertion or truth-telling as the essential function of language and the most important norm. But the point of the builders is to reveal the importance of normative action rather than reporting. The builders point to an alternative to the options provided by the Kantian aphorism I used to characterize Dummett’s position. For Dummett, sense without force is (arbitrary) formal association while force without sense is (mere animal) signaling. The builders show that meaningfulness does not require a formal theory of meaning and that acting for reasons does not require privileging truth-telling and assertion.

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Notes 1 Some might object to this way of identifying Frege’s idea, maintaining that the thesis should be the primacy of assertoric form. I agree with this, but think that we must begin with an ambivalent use of “assertion” as now “asserting” and now “assertoric form.” The ambiguity will be resolved in favor of a thesis of the primacy of assertoric form. It is too early in the development of these notions to draw a sharp distinction between assertion, or judgment as Frege would say, and assertoric form. That comes with the success of Frege’s idea. 2 Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic, x. 3 Frege, Begriffsschrift, 63. 4 It is interesting to note that in the original German, Wittgenstein uses the word “steckt,” which is translated as “contain.” Yet the primary meaning of the German word is “plant.” This provides just the metaphor that is expressive of Wittgenstein’s views. It is the acceptance (“assumption”) of something which is organic and grows. 5 Dummett, “What Is a Theory of Meaning?” These ways of characterizing Frege’s idea already build into the descriptions the features Wittgenstein seeks to undermine. 6 It must be noted that there are important differences between Frege and Wittgenstein on these matters. The first, as mentioned above, is that Frege did not apply the Fregean picture of language to ordinary language. He thought of it, rather, as a logically perfect language that could not be successfully applied to natural languages. Nonetheless he was concerned to accommodate many features of ordinary language with his logically perfect language. Second, Frege rarely uses the term “assertion.” His preferred locution is “judgment” or “declarative sentence.” Both of these expressions are distinguished from “entertaining.” So, a syntactic sentence of the right sort, namely, a declarative sentence, expresses a sense, which, in its turn, can be entertained as well as judged to be true. Wittgenstein’s treatment appeals to a distinction between entertaining a proposition and asserting that proposition. It will make a difference in how we understand Wittgenstein’s argument against Frege’s idea. Third, there is a deep divide between Frege’s account of the relation between sense and reference of a declarative sentence (the sense names its object) and Wittgenstein’s view in the Tractatus that asserting is a kind of operation upon the sense of a sentence that has as its value (if true) the object the True. I alert the reader to these differences now in preparation for a fuller discussion later. I want to thank Joan Weiner who made me aware of these differences and the importance of distinguishing Frege’s views from the Fregean picture that draws on Frege’s ideas as Wittgenstein used them. See Joan Weiner, Frege Explained (Chicago: Open Court, 2004). 7 Frege, Begriffsschrift, 1–2. 8 Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic, x. 9 Frege, Begriffsschrift, 157. 10 Ibid., 65; my italics. 11 Ibid., 64. 12 I have already shifted to this locution in my discussion above, but now note it officially (as it were). 13 Some might object that this description of the proposition does not fit that of the Tractatus. The Tractatus defines the proposition as “a propositional sign in its projective relation to the world” (TLP 3.12). This remark should be compared with PI §94:

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“A proposition is a queer thing!” Here we have, in germ, the subliming of our whole account of logic. The tendency to assume a pure intermediary between the propositional signs and the facts. Or even to try to purify, to sublime, the signs themselves.—For our forms of expression prevent us in all sorts of ways from seeing that nothing out of the ordinary is involved, by sending us in pursuit of chimeras. 14 The importance this game had for Wittgenstein can be seen in the way in which he recurred to it again and again in his writings. See RFM III.80, V.47, VI.38, VI.40, VII.30, VII.71; PI §§2, 6, 7, 8, 9; RPP I.559 and II.203, 205; Z §§98, 99. 15 The simple case of the grocer filling an order for five red apples makes this point (PI §1). The use the grocer makes of the numeral “five” cannot be made to fit the denotational theory. 16 A Fregean might hold that this restriction on the scope of builders-like games is an objection against the relevance of the builders game to a theory of language tout court. But it must be remembered that the Fregean also circumscribes a part of language, namely, that part of language that can be regimented to fit the logical structure of the Fregean picture. The difference is that the Fregean holds that the rest of language can be gerrymandered to fit, while Wittgenstein makes no such claim for the builders, not just in virtue of the simplicity of the game, but also keeping open space for his motley of language and open texture of language remarks later. 17 One might object to this claim, given that Wittgenstein opens the Investigations with a focus on the relation between words and objects or properties. Further he appeals explicitly to reference in our already knowing “what sort of ‘referring’ this is—that is, how these words [“block,” “slab,” etc.] are used” (PI §10). This objection misses the point. Even in an apparently simple Augustinian game, the kind of referring is tied to the place of these words in the extended builders game of PI §8. My exegetical point is that even the earliest references to “reference” implicate broader more systematic features of the language. Wittgenstein directs his criticisms to the explanatory role traditionally assigned reference at PI §§28–38. This is after he has reached his first major conclusion at PI §22, the rejection of Frege’s idea. 18 See PI, p. 11, footnote. “Imagine a picture representing a boxer in a particular stance. Now this picture can be used to tell someone how he should stand, should hold himself; or how he should not hold himself; or how a particular man did stand in such-and-such a place; and so on. One might (using the language of chemistry) call this picture a proposition-radical. This will be how Frege thought of the ‘assumption’.” 19 I have added the numbers to the passages taken from the Investigations. I shall take up thesis (3) in Chapter 3. Let me also note that Frege, strictly speaking, would object to several features of this characterization of his “idea.” Where Wittgenstein speaks of “assertion,” Frege would speak of “judgment.” Also, Frege would reject the third thesis as introducing unwanted psychological content to the discussion of judgment and propositional content. Indeed assertion itself is something that we do. Wittgenstein’s way of putting the problem of the content of judgment shows that he rejects the idea that the psychological can so readily be sidelined by a purely logical investigation. Finally, Frege holds that his new notational system can provide a description of a logically perfect language, but not of a natural language. 20 John McDowell, in his excellent article, “Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of Understanding,” pursues many of the same issues I am developing here. Though I developed the argument for this chapter independently of McDowell’s essay, I

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21

22 23 24 25

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have found it very useful in refining my discussion. McDowell and I both reach similar conclusions concerning Dummett—McDowell by way of criticizing Dummett’s anti-realism, and myself by way of developing Wittgenstein’s early critique. As will be seen, there are two important converging conclusions: that there is an innocuous or “truistic” conception of truth-conditional semantics that is philosophically “innocent,” as it were; and that Dummett’s motivation for his revival of verificationism lies outside the demands for an adequate description of meaning. PI §308 occurs within Wittgenstein’s examination of the Cartesian model of mind. We should expect there to be similarities in Wittgenstein’s diagnostic argument against the Cartesian model of mind as we find in his critical examination of the Fregean picture of language. And we won’t be disappointed. Frege, Begriffsschrift, 63. See, for instance, Harman, “Logical Form,” where he explicitly takes the thatclause to name a particular proposition. This is not Frege’s actual way of arguing, but it does make vivid the explanatory work that is to be done by the proposition. That is important to Wittgenstein’s diagnostic strategy. The builders, if they came in contact with us, would no doubt translate our “Bring me a slab” into their “Slab!” See PI §19 where Wittgenstein asks “But why should I not on the contrary have called the sentence ‘Bring me a slab’ a lengthening of the sentence ‘Slab!’” See Brandom, Making It Explicit, ch. 6, where he explains subsentential structure in terms of substitution strategies rather than in terms of semantically autonomous constituent elements. This is part of his defense of an inferentialist conception of language, one that has much in common with Wittgenstein’s approach. Brandom’s detailed defense of this strategy offers a full alternative to the traditional approach in terms of reference and truth-conditional semantics. It shares, however, much with the Fregean picture of language. More importantly Brandom retains the primacy of assertion. The core of language is tied to a logically structured and rationalized conception of semantic meaning. Also see Warren Goldfarb’s excellent discussion of these passages in his article, “I Want You to Bring Me a Slab,” 265–82. In the first section, above, I pointed out that Frege rejects a certain understanding of the relation of sense and reference in sentences. It is a mistake, Frege urged, to think that the relation between these two semantic properties is one of subject to predicate. As Frege puts it: “One might be tempted to regard the relation of the thought to the True not as that of sense to reference, but rather as that of subject to predicate. One can indeed say: ‘The thought, that 5 is a prime number, is true’. But closer examination shows that nothing more has been said than in the simple sentence ‘5 is a prime number’” (Frege, Begriffsschrift, 64). Frege uses this to argue that the relation of sense (or thought) to reference (the True) is the relation of name to object. As we can see from footnote 28, Frege takes this banal feature to be the grounds for rejecting a certain conception of the relation between thought and the True. In the first section, I have given reasons for thinking that Frege needs to use something like the argument–function relation. But what I wish to emphasize here is the very different morals Frege and Wittgenstein draw from the emptiness of moving from “p is true” to “p” (Frege) and “it is true that p” to “p” (Wittgenstein). For Frege, it eliminates a possible account of the relation between sense and reference and clears the way for his own theory. For Wittgenstein, this banal inference helps explain why a certain conflation seems so unobjectionable. It is

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29

30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37

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part of the mistake that gives us the proposition as the metaphysically robust intermediary between language and the world. We can see that Wittgenstein’s deflationary account of assertion and proposition (proposition being that which is asserted) is matched by his expressivism in connection with the mental. Here too Wittgenstein uses the same language: “It would be quite misleading, in this case [taking the sentence “I know how to go on” to be a “description of a mental state”], for instance, to call the words a ‘description of a mental state’.—One might rather call them a ‘signal’; and we judge whether it was rightly employed by what he goes on to do” (PI §180). F. Waismann was the first to use this expression in characterizing Wittgenstein’s approach to language. See Waismann, Principles of Linguistic Philosophy. The third objection, made by Dummett, is that language must have the complexity to support the tripartite distinction between sense, force and point. I shall take this up in the next section. In Chapter 4, I shall discuss Davidson’s argument for the close connection among the learnability of language, compositionality of meaning, and systematicity of logical form. Brandom makes this point explicitly in both Making It Explicit, 172, and Articulating Reasons, 15. Goldfarb, “I Want You to Bring Me a Slab,” 265–82. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image.” Brandom, Articulating Reasons, 14. Ibid., 10–11. Brandom’s rejection of modus ponens as fundamental to reasoning and conceptual articulation bears on at least one argument discussed in the second section of this chapter. And that concerns whether an argument for propositional content can be entertained without being asserted (or anything else). If there isn’t such a distinction between the sense of an assertoric sentence and the force applied to that sentence, then the conditional major premise is unintelligible. The antecedent must be assertoric in order to have a sense but without determining a truth value (that is, without being asserted). Brandom’s strategy avoids the difficulty that the conditional raises for the classical account of inferential reasoning. For Brandom, the conditional “if, then” is part of our logical vocabulary which is essentially expressive. That is, our logical, semantic, and pragmatic vocabulary enables us to express our implicit commitments. For an excellent discussion of these basic features of Brandom’s views, see Jay Rosenberg, “Brandom’s Making It Explicit.” Brandom, Articulating Reasons, 17. This claim can, of course, be challenged, and for good reasons. At this point in the argument, however, it is useful to let Brandom’s distinctions between these three kinds of doing stand. For careful criticism of Skinnerian conditioning theory and particularly the claims made on behalf of the Skinner box experiments, see Charles Taylor’s excellent book, Explanation of Behaviour. An excellent example of the distinction, Brandom is making can be found in a particular scene in the Japanese film Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki (1998). The protagonist of the film has killed several people and is wanted by the authorities. A monk goes into the mountain area where the protagonist is hiding and induces him to approach his camp fire. Once the protagonist has joined him and eaten, the monk “captures” the hunted man by beating him with his hand. If this beating were merely an external sanction, it would not explain the subsequent docile behavior in causal terms. But the potency of the beating is not the pain inflicted, but the fact that the sanction is an internal

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42 43

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47 48 49 50 51 52

sanction and not a mere external sanction. As the monk strikes the hunted man, the monk says to him, “I beat you with the hand of your parents.” The authority of the parent is the source of the efficacy of the beating. Rosenberg, “Brandom’s Making It Explicit.” Wittgenstein himself has introduced variations on the builders game in order to make specific philosophical points. In particular, see PI §42, where Wittgenstein considers a joke arising between the builders. My variation on the game is presented in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s modified game. It is perhaps useful to note an affinity between Wittgenstein’s use of the simple builders game and Plato’s methodological use of the simple economic community in the Republic. In Book II, Plato begins his investigation into the nature of justice by introducing a thought experiment, that of a rudimentary community. It is a purely economic community in which there is a natural division of labor such that the physical needs of the members of the community are met. The skills required are passed on from one generation to the next. It will be recalled that Glaucon condemned this rudimentary community as a city of pigs hardly worthy of the name “city” at all. Given that all naturally, and as a matter of course, carry out their labors, the issue of justice simply cannot arise, according to Plato. Not until the community becomes complicated in ways that require a political structure does it become a city. We find an echo of this charge in Goldfarb’s and Brandom’s claim that the builders are so primitive that their calls are not worthy of the name “language.” But just as Plato found his economic community useful though it lacks the political complexity of class structure required for justice or injustice, so does Wittgenstein find the builders useful though their game lacks the systemic complexity required for making claims and justifying them. For both Plato and Wittgenstein, this simplicity is the point of introducing the thought experiment. The right way to understand the usefulness of both the economic community and the builders game is to note that they are explanatory because they lack the complexity of full-fledged practices. They provide the background against which political complexity and epistemic-logical complexity arise and can be sustained. See Plato, Republic. Dummett, “What Is a Theory of Meaning?” The extent to which philosophical claims concerning the nature of language or normativity have implications for empirical psychology is an important issue. But a full response must await the discussions of rule-following and the foundations of psychology. Dummett, “What Does the Appeal to Use Do for the Theory of Meaning?” 115. Also see “What Is a Theory of Meaning?” Dummett, “What Do I Know When I Know a Language?” 99–101. Dummett, “What Does the Appeal to Use Do for the Theory of Meaning?” Ibid., 108. This will have important implications not only for an account of language understanding, but also for the propositional attitude theory of beliefs and other intentional states. See Chapter 5. I have identified “Frege’s idea” with the primacy-of-assertoric-form thesis, the claim that assertoric form is fundamental to the structure of language and to the theory of meaning. We can see that Dummett identifies this idea with that of assertoric force in general. This is what Wittgenstein identified with the entertainment of a content. This slight difference in how the expression is used makes no difference to the divide between Dummett and Wittgenstein.

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53 Dummett, “What Does the Appeal to Use Do for the Theory of Meaning?,” 107. Dummett’s own example of this bad argument at work turns on a case in which the principle of the excluded middle is at stake. This allows him to comment more generally upon the classic conception of truth as bipolar, but we needn’t get into a full-blown discussion of Dummett’s arguments against the classical view. 54 Ibid., 109. We shall have to be careful in elucidating what Dummett intends by his claim that one must have a “prior understanding” of a sentence before asking for the point of its utterance. If that is construed in a psychological way, then Dummett endorses the psychologistic position discussed in the second section, “Wittgenstein’s Rejection of ‘Frege’s Idea’.” If construed analytically or as logically prior, then the claim for prior understanding carries no implications for what psychological processes must be involved in linguistic usage. Given Dummett’s own disavowals, this claim must be interpreted as demanding the logical priority of understanding the sense of a sentence over understanding the point of its utterance. 55 Ibid., 115. 56 Dummett, Frege. 57 Dummett, “What Does the Appeal to Use Do for the Theory of Meaning?” 58 Dummett, Frege, 305. 59 Ibid., 295–305. John McDowell has an excellent discussion of this argument that dovetails with much that I am pursuing here. See his “Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of Understanding.” His discussion helped clarify my own thinking about this argument of Dummett’s. As I shall bring out later, however, I have an important disagreement with McDowell’s attribution of psychologism to Dummett. 60 Dummett, Frege, 295–6. 61 Ibid., 296. 62 In “Truth,” Truth and Other Enigmas, Dummett makes a very similar argument. There too he uses the analogy with games to argue that a formal theory of meaning, though essential, is not adequate. But the focus of that paper is to argue that truth itself has a special value, without which a truth-conditional semantics would be pointless. 63 Ibid., 3; and Dummett, Frege, 295–6. 64 This is like Hume’s objection to cosmological theories in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Hume argues that theorists have confused the fact that a cosmological story can be told that is compatible with the empirical facts with the claim that the empirical facts thereby provide evidence for the cosmological theory. This is a fallacy. 65 It is very difficult to be strict about what counts as force and what as point. Part of the point of the way in which Dummett argues is to make this point. The strictest taxonomy permits very few candidates for force, the remaining uses of language being assigned to a much looser category of point. The central candidates for force are assertion, question, command. To follow Dummett’s argument, we need to accept warn, beckon and the like. 66 This is my reconstruction of what Dummett is getting at in this first stage of his overall argument. He himself does not put it this way and might well repudiate this construal. 67 Dummett, “What Does the Appeal to Use Do for the Theory of Meaning?” 109. 68 Ibid., 109–10. There are other reasons as well. The concept of truth is needed for understanding logical complexity, to explain “the role of the sentence when it figures as a constituent in more complex sentences” (p. 109), and logical

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connectedness, our forms of valid inference. A second partial answer is that we need truth “to attain a conception of the meaning of the sentence as a type,” independently of the context of its use. Ibid., 109. Such primitive appropriateness is the target of Wittgenstein’s investigation. Ibid., 115–16. One can see Dummett’s defense of the primacy of philosophy of language in his Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Dummett, “Truth,” Truth and Other Enigmas. Cf. McDowell, “Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of Understanding.” Wittgenstein’s endorsement of a deflationary conception of truth is not tantamount to his denying that the predicate “is true” has a role to play in any language game. On the contrary, it plays an important role in any calculus of truth functions, and the concept of a proposition is tied to that of truth. One learns the concept of a proposition through learning how to use the phrase “is true” or “is false.” Cf. PI §§136–7 and 225. For a defense of a deflationary conception of truth, see Horwich, Truth; and Michael Williams, “Do We (Epistemologists) Need a Theory of Truth?” See On Certainty where Wittgenstein criticizes the correspondence theory of truth for a failure to make sense of the notion of agreement between proposition and fact (OC §§199 and 215) and a broadly pragmatist conception of truth (OC §§130– 1, 203, 422, 474). See Michael Williams, “Meaning, Truth and Normativity”; and “Meaning and Deflationary Truth.” It is important to note that the tripartite distinction per se is not incompatible with a Wittgensteinian approach to language. Even if one were to develop a theory of meaning as use, all that is required is that the differences among sense, force and point are explicated in terms of normative regularities, for example. The distinctions can be abstracted from our patterns of use. They do not underlie and explain that use. This issue lies at the heart of Robert Brandom’s important book Making It Explicit. There Brandom seeks to show that the representational theory of language, which takes reference, meaning and logical form to be explanatorily basic, is mistaken. These semantic and logical properties of language are revealed through what Brandom calls “explicitations,” in which what is implicit in the practices is made explicit through the expressive use of a logical and semantic vocabulary. What Brandom calls “explicitations” are what I am calling descriptions of an abstract skill. While Brandom is interested in showing, in detail, how all the semantic, logical and other systematic features of language can be explained in nonrepresentationalist, inferentialist terms, Wittgenstein is concerned with the explanatory work that was to be done by these features. We must look for such explanation in a very different place, in the background against which moves are made within language games. This form of explanation does not involve a logical circle of the sort associated with a truth-conditional semantics, a circle that Dummett also wishes to avoid. This is part of his justification for insisting on the manifestation argument. Grasping the meaning of an expression is a matter of knowing its assertability conditions, and these are specified in terms quite distinct from the expression being explained. See “What Does the Appeal to Use Do for a Theory of Meaning?” 113. Dummett characterizes the Tractatus view of the meaning of a sentence as one for which it is “plain that a grasp of the meaning of a sentence is not held to be in all cases related to, or given in terms of, the means available to

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us for recognizing it as true” (p. 112). This conception, Dummett goes on to say, “leaves us unable to state informatively the conditions for the truth of many of our sentences: an essential circularity appears in any attempt to do this, a circularity which does not appear in a characterization of what justifies us in asserting a sentence” (p. 113).

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3 THE DOMESTICATION OF R E F E R E N CE

The problem of normative similarity 1: ostensive definition Rejection of Quine’s picture of language 89 Objects and paradigms 97 Ostensive teaching and social practices 104

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In Chapter 2, we saw how Wittgenstein used the builders game to open space for serious consideration of an alternative to the Fregean picture, one that makes meaningfulness prior to meanings and patterned behavior prior to Fregean systematicity. He attacked the central idea that the basic units of meaning are propositions that have the general form: this is how things stand (TLP 4.5). In consolidating his view that this is a bad picture to impose on all language, he later brings out that the expressions “proposition,” “general form of the proposition,” and “logical form” are all proprietary notions that are made for each other (PI §136). So, we can see that Wittgenstein would agree with Dummett that once we introduce certain parts of the picture (propositions and the Fregean notion of the sense of a sentence) we find other parts follow (a truth-conditional semantics and the systematicity of language). Wittgenstein urges that this is wrongly construed as a discovery about the deep structure of any possible language. It is a grammatical mistake. A banal feature of natural language is taken for a deep metaphysical insight into the place of the proposition in language. The exploration of the highly sophisticated picture of language that follows obscures a deeper problem, one that I identified as “the problem of normative similarity.” As we saw, the builders game is used as a foil to the Fregean picture, which is clearly unnecessary to either describing or explaining the linguistic competence of the builders. But what is necessary is some appropriate link between words and objects. Traditionally that link has been identified with reference.

The problem of normative similarity 1: ostensive definition The first problem of normative similarity arises with Wittgenstein’s critical examination of the explanatory role assigned ostensive definition by 77

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denotational theories of meaning. The object denoted by an expression fixes the meaning of that expression by providing the standard for the correct application of the term to other objects in the environment. This theory is associated with a companion picture of the acquisition of language, one that is compelling in its simplicity. Part of the enduring appeal of the denotational theory is precisely its capacity both to explain meaning and to account for the acquisition of language. Adults point to individual objects in the immediate environment of the child and name them. The child, as a result of this demonstration, associates the name with the particular object and subsequent to making this association uses the same name for any other object belonging to the class of which the first originating object was a member. Though she knows much less than the adult, the understanding that the child has of the words she has learned is essentially the same as that of the adult. Yet how can the utterance of a word by one person while standing close to an object effect an association in the mind of the second person such that the second person can subsequently generalize to the same objects as the first person would? The answer is that the relation established between the word and object is not one of simple association, but of naming. Through ostensive definition, the novice takes the object as the standard guiding subsequent use of the word. The effectiveness of the ostensive definition lies with the cognitive capacity of the novice, in particular her capacity to grasp that the baptismal object (or property of an object) is the exemplar that functions as the standard for correct application of the term uttered. Wittgenstein’s criticism of ostensive definition appeals to the indeterminacy of the demonstrative gesture itself. The range of properties that can be distinguished in the region of the pointing gesture is indefinitely large, and the target property (even if reduced to the range of obvious properties like color, shape, size, kind of object) cannot be individuated solely by pointing, no matter how emphatic. This indeterminacy can be resolved by identifying the target property independently of the pointing gesture, through the use of a sortal expression.1 But this leads to an explanatory regress. Teaching by ostensive definition cannot explain how the novice comes to identify members of a class precisely because it presupposes that the novice already has some relevant classificatory categories, understands the notion of class membership, can take the baptismal object as the paradigm by which other members of a class can be so recognized (that is, identified as the same), and realizes that the teacher is not only uttering a word, but a general name which functions to designate indifferently the members of a class (cf. PI §32). The child both has the concepts of the game she is to learn and can engage in the semantic game of naming. Moreover, all of these abstractly characterized cognitive abilities must be relativized to the particular context and setting within which the ostensive definition is made. The conclusion that Wittgenstein draws is that naming cannot fix meaning, but is itself a semantically sophisticated act that presupposes a great deal of cognitive and 78

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contextual stage-setting: “only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name” (PI §31). Asking for a name is thus a metagame, one presupposing facility with a primary game. This first problem of normative similarity concerns sameness with respect to categorization, especially object categorization. It is raised in the context of how meaning is originally fixed for the linguistic novice. Naming presupposes a conceptual background that is semantically rich, that already enables the recipient of an ostensive definition to categorize successfully. The success of ostensive definition for initiate learning depends upon the novice already having that very background and conceptual competence that ostensive definition is supposed to engender. One must already be master of a language in order to learn a new language through ostension: Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think, only not yet speak. And “think” would here mean something like “talk to itself.” (PI §32) If ostension plays a role in the initial acquisition of a first language, it cannot be that of ostensive definition. There must be a way of categorizing that is not a matter of naming. We can bring this into view only by taking seriously the difference between the domain of the novice and the domain of the master. Failure to appreciate the difference between the two domains lies at the heart of the empiricist reliance on ostensive definition as the vehicle of initiate learning. This confusion results in reading the adult into the child and shaping one’s theory of language accordingly. Wittgenstein addresses this persistent bias in the philosophic tradition. He thinks that philosophy has inverted the order of explanation, taking last things for first. The primitive language-game is the basis for the more sophisticated. Wittgenstein’s response to the indeterminacy of ostensive definition both explains why ostension appears to be such a plausible mechanism for fixing meaning de novo and suggests an alternative picture, one that provides a way of categorizing that is not naming. Wittgenstein suggests that the role traditionally attributed to ostensive definition is actually played by ostensive training: An important part of the training [in the mastery of language] will consist in the teacher’s pointing to the objects, directing the child’s attention to them, and at the same time uttering a word; for instance, the word “slab” as he points to that shape. … ( … I say that it will form an important part of the training, because it is 79

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so with human beings; not because it could not be imagined otherwise.) This ostensive teaching of words can be said to establish an association between the word and the thing. (PI §6) Ostensive training is a causal process which brings about an association between an object and a word.2 But animals as well as humans are susceptible to this kind of teaching. So, it looks as though this cannot effect an understanding of the word, but can only produce the ability to “parrot” given the appropriate stimulus. In other words, ostensive training looks very much like conditioning an organism to respond differentially to some property or object. This looks like crude behaviorism. Wittgenstein is aware of this danger (cf. PI §307) and seeks to avoid it. The critical difference is that ostensive training can effect an understanding of the word only if it is coupled with a training in the use of the word. And the use of the word is determined by the practice or custom in which the sign is embedded: But if the ostensive teaching has this effect,—am I to say that it effects an understanding of the word? Don’t you understand the call “Slab!” if you act upon it in such-and-such a way?—Doubtless the ostensive teaching helped to bring this about; but only together with a particular training. With a different training the same ostensive teaching of these words would have effected a quite different understanding. (PI §6) Ostensive teaching, which helps effect understanding in the child, presupposes a public language, though the child does not yet know that language. It therefore contrasts with ostensive definition, which does require that the recipient has mastery of a language: “One has already to know (or be able to do) something in order to be capable of asking a thing’s name” (PI §30). In their different ways, both ostensive teaching and ostensive definition presuppose normatively structured practices, or language-games. For the novice, there is a cognitive division of labor. The cognitive competence that is presupposed in the normatively correct use of an expression is exercised by the adults who structure the environment for the child and provide the background understanding necessary to judgment. The child’s utterance is treated as a full-fledged judgment or request, as it were, by courtesy. The environmental and cognitive stage-setting necessary for the child’s utterances to be treated as judgments or requests is provided by others. To be sure, ostensive teaching doesn’t explain meaning to the novice. It creates a causal association that is exploited in the normatively structured training of which it is a part. Even so, the child’s actions are properly described only in terms of what is correct or incorrect, appropriate or 80

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inappropriate. These are not mere conditioned responses but appropriate actions. The child’s way of doing something is part of a normative social practice. Ostensive teaching, then, because it exploits the child’s way of being causally embedded in the world, is not mere causal conditioning. In ostensive definition, by contrast, the one providing the definition sets the stage by using a sortal expression which must be understood by the recipient herself. For it is only in virtue of this understanding that she grasps the point of the ostensive gesture. The mistake made in treating ostensive definition as the vehicle for fixing meaning turns on conflating ostensive definition with ostensive teaching. Ostensive teaching is used with the initiate learner. Since ostensive teaching can be characterized as akin to stimulus–response conditioning, instances of this “training” can be described in relative isolation from any background of social convention or custom. Such training results in a way of “categorizing” that is not a matter of naming and that does not presuppose the background and conceptual competence on the part of the pupil that naming does. On the other hand, in explaining how this kind of causally based association between word and object relates to meaning and understanding, competence-presupposing ostensive definition is smuggled in. In this way, causal and semantic features have been mismatched. Wilfrid Sellars makes a strikingly similar move in his discussion of the difficulties that arise in understanding the word–object relationship.3 But he puts his discussion in a somewhat different context, one that will help enrich Wittgenstein’s critique of the philosophical mistake in the empiricist approach. Like Wittgenstein, Sellars is concerned to show the “radical confusion” of contemporary empiricism,4 but he is also concerned to provide an alternative account of the linguistic phenomena that were to be explained in terms of reference and logical systematicity. The “radical confusion” is the mistake of taking a causally based association between word and object (which Sellars happily characterizes in terms of stimulus–response conditioning) for the use of an expression according to “semantical rules, whereby basic factual terms acquire extra-linguistic meaning.”5 What Wittgenstein and Sellars agree upon is that causally based associations are not semantic relations. The key mistake of empiricism and the denotational theory of meaning is to elide causal and semantic relations, and so misunderstand the more subtle relation that mastery of category terms has to the causal sensitivities of our perceptual systems. Sellars emphasizes that … the learning of a language … involves the following logically (but not chronologically) distinguishable phases: (a) the acquisition of S-R connections pertaining to the arrangement of sounds and visual marks into patterns and sequences of patterns. … 81

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(b) The acquisition of thing-word connections … [where these] connections are a matter of being conditioned to respond to kinds of situation with kinds of verbal pattern.6 Sellars ties these analytically distinguishable phases of language learning to two kinds of transitions within a language-game. These are intralinguistic moves or inferences which answer to phase (a) and, in phase (b), language entry and exit transitions in which transitions are made between what is not a position in the game (e.g., the causal relation between the reflectance properties of a fire engine and the perceptual report “This is red”) and what is a position in the game (the inferential connection between “This is red” and “The fire engine is in good light”).7 The acquisition of thing–word connections is, on Sellars’ view, the acquisition of language entry and exit transitions. Moves within the game reflect inferential connections among sentences or expressions. Here is Sellars’ very important idea that Wittgenstein is also trying to articulate: “the observational application of a concept cannot be the obeying of a rule at all. It is essentially the actualization of a thing-word S-R connection [ … ] a language entry transition is not in the full sense an observation, unless the subject has more than the bare ability to respond with tokens of ‘This object is green’—in standard conditions, and given a certain mental set—if and only if a green object is present to his senses.”8 Having a concept cannot be identified with an association between a word and an object, even though such associations are language entry transitions. Having a concept involves something more, according to Sellars, and that something “is not a matter of obeying semantical rules, but rather the ability to infer.”9 Conceptual content for Sellars is inferential content where this is significantly divorced from the entry and exit transitions into and out of language-games. For Wittgenstein, on the other hand, the language-game cannot be so circumscribed, for Wittgenstein calls “the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the ‘language-game’” (PI §7; my emphasis). But the affinity with Sellars is clear. Sellars enriches the discussion with his own emphasis on the need to keep causally based thing–word associations distinct from grasping conceptual content which is a matter of mastering inferential connections. For both philosophers, association between word and object, however important to language, does not fix meaning. Meaning is a function of the role of the word within a larger linguistic practice. Sellars explicates this in terms of inferential connections among sentences while Wittgenstein emphasizes the use of the expression in concrete situations. For both, the philosophical notion of reference, as that which fixes meaning, is a mistake. Disentangling the conflation of naming with training reveals that we either get “tepid” naming (all is done cognitively but to provide the label) or causal association, which is not a semantic relation. 82

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Quine makes this philosophical mistake the centerpiece of his own approach to the structure of language. Here too there are important affinities between Wittgenstein and Quine, most particularly between Wittgenstein’s problem of normative similarity10 and Quine’s argument for the indeterminacy of translation.11 Both arguments cast doubt on the explanatory role assigned reference. Both arguments lead to a rejection of meaning as an object of theory. Both, in short, reject denotational theories of meaning and atomistic conceptions of language altogether. Both philosophers place thought experiments, or philosophical myths of language, at the heart of their arguments. Both draw connections between their primary thought experiment and children learning their first language.12 Yet the conceptions of language and learning each invokes through the use of their indeterminacy arguments are quite different. Quine concludes that indeterminacy is an ineliminable aspect of all language use whereas Wittgenstein rejects the indeterminacy of meaning and the inscrutability of reference. We can expect to find part of the answer as to why they draw such different morals by looking to the difference in the myths each introduces. For Wittgenstein, that myth is given by the primitive builders game. For Quine, it is the field linguist trying to construct a radical translation of an utterly alien language. The debate between Wittgenstein and Quine can be summed up with the question: Are we more like Wittgenstein’s builders or Quine’s radical translator? Quine’s indeterminacy argument is a continuation of his attack on the analytic–synthetic distinction and the idea of necessity. From his criticisms of analyticity in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,”13 Quine concludes that what are designated “analytic truths” cannot be distinguished from strongly held empirical beliefs, beliefs that we are unlikely to abandon because of their centrality to our entire system of beliefs. His rejection of the long-standing idea that there are two kinds of truth, empirical truth and conceptual or analytic truth, leads to his view that all beliefs are empirical, differing only in their varying degrees of confirmation. Quine’s attack on analyticity, meaning, and necessity is his path to holism. His early holism is both radical and homogeneous.14 It is radical in that all beliefs form a single web or network of interconnected hypotheses, the connective tissue being the syntactic, logical and evidential relations obtaining among the beliefs. It is homogeneous in that it treats the constituents of the system as all having the same status. All beliefs are nodes within the network, and all nodes are empirical hypotheses. Beliefs qua hypotheses differ only by how deeply entrenched within the network they are, that is, by their logical and inferential connections to other beliefs. It is important to draw attention to the connection between Quine’s early attack on analyticity and his holism, for it is his radical holism that provides one of two key ingredients for his indeterminacy arguments. Wittgenstein accepts neither Quine’s radical holism nor his doxastic egalitarianism, but our discussion of this must await Chapter 6. 83

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The other ingredient is Quine’s unwavering commitment to scientific naturalism, that science is the arbiter of what is real and true.15 The scientific picture of human beings is that of complicated physical organisms, endowed with an array of sensory systems, the stimulations of which are the only points of empirical contact with the world beyond our own skins. Everything that philosophers had thought could not be compatible with a physicalist metaphysics—knowledge, necessity, intentionality, language—must be reconstructed or eliminated. Quine can see no point of contact between the world and our beliefs except by way of changes to the surfaces of our sensory systems. Language mastery is a set of verbal dispositions acquired through conditioning and our sensitivity to sensory stimulations. Epistemology and the study of belief formation is to be replaced by the sciences of behavior. These successor sciences are the neural sciences, especially those concerned with the neurophysiology of our sensory systems, and behaviorism. Quine would not include cognitive science among the successor sciences, given his deep skepticism with respect to any form of intentional psychology. The very idea of mental content is part of the intentionalist myth that he seeks to eliminate. While Wittgenstein shares Quine’s skepticism about intentional psychology as a science, he doesn’t think that the neural sciences or scientific behaviorism can replace intentional explanation or epistemic justification.16 Quine’s scientific naturalism has a strong reductionist element that is antithetical to Wittgenstein’s approach. Wittgenstein’s “naturalism” extends only to the rejection of any Platonic or Cartesian (or any other supernatural) conception of minds, meanings and necessity. But his naturalism does not extend to taking science to be the final arbiter of all that is true. This, for Wittgenstein, is a scientism which can hide what is in plain view. The physicalist description of our situation in the world can no better account for our practices than the Cartesian appeal to the powers of mind. What Wittgenstein discerns in minds, meanings and necessity is a normative dimension that the scientific perspective obliterates. We are neither Cartesian minds inhabiting a mechanical body nor a mechanical body with the mind eliminated. Quine’s methodological device for examining language is the mythical situation of a field linguist trying to translate the language of an alien tribe for which no translation or related language is known. This situation of radical translation respects both Quine’s scientific naturalism and his radical holism. The radical translator knows nothing of the native language and nothing of the people who use it. He is the complete outsider, taking up the stance of the scientific observer. Questions of meaning are replaced by questions of translation. Meaning is just whatever translation recovers. If translation doesn’t fix unique “meanings,” then there are none. His only resources for translating the native language are the verbal and other behaviors of the natives, the environment in which they act, and his own language, beliefs and sensory experiences. The only method available is to form hypotheses about 84

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how to translate native utterances by establishing correlations between kinds of utterance and publicly salient phenomena in the environment and then looking for assent or dissent to the native utterance upon appearance of the correlated phenomenon. These constraints imposed on radical translation are held to be revelatory of the nature of language in general, precisely because they respect Quine’s critique of analyticity and meaning in general and his scientific naturalism. Quine’s now famous example is the hypothesis that the native utterance “Gavagai!” means or is translated “Rabbit!” (or “Lo, a rabbit”) in English. The only way that the linguist can test this hypothesis is by actively questioning the native to see whether he assents to the query “Gavagai?” when he has been sensorily stimulated by rabbits and dissents when he has not been so stimulated. The success of this strategy requires that the linguist can correctly identify assent and dissent in the native language and that he can empathetically identify the sensory stimulations of the native. Quine’s idea is that what underwrites language and communication is a shared physiology of the sensory systems. The pattern of sensory stimulations that would prompt assent to occasion sentences like “This is a rabbit” is the “stimulus meaning” of that sentence.17 As such, patterns of sensory stimulations and the behaviors they prompt are the only “entering wedge” into understanding an alien language. Quine takes the similarity of sensory stimulations to provide a common stimulus meaning for the alien utterance and its English translation for granted. Equally important, he must assume that the inferential interconnections between these occasion sentences and a growing web of belief are much the same for the native and the translator. The situation of radical translation is not restricted to confronting an alien culture. As Quine tells us, translation begins at home but not at birth. At what point can a speaker construct hypotheses, test them, identify the relevant empirical data that would bear upon the hypotheses constructed? When does the child, a novice, become the translator? The child is bombarded with sensory stimulations, including the verbalizations of the adults and associated feelings of pain and pleasure. “Learning,” as Quine tells us, “is a matter of learning to warp the trend of episodes, by intervention of one’s own muscles, in such a way as to simulate a pleasant earlier episode. To learn is to learn to have fun.”18 This brief characterization of a behaviorist model of learning, or behavior modification, applies equally to the adult as to the child. This adult, or “master” of the practice, is in no fundamentally different situation than that of the child. The years of accumulated conditioned associations are all that distinguish the adult from the child. This is, of course, a great difference in quantity but not in structure. Radical behaviorism does not so much read the child into the adult as leave the adult in a state of permanent childhood, who differs from the child only in the years to which his behavior has been subject to contingencies of reinforcement. By implication this complicated array of behaviors comes to sound like theories to those of us who are 85

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outside the Quinian world. The shift from the child’s one-word vocables to the theoretical hypotheses of the field linguist is an utter mystery, compounded by the fact that our “shared” language is an illusion. Every language is a language of one, calling for the translation of the vocables of all other speakers. Successful communication seems improbable and the development of the child into the linguist is without explanation. What is needed minimally for an explanation of such development is the idea of the child becoming a member of a social practice, the mastery of which provides a bedrock for acquiring the more sophisticated epistemic practices of the linguist. Quine’s radical behaviorism, a science of individual behavioral modification, his commitment to identifying language with its sophisticated epistemic practices, and his assumption that communication is a matter of translating reports on the passing scene combine to create problems that cannot be resolved with the theoretical resources available. Quine’s failure to negotiate the divide between the behavioristically constrained child and the scientific linguist invites a second response. That is to close the divide by treating the child as a little linguist. The child at birth is in the situation of the radical translator. He has a language sufficient for concept formation and hypothesis formation and testing. J.A. Fodor, a leading advocate of the view that we are born with the cognitive and linguistic resources to acquire a “first” natural language, says, in characteristically direct manner, that I am going to take three things for granted: (1) that learning a first language is a matter of hypothesis formation and confirmation …; (2) that learning a first language involves at least learning the semantic properties of its predicates; (3) that S learns the semantic properties of P only if S learns some generalization which determines the extension of P.19 Fodor’s language of thought hypothesis is to be used to explain concept/ first language learning, perception, and deliberate action. Importantly the language of thought hypothesis and its domain of explanation support and require the philosophical representationalist theory of mind. We see here the same elements that were in play with Quine’s theory. But instead of reading the novice into the master of language, as Quine does, Fodor’s account reads the master into the novice. Fodor is blind to the importance of social practice, thinking that the cognitive apparatus of hypothesis formation and confirmation is adequate to an explanation of linguistic mastery. But there is no satisfactory explanation for how we came to be endowed with a language of thought.20 Further, and in a way more important, the hypothesis cannot do the explanatory work intended. The diagnosis for this is that it does not understand the relation between 86

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the novice and master of a social practice. The problem is to see that our sophisticated epistemic practices are grounded in a bedrock of social practice that need not conform to epistemic principles of belief formation and prediction. So whether one “discovers” them exercised by the master of language or “infers” their existence in a novice, to take these sophisticated principles as exhausting language or the essential core of language is an error. It leads to an attenuated misconception of both the domains of the master and of the novice. Both attempts to account for language learning fail to recognize the essential role of our shared social practice within which the child learns her first language. It is in this context, as we have seen, that the first problem of normative similarity arises. Whether one leapfrogs to the situation of radical translation or tries to secure a solution to the problem by appeal to innate representations, we can see that the problem is not solved. We need to see just how Wittgenstein would disagree with Quine’s problem of the indeterminacy of translation. From Quine’s point of view, treating the very young child as a translator would not undermine his argument, but show the fully general import of the situation of radical translation. The indeterminacy as to what the natives are referring to—rabbits, undetached rabbit-parts, rabbit time-slices—is revealed in the inherent and unresolvable ambiguity that arises in trying to construct any translation manual. The empirical evidence available to the linguist is compatible with different translation manuals because any hypothesis of how to translate a native expression requires the linguist to individuate single words, their singular or plural forms, and the like. There is always more than one such “apparatus of individuation” that the linguist could use, and there is no principled way to determine which apparatus is the correct one. The result is an inevitable indeterminacy of translation: there is no fact of the matter as to which translation schema is the correct one. This indeterminacy of translation, as Quine later argues, is buttressed by an argument that is designed to show that reference itself is inescapably inscrutable. Reference can only be resolved by appeal to a background theory that specifies the ontology of the native or object language.21 Ontological matters cannot be decided from within the language in use since fixing ontology is the work of a theory about the referents of the language in use. Yet the language in which the ontological theory is expressed itself involves ontological commitments that are as indeterminate as the ontology of the object language. There is no principled way to stop the regress, and so reference within any language is inscrutable. This regress is stopped only by our de facto acquiescence in our home language.22 Such acquiescence can be explained in terms of social conditioning and it can be defended on pragmatic grounds, but it cannot be justified as the correct specification of that to which we refer. The gap left by the inscrutability of reference is filled by pragmatic considerations of holistic belief formation, passive acquiescence in our home language, and the stimulus meanings of our observation sentences. 87

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How do the doubts that Wittgenstein raises with respect to ostensive definition compare with Quine’s argument for the inscrutability of reference? Both arguments cast doubt on the explanatory role assigned reference. Both arguments draw connections between their primary thought experiment and children learning their first language. Both endorse something like social conditioning to account for early language learning. Both hold that such social training (causally) requires that we be innately responsive to certain environmental stimuli, that we have and share a sensory physiology. Both hold that initial word-object (or property) connections can be achieved through relatively simple association, without the aid of an intellectual or cognitive background whether in the form of a theory or a game. Both argue that reference (or ostensive definition for Wittgenstein) requires a background. Both agree that inquiry terminates in our home language. Despite this important convergence in their ideas, Wittgenstein’s myth of the primitive builders orients us to the problem in a wholly different way. Unlike the radical translator, the builder is a participant within the game. For Wittgenstein learning sheds light by showing how a novice becomes a participant in a practice while for Quine language learning, though rooted in conditioning, becomes a matter of hypothesis formation and testing when adulthood is achieved. Fodor, on the other hand, assimilates even the child to Quine’s mythical translator while Wittgenstein assimilates the mythical builder to the child. For Quine and for Fodor, the child too confronts an utterly alien language for which the only entering wedge is the observable behavior of the adults and the situations in which they speak. The child, that is, all of us in the beginning, is either manipulated by her environment or in the situation of radical translation, a situation which the indeterminacy arguments show us that we never escape. For both, acts of communication and understanding are acts of translation. This is not a hypothetical but a fully universal feature of all human life. For Wittgenstein, on the other hand, the indeterminacy and inscrutability that Quine finds in all language use are in fact the products of misplaced philosophical theories of language. Within our language-games are shared bedrock judgments of similarity, categorization, and rule-following which are certain and are, if anything, overdetermined (as Wittgenstein expresses it in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics VI.16). What strikes Wittgenstein is the remarkable degree of agreement that exists among us all, the commonality in our lives and actions, not an isolation we all must endure as the object of contingent reinforcement or as radical translators. How is it that their arguments can seem so similar and yet be in the service of such different conceptions of language? Part of what I hope to bring out is that Quine’s central indeterminacy argument does not run as deeply as Wittgenstein’s problem of normative similarity. Wittgenstein changes the perspective we take of the entry moves within a language-game. The mistake is to be asking what is the origin of the meaning of words or how do words 88

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become imbued with meaning. Rather we should look to how one becomes a participant within a language-game. It is not that words have meanings but that individuals engage meaningfully with the use of words. So, it is only right that the semantic question, what fixes the meaning of a word (ostensive definition, ordinary definition, causal relations to the world), should be replaced by the genetic question, how does one become a participant in a practice?

Rejection of Quine’s picture of language We can begin to understand these differences by looking first at Quine’s criticism of Wittgenstein’s critique of ostensive definition. Just as Quine does not think that reference fixes the ontological category of its referent, so Wittgenstein does not think that ostensive definition creates the game in which the ostended object plays a normative role. This suggests that we should find a similarity in Quine’s treatment of reference and Wittgenstein’s treatment of ostensive definition. Yet in “Ontological Relativity,” Quine distances himself from Wittgenstein: I am not worrying, as Wittgenstein did, about simple cases of ostension. The color word “sepia,” to take one of his examples, can certainly be learned by an ordinary process of conditioning, or induction. One need not even be told that sepia is a color and not a shape or a material or an article. … Like all conditioning, or induction, the process will depend ultimately also on one’s own inborn propensity to find one stimulation qualitatively more akin to a second stimulation than to a third; otherwise there can never be any selective reinforcement and extinction of responses.23 Quine takes Wittgenstein to be offering the relatively shallow argument that pointing at something, by itself, does not distinguish which property is ostended. He takes Wittgenstein to be holding that to resolve the ambiguity inherent in mere pointing, we must use a kind term, or sortal, to individuate the object or property ostended. Quine’s objection to this, and so dismissal of Wittgenstein’s argument, is that conditioning can succeed without the explicit use of a sortal in instruction because of our “own inborn propensity to find one stimulation qualitatively more akin to a second stimulation than to a third.” Our innate sensory capabilities are such that we can be conditioned to respond to particular properties, such as the color red, without the use of sortal expressions. For Quine, such basic conditioned associations between natural properties and the use of words is the basis for all subsequent language acquisition. The philosophical possibility of confusion or ambiguity in the pointing gesture itself is irrelevant to the psychophysiological fact that we do respond to certain natural properties in the world and not to others. 89

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There are passages in Wittgenstein that support a similar picture. Wittgenstein too insists upon the importance of our having and sharing certain natural reactions to how we are trained into a social practice.24 But Quine fails to notice that Wittgenstein distinguishes between ostensive training and ostensive definition. Ostensive training, as we have seen, is a causal process of just the sort that Quine appeals to in his criticism of Wittgenstein. Such causal processes and the sensory systems they involve are fully open to empirical investigation. That investigation, however, is not part of the philosophical project for Wittgenstein as it is for Quine. Ostensive teaching is not simply a kind of stimulus–response conditioning. Rather it effects an association in a normatively structured setting. Different training involving the same association of word and object, and so the same sensory capabilities, would effect a “quite different understanding” (PI §6). As Quine and Wittgenstein would agree, such training does not require the explicit use of sortals to succeed. But it does not fix the meaning of the word either for the teacher or the child. Rather it causally exploits innate sensory sensibilities. Ostensive definition, on the other hand, does fix meaning in the sense that it supplies an exemplar or paradigm of use for a word. But to know how to take the exemplar on the basis of its presentation does require a sortal to differentiate for the recipient which property is the relevant one. “Sortal” here is a stand-in for more general cognitive competence. This kind of explanation of meaning does require that the recipient be a competent language user if he is to use the sortal to grasp the point of the definition. So Quine’s quick dismissal of Wittgenstein’s view of ostensive definition misses the point by conflating ostensive training and ostensive definition. This is a conflation only to be expected from one who seeks to pull epistemic resources out of conditioning theory. But just as classical empiricists got explanatory mileage out of the conflation, so does Quine. We can see this in the explanatory work claimed for ostension both from the perspective of ostensive training and from the perspective of ostensive definition. In treating our sensory stimulations as the meager and sole evidence we have for forming hypotheses about the world and the utterances of those around us, Quine exploits the ambiguity in the undifferentiated notion of ostensive definition. In emphasizing that ostensive definition is tied to the kinds of sensory apparatus we have, he is concerned with ostensive training. But in getting epistemic and semantic mileage out of this training, he must rely on ostensive definition. We can contrast Wittgenstein’s and Quine’s views both from the perspective of ostensive training and from the perspective of ostensive definition. Let me first, then, distinguish the problems raised from each perspective. From the perspective of ostensive training, the issue turns on whether or not sensory stimulations provide evidence at all (not whether it is only meager evidence). From the perspective of ostensive definition, the issue concerns whether ontology must be established by some background theory or other. To elaborate, let me begin with this second issue. 90

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For Quine, ontological categories cannot be established by ostension. Differentiation into categories is the task of background ontological theory. This is Quine’s response to the inscrutability of reference. It itself initiates an explanatory regress that can only be stopped pragmatically by our acquiescence to our native language. But this is not Wittgenstein’s response. For Wittgenstein, ontology is not fixed relative to a background theory. Asking for and receiving an ostensive definition does involve a semantic metagame. One must be able to talk about words, using semantic concepts. But to offer (or receive) an ostensive definition is not to engage in theorizing about the ontology of the game in play. When A asks of B, “what’s that piece called?” in a game of chess, and B answers “the King,” B is not engaged in specifying the ontology of chess (an ontology of pieces). Rather the point and success of the naming game presupposes that A and B already work with the variously shaped pieces as markers governed by rules within the game (cf. PI §31). What Quine identifies as the background theory that specifies the ontology of the game in which A and B are engaged is, for Wittgenstein, immanent in the way in which the game is played. Or as Wittgenstein might say, that the King is a piece in the game of chess (rather than, say, a decorative ornament of the board or a time-slice or a set of pieces, as is true of the king in checkers) is held fast by the ways in which the King is used in the games that are played. What distinguishes Wittgenstein’s view of what is immanent in a game from Quine’s view of the role of background theory is tied to what counts as a determinate answer to requests for names or referents. Quine holds that, in principle, reference is always indeterminate even though pragmatically no problems arise. Wittgenstein does not think, however, that we accept an ontology of rabbits or pieces (as opposed to collections of rabbit parts or time-slices of markers and so on) for pragmatic reasons, say, of simplicity or theoretical elegance. Nothing like pragmatic reasoning enters in as a matter of fact in our talk of rabbits and game pieces nor is such pragmatic justification called for in principle. For Wittgenstein, there is nothing indeterminate in our ordinary use of the words “rabbit” or “game piece.” Apparent indeterminacy arises from philosophical views about what determinacy of meaning or reference requires. That Quine holds to an ideal of determinacy that cannot be met by any of our usual means for fixing reference or translating languages is clear. What needs to be identified is the standard against which all attempts at fixing meaning or reference fail. That standard is provided by Quine’s scientific naturalism. The reason that “gavagai” or “rabbit” are open to multiple interpretations is that the only empirical evidence for deciding among rival ontologies is the patterns of sensory stimulation hypothesized by our best physiological theories of perception. The ultimate standard is thus similarity of physical stimulation. All else is hypothesis. Without the physicalism, Quine’s indeterminacy arguments cannot succeed. It is this that allows Quine 91

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to import indeterminacy into our home language. Whether we are trying to understand an alien language, members of our home community, or our past selves, we are engaged in producing translations and making ontological inferences that are inherently indeterminate. Wittgenstein does not accept Quinean scientific naturalism, which he would view as being overly scientistic. But is there more to the response that Wittgenstein might raise than his antagonism to the ubiquitous application of science and theory? Quine, we could say, answers the problem of normative similarity for reference by appeal to a natural similarity among physiological perceptual states. Such states are our entering wedge into translation and language learning. Word usage and communication are thus anchored for Quine in our common sensory apparatus and common physical world. What is wrong with this resolution of the problem from a Wittgensteinian point of view? Quine, in taking sensory stimulations as our only opening onto the world, identifies such stimulations as the only empirical evidence available for the construction and testing of hypotheses (the importance of ostensive training) and as such all hypotheses are rendered indeterminate relative to that evidential base (the inadequacy of ostensive definition). The retinal pattern of stimulations that prompts the disposition to utter “Gavagai!” or to assent to the query “Gavagai?” could also prompt dispositions to utter “Rabbit-parts” or “Time-slice of a rabbit” or, more familiarly, “Brown” or “Cute.” The retinal pattern itself is neutral with respect to all these reactions just as an ordinary object is equally neutral with respect to the many ways of construing an ostensive definition. For Quine, this underdetermination of the hypothesis by the available evidence is a crucial component of both indeterminacy arguments. Patterns of sensory stimulation to our sensory organs provide the only empirical constraint on translation. Sensory stimulations constitute the stimulus meaning, as Quine puts it, of our occasion sentences. Even forgetting the problem that the justification for this claim is based upon scientific theories of perception, which themselves are more epistemically distant from the periphery than beliefs about rabbits and people, the very idea of stimulus meaning itself needs to be put in question. The issue between Wittgenstein and Quine can be put this way. For Quine, the hypotheses are impugned, not the base. For Wittgenstein, indeterminacy impugns the so-called “evidence,” not the observational judgment or ostensive definition (Quine’s hypotheses). Quine’s notion of stimulus meaning is subject to Wittgenstein’s problem of normative similarity. Ostensive training exploits causal propensities to create a dispositional basis for making language entry transitions. Quine and Wittgenstein agree on this. But Quine takes sensory stimulations to be evidence in the forming and testing of empirical hypotheses about the distal cause of those stimulations. It is this use that is subject to the problem of normative similarity. The pattern of retinal stimulation can no more guarantee success than the object 92

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of ostensive definition can, and for the same reason. Just as the object being pointed to cannot indicate which property is the relevant one, so the occurrence of a retinal stimulation does not in itself fix the relevant class of stimulations that are to correlate with a specific linguistic disposition. Which pattern is the relevant pattern, and so which class of stimulations is to be trained in association with a particular sentence, is not a purely causal matter. It is a normative issue. It is for this reason that stimulus meaning becomes another variant of the first problem of normative similarity.25 Retinal stimulation is as problematic as the medium-sized object in determining the meaning of a holophrastic sentence. Social training provides the context in which the relevant retinal stimulations are selected for, not by nature (understood physicalistically) but by social acculturation. One can see, then, that descriptions at the level of retinal stimulations are of the wrong order altogether for understanding such holophrastic sentences as “Gavagai!” or “Slab!” Though Quine is arguing that the sensory pattern actually caused in the sensory organs is compatible with (could have been caused by) rabbits, rabbitparts, rabbit stages, tree stumps seen from a certain angle, and so on, nonetheless he insists that the relevant retinal pattern is a rabbity pattern. But how does one discern that those aspects of retinal stimulation that correspond to the rabbity shape constitute the pattern that evokes the disposition to assent to “Rabbit!”? The pattern itself can only be specified relative to the paradigm distal object, as it were. But, then, it is unclear why the detour by way of sensory stimulations should be made at all. The important and indispensable correlation is between objects and sentences.26 The rabbity patterns of stimulation only figure in as the intermediary between the distal object and the belief expressed by the occasion sentence, given the causal mechanisms of our perceptual systems. In other words, appeal to sensory stimulations is “a wheel on which nothing turns” so far as the identity of the relevant pattern of stimulations is concerned. The standard for specifying the relevant sensory pattern is the distal object. Retinal stimulation does not provide the standard for category judgments. Sensory stimulations, however important they are to the activity of our sensory systems, are inadequate to the task of providing evidence or setting a standard for category membership. Someone who uses evidence, tests hypotheses, and assents to observation judgments is not simply “parroting” words in the presence of a causal prompt. Evidence and assent belong to the logical space of reasons. Parroting is not assent, retinal stimulation is not evidence. For Wittgenstein, sensory stimulations are part of the causal perceptual system that is exploited in our being trained into normative social practices, the language-games of justification and knowledge. To be in the space of reasons is precisely to be able to draw material, logical and evidential inferences, to make moves within language-games. Assent to an occasion sentence is a move within a language-game. Wittgenstein’s distinction between ostensive training and 93

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ostensive definition respects just this difference between the causal nexus and the space of reasons, or more generally, a normatively structured context. It is no accident that Quine’s position is subject to well-known difficulties with respect to recalcitrant experience and logical connectedness. Crucial to Quine’s conception of revising the web of belief is the idea of recalcitrant experience that is at odds with existing beliefs and that forces changes within the network of accepted hypotheses. Recalcitrant experience just is some recurrent sensory stimulation that elicits assent to the corresponding occasion sentence in conflict with the rest of the web of belief. Yet if all is indeterminate, there can be no place for recalcitrance. The idea of a recalcitrant experience carries with it both the idea of the violation of some expectation with respect to our experiences and the idea of some kind of necessary connection among beliefs. Yet, given Quine’s holism, why should preference be given the “recalcitrant” experience over other beliefs? When this point is combined with the problem of normative similarity that arises for sensory stimulations as the evidential base, the privilege Quine wants to accord sensory stimulations becomes seriously compromised. Further, the very notion of revising our system of hypotheses requires that there is some “connective tissue” holding the nodes together in a system. There must be logical and inferential relations among the hypotheses such that an alteration in one hypothesis entails alterations in other hypotheses. Indeed for a holist position, the only sense we can make of a hypothesis is in terms of its logical and evidential relations to other hypotheses. But, for Quine, logic is not immune from these considerations. Logical principles themselves are but further nodes in the system of belief, confronting the tribunal of experience along with all other hypotheses. Dummett has made the difficulty quite clear: Quine’s thesis involves … that the principles governing deductive connections themselves form part of the total theory which, as a whole, confronts experience. … we must recognize the total theory as comprising rules of inference as well as logical laws … But in that case, there is nothing for the inferential links between sentences to consist in.27 These are serious difficulties, incurred primarily by Quine’s commitment to scientific naturalism and the picture it gives of our place in the world. As masters of linguistic practice, we are all in the position of the radical translator all of the time. This is camouflaged by our sharing a common language, that is, our use of homophonic languages. But the case of the young child just acquiring a natural language removes this camouflage and reveals the utter isolation in which we each live, with only a very small point of contact in our sensory experiences of the world and others and a large capacity for hypothesis construction. 94

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Wittgenstein would reject Quine’s picture of language and the scientific naturalism on which it rests. For Wittgenstein, the proper picture of language is that of the language-game in which words are part of activities involving the participation of others. Quine treats this as our acquiescence in our home language. This acquiescence is either ignorance of the philosophically uninformed or skeptical resignation in the light of the indeterminacy of language. For Wittgenstein, this acquiescence is our blind obedience within bedrock social practices, an obedience that is perfectly in order as it is. The skeptical conclusions result from Quine’s misleading theory of our situation. Wittgenstein takes the lack of hesitancy or disagreement among the participants to be an important feature of language-games. What strikes him is not the meager point of contact between participants at the level of sensory stimulations but the considerable commonality and certainty in the judgments and reactions of the participants. These judgments and reactions are made as a matter of course and are justified, if at all, by appeal to the training in which the relevant techniques were acquired. Indeterminacy is eliminated, or rather simply does not occur, through the acquisition of techniques of application. The process of learning techniques is, for Wittgenstein, constitutive of what is learned at the bedrock level. What is so learned are not metaphysical truths or analytic truths but normative moves in the social games that fix what is the same and so what is necessary. There is no indeterminacy in what the child learns. If there were, this would not be evidence for Quine’s philosophical theses but evidence that the child was ineducable or that the social conditions for learning chaotic or abnormal. Initiate learning, that is, the acquisition of a first language, is importantly different from later learning, especially learning or belief acquisition by way of hypothesis formation and testing. Wittgenstein’s picture of language is precisely one that cannot be modeled on the structure of knowledge and justification. The picture of the child invoked by Fodor as theorist or translator is misguided. It requires importing elaborate theoretical and normative content into the mind of the individual child, but this content, Wittgenstein argues, is public and social. This structure is provided by the adult, not the child. In sum, there are three major differences between Quine and Wittgenstein: (1) Though both develop indeterminacy arguments directed against traditional philosophical theories of reference, they draw quite different morals from these arguments. Quine concludes that all language use is indeterminate; there is no fact of the matter as to what we mean or to what we refer. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, uses the indeterminacy that results from philosophical theories of ostensive definition, as a ground for rejecting those theories. This fundamental difference is reflected in the conceptions each has of initiate language acquisition. Quine retains the empiricist picture that privileges the semantic work done by ostensive definition, but treats it in behaviorist terms that render the “semantic” relation into one of stimulus 95

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and response. The gulf this creates between the initiate learner and the linguistically competent is unsolvable. It invites the Fodorian solution of assimilating the novice to the isolated translator. Quine’s stimulus meaning is the device intended to straddle the divide between the indeterminacy argument and competent hypothesis formation, by providing the entering wedge to language mastery and knowledge of the world. Stimulus meaning is Quine’s duck–rabbit: now a physiological state, now evidence. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, identifies participation in a languagegame as the entering wedge into language mastery just as the primitive language-game is for understanding what language is. When, after a period of gathering evidence, Quine’s linguist hears “Gavagai!” he hears “Lo, a rabbit!” When Wittgenstein’s builder, who is trained in the building game, hears “Slab!” he hears a call to action. Reference to the slab, as fixed through ostensive training, cannot be called into question for the actor. It is completely determinate so far as carrying out his role in the game goes. That determinacy is fixed by the actions within the game, not by the evidence available for the hypothesis that, e.g., stones of a certain shape are slabs. The builders game is simply too primitive to make room for hypotheses and evidence, and so for indeterminacy. This difference reflects Quine’s conception of language as an interconnected set of theories and Wittgenstein’s conception of language as ongoing regulated social activities. The emphasis on action marks an important difference between Wittgenstein and Sellars as well. Sellars, too, tends to the Quinean picture of language as a system of sentential nodes inferentially connected. Wittgenstein is struck by the indispensability of our interactions with the natural environment and other participants to our language-games. Nonetheless Sellars’ view that the inferentially structured space of reasons is a rule-governed game is clearly closer to Wittgenstein’s conception of language-games. Moreover, important to both, and missing from Quine’s account, is the distinction between what Sellars calls “material inferences” and logical inferences.28 Material inferences are substantive moves from one position within the game to another, moves that are not mediated by formal logic. (2) Though both Quine and Wittgenstein are non-atomistic in their views of language and knowledge, the kind of holism each endorses is very different. Quine endorses a homogeneous radical holism. There is a single web of belief in which every node has roughly the same status, namely, that of an empirical belief. The only principled internal distinction is between the core and periphery, and this is drawn along traditional empiricist lines. Wittgenstein develops a heterogeneous holism.29 It calls for a distinction between the network of beliefs and a background against which, or in virtue of which, the beliefs are held (or have a life). It also calls for distinguishing among the “nodes” constituting the web, the most important of which is the distinction between normative propositions and empirical propositions. Both are 96

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grappling with alternative ways to understand the systematicity of language and belief. (3) Quine, in accord with his deep suspicion of anything metaphysical, rejects any form of necessity and certainty. All forms of alleged necessity, whether metaphysical, logical, or analytic, reflect pragmatic decisions concerning what we are willing to give up in the way of belief. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, is committed to the idea of conceptual necessity (grammatical propositions) and logical (and mathematical) necessity. His account of necessity is neither metaphysical nor narrowly conventionalist. Like Quine, he eschews any appeal to unacceptable metaphysical notions, but he also finds a purely pragmatic “unmasking” inadequate. This requires him to rethink the nature of necessity and the role of certainty, both of which he comes to understand in terms of the normativity of language-games.30 Developing Wittgenstein’s form of holism and account of necessity must await the discussion of rule-following, but we can press his domestication of reference. The foundational difference between Wittgenstein and Quine is the indispensability of culture in the accounts each develops. The normativity of language is tied to culture, something that Quine is blind to. Normative practices are cultural practices. As such, they are open to sanctions, are culturally heritable, and informed by the interest of the participants. Quine’s scientific naturalism permits only the explanatory resources of behaviorism. Sanctions are positive and negative reinforcements, learning is operant conditioning, and the interests of the participants are the drives and instincts of each individual. Quine fails to recognize that our acquisition of language is our enculturation into a society. This picture provides no way to account for the remarkable fact that we begin as initiate learners and become autonomous masters of language. Quine has no way to explain this shift from being the child to becoming the linguistically sophisticated adult. In ways having affinities with operant conditioning, the child learns to master language only within the context of a culture. Failure to grasp this essential point makes it mysterious how human beings can ever change from being creatures subject to conditioning to adults displaying their mastery of language through engagement in the world as scientists using the epistemic and logical apparatus of hypothesis formation and testing. Quine cannot but view this epistemic sophistication as itself a complex behavior explained in terms of behavioral regularities inculcated through a history of reinforcements. This is to read the child into the adult.

Objects and paradigms Wittgenstein completes his attack on the denotational theory of meaning in PI §§38–59. So far his discussion concerned ordinary objects and ordinary acts of ostension. From that, there is no base to build a philosophical theory of reference that will explain how an ordinary object or property fixes the 97

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meaning of a word for the recipient of an ostensive definition. The illusion that reference can provide such an explanation is the result, as we have seen, of conflating two quite commonplace practices: ostensive training—in which an association between word and object is effected in the process of training—and ostensive definition, which is a common way to explain the meaning of a name to one who is linguistically proficient. Ostensive training depends on our having certain natural reactions to the training we are given; and ostensive definition requires the use of a sortal to permit the proper interpretation of the pointing gesture. Ostension can become part of a philosophical theory of reference only if it is in some way mystified; and that, Wittgenstein thinks, comes about through treating the act of referring as a special kind of mental or spiritual process (cf. PI §37). This he will return to in the context of the private language argument. Wittgenstein completes his attack on the semantically foundational role of publicly ostended objects by turning his attention to a more sophisticated version, one that focuses on the temptation to introduce special objects to do the work that ordinary objects could not. It is at this point that Wittgenstein maintains that “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday” (PI §38), that is, when we deliberately move away from ordinary contexts of linguistic usage. Ostensive definition gives way to correlation between special objects and special names. Wittgenstein shifts from the epistemology of denotational theories of meaning—How do we associate a name with an object and thereby acquire the use of the name?—to the ontology of denotational theories—What sort of objects can be the meanings of words? The Tractatus took the ontological problem to be basic, leaving the epistemological problem to solve itself. In the Tractatus, it is the special nature of certain objects that enable them to be the meanings of words. These meaning-conferring objects are absolutely simple and indestructible. A key argument for simple objects given in the Tractatus is a reductio ad absurdum.31 If meaning is given by objects and all existence is contingent, Wittgenstein argues, then whether a particular proposition has a sense would depend on the contingent truth of yet another proposition, stating that the former proposition’s objects exist: “If the world had no substance [simple objects], then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true. In that case we could not sketch out any picture of the world (true or false)” (TLP 2.0211–2.0212). On a representational theory of language, the successful use of words requires that their corresponding objects exist. If all objects exist only contingently, then whether a proposition has a sense would depend upon the truth of another proposition stating that the meaning-conferring objects referred to by the first proposition actually exist. This, of course, initiates a regress, for whether the ontology stating proposition has a sense must in its turn rest upon yet another proposition stating that the objects that it depicts exist. The only way to stop such a regress requires that the objects that “make up 98

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the substance of the world” are simple and indestructible (TLP 2.021). Thus, ultimately, our words, if they are to constitute propositions with sense, must be correlated with simple indestructible objects. We can see affinities between this argument and Quine’s argument for ontological relativity. But where the Tractarian view opts for an ontology of simple objects, Quine, as we know, concludes that all ontological commitments are relative to a background theory (the Tractatus’ proposition that such objects exist) and so the regress can be stopped only pragmatically. The later Wittgenstein rejects both the Tractarian metaphysics of simple objects and Quinean ontological relativity. A key error of the Tractatus picture, on Wittgenstein’s diagnosis, is to mistake the linguistic role an object can play for metaphysical properties of the object itself. Wittgenstein’s method of showing this is, once again, to construct a simple language-game that appears to meet the requirements of the philosophical theory under investigation, and to show, with respect to that language-game, how the mistake is made. The two most important language-games32 he introduces to undermine the ontological claims made on behalf of the sophisticated denotational theory of meaning are languagegame PI §48 (a language depicting an arrangement of colored squares) and language-game PI §50 (the introduction of the standard meter stick).33 PI §48 is used to undermine the ideal of simplicity, and PI §50 is used to undermine the requirement of indestructible standard-setting objects. Just as we often explain what a word means by way of examples, so we also use objects as paradigms or exemplars to set (or display) standards of correct use. This is the home truth that is the source of the sophisticated denotational theory, but it cannot support the metaphysical claims made by that theory. It is only by taking paradigms outside the ordinary contexts in which they function that they can be seen to suggest anything like the ontology of the Tractatus. Language-game §48 is constructed to conform to the Tractatus conception of the relation of language to states of affairs. Signs are correlated with simple objects. The relation of the signs to each other shows the relation that holds among the objects themselves. Wittgenstein uses single-letter signs to correspond to a (constructed) world of colored squares. Wittgenstein’s objection is the now familiar one that there is no one way in principle to determine what counts as simple in this constructed world. What is simple is not absolute, but relative to the interests and point of the language-game in which the objects play a role. With respect to the display of colored squares, there are many different ways to identify what is simple and what is complex—given appropriate manipulation of the circumstances in which the display is introduced.34 The circumstances or context in which any event or object occurs bear on the way in which it is identified.35 Yet, important to Wittgenstein’s treatment of the problem of normative similarity is that, as a matter of fact, we find certain ways of responding completely natural. Although there is no principled way to draw the simple/complex distinction for all contexts and 99

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situations, we find it quite natural to identify the individual colored squares as the simples in this game: “The primary elements are the coloured squares. ‘But are these simple?’—I do not know what else you would have me call ‘the simples’, what would be more natural in this language-game” (PI §48). What we find natural to identify as the simple elements of a game has nothing to do with any metaphysical properties of the objects themselves, but much to do with our shared reactions to the display, and in particular with the techniques we share for identifying the simple elements in this game. We do not canvass the range of alternative circumstances that might lead to different ways of identifying the simple elements. Nor can we specify that range, as new unthought-of circumstances could arise that could lead us to alter our judgments. What is significant, according to Wittgenstein, is that our techniques for judging for simplicity (in this situation) are natural and shared. In this case, the conflation of means for identifying simple elements, techniques acquired in learning language, and the properties of the objects so identified is rendered plausible by our having ignored or been blind to the background technique without which there are no norms of identity or simplicity. What we find natural is not a matter of our being attuned to certain metaphysical properties of the objects we are confronting, but rather is a matter of how we have been trained into the social practice of certain language-games. That training creates a set of reactions and expectations without which there would be no way to judge for simplicity. The contextualist point that there are alternative circumstances in which the same objects or event would be judged very differently is tied to the notion of alternative practices or language-games. Language-game PI §48 thus attempts to show that what philosophers have taken as a metaphysical property of certain objects is indicative of what we find obvious in the exercise of techniques for identifying simplicity. This conflation produces arguments for absolute simplicity that track the requirement for a background of the obvious in our practices, but the philosophical ideal of absolute simplicity is not that of the obvious within a language-game. The conflation of techniques for identifying simplicity with the property of being simple results in the search for metaphysically simple objects. Wittgenstein’s diagnosis highlights the important role of the exercise of techniques for applying the contrast between simple and complex. The argument initiated here is completed by the so-called “private language argument.” The paradox of self-knowledge, the first of two paradoxes of consciousness (to be discussed in Chapter 9), will complete the argument against the notion that we can identify simple objects without a background context to support that identification. The second conflation argument, in PI §50, will be paired with the second paradox of consciousness—the paradox of sensation. Just as the conflations arguments of PI §§48 and 50 are close together in the text, so are the paradox of self-knowledge (better known as the private language argument) and the paradox of sensation (the beetle in the box argument). Let us turn now 100

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to the second language-game, that of the standard meter stick in Paris. This addresses the alleged need for indestructible objects if language is to be meaningful. On the sophisticated denotational theory, objects are needed that can themselves set standards and preserve meaning. Ordinary objects can do neither, and so extraordinary objects are required, objects that preserve meaning in virtue of their indestructibility. To examine this claim, once again Wittgenstein selects a language-game which has an important analogy with the metaphysical picture of indestructible simple objects:36 “There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris” (PI §50). The analogy lies with the claim that an indestructible object is one to which “we can attribute neither being nor non-being” (PI §50). This is because, if everything that we call “being” and “non-being” consists in the existence and non-existence of connexions between elements, it makes no sense to speak of an element’s being (non-being). (PI §50) The force of the analogy turns on why Wittgenstein thinks that the standard meter stick, preserved in a special vault in Paris, can’t be said to be one meter long or not one meter long. This is because that very piece of metal was introduced to determine the one-meter length. It does so because, we, or some authorized group of ourselves, stipulated that this piece of metal sets the standard. Here is a case in which the loss of the meter stick would render the word “meter” (which is the length of that very stick, by stipulation) meaningless. Unless, of course, we introduce a new standard for meter length (which, in fact, has been done more than once37). Whether the object used as the standard of measurement is the rigid metal bar locked in a Parisian vault or a proportion of the earth’s circumference, the point is that we can’t measure a meter without a standard meter. Measurement is done by reference to that common standard, some object with stable rigid properties that render it appropriate for this kind of use. “The same length” just is whatever is as long as the particular object (in this case a metal bar) that is used as the standard. The adoption of a particular bar as the standard for a meter can occur only against the background of a technique for comparing objects by measuring them. Though objects selected for such purposes must have certain properties, such as being stable and rigid, these are not metaphysical properties and certainly don’t guarantee the indestructibility of the object. Using a particular metal bar as the standard for the meter length “is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a metre-rule” (PI §50). Examination of the conventional use of an object as a standard is illuminating not only for what it shows about the relation between objects and words but also for what it can show of its own limitations. 101

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Stipulative convention does show how an association between an object and a word can be deliberately formed to set the criteria for the proper use of the word. Painters might set up color standards by using particular color samples as paradigms, dog shows could use particular dogs to set the standards for judging other dogs, and so on. But stipulative convention does this only against the background of ongoing language-games. So, the association of word and object, which fixes norms, cannot in general be the conventional assignment of a regulative role to the object with which the word is associated. Explicit adoption of a convention cannot be the sole means by which an object acquires a normative or regulative role any more than ostensive definition can fix meaning de novo. The moral Wittgenstein draws from such cases can be put like this: This sample is an instrument of the language used in ascriptions of colour. In this language-game it is not something that is represented, but is a means of representation.—And just this goes for an element in language-game (48) when we name it by uttering the word “R”: this gives this object a role in our language-game; it is now a means of representation. And to say “If it did not exist, it could have no name” is to say as much and as little as: if this thing did not exist, we could not use it in our languagegame. (PI §50) What philosophers have taken as a metaphysical requirement of objects if they are to set a standard is in fact the truism that if a particular object didn’t exist, it couldn’t be used as a paradigm. That is the explicit diagnosis that Wittgenstein renders; but what also is revealed is that objects can be introduced as paradigms only against a background practice. Like ordinary ostensive definition, paradigmatic objects presuppose the very languagegames they were to explain. But there is another perspective that supports the illusion of metaphysically necessary items. This illusion also is a function of ignoring an important dimension of the background, namely, that which stands fast, that which is certain. In considering our practices of measuring objects, the techniques and results of such measurements hold fast the metal bar’s normative role. A misunderstanding of background certainties (like this) leads to assigning a metaphysically special role to the meter-standard. This might be pursued in the name of a transcendental argument. But Wittgenstein is turning an apparent transcendental argument for indestructible simple objects into an anti-transcendental argument in which the metaphysically necessary object vanishes. Only commonplace truisms remain. Neither the naive Augustinian conception of the semantic role of the object nor the more sophisticated conception of object as standard answers 102

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the problem of normative similarity. This is not to deny that objects are used as examples in ostensive definitions or become instruments of representation in the way that the meter stick does. Nor is it to deny that, as a matter of fact, the association of word and object obtained in initiate training is an important part of the way in which we learn language. But none of these explain the linguistic or normative role of objects that philosophers have sought in articulating denotational theories of meaning. The focus on the object, in isolation from its context of use, has served to hide the background against which the object can be a part of language. The example used in ostensive definition and the normative role assigned an object as paradigm presuppose concepts and practices that they were thought to ground. The color-chart game (PI §48) reveals a conflation between what is simple and what are the means for identifying simples, rooted in a failure to recognize the significance of background technique in distinguishing the simple from the complex. The standard meter stick game (PI §50) conflates what is represented—a meter length—with the means of representation—the metal bar—mistaking background certainty for metaphysical grounding in indestructible and inherently normative simples. Thus, we see the three primary conflation arguments in PI §§6, 48 and 50 each implicate one of the three dimensions of the background in the diagnosis of error: ostension and stage-setting, recognizing simples and techniques of use, and the role of standards and background certainties (propositions that hold fast). Another way to think of these three is in terms of acquiring (learning) language, using language (techniques), and sustaining social practice.38 There is a temptation, one that will recur in Wittgenstein’s discussion of sensations and visual images, to assign memory the epistemic task of securing the normative work of the paradigmatic sample, a sample that might not continue to exist. “But what if no such sample is part of the language, and we bear in mind the colour (for instance) that a word stands for?” (PI §56). On this view, a memory-image is to perform the role of sample or paradigm. Our reliance on memory itself, however, turns on the criterion for remembering correctly. Memory can be overridden. It isn’t inevitably “the highest court of appeal” (PI §56). Wittgenstein does not reject the appeal to memory. In fact he agrees that “when we forget which colour this is the name of, it loses its meaning for us. … And the situation then is comparable with that in which we have lost a paradigm which was an instrument of our language” (PI §57). Words can become useless by our forgetting what they mean as well as by losing the standard that determines their use. But this role for memory does not show that mental images are special in a way that physical objects are not. Moreover, the loss of such mental imagery no more supports the idea that there must be indestructible objects than does the loss of a physical paradigm. This brief journey into the domain of skeptical arguments recurs in the midst of the paradoxes of consciousness at PI §265. We will return to 103

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PI §56 when we discuss whether a “subjective justification” is needed to buttress what we seem to know. A point to note now (and later) is just how unusual it is for Wittgenstein to raise epistemological questions. In sum, though Wittgenstein acknowledges the role of objects as a means of representation, and so as much a part of language as words and rules of grammar, objects that serve this function cannot solve the problem of normativity. Their use as examples and paradigms presupposes mastery of concepts and practices. Description of this use does not add up to a philosophically interesting theory of meaning. Yet the example provided by the standard meter bar supports a different analogy for our judgments of category membership, not that such judgments are backed by indestructible objects, but rather that such judgments are part of the calibration of the participant within a language-game. Judging “that’s a red cube” in the presence of a red cube is not a matter of “red” denoting a color patch and “cube” denoting a shape. Rather the sentence “that’s a red cube” is an alignment of the subject to a state of affairs in the way that the meter bar in alignment with an object marks the length “one meter.” “Red cube” is a line of measurement on the human “bar.” Individual marks are fixed by means of training into a social practice.

Ostensive teaching and social practices Language is learned, and some kind of word–object association is fundamental to any language. Ostensive definition, which seemed the simplest and most plausible way to account for both of these features of language, cannot perform either task. It is an efficient device for adding to the recipient’s fund of usable words. But, as we saw in the previous section, this efficiency is an effect of cognitive stage-setting and mastery of techniques. A language-game is in place with a history, immediate context, and competent participants. Ostensive definition is so efficient because it has so little to explain. And precisely because it has so little to explain, it cannot play a role in accounting for first language acquisition. So, although ostension can establish a referential link between a word and an object (or property) for the recipient, it is only a very humble form of reference. It is certainly not a semantically primitive device for fixing meaning of words. It is utterly domestic, usable only when we are already comfortably at home with our own language. Naming instructs a recipient in certain norms of the language. But it is the normative dimension itself that Wittgenstein is seeking to understand better. It is this that he thinks traditional philosophical theories have misunderstood and that looking to the domain of the novice will help clarify. When a child learns to talk, she “uses such primitive forms of language” that “the teaching of language is not explanation, but training” (PI §5). Learning the use of a word in connection with an object is better assimilated to associating word and object rather than to confirming a hypothesis about the use of a natural 104

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language word or its translation into some language of thought. The learner, however, is not a tabula rasa. Ostensive teaching requires the learner to have certain behavioral and perceptual capacities and abilities; otherwise the training will fail. However, these capacities cannot be the distinctively linguistic competencies acquired in mastering a first language, without generating an explanatory regress. Initiate learning can only appeal to cognitive and behavioral capacities that are significantly less sophisticated than those acquired. The learner must be able to discriminate behaviorally objects within her environment, but this does not require that the learner use standards, exemplars or the semantic notion of naming to do so. In particular, the novice is precisely one who cannot engage in first-order normative practices, let alone secondorder semantic or epistemic practices. First learning to participate in a game cannot require mastery of any metagame. Ostensive training, unlike ostensive definition, does not impute higher cognitive or epistemic competencies to the novice in order to explain lower-level forms of behavior.39 There is an important cognitive division of labor in which the master of the practice provides the background competence while the child is trained in the use of words. The child is treated as a linguistic partner before she has the competence to be one. Her holophrastic sentences are treated as judgments and requests before they are such. This is done by assimilating the child’s utterances to the adults’ full linguistic competence. That full competence includes the logico-syntactic skills that enable the speaker to recognize a range of alternative sentences in which the word can occur. The contrastive force provided by these alternatives enables the adult to treat the child’s holophrastic sentence as now a request and now a report. It makes it natural to translate the child’s words into the adult’s longer sentence, just as it was natural to translate the builder’s cry “Slab!” into “Bring me a slab!” The child, on the other hand, is alternative-blind. The child is learning to adapt her behavior to norms set by the adult use of words, but without recognizing that her behavior is normatively guided. Her lack of cognitive alternatives is critical to the success of the training, to the child’s coming to take things in a certain way as a matter of course. This lack of alternatives is what sharply distinguishes the recipient of ostensive training from the recipient of ostensive definition. The use of a sortal is not required, for alternative interpretations of the pointing gesture are not available to the novice. Training builds, not on prior understanding, but on the very lack of cognitive resources. That, and the novice’s innate repertoire of perceptual and behavioral sensitivities and her susceptibility to such training. As a matter of fact, we do respond with aversion to cliffs and loud noises and with attraction to smiling faces and red objects. We are responsive to sanctions, both positive and negative. This responsiveness is the novice’s point of entry into the language-game. It is this that allows for the association of word and object without an appeal to sortals or the semantic apparatus of naming. 105

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What is distinctive, then, about the learning situation is that the learner does not have the necessary background competencies that make what she does naming (when the child calls out “ball” in the presence of a ball) or counting or identifying a pain. That background structure can only be provided by the social environment personified in the actions of the teacher or parent. The significance of this is that the “judgments” of the child and the judgments of the adult do not have the same status. The status of the naive learner’s utterances (that, for example, they are taken as judgments or requests) is a function of the status extended to those utterances by masters of that practice. The initiate learner speaks, makes judgments, requests, and the like only by virtue of a courtesy extended to the learner by those who have already mastered the practice. What this position underscores is the linguistic and cognitive dependence that the initiate learner has on the teacher, and by extension the social environment. The language-game of the novice is primitive relative to that of the master in the way that the builders game is primitive. Language mastery is in the first place a practical skill acquired through a trained association between word and object in a socially structured context of action and interaction with other participants. The context is that of the language-game in which the novice’s performances are individuated by reference to some norm, standard, exemplar or rule. The objects used as norms (whether formula as rule, post as signpost, or rose as exemplar) are open to multiple interpretations if considered in isolation from their normative contexts. And the actions themselves (writing down a particular number, taking the left fork in a road, or gathering more of the same) do not have any innate biological “direction” or purpose. This opens action to the possibility of error, itself the mark of normative practices. Contributions to normativity come from both the novice and the master. Alternative uses of words, alternative interpretations, and the possibility of mistake belong to the domain of the master of language. The alternatives belonging to the novice are of a different sort altogether; the novice can be quick or slow to learn, ineducable, or neglected. As said before, the initiate learner is blind to cognitive alternatives. Yet that very blindness is necessary for becoming a participant, for acquiring the background understanding against which full semantic, cognitive and epistemic competence can be exercised. Though the child’s behavior is causally shaped by training into a practice, nonetheless such practices are not themselves law governed, that is, they are not causally determined. The causal necessity for being acculturated into normative practices is a crucial part of our human natural history. Precisely because our behavior is not fully determined innately, the regularities that are necessary to human life can only be normative regularities that are socially sustained. Thus, normatively guided behavior is distinct from instinctual or biologically determined behavior. It is important to be explicit 106

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in distinguishing normative regularities from biological regularities, as the latter kind of behavior also can, in an attenuated sense, be described as correct or incorrect. The apparent directionality of biologically or evolutionarily driven behaviors can be called “natural teleology.”40 Many try to exploit this as the basis for a program of naturalizing the semantics for mental representations41 or providing an evolutionary account of norms.42 Such behavior serves to meet (or fail to meet) certain biological needs and drives of the organism. When such behavior fails to meet such needs, it can be said to be “incorrect.” But the “correctness” of such behavior has to do only with its being biologically or evolutionarily explicable. It is not correct relative to a standard or norm of correctness or in connection with an agent’s goals or purposes.43 Without such biological needs and capacities, learning to master normative practices simply could not take place. But this biological competence is not to be confused with the normative competence that is displayed in rule-governed practice. There are two major issues that need addressing if this description of language acquisition is to be taken as relevant to philosophical questions concerning the meaningful use of language. First, a very natural suspicion arises that what has been loosely described as the biological and behavioral capacities of the child that are necessary even for ostensive training—that is, necessary for associating sounds and objects (of a kind)—must be so cognitively rich that the distinction Wittgenstein introduces between ostensive definition and ostensive training is very thin. This comes down to the objection that, whatever Wittgenstein’s scruples are about the Augustinian picture reproducing the phenomena to be explained, a great deal of cognitive structure must be innate. The second issue raises the problem of bootstrapping, how does the linguistically naive become linguistically competent? What changes occur to, or in, the individual who becomes linguistically competent? How does the individual become an autonomous practitioner of a social normative practice? This raises the question of how to draw the boundary between empirical inquiry and philosophical investigation. Many would object that philosophy is irrelevant to this entire matter. Language acquisition is something that must await empirical investigation. Only empirical study can tell us how much cognitive structure is innate, how much is acquired, and in what sort of order. This attempt to insulate discussions of nativism and the bootstrapping problem from philosophical investigation involves a fallacy. This way of arguing assumes that there is a sharp and clear distinction between what is an empirical matter and what is a conceptual or philosophical matter. But this distinction is very difficult to maintain in this context precisely because the cognitive structures hypothesized by the empirically minded are themselves not susceptible to direct empirical investigation. They are forever and 107

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always hypothetical—there is only indirect evidence for them. Much of the argument concerns the independent plausibility of the theory that is being tested. Thus, the debate is often conducted at very abstract levels concerning the coherence and plausibility of the theory schemas that are available. While Wittgenstein avoids constructing any theory of learning, relying only on descriptions of what can be observed in instances of initiate learning, nonetheless he raises potent objections to strongly nativist accounts. Moreover, his descriptions of initiate learning and where in the text he gives them raise questions about the legitimacy of drawing a sharp distinction between description and explanation. For Wittgenstein, descriptions of how we are trained can be explanations for the material inferences we make. A second factor in blurring the distinction between the empirical and the conceptual in this area is that the hypothesized cognitive structures have themselves a normative structure. That is why the word “cognitive” is used rather than “neural” or “behavioral.” A cognitive structure is a normative structure. The normativity of our practices is the target of Wittgenstein’s inquiries. It is important to keep in mind the difference between inquiry into the specific norms of a practice and inquiry into the character of normativity itself. The former is an empirical sociological or psychological matter in which one is concerned with the de facto norms that underwrite a practice or an individual’s actions. Wittgenstein’s target is quite distinct. He is concerned with understanding what it is to engage in normative practices at all. It is the Kantian problem of how to draw and understand the distinction between “is” and “ought.” These remarks are provisional at this stage. The plausibility of this position depends greatly on the account of the background against which moves are made in a language-game. This requires a fuller presentation of Wittgenstein’s views on rule-following, logical and mathematical necessity, and certainty.

Notes 1 See Geach, Mental Acts, for the classic articulation and defense of this line of argument. 2 Wittgenstein sometimes speaks of ostensive teaching: “with different training the same ostensive teaching of these words would have effected a quite different understanding” (PI §6). Even here training is fundamental to initiate learning. 3 Sellars, “Is There a Synthetic A Priori?” and “Some Reflections on Language Games.” 4 Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality, 312. 5 Ibid., 312. 6 Ibid., 333. 7 Ibid., 329. 8 Ibid., 334. 9 Ibid., 334.

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10 This is also to be found in the paradox of interpretation argument and the paradoxes of consciousness also raise problems of normative similarity and can be seen to involve indeterminacies of their own. 11 Quine, Word and Object, ch. 2; and “Ontological Relativity,” in his Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. Also see Quine, “On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation”; and “Empirically Equivalent Systems.” Quine’s argument for the indeterminacy of translation and his argument for ontological relativity are distinct. Thus, developing Wittgenstein’s alternative use of indeterminacy considerations will require that we keep these two arguments distinct. 12 Although every discussion Quine has of the indeterminacy of translation and reference involves a comparison with the situation of the child first learning language, his Roots of Reference has the most extensive treatment of this comparison. 13 Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” 14 Quine does come to modify his radical holism in later work. See Quine, Pursuit of Truth. 15 David Lewis brings out the crucial work done by this assumption in his important article, “Radical Interpretation.” Also see Searle, “Indeterminacy, Empiricism, and the First Person.” See Hookway, Quine, for a more general discussion of the importance of scientific realism for Quine’s views. Lastly, see H.J. Glock, a leading interpreter of Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson. 16 These issues will be taken up in Chapters 7 and 8 on intentionality and scientific psychology. 17 See Quine, Word and Object, 32–4. Quine defines the affirmative stimulus meaning of a sentence S as “the class Σ of all those stimulations that would prompt assent to S” (p. 34). 18 Quine, Roots of Reference, 28. 19 Fodor, Language of Thought, 59. 20 The internal problems that arise for the language of thought hypothesis are serious. If one follows Fodor’s own arguments chronologically from The Language of Thought through Modularity of Mind and Psychosemantics, one will find that the large claims of The Language of Thought give way finally to a very restricted domain of sensory modules (and the language module), modules replete with shallow forms of representation. 21 This is the argument of “Ontological Relativity,” Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. Though in my brief discussion the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference arguments are treated in a continuous fashion, they are, of course, distinct arguments. The full argument for the indeterminacy of translation turns on the status of the auxiliary hypotheses that introduce the apparatus of individuation that is necessary to the construction of a translation manual. Quine’s recognition of the fundamental importance of specifying the conditions for individuation of our empirical words concurs with the importance Wittgenstein assigns to the problems of normative similarity. 22 This conflicts with another of Quine’s claims, namely, that translation begins at home. Clearly we cannot begin any translation without taking something for granted. Our home language, it would seem, is what we are individually inclined to say. 23 Ibid., 31. Quine’s repeated phrase “conditioning or induction” is telling, and speaks to the difficulty addressed just above, in the first section. The choice that Quine implicitly gives us between the conditioning of the child and the inductive extrapolation of the adult disguises that choice by the suggestion that they are

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really the same, and so we have the bridge from the conditioned novice to the epistemically sophisticated master of the practice. Their conceptions of what counts as a “natural reaction” do not completely dovetail. Quine restricts the notion to our physiological sensory sensitivities while Wittgenstein uses this notion in a much broader way to cover not only sensory capabilities but also ways of reacting to teaching, for example. This problem is now clearly recognized as a central issue for any naturalized semantics, though under a different name. It is the problem of misrepresentation that focuses on the normative role that is played by mental representations (or stimulus meaning). It is interesting to note that Fodor, in his later attempts to solve this problem, has endorsed Skinnerian semantics as fundamentally correct. The semantic relationship between representation and property is a nomological correlation. In this way Fodor hopes to shift a number of problems about his naturalized denotational theory to questions about the mediating mechanisms. What matters for semantics is the existence of the appropriate correlations; how these correlations are sustained can be very complicated, involving not only complicated physiological mechanisms within the person but also social institutions which structure how words can be used. This is a remarkable concession on Fodor’s part, one that is much deeper than he acknowledges. See Fodor, Theory of Content and Other Essays, esp. essay 2. See Davidson, “Reality without Reference,” where he develops a related line of argument. Also see his argument from “triangulation” that he develops in “Rational Animals”; and “Second Person.” Dummett, Frege, 596. See Sellars “Is There a Synthetic A Priori?” 317; and “Some Reflections on Language Games,” 330. Brandom develops this Sellarsian idea in detail in his Making It Explicit, in which material inference is the very foundation of his inferentialist theory of language. See Chapter 6. See Chapter 7. See Fogelin, Wittgenstein, 14–17. There is a third as well that I shall not discuss here. This is the use of an individual leaf as a sample for leaves in general (PI §73–4). Some might object to calling the use of the color chart or the standard meter stick a language-game on the ground that these are not artificial cases constructed for a philosophical end. What is important is not whether Wittgenstein made them up, but the distinctive way in which he uses these very simple cases. They meet the criteria for being language-games: they are simple instantiations of a philosophical theory; and they do not require the use of proprietary terms. They play an important methodological role for Wittgenstein’s diagnostic arguments. See Rosenberg, “Wittgenstein’s Self Criticisms,” for an excellent discussion of language-game PI §48. Rosenberg argues, convincingly, that as a critique of the picture theory of meaning, it fails in that it does not correctly represent the picture theory itself. See, for example, PI §584: “A coronation is the picture of pomp and dignity. Cut one minute of this proceeding out of its surroundings: the crown is being placed on the head of the king in his coronation robes—But in different surroundings gold is the cheapest of metals, its gleam is thought vulgar. There the fabric of the robe is cheap to produce. A crown is a parody of a respectable hat. And so on.” In this case, Wittgenstein can only construct a language-game that has analogies with what is demanded by the philosophical theory. This is because there are no

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indestructible objects, and so he cannot construct a language-game that meets this requirement. This is unlike his examination of simples and ostensive definition. The history of the standard meter is quite interesting. In 1790 Charles de Talleyrand, then Bishop of Autun, introduced a standard unit of length equal to that of one full swing of a pendulum per second. Three years later a new unit of length was introduced: one 10 millionth of the length of the arc from the equator to the North Pole. In May 1793 this was named a “metre.” In June 1799, the French National Archives in Paris commissioned the construction of a platinum reference standard—the Meter of the Archives—which is the standard meter stick to which Wittgenstein refers in PI §50. See “Metric System,” 1997 Grolier’s Multimedia Encyclopedia for a short history of the introduction of the metric system. What is left out of this picture is the argument of PI §22, which is directed to the systematic features of language. Frege’s idea of the primacy of assertion is to be replaced with the multiplicity and heterogeneity of natural language. Current theories of behavior in terms of underlying cognitive processes and maps certainly suggest a very different picture. The trend is towards explaining low-level behavior with very sophisticated forms of computational processing. I will come back to how these empirical theories relate to Wittgenstein’s understanding of psychological and mental processes and states. In using the expression “natural teleology,” there is no intention to invoke a preDarwinian notion of Nature’s purposes or design. Rather it is a shorthand way of acknowledging that organic systems do have biological functions, selected for by the mechanisms of evolution. For a criticism of even this weaker conception of a “natural teleology,” see Searle, Construction of Social Reality, esp. ch. 1. See Dretske, Explaining Behavior; and Naturalizing the Mind; Millikan, Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories; and Pappineau, Reality and Representation. See Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. This is, of course, open to debate. There are numerous attempts now to provide a naturalized semantics which will ground the basic normative contrast between correct and incorrect. One of the more promising of these strategies is the biological one in which its advocates attempt to use “natural teleology” as sufficient for normativity. The preferred description is to provide a theory of mental representations.

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The subliming of logic Frege’s Idea and the paradox of thought Davidson’s challenge: meaning and logical form The limits of systematicity In Chapter 2, we saw that Wittgenstein’s first target in the Investigations is Frege’s idea, by which Wittgenstein meant the universality of assertoric content—the proposition. The proposition is assigned just those properties that result from conflating a sentence fragment (that the ball is red) and a sentence (the ball is red). The proposition has constituent structure without actually having syntactic structure. It points to states of affairs without asserting them (as that would take us back to assertions). Yet it constitutes the sense that determines the referent of a sentence of natural language. “A proposition—that’s something very queer!” (PI §93). Identifying the confusions and mistakes is only the first step in the full diagnostic argument. There is still much that has to be done to show that the introduction of the proposition is indeed a mistake rather than a profound discovery. But at this stage what might be said is that the objections to ostensive definition vindicate the context principle, the thesis that the assertoric sentence is the smallest unit of semantic meaning and with it the idea of logical form. In short, troubles for the attempt to ground meaning on reference might be seen to support the primacy of assertoric form. Fregean systematicity does, in this sense, give use precedence over reference. How, then, do Wittgenstein’s arguments against the primacy of assertoric form, shallow naming, and the causal associations achieved through training in a practice come together to defeat the Fregean picture and to insinuate an alternative?

The subliming of logic Wittgenstein asks in PI §89, In what sense is logic something sublime? For there seemed to pertain to logic a peculiar depth—a universal significance. Logic lay, it 112

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seemed at the bottom of all sciences.—For logical investigation explores the nature of all things. The subliming of logic takes us back to the Tractatus and is now the focus of considerable debate particularly over how its ontology of simple objects ought to be understood.1 The debate over whether Wittgenstein held a realist ontology or a constructive view (or neither of these) is, at its core, a debate over whether use or reference is explanatorily fundamental in accounting for meaning. The following passages are cited in defense of use: 3.327 A sign does not determine a logical form unless it is taken together with its logico-syntactical employment. 5.557 The application of logic decides what elementary propositions there are. Passages like these seem to stand in opposition to the theory of names and the ontology of simple objects to which that theory is related: 2.02 Objects are simple. 2.021 Objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot be composite. 3.221 Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. 3.203 A name names an object. The object is its meaning. To put the debate in its starkest terms, the first set of passages suggests that what counts as a name is a function of how it is used in the employment of propositions. What object a name denotes, and what counts as a name, is determined by the range of propositions in which the name can occur. The second set of passages, on the other hand, supports a different order of explanation. There it seems that the object sets the standard for correct employment of the name. The internal properties of the simple object determine the range of propositions within which a name can significantly occur. H. Ishiguru, in her important 1962 paper “The Reference and Use of Names,” initiates this dispute concerning the proper interpretation of names in the Tractatus.2 She rejects the standard realist interpretation of the Tractatus, arguing that the use of an expression as a name (that is, as unanalyzable) is more fundamental than reference since it is the use of propositions that fixes the referent of the name. This way of interpreting the Tractatus brings it much closer to Wittgenstein’s later views in two ways. The first and obvious similarity is that it favors use over reference. This suggests that a sign can be individuated as a name, not by its relation to an individual object, but only by its connection with the logical apparatus of its use. Names are those signs that occur in elementary propositions 113

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(identified by their syntactic shape and role); and they are the only symbols in elementary propositions (all other “elements” occurring only as devices to show the relations among the symbols). Second, in favoring use over reference, this reading eliminates any explanatory work to be done by the simple objects. An object just is whatever is picked out through the proper application of a name. Even so, though this interpretation brings the Tractatus closer to the Investigations, it is still a very different conception of language. Use is logico-syntactic application, and as such is tied to the ideal of logical form. And the conception of object is simply not to be found in the later work. The Investigations’ criticism of the explanatory role of logical form is directed against a conception of logical form that is metaphysically robust: “logic [is] … at the bottom of all the sciences.” But, in order to appreciate his critique, we need to understand how the apparently incompatible passages concerning simple objects can be reconciled. That reconciliation lies with the idea that pictures and what they picture share logical form. This, as we shall see, makes thought (“a proposition with a sense”; TLP 4) the pivotal explanatory idea. Since a proposition with a sense just is a propositional sign in a projective relation to the world (that is, “applied and thought out”), a thought is a proposition. Propositions, then, are the linking medium between language as a logico-syntactically structured system of signs and the world as the “totality of facts” (TLP 1.1). It should be noted how much this incompatibility (between an ontology of simple objects and the context principle according to which logical form is shown through application) foreshadows some of the strains within the primacy of assertoric form thesis. As we saw in Chapter 2, the proposition is assigned just those properties that enable it to (apparently) overcome the confusions implicit in conflating “It is asserted that p” and “It is asserted: p.” A sentence fragment is identified with a sentence. The notion of “assertion” is ambiguous. It can be understood as the action of asserting a content and it can also be understood as the asserted content itself.3 I have attempted to avoid this ambiguity by distinguishing assertion and assertoric form: assertoric form is assertion without the asserting. Even if we succeed with avoiding ambiguity (and it is not clear that even this much has been achieved), we need the proposition to solidify the view that we can have assertion without asserting. And even the notion of a proposition is used in differing ways: as a proposition sign in projective relation to the world; as the shadowy intermediary between sentences and the world; and as the thought expressed by an assertoric sentence. These confusions and ambiguities persist, however, and will be the undoing of the notion of the proposition (or thought). A proposition is an assertoric content, identified by a that-clause, without being an assertion and so shareable with nonassertoric speech acts; and yet having a content that is identified in terms of states of affairs, that things are thus-and-so. What we can note for now is that “proposition,” as 114

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Wittgenstein discusses it in PI §§19–22, can be identified with something like Fregean sense while “proposition” in the Tractatus (closer to assertoric content) is quite clearly defined as a propositional-sign in projective relation to the world (and so closer to asserting). Though these sound distinct, we will see that they coincide in Wittgenstein’s final argument against the primacy of assertion, the paradox of thought. “Logic pervades the world” (TLP 5.61), Wittgenstein tells us. Logic pervades the world not by the world’s being governed by truths or principles of logic (tautologies). Rather the isomorphism of logical form between world and language shows itself through the “logico-syntactical employment” of the sign. Logic is immanent in the employment of language. But, to explain how language can have this immanent form requires that the world itself have logical form. Alternative explanations, which appeal, for example, to the intentions of a speaker or to independently existing logical principles, fail because each initiates an explanatory regress. Speaker intentions or the use of laws of logic require thought, which has the very logical structure that is supposed to be explained by the appeal to the intentions or use of principles in the first place. No explanatory progress has been made. The Tractatus needs the ontological theory to explain how one part of reality (linguistic signs) could represent another part (a possible state of affairs). At base, representation consists in an isomorphism between two systems. The simplest version is one in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of one system and the elements of another system. The correspondence is assured through associating elements from each system in pairs. Changes in the elements from one system are mirrored by corresponding changes in the elements of the other system. Such an isomorphism is symmetrical; there would be no representational direction from one system to the other.4 This simple isomorphism is inadequate to the explanatory goals of the Tractatus. If the referring relationship were understood in terms of a simple invariable association between a sign in the representing system and an object in the world system, this would give the association an explanatory role for some things but it would not be a representational relation. What is needed is not covariation, but variation while nonetheless retaining an isomorphism between the two systems. This is not just a version of the problem of misrepresentation that is so central to debates concerning the nature of mental representations. The problem of misrepresentation raises the issue concerning how error or mistake is possible, where this possibility is taken as the mark of a normative relation. But the Tractatus is looking to accommodate something other than a failure of covariation due to mistake. The Tractatus seeks an explanation of contentful thought that is independent of whether the thought is true or false, and so independent of contingently occurring covariation or its lapse. The naturalistic program takes de facto empirical covariation as its baseline for providing an account of 115

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representation. For the Tractatus, this is a doomed program. The isomorphism that is required for representation is that of shared logical possibilities.5 It is because an isomorphism of implicit possibilities is required, that the sign alone cannot determine its logical form but only the sign in its logico-syntactic employment. The occurrence of signs in syntactically appropriate strings must be isomorphic to possibilities of occurrence of objects in states of affairs. This can only be done if the signs and objects share logical form, i.e., the same range of possible combinations. Objects must have sui generis properties, that is, internal properties, that fix the range of logically possible states of affairs in which they can occur. Such simple objects are invoked as the locus of possibilities. That is what it is for logical form to be immanent in the world. So, the ontology of simple objects cannot be eliminated without forfeiting the explanation of representation. Yet equally the logical form of signs can only be determined in their employment: “The application of logic decides what elementary propositions there are” (TLP 5.557). The reason for this is twofold. The first, discussed above, is that simple association and covariation are inadequate to constitute the representing relation. Further, de facto covariation is theoretically irrelevant to representation. The application of logic is displayed in the complete analysis of any complex proposition. The second reason turns on there being an asymmetry between the two isomorphic systems. Thought and language picture the world, but the world does not picture thought. If the two systems, thought and reality, were identical with respect to logical form, this would require them to consist of objects whose internal properties were the same. But then, as Wittgenstein says, “it is quite impossible to indicate one of them. For if there is nothing to distinguish a thing, I cannot distinguish it, since if I do it will be distinguished after all” (TLP 2.02331). This variant on Leibniz’ principle of the identity of indiscernibles requires a difference between signs and the objects they go proxy for. Signs have the logical form of the objects they go proxy for; that is the signs’ pictorial form. But objects do not have the logical form of the counterpart signs. This is because the sign itself, as a part of the world, can configure in states of affairs that may not correspond to possible configurations of the objects designated. This is a way of pointing out that one cannot assess the representing role of a sign merely from scrutiny of the sign qua complex object. Only the sign in its syntactic employment “reaches right out” to its object. Thus, the Tractatus account of representation requires both the ontology of simple objects and the employment of signs through which their pictorial form is individuated. There is one further crucial element that is necessary to effect this reconciliation between the claims made on behalf of ontology and the claims made for the application of logic. This is the work achieved by thought. Here a thought is a propositional sign in a projective relation to the world.6 That a certain complex of objects is a sign is a function of its syntactic structure. That a complex of objects with 116

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syntactic structure says that so-and-so is a function of its logical application to the world, that is, to its being thought. This is the logico-syntactic application of which Wittgenstein speaks. We now see that thought or the proposition appears as the special intermediary between the syntactic strings that constitute a language and possible states of affairs in the world. Propositions are the vehicles by which possibilities can be expressed, that is, the propositional sign reaches out to the world, while not always connecting with the actual world. This reconciliation turns on the explanatory work assigned to logical form and the special way it is shared between reality and language. Wittgenstein’s later attack on logical form as explanatory is a repudiation not only of the Tractatus conception of language and thought, but also of its conception of what needs to be explained. According to the Tractatus, the systematic features of language explain meaningful use of language (reference falls out of logico-syntactic use), and explanation of this systematicity requires a metaphysically robust notion of logical form and the proposition. Logical form must be a sui generis feature of the world, the internal properties of simple objects. This explanatory role produces what Wittgenstein sees as the subliming of logic. His later assessment is that a sublimed logic is not a condition for the meaningful use of language but a requirement that philosophers impose upon a theory of meaningfulness. Wittgenstein aims to show that treating logic as something sublime leads to paradox. In showing this, Wittgenstein rejects his Tractarian view of the significance of Fregean systematicity. He takes a decidedly deflationary stance towards this feature of language, as we saw in the second section of Chapter 2 (“Wittgenstein’s Rejection of ‘Frege’s Idea’”). Not only does the picture of language as a fully articulated structure distort our descriptions of language use, it also directs our attention away from the background that is indispensable to participation in language games. Now to the paradox of thought.

Frege’s Idea and the paradox of thought Wittgenstein asks “in what sense is logic something sublime?” (PI §89; cf. 38). Kant’s characterization of the sublime gives some insight into this choice of description. The sublime, Kant tells us, “is to be found in an object … so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality.”7 Kant distinguishes the mathematical sublime and the dynamic sublime. Both involve an awareness of the limitations of our imagination that itself intimates that which transcends experience and is absolutely great. The mathematically sublime is referred to our faculty of reason while the dynamically sublime is referred to the faculty of desire and its relation to our moral lives. The Tractatus views logic as mathematically sublime. Kant’s analysis of this move to the sublime is that 117

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because there is a striving in our imagination towards progress ad infinitum, while reason demands absolute totality, as a real idea, that same inability on the part of our faculty for the estimation of the magnitude of things in the world of sense to attain to this idea, is the awakening of a feeling of a supersensible faculty within us.8 Kant’s analysis is that the notion of the mathematically sublime is a result of trying to combine the idea of “a progress ad infinitum” with the idea of an “absolute totality.” The former is the work of imagination and the latter is a demand of reason. It is clear in the Tractatus that Wittgenstein experienced just this Kantian sense of the sublime in his regard for the explanatory reach of logic. Logical form as a totality, the space of possibilities, satisfies the demand of reason, while logical syntax addresses the “striving in our imagination towards progress ad infinitum.” This sense of the mathematical sublime gives rise to a “feeling of a supersensible faculty within us.” This feeling is captured in the Tractatus with the identification of a metaphysical self that transcends the limits of the possible, giving rise to mystic insight into the nature of reality as a whole (“Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical”; TLP 6.45). This contrasts with an earlier claim that “[i]t is not humanly possible to gather immediately from [everyday language] what the logic of language is” (TLP 4.002). Kant’s account of the sublime accords with Wittgenstein’s claim at PI §89 that logic is “something sublime” in that “there seemed to pertain to logic a peculiar depth—a universal significance. Logic lay, it seemed, at the bottom of all the sciences.—For logical investigation explores the nature of all things.” This picture presents an order, in fact the a priori order of the world; that is, the order of possibilities, which must be common to both world and thought. … this order is prior to all experience, must run through all experience.—It must … be of the purest crystal. But this crystal does not appear as an abstraction; but as something concrete, indeed, the most concrete, as it were the hardest thing there is. (PI §97) But this picture is the result of misunderstandings “concerning the use of words” (PI §90). Once again, Wittgenstein’s first stage in the critical diagnosis of a philosophical problem is to identify misunderstandings that originate in conflating our means of representation with what is represented. The misunderstandings that lead to the subliming of logic occur when, in philosophy we often compare the use of words with games and calculi which have fixed rules, but cannot say that someone who is using language must be playing such a game.—But if you say that 118

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our languages only approximate to such calculi you are standing on the very brink of a misunderstanding. For then it may look as if what we were talking about were an ideal language. As if our logic were, so to speak, a logic for a vacuum.—Whereas logic does not treat of language—or of thought—in the sense in which natural science treats of a natural phenomenon, and the most that can be said is that we construct ideal languages. (PI §81)9 The Tractarian conception of logical form was of this sort: “logical investigation explores the nature of all things.” The picture of natural language as a calculus with rules that approximates an ideal calculus of fixed rules invites a comparison with the construction of idealizing models within the natural sciences. Just as the ideal gas laws explain the behavior of gases while at the same time idealizing away from the messy reality of actual gases, so logical form is an ideal that explains the systematic properties of language even while it idealizes away from the messy reality of actual speech. Both are discoveries of a hidden structure lying behind the hurly-burly of reality. Once one has hypothesized the ideal gas laws or logical form, one can see that these must be at work in everyday phenomena. This treats logic, and so the philosophical project, as a kind of scientific engagement with ordinary language. To show why this is a mistake requires “clarity about the concepts of understanding, meaning and thinking.” For then, Wittgenstein continues, it will become clear why we are led to “think that if anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it he is operating with a calculus according to definite rules” (PI §81). It is clear from this passage that Wittgenstein thinks that part of the attraction of the sublime conception of logic as the idealized deep structure of ordinary language is the explanation of linguistic competence and performance that it promises.10 In his criticisms of this conception of logic, Wittgenstein identifies two diagnostically significant errors. The first error (cf. PI §§90–103) overgeneralizes the success that certain logical analyses have in dispelling misunderstandings. What Wittgenstein clearly has in mind are Russell’s theory of definite descriptions and Frege’s treatment of identity statements. In both cases, misunderstandings of the ordinary use of words were removed precisely by substituting one form of expression for another, thus undermining analogies with other parts of language that created philosophical misunderstandings. The usefulness of this tool for specific puzzles lies with its showing differences in the inferential commitments that syntactically similar sentences may have. In the hands of the logical positivists this locally useful tool becomes identified with the ideal of a complete and final analysis: we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we were moving towards a 119

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particular state, a state of complete exactness; and as if this were the real goal of our investigation. (PI §91) Through this move, we come to think that there is “something like a final analysis of our forms of language, and so a single completely resolved form of every expression” (PI §91). But from the success (that is, the usefulness) of certain core cases of analysis, it is unwarranted to infer that there is a single complete analysis even for those core cases, let alone for all of language.11 Wittgenstein has already initiated the argument against this inference earlier in the Investigations (§§60–4) with a naive version of analysis: When I say: “My broom is in the corner,”—is this really a statement about the broomstick and the brush? Well, it could at any rate be replaced by a statement giving the position of the stick and the position of the brush. And this statement is surely a further analysed form of the first one.—But why do I call it “further analysed”? (PI §60) If we replace the first sentence with the second in any ordinary context in which we might say the first, the result is ponderous and awkward: Suppose that, instead of saying “Bring me the broom,” you said “Bring me the broomstick and the brush which is fitted on to it.”— Isn’t the answer: “Do you want the broom? Why do you put it so oddly?”—Is he going to understand the further analysed sentence better? (PI §60) Simply looking at this naive example of analysis, all that can be said in its favor is that the two sentences can be used to achieve the same end, but this result favors neither sentence as the deeper or more accurate representation. If anything, the analysandum is the more perspicuous expression. This is just the sort of reminder that Wittgenstein thinks should undermine the picture that takes the longer sentence to explain the meaning of the simpler sentence. Only if there is this explanatory order do we achieve the depth that the philosophical picture requires. Yet nothing about these two sentences or the contexts in which they would be used successfully shows any order of priority or depth. The rationale for analysis must be found outside any such naive analyses. That rationale, as we saw above, comes from the usefulness of Frege’s Begriffsschrift in sorting out differences among ordinary sentences that had become of special interest to philosophers: most particularly, sentences 120

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involving definite descriptions, identity claims, existence claims, or intentional contexts. The notational system introduced by Frege can indeed be used to bring out inferential differences between grammatically similar sentences. Just as the duck–rabbit drawing can be disambiguated by aligning the drawing with pictures of ducks or with pictures of rabbits, so “The author of Waverley is Scottish” loses its puzzling aspect when aligned with Russell’s analysis, “There is one and only one person such that he wrote Waverley and he is Scottish.” The mistake, Wittgenstein urges, is to construe the usefulness of this translation or paraphrase with its revealing a hidden deep structure of all language and thought. When we use pictures of rabbits and pictures of ducks as our means of representing the way the drawing can be taken, it is a mistake to think that lying behind the drawing itself is a rabbit picture or a duck picture. This was the mistake of the Gestalt psychologists who hypothesized different organizational structures lying behind our perception of ambiguous drawings.12 Both Russell and the Gestaltists construe a grammatical mistake as a discovery. The motivation for such confabulated inferences comes from the second and more fundamental mistake: We predicate of the thing what lies in the method of representing it. Impressed by the possibility of a comparison, we think we are perceiving a state of affairs of the highest generality. (PI §104) In the case of “analysis” logic as a formal calculus is our means of representation and what we represent through the use of logical analysis are expressions of ordinary language. The fallacy is to think that this logical tool is the structure of language (cf. PI §§90–1). The philosopher moves from engaging in logical analysis for a reason (e.g., to reveal misunderstandings of the use of words, “by substituting one form of expression for another”) to the conclusion that the essence of language is its logical form in which assertoric form, and so, propositional content, is primary. The primacy of assertoric form and Fregean systematicity are thus taken to be the defining features of language. We examined the initial conflation arguments against the primacy of assertoric form in Chapter 2. While these cast some suspicion on the thesis itself, without further diagnostic argumentation, the issue can come to a stalemate: fallacy of conflation or discovery of deep truth? In the context of the philosopher’s subliming of logic, Wittgenstein completes his critique of the primacy of assertoric form. The primacy of assertoric form—that is, explanatory primacy of the proposition—leads to the paradox of thought. Understood in this way, the proposition becomes, as Wittgenstein puts it, “something queer”:

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“A proposition is a queer thing!” Here we have in germ the subliming of our whole account of logic. The tendency to assume a pure intermediary between the propositional signs and the facts. Or even to try to purify, to sublime, the signs themselves.—For our forms of expression prevent us in all sorts of ways from seeing that nothing out of the ordinary is involved, by sending us in pursuit of chimeras. (PI §94) That the proposition is “something queer” or “a chimera” is shown by the fact that this philosophical notion is self-defeating. It involves attributing properties to the proposition which not only are incompatible with language but eliminate just what the proposition was supposed to explain. Wittgenstein states the paradox of thought in PI §95: “Thought must be something unique.” When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this—is—so. But this paradox (which has the form of a truism) can also be expressed in this way: Thought can be of what is not the case. Some commentators have taken this passage to be one that is endorsed by Wittgenstein.13 That is, it is taken as Wittgenstein’s asserting that “we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact.” But this is a misreading. As part of a philosophical theory of propositions, this phrase, though it sounds like a truism, contributes to the paradox. But just what is the paradox? The proposition is necessary for the account of representation given in the Tractatus. Taking logical form to be a feature of language and the world is to take the space of logical possibilities to be fundamental, both ontologically (the world is the totality of facts not objects) and epistemologically (language can represent all possible facts). To be capable of representing all possible facts requires that linguistic strings have content independently of whether they are true or false. Meaningful linguistic strings, empirical sentences, can be either true or false. In short, representational systems must be bipolar.14 A consequence of this, as we have already suggested, is that representation is possible even if no true sentence is ever constructed. The isomorphism required between admissible linguistic strings and states of affairs does not require covariation in fact. To make sense of this requires that there be an intermediary that explains how the sentence strings stand in an isomorphic relation to the world and yet can be false as well as true. The proposition is just the sort of chimera that is to play this dual role. The proposition is an abstract entity that has a constituent structure 122

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isomorphic to the syntactic structure of the sentence string that expresses the proposition. This secures the relation between sign and proposition. But propositions must also face the world.15 They relate to the world in an immediate fashion: “That is how a picture is attached to reality; it reaches right out to it” (TLP 2.1511; italics in original). Wittgenstein aims to express this same idea just quoted: “When we say and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean this—is—so” (PI §95; italics in original). The use of italics in each quotation is crucial to expressing the immediacy with which the sentence reaches the world. This makes a significant contribution to the way in which the paradox arises. When we say “Grass is green” and mean that grass is green, meaning that grass is green does not stop short of the fact that grass is green. Identifying the proposition with a that-clause is especially useful in its lining up with the fact, identified by the same that-clause. Thus, propositions seem to have features both of sentences (a constituent structure) and of facts (that-clause identification), and it is this peculiar combination that renders them the perfect intermediary between language (as a system of signs) and the world (as the totality of facts). In what way is this conception of propositions self-defeating? Propositions seem best suited to explain how sentences say something substantive about the world (that is, something that can be true or false) precisely because the proposition has a constituent structure that corresponds with the syntactic structure of sentences and the proposition has content, that is, its immediate and direct relation to states of affairs, the object of representation. Propositions “touch” facts. If the content of the proposition is the fact that things are thus-and-so, then there can be no false propositions. A false proposition must stop short of the fact, since the “fact” does not obtain. But stopping short of the fact violates a metaphysically necessary feature of propositions, namely, that a proposition cannot stop short of the facts. This is the way that a proposition reaches right out to the world. If empirical sentences are meaningful sentences that can be either true or false, then there are no empirical sentences. The contrast between being true or false and being necessarily true collapses. The paradoxical result is that this theory of representation eliminates meaningful empirical sentences, the very thing propositions were introduced to explain. Empirical sentences are eliminated because a proposition, in order to explain content, is necessarily true. We find with the first paradox argument that semantic normativity—the contrast between true and false—is eliminated. One can try to avoid this result. The obvious first way, defended by Russell, is to hold that there are positive and negative facts.16 False statements, namely, thoughts of what is not the case, don’t stop short of the facts either. They only stop short of the positive facts, but not the negative facts. So, to say and mean that grass is red does indeed mean: grass is red, where this “fact” is a negative fact. But this strategy is obviously defective. The gap 123

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between sentences and the world that was to be bridged by propositions is recreated in the gap between positive and negative facts. A second option would be to try to avoid the paradox by holding that the paradox arises only in virtue of thinking of the proposition as a peculiar kind of intermediary between sentences and the world. One way to do this would be to hold that propositions are not metaphysically special. They are rather complex objects, consisting of individual objects, sets of things and/or properties. The proposition that grass is green would consist of the set of all grassy stuff and the property green. This proposition is true just in case all the stuff in the set of grass instantiates the property green. Now a regress is threatened because it is not enough to individuate the complex object, set of grasses and property green. We need further the instantiation of the latter by the members of the former. If we treat this instantiation as itself a further element in the complex object, the very same problem arises. Instead of a Third Man problem we have a Third Green problem. Regress is inevitable.17 If we don’t so treat the instantiation, we do not have an account of the relation between the set of grassy stuff and the property of green. Either way, this strategy fails. Wittgenstein identifies exactly what features the proposition must have to do the explanatory work the philosopher is looking for. The alternatives all leave behind one or another of the crucial elements that the proposition was introduced to explain. If we introduce negative facts, we thereby preserve a form of bipolarity for the language but at the cost of losing the internal logical relation between a proposition and its negation. If, on the other hand, we treat propositions as scattered complex objects, propositions fail to mean that things are thus-and-so. Lastly, if we insist, as Wittgenstein puts it, both that thought (propositions) can be of what is not the case as well as what is the case and that propositional content does not stop short of the facts, then contradiction arises. Either we do not mean anything by our sentences (the sentence stops short of the world) or all meaningful thought must be true. In short, we eliminate the possibility of thinking what is not the case. All thought must be of what is the case. Yet the distinctive feature of representation (or thought) is that it can be of what is not the case. Accounting for the intentional inexistence of content is the point in introducing a theory of propositions. This theory is now revealed to eliminate the possibility of intentional inexistence. This is Wittgenstein’s first paradox argument. Propositions must have contradictory properties. To express the order of possibilities, propositions must be capable of being either true or false (that is, bipolar). Yet to connect with reality, to say and mean that things are thus and so, they must be true. The very intermediary that seemed to give us a way to specify places within the order of possibilities cannot accommodate falsehood or negation or, indeed, even mere speculation. We might say, in order to drive the point home, that we cannot entertain a propositional content. Metaphysically, 124

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entertaining a content cannot be distinct from asserting truly. At best, entertaining could express a psychological state of confusion. Wittgenstein’s skepticism about introducing two actions, entertaining and asserting the content, comes to fruition with the paradox of thought. The full-blown Fregean picture that supports the philosophical theory of propositions is radically self-defeating. Further, this theory itself, in its contradictory elements, conflates the domain of the master and the domain of the novice. We saw in Chapter 3 that the key misunderstanding that lies behind taking ostensive definition to fix meaning is the failure to distinguish ostensive definition from ostensive training or teaching. The former can be used for the master of language but the latter is required for the initiate learner. Here too in the paradox of thought we see a variant of this same conflation. The only way to connect directly to reality is through causal interaction, but to express that which could be either true or false (bipolarity) requires that we be in the space of reasons. The former is the situation of the initiate learner who does not yet understand the world in which he is situated. The latter is the domain of the master of language. The paradox of thought thus implicates the differences between the two domains in the character of the contradictory elements the picture of thought seeks to combine in a theory of meaning: the immediacy of the causal nexus (captured in the idea that our meaning does not stop short of the facts) and the possibility of false or neutral thought.

Davidson’s challenge: meaning and logical form The paradox of thought argument, as we have seen, turned on introducing a theoretical construct, the proposition or thought, that was revealed to have been assigned contradictory explanatory tasks. This is what made the proposition seem such a “queer entity,” in Wittgenstein’s words. Introducing such entities was linked to the hypothesis that language has a deep structure for which logic is the a priori form. Such Fregean systematicity requires the primacy of the assertoric sentence. But impugning this primacy thesis may not be tantamount to impugning the claim that logic constitutes an a priori constraint on language. Donald Davidson gives us a contemporary defense of the explanatory importance of systematic features of language, one that is not linked to solving the problem of meaning by appeal to propositional intermediaries or links between the sign and the world. Do Wittgenstein’s arguments against the (fundamental) explanatory importance of logical form apply to the use that Davidson sees for systematicity? There are three interrelated dimensions of linguistic systematicity: the logical and syntactic articulation of language, the compositionality of meaning, and the productivity (or generativity) of language.18 The first concerns the logico-syntactic structure of language at both the intersentential and subsentential levels. The compositionality of meaning is the thesis that 125

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the meaning of a complex linguistic string, paradigmatically the sentence, is a function of the meanings of its constituent elements. Finally, the productivity of language allows for the construction of any of an infinite number of well-formed sentences from finite resources. We need not look to the Tractatus to find arguments that these systematic features of language are the mark of language.19 They are equally central to Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language. As he puts it, a theory of meaning should account for “how an infinite aptitude can be encompassed by finite accomplishments.”20 It is the generativity of language that Davidson takes as the defining feature and problem for a theory of meaning rather than the problem of negation or falsity which was, in a sense, the defining problem for the representationalist approach of the Tractatus. Though the later Wittgenstein and Davidson would disagree on the philosophical significance of systematicity, there are many points of agreement between the two. Davidson and the later Wittgenstein are united in their opposition to traditional representationalist theories of language. Both agree that reference and meaning are abstractions from linguistic practice as a whole and that linguistic understanding is thus explanatorily more basic than either reference or meaning. Both agree that linguistic understanding is a skill, not knowledge of propositions or rules. Both agree that meaning is holistic and interconnected with belief. Nonetheless, there are profound differences in their respective conceptions of language and its relation to logic. Davidson’s theory of meaning takes the form of a truth-conditional theory for which the logical articulation of language is a necessary condition and truth is explanatory.21 This is the view that Wittgenstein attacks. As reference was domesticated, so logic as well as truth are to be deflated. Thus, we need to ask ourselves—when we come to look at the criticisms Wittgenstein raises to the subliming of logic—whether these criticisms apply equally to Davidson’s appeal to logic and logical form or whether they concern only the Tractatus’ metaphysically robust conception of logical form.22 If they are irrelevant to Davidson, this can call into question Wittgenstein’s reassessment of the importance of the systematic features of language in answering foundational questions.23 This is Davidson’s challenge to Wittgenstein. Davidson develops two argumentative strategies for showing the necessity of systematicity. Each is associated with one of the key components of his theory of language, the theory of meaning and the methodology of interpretation. Davidson agrees with Dummett that a theory of meaning should be a theory of linguistic competence. To know a language is “to know what it is for a sentence [of that language] to be true.”24 Davidson’s theory of meaning is a truth-conditional theory for that language. The methodology of interpretation identifies the constraints necessary for constructing and testing such a theory. Davidson’s truth-conditional theory of meaning is explicitly modeled on Tarski’s truth theory for artificial languages.25 Davidson modifies the 126

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explanatory work done by Tarski’s theory in two important respects. Firstly, Tarski took the theory to provide an explanation of truth in terms of a satisfaction relation, a kind of reference. Davidson reverses this explanatory order, taking truth to be semantically primitive. Our intuitive understanding of what it is to hold a sentence true is the basis from which to explain the reference of the constituent terms, and thereby in that sense the whole sentence is a function of the meaning of the constituents. Secondly, Tarski thought that this theory worked only for artificial languages and not for natural languages. The semantic paradoxes that arise in natural languages as well as the ambiguities and vagueness that pervade natural languages, Tarski held, render this theory inappropriate for ordinary linguistic competence. Though Davidson acknowledges these difficulties, he nonetheless insists that the Tarskian theory fits, if not all uses of ordinary language, “a carefully gerrymandered part of the language. This part, though no doubt clumsy grammatically, will contain an infinity of sentences which exhaust the expressive power of the whole language. … We may think of the sentences to which the theory applies as giving the logical form, or deep structure, of all sentences.”26 We see in the first modification Davidson’s endorsement of Frege’s idea, the idea that sentences of assertoric form capture the full expressive power of language, and, in the second modification, an endorsement of logical form as the deep structure of language.27 The expressive power of a language, its infinite productivity, is a function of its formal structure, which consists of a finite set of recursive rules operating on a finite set of constituent elements, and the compositionality of meaning. A truth theory provides an interpretation of this formal structure by specifying the set of truth sentences for the language, a set of T-sentences. Since Davidson wants to explain the meaning of a sentence in terms of its truth rule, he needs a criterion for the correctness of the truth rules specified for a language. The general criterion for a correct truth rule is that the truth rule for any meaningful sentence must conform to convention T: s is true in L iff p, where “s” is a structural description of a sentence of the object language L; “p” is a metalanguage statement specifying the truth conditions for “s”; and truth looks like a primitive explanatory notion. We intuitively grasp the appeal to truth, and so understand the semantic import of T-sentences. In this way, a truth theory for a language, modeled on the truth theory for formal languages, provides a general account of meaning. Davidson’s first argument for the systematicity of language is ostensibly an argument for the compositionality of meaning. In an early and important paper, “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages,” Davidson argues that for languages to be learnable, they must be compositional. Putting the point in terms of necessary conditions for the learnability of language 127

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definitely gives Davidson’s argument a psychological hue. This implication seems to run counter to his long-held view that language, as a formal structure, need not exist as a psychological reality. Davidson’s point, in putting the matter in terms of the learnability of language, is that whether or not ostensive teaching is part of the way in which we learn language, it is not a necessary condition for the learnability of language. This criticism expresses Davidson’s view that “it is not appropriate to expect logical considerations to dictate the route or mechanism of language acquisition.”28 But though the philosopher cannot identify a priori features of psychological mechanisms, he can identify “what we shall count as knowing a language.” This “descriptive” task, as Davidson thinks of it, has implications for empirical theories of language acquisition, not by describing necessary features of the psychological mechanism involved, but by describing necessary features of linguistic competence itself. Empirical theories that do not accommodate such necessary features are ruled out a priori. Compositionality of meaning, Davidson urges, is just such a necessary feature of knowing a language. If language did not have a constituent formal structure and a finite number of semantic primitives, it would not be learnable. This is because no matter how many sentences the speaker learns, “there will always be others whose meanings are not given by the rules already mastered.”29 The finitude of speakers requires that a learned language have a finite structure. Yet what is learned always outstrips the actual sentences a speaker learns to produce and understand. In short, compositionality of meaning is required to capture the reach of language beyond anything explicitly learned or said, and a necessary condition for that is the logical articulation of language.30 Though Davidson puts the argument in terms of a necessary condition for the learnability of language, what really drives the argument for compositionality and logical articulation is what is required to explain the infinite productivity of language (at a given time): When we can regard the meaning of each sentence as a function of a finite number of features of the sentence, we have an insight not only into what there is to be learned; we also understand how an infinite aptitude can be encompassed by finite accomplishments [my italics].31 This infinite aptitude must be explicable in terms of finite accomplishments; otherwise language is simply inhuman.32 Davidson’s rejection of atomistic theories of meaning requires rethinking how compositionality is to be explained. It is explained by relating “truth conditions of each sentence to those words of the sentence that recur in other sentences and can be assigned identical roles in other sentences.”33 Constructing T-sentences for a language can only be pursued in a holistic way that involves the comparative examination of many sentences of the object language in order to individuate 128

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words and their roles within sentences. Identifying what the words refer to is abstracted from the contribution that the words make to the truth conditions for the sentence. Thus, reference is an abstraction from the logical form of a language, a structure revealed by the truth theory for the language as a whole. What is explanatorily primitive or basic in accounting for meaning and linguistic competence is the whole pattern of use of linguistic expressions, not the meanings (i.e., referents) of individual nonlogical words. In short, Davidson is committed to holding that languages are only formally compositional, not psychologically compositional. Perhaps we don’t express ourselves verbally by way of psychological processes that are themselves isomorphic to the logical structure of the sentences uttered. Meaning is thus holistic, not atomistic. Quoting Davidson: If sentences depend for their meaning on their structure, and we understand the meaning of each item in the structure only as an abstraction from the totality of sentences in which it features, then we can give the meaning of any sentence (or word) only by giving the meaning of every sentence (and word) in the language.34 One grasps the meaning of a word or sentence only insofar as one grasps the whole of language, and that is tantamount to grasping logical form.35 But this has implications for the relation of compositionality to language learning and linguistic competence. Compositionality, on this view, is irrelevant to the learnability of language since we cannot learn the meanings of individual words and build from there. It can be said to be relevant only in the most attenuated sense, namely, that we finite beings cannot learn an infinite array of individually meaningful sentences. Davidson acknowledges this when he says that “in so far as we take the ‘organic’ character of language seriously, we cannot accurately describe the first steps towards [language’s] conquest as learning part of language; rather it is a matter of partly learning.”36 Since individual words have meaning only against the background of whole patterns of linguistic usage, acquiring the use of individual words in learning a first language is not learning their meaning, which subsequently allows the child to understand and produce complex linguistic strings using the individual words. Thus, compositionality of meaning as understood by Davidson does not figure in the learning of language. We don’t first learn the meanings of words and then go on to grasp the meanings of sentences as constructed from those word-meanings. In sum, the first argument for logical form, the argument from the learnability of language, masks Davidson’s real focus, namely, that languages are infinitely productive in virtue of their formal structure. This is what really carries the argument for compositionality. This idea is accompanied with a certain background picture, namely, the idea of language as a limited totality that nonetheless has an infinite reach. This is part of the Fregean picture of language. 129

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Yet much that Davidson argues in criticism of atomistic theories of meaning and in support of his meaning holism accords with Wittgenstein’s later conception of language. Wittgenstein draws on similar ideas in his examination of why we find it natural to consider the call “slab!” in the builders game elliptical for “Bring me a slab!” We find this natural because “our language contains the possibility” of other sentences, like “Bring two slabs!,” “Bring him a slab!” and so on (PI §20).37 Moreover, Wittgenstein, like Davidson, considers our mastery of this language as implicating these other possible sentences while rejecting the temptation to construe this mastery as “something that happens while you are uttering the sentence” (PI §20). Davidson too, as we know, is agnostic about what happens to the speaker psychologically while speaking. But Davidson links this implicit relation to alternative sentence-structures to the background picture of language as a delimitable whole encompassing an infinity of possible constructions. And this Wittgenstein rejects. Also, Wittgenstein’s reasons for denying that this implicit inferential structure of our language describes the psychological processes by which we use language are quite different from Davidson’s. Davidson is not opposed to there being such psychological mechanisms, but insists that philosophical theories of competence do not constitute empirical theories of performance.38 There may or may not be an isomorphism between the formal structure of linguistic competence and the psychological mechanisms whereby we learn and use language. This is a matter for the empirical sciences. Wittgenstein’s reasons are more complicated, involving the idea that what are often identified as psychological factors in language use are rather grammatical requirements that have been mistakenly described. We shall return to this later. Though Davidson’s argument from the learnability of language, in “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages,” fails, he is nonetheless correct that the conditions necessary for language to be learnable are relevant to the characterization of linguistic competence. Perhaps as a result of this failure, as well as of his insistence that language as a formal system need not exist as a psychological reality, Davidson does not appeal to language learning again until the late 1980s and 1990s.39 And, as we shall see in Chapter 5, the way in which he brings in the relevance of language learning draws him away from the background picture of language that motivates the argument here and towards a conception much closer to that of Wittgenstein. This later work takes him to the striking conclusion that “there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with.”40 Davidson’s second argument for logical form comes with his methodology of interpretation. Following Quine, Davidson accepts the situation of radical translation as the starting point in developing a theory of language.41 And he does so for the same reasons. Without a “museum” of stable meaning130

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objects or special mental powers to confer meaning, one must look to the use of language over time and between interlocutors to discover what makes linguistic performances meaningful. Further, Davidson accepts Quine’s naturalistic presumption that an explanation of meaningfulness cannot presuppose semantic or intentional notions on pain of circularity. The situation of radical interpretation meets those requirements so far as the theory of meaning for the speaker’s language is concerned. The radical situation is one in which the interpreter confronts a native apparently using a language, but it is a language wholly unknown to the interpreter. Armed solely with the utterance-noises of the native, his behaviors, and the environmental circumstances of his utterances, the interpreter must construct a theory of meaning that reveals the native’s noises to fit the abstract pattern of a language, to conform, that is, to truth rules constructed by the interpreter under various methodological and empirical constraints. Like Quine, Davidson holds that the situation of radical interpretation is universal, characterizing all instances of linguistic interaction, even among speakers of the same natural language.42 The method used by the interpreter is a method of interpretation. Interpretation is a systematic way of hooking up what the speaker says to what the interpreter understands, that is, the interpreter (implicitly) constructs a theory of meaning in his own language to accommodate the articulated noises of the speaker. Such a theory of meaning describes the speaker’s competence by providing a systematic explanation of the meanings of the speaker’s words. Interpretation is the method for constructing a truth theory for the language of a speaker, based on the sample of speech to which the interpreter is exposed. Such interpretation must respect two constraints, a formal constraint and an empirical constraint. The formal constraint requires that the native’s speech manifest logical form. Only if the speech of the native is systematically structured in this way can we account for the ideas of compositionality of meaning and infinite productivity. Identification of subsentential structure depends upon the existence of patterns of linguistic behavior that conform to the principles of a logical syntax. Displaying logical form is thus necessary for the possibility of interpretation. Ordinary language, then, must approximate formal languages with respect to these systematic features. The second, empirical, constraint on interpretation marks the way in which natural languages diverge from artificial languages and reveals that a philosophically broader notion of “interpretation” is involved in Davidson’s theory. The guiding principle here is that of charity, the requirement that the interpreter maximize the true beliefs of the speaker.43 For artificial languages, semantic interpretation is a matter of stipulation. Names are assigned objects, predicate expressions extensions, sentences truth conditions. But for “found” languages, rather than invented ones, interpretations are hypotheses about the truth theory of the “found” language. Empirical evidence is needed to support or disconfirm any hypothesis. This 131

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evidence cannot itself include semantic or intentional features without begging the question. This is the condition that is allegedly met in the radical situation, thus justifying that situation as especially illuminating about the nature of language and meaning. Interpretation must go all the way down. Empirical evidence for hypothesized interpretations will include the circumstances in which the utterances are made, the causal relations that obtain between the speaker and objects in the environment, and what the speaker holds-true (that is, what utterances the speaker assents to). In order to bring these data to bear upon the plausibility of candidate interpretations, the interpreter must begin by assuming that the native holds mostly true beliefs. The assessment of true belief is, of course, relative to the interpreter. The interpreter’s language is the metalanguage used to construct a truth theory for the native’s language, and it is the hypotheses and evidence available to the interpreter that figure in the methodology of interpretation. The interpreter must use this principle of charity if interpretation is to get off the ground. This is because belief and meaning are interdependent—they cannot be individuated or evaluated independently of each other. To discover meaning, belief must be held constant by maximizing the rationality of the native. Assigning logical form to the utterances and true beliefs to the speaker severely constrains the range of interpretations, that is, the specification of truth rules for the native’s sentences, available to the interpreter. Where there is an unavoidable gap between what the speaker means by his words and the truth of his beliefs, false belief can be attributed to the speaker, but only so long as this is the exception. Indeed, as Davidson says, the concept of belief is built to accommodate individual idiosyncrasy and mistake.44 Something like canons of rationality, epistemic principles, and particular substantive beliefs must be shared for a language to be interpretable. And, according to Davidson, what is not interpretable is not a language.45 In this way, logical form and true belief are the transcendental conditions for the possibility of language. Do Wittgenstein’s criticisms of logic and logical form apply to the use to which Davidson puts logical form? Davidson certainly doesn’t attribute a robust metaphysical reality to logical form. Davidson’s argument is rather that logical form is a transcendental condition for the possibility of linguistic understanding and use. Without it, Davidson is arguing, the infinite productivity of our language and interpretability of utterances are not possible. Our question is the extent to which this view challenges Wittgenstein’s criticisms of logical form and its allies, analysis and truth conditional semantics.

The limits of systematicity Davidson’s 1986 paper, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” cited above, ends with the radical conclusion that “there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have 132

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supposed.”46 On that conception, one endorsed by Davidson himself, language is “a complex abstract object, defined by giving a finite list of expressions (words), rules for construing meaningful concatenations of expressions (sentences), and a semantic interpretation of the meaningful expressions based on the semantic features of individual words.”47 So, what is Davidson getting at in denying that language exists? We can connect this claim to three important ideas, each of which resonates with Wittgensteinian views. (1) The first, a point already emphasized, is that language, as a formal structure, need not exist as a psychological reality. In holding that his theory of meaning describes linguistic competence, Davidson is quite clear in denying that this entails anything about the “psychological mechanism” that produces linguistic performances. This point cannot be separated from the role that the method of interpretation plays in linguistic understanding. Interpretation is a systematic way of hooking up what the speaker says to what the interpreter understands, that is, to the theory of meaning the interpreter (implicitly) constructs to accommodate the words of the speaker. Though a theory of meaning for the speaker, constructed in accord with the constraints imposed upon interpretation, describes linguistic understanding, Davidson is explicit in denying that understanding another need involve any actual acts of interpretation (whether conscious or unconscious).48 Actual linguistic performances and acts of understanding need not involve any psychological mechanism whose structure is isomorphic with the formal structure of the abstract object. (2) Secondly, and as a consequence of the first point, what is explanatorily primitive or basic in accounting for meaning and linguistic competence is the whole pattern of use of linguistic expressions. The base clauses of the formal structure, that is, the clauses that specify the lexical items, are not explanatorily fundamental. That is why reference is a derivative relation, abstracted from the pattern of systematic usage. Meanings don’t exist. (3) The first two ideas have long been part of Davidson’s views. More recently, and more controversially, Davidson has denied that language exists in a third sense. Linguistic knowledge or competence, as described formally, represents something that is neither stable nor shared. Though sharing a stable common lexicon and stable set of syntactic rules apparently occurs as a matter of fact and facilitates communication, Davidson maintains that neither sharing linguistic conventions or regularities nor the stability of such conventions is essential or necessary to communication. To speak a language is for each linguistic performance to be interpretable; that is, a theory of meaning can be constructed for each performance. This is necessary and sufficient for the possibility of communication. In actual practice, of course, much else is involved in successful communication, but these are contingent features of communication. They are only relevant insofar as they figure in the construction of theories of meaning.

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In constructing his arguments, Davidson relies on several assumptions. These are that the productivity of language is infinite; that an explanation of meaning is to be modeled on the semantics for formal languages; and that the myth of radical interpretation reveals the necessary constraints on interpretation and so understanding. Under these assumptions, systematicity (logical form) is identified as a necessary condition for productivity, meaning and understanding. As such, it figures essentially in the explanation of each of these. Wittgenstein rejects all three of these assumptions. The open texture of language replaces the idea of the infinite productivity of language. Davidson’s formal theory of meaning does not explain meaning, but, as Michael Williams has argued,49 is a specification of meanings; and as such, it presupposes the meaningful use of language. And the myth of radical interpretation profoundly distorts the character of linguistic understanding and communication. In this section, we shall take up Davidson’s theory of meaning and its relation to the first two points associated with his claim that language does not exist. Does Davidson’s insistence that linguistic competence has a systematic structure open him to the subliming of logic that Wittgenstein criticizes? Or does Davidson offer a defense of logical form that runs free of such criticism? In the next chapter, we shall turn to the methodology of interpretation and its relation to Wittgenstein’s second problem of normative similarity and the paradox of interpretation argument. But now to an examination of Davidson’s claims on behalf of systematicity. For Davidson, too, language as an abstract formal object is a calculus according to rules. Tarski-style truth theory and the first-order predicate calculus enable us to individuate the markers of the game (the lexical base clauses) and the recursive syntactic and logical rules governing their movement. Davidson makes no claim that his theory describes a psychological mechanism. Davidson differs, in this regard, from most philosophers who defend the explanatory importance of logical form. Typically a defense of the systematicity of ordinary language is accompanied with a defense of Chomsky-style psycholinguistics or a computational theory of mind.50 But Davidson does not reify logical form in this way. Without a metaphysically or psychologically robust conception of logical form, what Wittgenstein has identified as the key fallacy (namely, applying what belongs to the means of representation to the object of representation) arguably does not occur. Davidson’s descriptivist project and agnosticism about psychological mechanisms of language use align him much more closely to the later Wittgenstein. The implication, one that Davidson accepts, is that logical form is not a deep structure that explains application and understanding; rather logical form is the means used to represent substitution patterns within sentences and patterns of usage among sentences. This is not the subliming of logic that Wittgenstein objects to. Does this mean that there is no Wittgensteinian objection to Davidson’s project? 134

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Davidson’s first argument for the systematicity of language purported to show that the learnability of language requires that meaning be compositional. Yet given Davidson’s holistic conception of meaning, it is not possible to learn the meanings of individual words without a broader linguistic competence, and so compositionality cannot play the role suggested in learning a language. Davidson’s real concern, as we saw, is not learning but the infinite productivity of language. An infinite linguistic aptitude can only be possible for a finite being provided meaning is compositional and language is logically articulated. We need to examine this focus of Davidson’s argument in relation to the two mistakes Wittgenstein attributes to those who endorse the view that logic provides the explanatorily deep structure of language. Davidson, it is important to see, does not commit the first mistake of reifying logical form by taking logic, our means for representing linguistic competence, for what is represented. For Davidson, the first-order predicate calculus is used to describe the abstract structure of an idealized part of natural language. In this, there need be no disagreement between Wittgenstein and Davidson. Their very ways of understanding the usefulness of particular analyses and the individuation of words (patterns of occurrence and reoccurrence in sentence strings) are roughly the same. This is a metaphysically deflationary use of logical form, not a subliming of logic. Their disagreements lie elsewhere. Davidson’s mistakes, on a Wittgensteinian view, are the unwarranted inferences that our linguistic aptitude is infinite and that the cognitive content of language is captured by that part of language that can be rigidified to accord with the first-order predicate calculus. Both the infinity of linguistic competence and the boundary to cognitive expressivity support Davidson’s early commitment to the explanatory adequacy of a Tarski-style formal theory of meaning. Even though Davidson avoids the metaphysical or psychological reification of logical form, he nonetheless treats systematicity, both intersententially and intrasententially, as essential to language. What is important to this commitment is not so much the inference to an infinite aptitude and bounded cognitive expressivity, but the requirement that a language have boundaries that positively delimit its reach.51 Davidson (at least the early Davidson) endorses the view that there are positive limits to what is sayable and so thinkable (specified by the lexicon of meaningful expressions and the recursive rules of combination), that the meaning of any complex expression is a function of the meanings of its constituents, and that these first two principles permit and explain the infinite reach of language, if only by the use of formally acceptable recursive rules for embedding clauses and conjoining sentences. The infinite productivity of language, understood in this way, is a myth. It is important to note there is something misleading about the formal conception of productivity that Davidson invokes. The productivity of language is a function of recursive rules: one can always add one more clause or 135

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one more sentence to any given sentence string. Formal productivity scarcely bears upon the open-ended reach of linguistic innovation, whether in the acquisition of language, the interpretation of others or the investigation of the world. The only way to ensure a substantive explanatory role for formal productivity is by a tacit appeal to the subliming of logic or a commitment to something like the positivist ideal of the structure of language. But Davidson would certainly not want to endorse either of these ideals of the logic of language. His rejection of the metaphysics of logic and his endorsement of the method of interpretation ensure this. Without the substantive ballast of a sublimed logic or a positivist structure, the appeal to a formal infinite productivity is of mild explanatory interest. Wittgenstein certainly challenges these ideas without rejecting the viable counterparts that are to be found in ordinary language. There are no principled boundaries to the use of words. What has been identified as the infinite reach of language, in virtue of its recursively applicable logico-syntactic rules, is the indefinite creativity in the use of language. And the compositionality of meaning is at best a rough and ready account of the meaning of complex expressions. These are two very different conceptions of the systematic features of ordinary language. Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the openended character of language and the multiplicity of overlapping language games does not allow for the identification of boundary-rules that set the limits of a language once and for all. This does not eliminate systematicity from language use. Language use does display regularities, some of which are describable, albeit idealized, in formal terms. But this does not explain the regularities in terms of formal rules. Nor does it warrant reading more systematicity back into language than can be warranted by surface use. Davidson in his own later elaboration of his theory of language comes remarkably close to Wittgenstein’s position. This can be seen by considering an objection to the way that systematicity has been criticized. It might be objected that it has been characterized in an overly rigid and shallow way, one that results in an impoverished conception of what is cognitively expressible. The Davidsonian picture of language does not prohibit the introduction of new terms. Language does not fix, once and for all, the limits of the sayable. So, in this sense, there is no fixed boundary to what is linguistically possible. Such additions to language require that the new terms added to the base clauses themselves contribute to defining the limit of the intelligible. There are problems with how to introduce a new word that does not already draw on the expressive power of language. Ostensive definition is not an acceptable strategy. Introduction by way of definition is also beside the point. The only way to introduce new terms is by using them in an array of different sentences such that, when viewed holistically, they can be seen to show a pattern of usage that warrants a new truth sentence and perhaps the elimination of some others. This flexibility is either marginal and so does not seriously challenge the idea that language has boundaries for the cognitively 136

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expressible; or it marks acts of communication that create pressure against the very picture of a formally structured language. It is this latter possibility that leads Davidson to question the existence of language. The theory of meaning that underwrites particular acts of interpretation does not require a standardized theory of meaning. What is required for successful communication is that the passing theories, as Davidson calls them, that underwrite the acts of communication between two persons need not, and often do not, involve systematically shared meanings or shared conventions of interpretation. Our capacity to accommodate misspeakings and malapropisms is evidence of a cognitive flexibility that a requirement for formal systematicity and fixed boundaries cannot accommodate.52 The principle of the compositionality of meaning of all complex expressions simply does not apply to natural languages. It is not the case that the meaning of any complex expression is a function solely of the meanings of its constituent expressions. There are numerous examples of underarticulation, that is, sentences whose meaning draws essentially on factors that are not the meanings of constitutive terms.53 I want to distinguish two important kinds of cases that display such underarticulation. Each kind exploits some contextual aspect that is crucial to understanding the sentence in question, but cannot be explained as the meaning of some constituent expression. These categories are: (1) expressions involving unarticulated parameters;54 and (2) sentences drawing on background or collateral information. Each category includes a wide range of expressions. In the first case are included spatial and temporal markers (including indexicals) as well as expressions such as “relevant” and “normal.” A simple sentence like “It’s raining” is understood to restrict the location of the rain to the area in which the utterance occurs, and yet there is no constituent expression that marks the location. Even sentences explicitly including spatial and/or temporal indexicals do not specify, as part of their meaning, the parameters of the location or time. While discussing the weather and national politics on the telephone with a friend in London, the speaker from Baltimore may say “it is raining here” and “politics here has become very bipartisan.” What counts as the locale of the speaker that is indicated by the indexical varies with what is being attributed to the locale. In saying “it is raining here,” the speaker does not indicate by means of any constitutive expression the entire United States, but with the second sentence she does, drawing an implicit contrast with the political situation “over there.” Similarly for many sentences containing words like “relevant” (“the color of the car isn’t relevant” to its performance on the road) or “normal” (“the red spots are normal”). The meaning of a sentence can also be sensitive to background beliefs that are relevant to the context in which the sentence is uttered. This is another way to draw upon the interdependence of meaning and belief, once again a position common to Wittgenstein and Davidson. But it is worthwhile to 137

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consider this from the perspective of the compositionality of meaning. So intuitively plausible is this principle that it is useful to remind ourselves of the many exceptions that must be accommodated to preserve the principle in its full generality. Though he doesn’t describe the issue in this way, Charles Travis has developed this point in detail.55 Drawing on an example used by Travis will exemplify this second category. The meaning of the sentence “There is some coffee” looks straightforwardly to be a function of the meanings of its components. But differing contexts create differing “understandings,” as Travis puts it, for the sentence. Consider what conditions must be met in order to answer the question “Is there any coffee left?” correctly: asked of one’s spouse first thing in the morning, asked by a bean-picker on the way to the coffee field, asked by a workman loading bags of coffee in a truck. It will be objected that the different responses called for are a function, not of the strict meaning of the sentence, but of varying pragmatic considerations. Strictly, it might be said, so long as there were some coffee, no matter in what form or how small an amount, the sentence “There is some coffee” would be true given the meaning of the constituents. (This is a point that Davidson appreciates in distinguishing the prior theory and passing theories of meaning in the context of communication.) But a person who spoke in accord with such strict literal meaning would cease to be intelligible. So, it would turn out that in order to be intelligible to each other, in order to communicate, it is necessary not to speak in accord with the meanings of our sentences as governed by the principle of compositionality. To say to the workman loading large bags of coffee that there is more coffee in the back would be at best a poor joke if there were only a pot of coffee or a few beans in the back of the truck. To say to one’s spouse that there is some coffee in the kitchen when there is only a small spill on the counter would be equally misleading, and certainly not what was meant. Rationality demands a revision to the truth rule. Strict compositionality of meaning does not exist, and so cannot be necessary to explain how a language can be learned or novel sentences understood. As Davidson says, learning a first language is a matter of learning language partly, not a matter of learning parts of language. And the infinite productivity of language is the indefinite creativity of language users. But perhaps a rough approximation to compositionality of meaning is sufficient to support Davidson’s truth conditional theory of meaning, even though it is modeled on the formal structure and interpretation of artificial languages. So, to his claim that truth is the primitive semantic notion and as such explains the meaningfulness of sentences. Interestingly Wittgenstein brackets his discussion of rule-following with remarks on truth (PI §§136–7 and PI §§241–2). Just before turning to rules, Wittgenstein looks to the special “fit” between propositions and truth. The discovery of the general form of the proposition for the early Wittgenstein 138

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was philosophically important precisely because it was thought to capture that special fit between language and the world. Just such a “fit” is exploited by Davidson’s T-sentences, “‘p’ is true iff p.” The use of “p” on the righthand side exploits the ambiguous character of the proposition, ambiguous between being an articulated sign and being a structured content. We have already seen that this philosophical use of proposition leads to paradox. What Wittgenstein focuses on in this first set of remarks about truth is the grammatical error that is the source of this paradoxical conception: At bottom, giving “This is how things are” as the general form of propositions is the same as giving the definition: a proposition is whatever can be true or false [ … ] Now it looks as if the definition—a proposition is whatever can be true or false—determined what a proposition was, by saying: what fits the concept “true,” or what the concept “true” fits, is a proposition. So it is as if we had a concept of true and false, which we could use to determine what is and what is not a proposition. What engages with the concept of truth (as with a cogwheel), is a proposition. (PI §136) What looks like a discovery of the unique appropriateness of propositions to fit what is true and false is in fact a misunderstanding of a grammatical point. That is: “the use of the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ may be among the constituent parts of this game [of using propositions]; and if so it belongs to our concept ‘proposition’ but does not ‘fit’ it” (PI §136). For concepts to belong together is for there to be a grammatical relation that is revealed in how we learn the use of the words. For this relation, the metaphor of a “fit” is wholly misleading, for it suggests two independent entities that perfectly complement each other much in the way that Lego pieces fit each other. That is the bad picture and gives rise to the illusion of greater explanatory depth than has been achieved. The words are learned together, Wittgenstein tells us, and the concepts belong to each other; they are tailored for each other. That is not the discovery of a special fit between sign and proposition, but a description of how our concepts hang together. Wittgenstein returns to remark on the predicate “is true” only at the end of his rule-following passages. He does so because he recognizes that his view concerning rule-following prompts the charge that truth is relativized to what we as a community say or agree upon. He is explicit in his repudiation of this consequence. To the contrary, Wittgenstein endorses a deflationary approach to truth.56 The truth predicate “is true” does not explain the relation of words to world, but, as Paul Horwich puts it, “exists solely for the sake of a certain logical need.”57 It is a logical device that allows for semantic ascent, and, in doing so, enables us to infer from “p” to “p is true.” 139

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Michael Williams draws the full consequences of this for Davidson’s theory of meaning.58 Davidson’s T-sentences do nothing more than express this inferential property of the truth predicate. The T-sentences, then, do not explain the meaning of the sentence described on the left-hand side of the biconditional. At most, Davidson’s truth theory of meaning is a device for specifying meaning for a language. The explanation of meaning comes from the methodology of interpretation. This is where the substantive philosophical work is being done for Davidson. This can only be addressed in the context of Wittgenstein’s rule-following discussion. In conclusion, let me draw attention to Wittgenstein’s pattern of argumentation against the subliming of logic. It mirrors the pattern of argumentation used earlier in the Investigations against denotational theories of meaning. In both cases, Wittgenstein moves from naive versions of the theory to sophisticated philosophical theories: from the Augustinian account of naming objects to the Tractatus and Russellian conception of names and from analyzing “Bring me the broom” to the subliming of logic. In both cases, he moves from the first stage of his diagnostic treatment of philosophical problems—identifying the source of the problem in misunderstandings of grammar—to the second stage in which philosophical theorizing built upon a picture of how things must be leads to self-defeating paradox. Frege’s idea (the primacy of assertoric form) has been dismantled, and reference to ordinary objects and properties has been domesticated. The diagnostic critique of Fregean systematicity is well under way, to be completed with the discussion of the necessity of rules. This will involve taking up the second problem of normative similarity, the practical normative contrast between correct and incorrect continuations of a rule.

Notes 1 See, for example, Conant and Diamond, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely.” 2 Ishiguro, “Reference and Use of Names.” Pears, False Prison, vol. 1, argues against Ishiguro’s “substitutionalist” interpretation of names in favor of the standard interpretation, according to which the simple objects fix the substitutional possibilities of their respective names. 3 See W. Sellars’ discussion of this distinction and the confusions that can result from a failure to keep the two senses of “assertion” distinct. (Michael Williams pointed this out to me.) 4 This is a criticism that has been frequently directed against the picture theory of meaning. This too is a mistake, one that will be addressed in showing how the reconciliation between apparently conflicting passages can be realized. 5 From the perspective of the Tractatus, it is no accident that these naturalistic programs are forced to appeal to possible worlds as an essential component of the accounts of representation on offer. I am thinking in particular of J.A. Fodor’s failed account in terms of asymmetric causal relationships, Fred Dretske’s engineering model, and Brian Loar’s much more promising account of representation in terms of propositional indexing. See Fodor, Psychosemantics; Dretske, Explaining Behavior; and Loar, Mind and Meaning.

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6 Note in this context, thought and propositional sign are distinguished. As we discussed the notion of a proposition in Chapter 2 and earlier in this chapter, the thought just is a proposition, not that which is added to the propositional sign. For most of my discussion I will treat proposition and thought as interchangeable. 7 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 2nd book, Analytic of the Sublime, p. 90. 8 Ibid., 97. 9 The final sentence might well be an allusion to Frege. Despite using the phrase “Frege’s idea” as he did, Wittgenstein was certainly aware that Frege himself made no such universal claims for his Begriffsschrift. Frege considered it to be the construction of an ideal language. 10 This makes Davidson’s challenge especially interesting, since he holds that language has logical form and yet the theory of linguistic competence carries no implications for the psychological mechanisms of performance. We come to this in the next two sections. Cf. Dummett, who also rejects quasi-psychological explanations of understanding a language. 11 This strategy of early analytic philosophy of using exemplary cases, both in terms of the problem raised and the solution developed, is to be found in Wittgenstein’s own mode of arguing. He too recognizes the importance of the paradigm case. Consider Russell’s theory of definite descriptions and Frege’s treatment of the identity sign. 12 PI II.xi, especially pp. 194–7, 213ff. Identifying this parallel between the fundamental error of subliming logic with the fundamental error in explaining aspectual seeing prepares the way for our later discussion of Wittgenstein’s critique of philosophical theories of mind. There too we will see the same pattern of argumentation, the motley of reminders, diagnostic error arguments, and the identification of the underlying picture. 13 See McDowell, Mind and World. 14 Tautologies and contradictions are not meaningful precisely because they are not bipolar. 15 See Travis, Unshadowed Thought, for his excellent discussion of the “Janus-faced proposition.” 16 Russell, “Philosophy of Logical Atomism” and “On Propositions.” 17 See Jay Rosenberg’s excellent discussion of this problem. “Wittgenstein’s SelfCriticisms.” 18 For Davidson the systematicity of language is formal, at least in his early and middle period. In his late papers, he introduces substantive systematicities in our shared reactions to each other and the world. Compare an early paper, “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages,” with a late one, “Second Person.” 19 They are the foundation of contemporary linguistics and psycholinguistics. See Chomsky, Aspects of a Theory of Syntax. 20 Davidson, “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages,” 8. 21 This claim must be modified. Davidson holds that full logical articulation is a feature of only a part of language albeit a very important part. Wittgenstein agrees with this. That part of language contains the full expressive power of the language as a whole, that is, all possible fact-stating assertoric sentences. Yet this does not apply to poetry or exclamations and other non-fact-stating sentences. Davidson’s use of “expressive” in this regard is just the sort of adaptation of language that Wittgenstein would see as creative philosophical innovation. 22 This claim is seriously contested by many interpreters of the Tractatus. Champions of the resolute reading have developed strong arguments against such a metaphysical interpretation of logic form of the Tractatus. See Conant and Diamond, “On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely”; Diamond, Realistic Spirit; also see their and others’ articles in Crary and Read, New Wittgenstein.

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23 It is important to note that Wittgenstein does not deny that language has systematic features, though he is less impressed with any such features being fully universal. Rather his remarks are directed against logical form standing independent of any of our language games and so explaining our linguistic performance. 24 Davidson, “Truth and Meaning,” 24. 25 See Tarski, “Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages.” 26 “Radical Interpretation,” 133. Davidson wants to align his conception of the logical form to Chomsky’s conception of the deep structure of language, but there is a very important difference. Chomsky psychologizes the deep structure described by his generative grammar whereas Davidson repeatedly disavows any such ambition for his conception of logical form. 27 Wittgensteinian objections to privileging assertoric form are, for the time being, sidestepped by identifying logical form with “a carefully gerrymandered part of the language,” a part that nonetheless “exhausts the expressive power of the whole language.” This substantive sounding claim borders on tautology since expressive power is the power to say that things are thus-and-so, whatever that may include. “Expressive power,” as used by Davidson, is what assertoric sentences have. 28 Ibid., 7. 29 Ibid., 8. We shall return to this issue later in the chapter. Wittgenstein would not find this either a surprising or an objectionable result. What he finds philosophically suspect is just what Davidson finds so natural. Namely, the idea that in mastering language, there could not be sentences whose meanings are not given by the rules already mastered. 30 J.A. Fodor, as well as many others, has repeatedly urged the necessity of logicosyntactic systematicity in the defense of his language of thought hypothesis. See his “Propositional Attitudes”; and Fodor and Lepore, Holism. Without such structure, it is argued, the novice acquiring language would have to learn as many individual “sentences” as she could ever use. Each sentence would function as a unique unarticulated expression. Subsentential structure would be eliminated, leaving an array of expressions without any internal relations to each other. The meaning of each sentence could only be specified by way of a unique rule of meaning. Such a theory of language, if it could even be called that, would leave out the very features that distinguish language from animal signal systems. It is formal systematicity, it is argued, that distinguishes language from complex signal detection systems and allows for a productivity unavailable to the latter. Thus, for many the interest in formal theories of meaning of the sort provided by Davidson is to provide insight into the psychological processes by which we exercise our linguistic competence. To deny that connection is to reject the primary reason for being interested in constructing such formal theories in the first place. 31 Ibid., Davidson, “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages,” 8. 32 It is interesting to compare this view of the importance of the logical articulation of language with a remark from the Tractatus: “Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it. It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is” (TLP 4.002). This suggests that if language does have such a formal structure, then it isn’t humanly possible to grasp it. The idea here, one presumably shared by Davidson, is that we don’t have to understand the logic explicitly in order to use it implicitly. 33 Davidson, “Truth and Meaning,” 25. One should note the explanatory work to be done by the phrase “assigned identical roles.” Just how is identical role to be determined? 34 Ibid., 22.

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35 According to Davidson, standard quantification theory describes the logical form of natural languages. See Lycan, Logical Form in Natural Language, for an excellent account and defense of this view. 36 Davidson, “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages,” 7. This “all or nothing” feature of holistic conceptions of language is a problem that Davidson shares with other holists, including Wittgenstein and Sellars. This indeed motivates Wittgenstein’s distinction between ostensive definition and ostensive teaching examined in Chapter 3. 37 The italics are in the original. Wittgenstein is emphasizing that how we take these simple utterances of the language is a function of our language. See the second section of Chapter 2. 38 Davidson, “Belief and the Basis of Meaning,” 141. 39 See, for example, Davidson, “Second Person”; “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” first published in 1986; and “Social Aspect of Language.” 40 “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” 446. 41 There are important differences. Where Quine seeks to show that indeterminacy of reference and ontological relativity are the inevitable concomitant of all linguistic usage and interaction, Davidson minimizes these results in his attempt to use the same argumentative strategy to show that logical form and truth are ineliminable features of all linguistic understanding. Where Quine emphasizes the importance of the sensory apparatus that the linguist shares with the native in generating a translation manual and communicating with the native, Davidson breaks with this traditional empiricist approach and its focus on ostension and the word–object relationship. He rejects the empiricist claims that (1) for any predicate to be understood, there must be some predicates that are learned ostensively; and (2) the ostensive learning situation must be “articulated in language” by a demonstrative element. He cites Quine’s argument that these conditions do not require the use of singular terms with approval. But he wants to go beyond Quine in holding that there is no reason why reference to particulars must involve the use of demonstratives. Demonstratives are not required for knowing a language or for learning one, according to Davidson. We can have a fully adequate theory of meaning without any appeal to an ostensive foundation, that is, without the ostensive definition of any of our predicates. Needless to say, these remarks are quite interesting in relation to Wittgenstein’s treatment of ostensive definition and ostensive training. 42 Davidson, “Radical Interpretation.” Here Davidson states that “all understanding of the speech of another involves radical interpretation,” p. 125. 43 Interpretation, it would seem, involves forms of systematicity other than formal systematicity. Our “learned conventions or regularities” figure in the presumption of rationality accorded language users (“A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”). Davidson becomes increasingly skeptical about the place of such regularities in our interpretations of each other. But what is common to early and late Davidson is a commitment to formal systematicity and to charity. In his late work, when his disillusion with achieving a theory of language is strong, the methodology of interpretation and formal systematicity are thought to apply to only the most ephemeral events of interpretation. This consists in the construction of passing theories that are shared for the moment of communication and then dropped. We will return to the methodology of interpretation in Chapter 5. Our focus now is on formal systematicity. 44 See Davidson, “Thought and Talk.” 45 See Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” 46 Davidson, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” 446.

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47 Davidson, “Second Person,” 255. 48 This has not always been made clear in all of Davidson’s writings. Indeed his earlier papers suggest a much more psychologically realist construal of interpretation. Thus, it is no accident that some of the early criticisms of Davidson’s philosophy of language turned on the implausibility of our being engaged in acts of interpreting each other (as well as our past selves) during every linguistic exchange. See, for example, Hacking, “Parody of Conversation.” 49 Michael Williams, “Meaning and Deflationary Truth.” 50 See Lycan, Logical Form in Natural Language; and Fodor, Representations. For criticism of the view that language is subject to full logical articulation, see Mark Crimmins, Talk about Beliefs. 51 It isn’t necessary to get into a full discussion of Wittgenstein’s critique of infinity to make the key point here that it is the picture of language as a totality defined in terms of its lexicon and combinatorial rules that is the real motor of Davidson’s exploration of the connections among the various forms of systematicity that language reveals. This is the ordinary picture of language held by many philosophers and linguists that Davidson himself comes to question. 52 This is the argument from “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs.” 53 For a detailed critique of the principle of the compositionality of meaning, and of so-called “naive semantics” in general, see Crimmins, Talk about Beliefs. I am drawing here on a number of his examples. 54 I take this phrase “unarticulated parameter” from Crimmins, “Talk about Beliefs,” 18. 55 Travis, Unshadowed Thought. 56 In fact, Wittgenstein espouses a redundancy theory of truth at PI §136. Such a view can be traced back to the Tractatus. See TLP 4.431 and 6.111. 57 Horwich, Truth, 2. Horwich gives a full defense of this minimalist conception of truth against theories of truth that find substantive explanatory work for the concept. Also see Michael Williams, “What Do We (Epistemologists) Need with a Theory of Truth?” 58 Michael Williams, “Meaning and Deflationary Truth.”

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The problem of normative similarity 2: rules and interpretation Two pleas for interpretation 160 The community view and reductionism 171 The individualist view and mystification 177

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Wittgenstein’s deflationary stance towards both truth and logic goes a long way in explaining his remarkable lack of interest in the formal systematicity of language. As abstractions from complex patterns of linguistic use, recursive rules of the kind that define (or interpret) formal languages cannot explain or even reveal the background against which linguistic moves are made. Primitive games like the builders do more to display this background than the sophisticated constructions of idealizing formal languages. Logic requires the same background that our ordinary linguistic moves require. The problem lies not with rules of logic in particular, but with rulefollowing of any sort. Wittgenstein has already suggested that there is this deeper problem when he first identifies the picture that holds us captive with the idea that linguistic mastery is “operating a calculus according to definite rules” (PI §81). The 80s foreshadow the rule-following considerations we are now turning to. In these earlier passages, Wittgenstein briefly introduces three variants of the regress argument, followed by even briefer replies to these arguments. He is, in effect, giving his reader a reminder of the kind of replies we would ordinarily find sufficient although a philosopher would not. In PI §84, he introduces a classical regress argument: “Can’t we imagine a rule determining the application of a rule, and a doubt which it removes— and so on?” In PI §86, using a modified version of the builders game, he introduces the problem of the multiplicity of interpretations of how rules are to be applied. And finally in PI §87 he addresses doubts raised about explanations of meaning, “as though an explanation as it were hung in the air unless supported by another one.” All three of these truncated arguments will be examined anew in the rulefollowing passages. The regress of applications of a schema is used early in the rule-following discussion to introduce the problem (PI §141). The 145

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multiple interpretations argument becomes shaped as a “paradox of interpretation” (PI §201). We find a repetition of the concern that an interpretation “hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support” (PI §198). Wittgenstein’s aim is to show that the philosophical picture of language as a calculus with fixed rules is vulnerable to the very philosophical problems it was thought to solve. Wittgenstein’s critical responses are all of the kind that a philosophically naive person might offer. To the regress of applications engendered by doubt, Wittgenstein answers “But that is not to say that we are in doubt because it is possible for us to imagine a doubt” (PI §84). Imagined doubt is not real doubt. Wittgenstein is looking to the limitations of the philosophical imagination. In the multiple interpretations argument, Wittgenstein appeals to the training one gets in using the schema in one way rather than another: “One learns to look the picture up in the table by receiving a training” (PI §86). How we learn, then, is seen as an appropriate response to certain philosophical questions. As to the fear that our explanation will hang in the air unsupported, Wittgenstein responds that no further explanation is needed “unless we require it to prevent a misunderstanding” (PI §87). These ordinary responses invite the reply that the philosopher requires something more demanding than what would satisfy the naif. Wittgenstein’s task is to show that the something more demanding is an illusory goal. The philosopher needs to see that the naive responses are fully satisfactory. But these responses can be seen as satisfactory only if the import of the questions shifts in some way. What Wittgenstein must do therefore is to discredit the very problems that make naive answers seem inadequate. How can the appeal to ordinary doubts or to our training or to our actual needs come to seem legitimate philosophically? Aren’t these only pragmatic responses to theoretical problems?

The problem of normative similarity 2: rules and interpretation PI §138 introduces the transitional problem that connects Wittgenstein’s rejection of the explanatory power of logical form and propositional content to his discussion of rule-following: But can’t the meaning of a word that I understand fit the sense of a sentence that I understand? Or the meaning of one word fit the meaning of another?—Of course, if the meaning is the use we make of the word, it makes no sense to speak of such “fitting.” But we understand the meaning of a word when we hear or say it; we grasp it in a flash, and what we grasp in this way is surely something different from the “use” which is extended in time! 146

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Interestingly, he makes his transition to an examination of rule-following, which focuses on the relation of understanding a rule to applying a rule, by first raising another question for the Fregean picture: How does the meaning of one word “fit” the meaning of another word or “fit” the sense of a sentence? The compositionality of meaning is a function of some such fitting, of the contribution that the word makes to the sense of the whole sentence. This metaphor of fitting is a variant of the “bad picture” of a proposition engaging “with the concept of truth (as with a cogwheel)” (PI §138). It is time for a shift away from words and their meanings, and propositions and their states of affairs, to something different. This shift is to the use of a word. The use is to be sought in the method of projection from a meaning-object (Sinnkorpus) to its application. As we will come to learn, the use, which is the method of projection, is not to be identified with a verificationist list of empirically checkable criteria. Nor is use to be identified with the point, force or sense of an assertoric sentence. The theoretically interesting role use plays emerges with Wittgenstein’s response to the rule-following problem, which involves giving up the metaphor of “fit” between word and meaning, or word and world, in favor of using words as integral to actions in the world. Counting is an excellent example of a method of projection that makes the words integral to temporally extended action. For all its promise, this dynamic conception of understanding raises its own difficulties. We can grasp the meaning of a word “in a flash,” which should make no sense if meaning is the use of the word over time. In this transitional passage (PI §138), we see Wittgenstein bringing together two competing ways of understanding what a theory of meaning is to do. For some philosophers, a theory of meaning is supposed to describe linguistic competence as an abstract ability. On this view, a theory of meaning need not describe, or even correspond to the psychological processes whereby an individual understands and uses language. It describes what linguistic competence is, not what is involved in producing utterances, a task for linguistics and psychology. But other philosophers take the opposite position, insisting that a theory of meaning should have a robust relevance to the psychology of linguistic understanding. On this approach, the nature of linguistic understanding must illuminate the exercise of that understanding.1 Thus, a theory of meaning must be a theory, or a proto-theory, of the psychological “mechanism” of understanding. We have already seen that Davidson’s position, despite his efforts to keep the philosophical theory of meaning distinct from empirical theories of production, nonetheless takes on a psychological hue when he appeals to language learning and the exercise of an infinite aptitude by means of finite resources.2 Nonetheless Davidson remains agnostic with respect to the details of the psycho-neural mechanisms by which we achieve and exercise our understanding. He aims rather to identify the transcendentally necessary conditions for linguistic competence.3 Wittgenstein is suspicious of such an endeavor, constructing in the paradox 147

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of interpretation argument a kind of antitranscendental argument, “antitranscendental” in the sense that no positive necessary boundaries can be specified. In opening the discussion as he does, Wittgenstein is clearly taking a theory of meaning to have direct implications for the psychology of linguistic understanding. Here is how Wittgenstein introduces the problem in a naive form: When someone says the word “cube” to me, for example, I know what it means. But can the whole use of the word come before my mind, when I understand it in this way? … Can what we grasp in a flash accord with a use, fit or fail to fit it? What really comes before our mind when we understand a word?—Isn’t it something like a picture? Can’t it be a picture? (PI §139) How do we combine a use conception of meaning with the need for something to anchor or explain the use to which words are put? Surely we want to say, there needs to be something that constrains and justifies the use, something that can be grasped “in a flash.” But here’s the problem. Whether the image of a cube fits or fails to fit a use of the word “cube” depends on the method used to apply the image. A little imagination can conjure up different ways of projecting the image in applying the word. We could use the picture of a cube to pick out triangular shapes or pyramids. “What is essential,” Wittgenstein tells us, “is to see that the same thing can come before our minds when we hear the word and the application still be different” (§140; italics mine).4 This is the second problem of normative similarity. At issue is the problem of the individuation and identity over time of the method of applying the word. What Wittgenstein brings out vividly with this simple case of the use of the word “cube” is how little is explained in appealing to the image or picture unless one understands how the cube-picture, in this case, ought to be projected. On the classical Cartesian view, this problem looks to be a nonstarter because the faculty of the understanding is simply taken to grasp the manner of the projection in grasping the contents of an idea or concept. How to project the idea is precisely what Descartes thought was one of the distinctive powers of the rational mind, which he referred to as that “even the most backward men can do”5 Descartes’ problem, notoriously, was whether there was anything to correspond to the ideas we endorse. The epistemological problem concerning our knowledge of the external world is, for Descartes, the fundamental philosophical problem. What Descartes takes to be an irreducible and transparent power of the understanding, Wittgenstein subjects to critical inquiry, bringing to view this second problem of normative similarity. This is the deeper problem, the proper treatment of which will show that it is Descartes’ problem of the external world that is the nonstarter. 148

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Yet it still needs to be shown why our ability to think up alternative methods of application, if sufficiently imaginative, creates a problem for the correct use of the cube-picture. On the face of it, our ability to imagine bizarre and convoluted alternatives to our usual projections does little to undermine the correctness of our usual projections. It is only against the background of certain assumptions concerning what role the line drawing ought to play that this imaginative capacity of ours can be seen to threaten our natural preferences. What assumptions enable us to take an imagined projection of the cube-picture that picks out pyramids rather than cubes as a legitimate rival projection to the usual one? What conception of meaning leads us to take these imagined alternative projections as evidence that “we are at most under a psychological, not a logical, compulsion” (PI §140)? It seems that we are looking for (1) something that is isolable temporally and logically, and so can be grasped “in a flash” (e.g., the line drawing), but which (2) can serve as a guide for the speaker by (3) setting a standard of correct use. These three features can be taken as conditions on the adequacy of any candidate-rule for a word.6 These are, respectively, the independence of the meaning-object, itself a form of semantic atomism; the effectiveness of the meaning-object in guiding and so explaining behavior; and the epistemic role of the meaning-object in justifying the guided behavior as correct. In short, the meaning of an expression is an ontologically self-contained item, which places constraints upon the speaker in the correct use of the expression. Wittgenstein uses the example of the use of the word “cube” to shift the focus of philosophical concern from the cube-image to the method of projection. To think that the method itself might be included in the meaningobject (“say a picture of two cubes connected by lines of projection”; PI §141) immediately generates a classic explanatory regress, for now this schema might itself have different applications. Our attention must shift away from the meaning-object to the practical and justificatory dimensions of rule-following. Rules give us the method of projection. They both constrain what we do and justify the actions guided by them. In other words, the focus of philosophical attention must turn yet again from representation to the background of representation, that is, to necessity and normativity. However, before we can look at these in a fresh way, we must first eliminate the lure of the picture of understanding that requires explaining the practical and justificatory dimensions in terms of some independent source. Wittgenstein opens his critical discussion of each dimension with the situation of a pupil first learning the natural number sequence (at PI §143 and §185). As with his critical discussion of ostensive definition, here too it is crucial to keep track of the domains of novice and master. In the case of ostension, as we saw, failure to distinguish these leads to reading the adult into the child. Now in connection with the second problem of normative similarity, ignoring this difference leads to reading the child into the adult. 149

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Disentangling what belongs to the domain of the novice and what to that of the master enables us to identify the intersection of causal and normative factors in the participation in language-games. Wittgenstein’s critique of ostensive definition as semantically fundamental shows that causally grounded associations are conflated with naming relations. The question of how words manage to refer to objects must be replaced with the question of how the novice comes to be a participant in referring games. The master exploits, of course, the causal relations between the novice and aspects of her environment. Similarly when we turn our attention to methods of projection that underwrite our use of rules, we are inclined to define our task as finding the source of that which guides and justifies our applications, a variant on the search for a special semantic relation between object and name. If we cannot change the question we ask, we shall be led to Kripke’s skeptical conclusion, in which public checkings replace autonomous use and authoritarian conformity replaces authoritative judgment. This is in effect to read the child into the adult. The question that we need to ask is not, what is the source of our actions? But how does one become “calibrated” so as to make judgments? How does one become a participant in the language-games? How do we become adept enactors of normative similarity? Language-game §143 opens with a description of what occurs when a pupil first learns the natural number sequence. The point Wittgenstein emphasizes linking this passage to his discussion of the use of the cube-image in applying the word “cube,” is that “here already there is a normal and abnormal learner’s reaction.” Whether teaching is successful or not depends on the learner’s reactions. There are alternatives to the normal (successful) reaction: a pupil may make random errors or some systematic mistake or he may even exhaust his capacity to learn at all. The point is to contrast the range of normal and abnormal reactions with the sorts of logical possibilities that the philosophical imagination can produce to raise doubts about our unthinking use of expressions. These imagined possible projections in effect treat every word or its Sinnkorpus like the ambiguous figures of Gestalt psychology. Just as we see the rabbit in the duck–rabbit drawing, so we can see triangles in the mental image of a cube. Just as we see now a duck and now a rabbit, so we see now a cube and now a pyramid, so we conclude, when set the arithmetic problem, “What is 68 + 57?,” now “125” and now “5.” How are we to avoid finding ourselves trapped in such a world of interpretation where the imagined multiplicity of interpretations cannot but be allied with the instability of the mental objects that were to be our guides? In other words, the imagined possibilities must treat the Sinnkorpus as malleable itself while nonetheless aligning its starting position with the fixed line drawing of the genuine Gestalt object. The emergence of a regress is a symptom that something has gone wrong, not with our responses, but with our theorizing. The philosophical problems supported by such imagined alternative possibilities turn on a failure to understand the grammar of “understanding.” We are tempted to say, with 150

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Wittgenstein’s interlocutor, that “to have got the system (or, again, to understand it) can’t consist in continuing the series up to this or that number: that is only applying one’s understanding. The understanding itself is a state which is the source of the correct use” (PI §146). Succumbing to this temptation is the fundamental mistake. Such a hypothesized source is no more crucial to the understanding the pupil displays than is the cube-image to correctly using the expression “cube.” The very fact that “we can think of more than one application of an algebraic formula and every type of application can in turn be formulated algebraically” (PI §146) shows the inadequacy of identifying the source of understanding with a formula. What matters in the learning situation is what the pupil does with the formula: “The application is still a criterion of understanding” (PI §146). The philosophically tempting picture looks for a change inside the pupil, putting into place a mechanism for producing correct applications. It is this picture of a mental mechanism from which particular applications are derived to which Wittgenstein objects: “Try not to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all … In the sense in which there are processes (including mental processes) which are characteristic of understanding, understanding is not a mental process” (PI §154). Wittgenstein’s sustained treatment of reading (PI §§156–71), a case in which spoken words are literally derived from printed signs, is a critical examination of this picture of the source of understanding.7 The focus here is on the practical dimension of rule-following. His two most important arguments are (1) what Crispin Wright has called “the manifestation argument,” which shows the primacy of application over any hypothesized inner source (PI §§154, 155, 157, 164, 166); and (2) the explanatory emptiness of such hypotheses (PI §§154, 156, 158, 162, 169, 170).8 It is tempting to think of linguistic competence as “a state of a mental apparatus (perhaps of the brain) by means of which we explain the manifestations of that knowledge” (PI §149). Wittgenstein’s objection to this is that “there ought to be two different criteria for such a state: knowledge of the construction of the apparatus, quite apart from what it does” (PI §149). From today’s perspective of cognitive science, this sounds, not like an objection, but the need to specify how the competence or knowledge is implemented in the brain. Functional level descriptions are distinct from instantiation level descriptions. Wittgenstein is correct, it could be argued, in pointing out that the criteria for individuating the neural apparatus that implements competence are distinct from the criteria for identifying the competence itself, but this would not thereby constitute an objection. So what does he have in mind? Wittgenstein’s objections are directed to establishing two points. First, he thinks that the picture of a mental or neural apparatus is driven by an a priori commitment to “a form of account which is very convincing to us” (PI §158), but is, in the end, empty. Second, he thinks that this picture in no 151

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way undermines the manifestation requirement. Application is the criterion for understanding. Establishing this is his primary philosophical motive in his first use of language-game 143. Now to the considerations he uses to make these two points. Reading is a clear case in which spoken words are derived from printed signs, giving support to the idea that there must be some intervening mechanism that achieves this transformation. But Wittgenstein maintains such mechanisms “are only hypotheses, models designed to explain, to sum up, what you observe” (PI §156). The specification of the intervening mechanism is essentially tied to the very behaviors the mechanism is to explain. And so it does not really explain the behavior we observe; rather it sums it up. This is a variation on the very old argument made famous by Moliere’s comic portrayal of such dispositionalist explanations.9 “Why does opium make me sleep?” asks a patient. “Because of its dormative power,” answers the doctor. Though this objection certainly applies in some cases, the question is whether it applies to this case. Whether it does depends on whether a convincing case can be made for the existence of an apparatus that can be individuated by criteria other than the range of behaviors to be explained, namely, the behaviors that are correct derivations. If there were such independent criteria for the understanding-mechanism, that would open the possibility of discovering our ordinary behavioral criteria for reading (or failing to read) should be overturned. But the apparatus-criterion can never override the behavioral application criterion, as that would leave behind the very phenomena that were to be explained by the apparatus and that are essential to the identification of the apparatus itself (cf. PI §§157–8). Recommendations for a scientifically changed conception of understanding or reading, on the basis of a conflict between the two sets of criteria, could only be for the introduction of some new proprietary concept, tied to behavioral and/or neural criteria other than those of successfully reading or understanding.10 Wittgenstein’s point is that the identification of any such mechanism cannot but involve the ordinary behavioral criteria that manifest understanding. It is important to note that he is not arguing, in Humean style, that a causal connection requires the independent individuation of cause and effect. We can allow that that need not be required. Rather the requirement of independent individuation of the implementing mechanism that subserves instances of reading is a requirement imposed by the picture of reading that Wittgenstein is attacking. His point is that the three conditions imposed on an adequate theory of understanding are incompatible. We cannot both require that the source of understanding be some isolable entity (the mental or neural machinery) and that its operation be the source of what is correct in our applications. Since the identification of an underlying mechanism cannot eliminate the ordinary concept of understanding or reading, the primacy of application can never be relinquished, whether one searches for a mental mechanism or 152

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a neural one. But there is an important difference between these hypothesized mechanisms. The ordinary concept of understanding, with its ties to application, is our only vehicle for pursuing a scientific inquiry into the neurological bases of behavior. This is not just a methodological point; it has theoretical import as well. The functional individuation of the relevant neural substrate cannot be made independently of our ordinary concepts. Wittgenstein concludes that such a neural mechanism cannot be identified with understanding or reading; correlational studies that must avail themselves of behavioral and environmental criteria to specify the relevant neural structures are not discoveries of understanding itself, though they may well be discoveries of its neural substrates. It may be objected, however, that this manifestation argument reveals only a methodological constraint on neural or cognitivist theory construction.11 Given the methodological problems that the manifestation requirement reveals, just how are we to answer the question, how does the formula or written word guide us? Wittgenstein’s answer is to look to the learning situation and the normal and abnormal responses of the pupil. The deepest issue, for Wittgenstein, concerns the justificatory condition. Returning to the pupil learning the natural number sequence (PI §185), Wittgenstein introduces a different kind of breakdown in the instruction, not a random or systematic error on the part of the pupil, but a different way of going on that the pupil takes to be the same: Now we get the pupil to continue a series (say +2) beyond 1000— and he writes 1000, 1004, 1008, 1012. We say to him: “Look what you’ve done!”—He doesn’t understand. We say: “You were meant to add two: look how you began the series!”—He answers: “Yes, isn’t it right? I thought that was how I was meant to do it.”—Or suppose he pointed to the series and said: “But I went on in the same way.” Continuing the natural number sequence is an exemplary case for this second problem of normative similarity as the builders game was for the first. Because the procedure for counting does not vary with the kind of object (if any) being counted, the simple language-game of PI §143 enables us to focus on the way in which rules or procedures, the methods of projection, govern practice. In this language-game, A gives B an order to write down the natural numbers (“write down series of signs according to a certain formation rule”). Wittgenstein does not obscure the issue by using words that refer to objects (or at least ordinary objects). We want to see as clearly as we can just how rules determinate correct use of words, that is, correct continuation. The rule-following passages are a complex array of arguments that culminate in the paradox of interpretation at PI §201. I want to contrast my construal of Wittgenstein’s overall argument with two important and 153

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influential alternative interpretations. Each interpretation reflects a distinct understanding of the philosophical problem that Wittgenstein addresses. The first interpretation is Saul Kripke’s. He develops what I am calling this second problem of normative similarity as a “new form of philosophical scepticism.”12 He construes the arguments from PI §§143–202 as establishing the skeptical conclusion that “meaning vanishes into thin air.”13 PI §§203–42 then spell out an alleged skeptical solution to this problem, one that replaces objective normative constraint with brute community conformity. Kripke’s first task is to make plausible the new problem of meaning. Given that any actual use the subject has made of a rule is finite, any number of different future uses can be made out to be compatible with that past use. The problem then is how to determine which continuations are “bent,” and so mistaken, and which are “straight” and so correct.14 The problem is one of identifying the criteria or ground for sameness with respect to the application of a rule. On Kripke’s view, Wittgenstein accepts the skeptical conclusion that there is no fact of the matter as to which rule we follow and so no fact of the matter as to what it is to go on in the same way. As with the manifestation argument just discussed, the culprit is the independence condition. But this time the problem is not methodological or, in the end, epistemological; rather the problem is ontological. There is no fact of the matter as to the correct continuation of a rule, nothing isolable that counts as the uniquely correct projection or meaning of the rule. Consequently, appeal to a rule cannot justify our continuations as correct. I shall argue that though Wittgenstein does reject the independence condition, as Kripke maintains, this cannot be construed as supporting a conclusion of indeterminacy and so skepticism about meaning. Rather, Wittgenstein impugns the philosophical theories that invite drawing such a conclusion. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s example of a child learning the natural number sequence, Kripke introduces his skeptical challenge using the simple arithmetic operation of addition. He is not raising a skeptical question with respect to what the arithmetic function of addition is, nor with respect to whether an error is made (or not) in a particular calculation. The question he raises is how we know that we mean addition when we use the plus sign. Perhaps “+” really means quaddition, a fictitious operator that functions like addition for numbers smaller than 57, such that the product of any quaddition operation on numbers larger than 57 is 5. So, if I mean to add when I am set the problem, “What is 57 plus 68?” the answer is 125; but if I mean to quadd, then the answer is 5. Though Kripke chooses the number “57” arbitrarily, we are to suppose that “57” is a number larger than any human being has ever thought or used before. All that he needs is that there is some huge number such that no one has actually used it in an adding calculation. He takes Wittgenstein’s rule-following arguments to show that there is no way for anyone, not even the subject herself, to tell whether she means (or has meant) addition or quaddition in any of her uses of the sign “+”—Kripke 154

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expresses this by saying that there is no fact about the individual that determines whether she meant addition or quaddition. Certainly in our ordinary use of the term “fact,” it is a fact that I have added many times and that when I used the sign “+” I meant addition. So when Kripke says that there is no fact of the matter in virtue of which my claim is true, he can only mean “fact” as restricted in some way. The constraints that he imposes upon legitimate candidate “facts” about the subject are the three adequacy conditions of the traditional picture. Relevant candidate facts must refer to properties or states that are nonrelational and so can be individuated independently of anything else (the independence condition). They must be what guides the subject in getting an answer to the problem (the guidance condition). Finally they must generate a distinction between correct and incorrect answers (the justificatory condition). Kripke surveys the possibilities traditionally thought to be the most promising candidates for meeting these conditions: introspectable experiences, dispositions, and machine states of the individual. What he is most concerned to show is that each candidate fails to meet the justificatory condition. None of them, he argues, can generate a distinction between correct and incorrect answers. None enables the individual to tell whether she follows the bent rule (quaddition) or the straight rule (addition). Kripke concludes that Wittgenstein endorses a radically skeptical conclusion. According to Kripke, this is the import of Wittgenstein’s “paradox of interpretation” (PI §201): This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here. There is no basis for the objectivity of meaning. If there is no isolable entity that can determine our use by determining what is correct, there simply is no fact of the matter concerning what it is to go on in the same way. Multiple interpretations can always be gerrymandered to fit any course of action. Each interpretation “fits” the exposed portion of the practice, as the alternating Gestalt figures fit the perception of now a rabbit and now a duck. Writing down “5” when quadding should seem no odder than aligning the Gestalt perception of a duck–rabbit drawing with rabbits rather than ducks. The second influential interpretation of these passages is McDowell’s quietist interpretation.15 This interpretation is quietist in that McDowell offers no theories of rules and no recommendation for reducing rule-following behavior to something nonnormative. Yet the argument he attributes to Wittgenstein, pace his quietism, is a transcendental argument. McDowell argues that PI §§143–202 present a dilemma: either rules determine use as a 155

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kind of “super-rigid machine” which ensures the objectivity of meaning, an illusory myth (cf. PI §193); or rules are subject to interpretation, in which case alternatives can be gerrymandered to fit the exposed practice. Nonsense or vapidity. He takes Wittgenstein’s discussion of the “machine as symbol” in PI §193 to be especially illuminating in relation to the first horn of the dilemma: The machine as symbolizing its action: the action of a machine— I might say at first—seems to be there in it from the start. What does that mean?—If we know the machine, everything else, that is its movement, seems to be already completely determined. The machine-as-symbol is the idea that an actual machine, in some sense, represents all possible actions of the machine. This Platonist illusion, when understood as such, initiates a recoil to the second horn of the dilemma: the interpretationist strategy and its consequent vapidity. The second horn of the dilemma arises from the attempt to avoid the problems of the Platonized super-rigid machine by giving up the independence condition in favor of interpretation. The exposed portion of a practice, the formulae of mathematics and logic, or sentences of a language, we are now tempted to say, are all open to interpretation. Interpretation requires, both methodologically and theoretically, a holistic repertoire of accepted sentences, logical moves, and formal transformations. PI §201 states this second horn of the dilemma. If interpretation fixes correct application, then there can be no correct or incorrect application as rival interpretations can always be gerrymandered. The guidance and justification conditions cannot be met any more than can the independence condition. Against Kripke, McDowell holds, correctly, that Wittgenstein does not endorse the paradox of 201 as a skeptical conclusion and thus is not arguing for a generalized skepticism about meaning. Rather, McDowell claims, Wittgenstein rejects the dilemma as a whole, thereby mounting a transcendental argument for the position that “there is a way of grasping a rule that is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases” (PI §201; italics in original). Wittgenstein rejects the presuppositions of the dilemma without offering an alternative theory of rule-following. The Wittgensteinian philosopher can only describe what we do, without revision, commentary or theorizing. The naive responses to challenges just are legitimate. This is the quietist conclusion, but it is backed by a transcendental argument that “shows that there must be a middle position.”16 Just as the explanatory role philosophers have assigned ostensive definition involves conflating it with ostensive training, so the normative role of rules (that is, their method of projection) as traditionally construed ignores the differences between the domain of the master and that of the novice. No headway can be made on the rule-following problem so long as one looks 156

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only to the contexts in which the ideals of description, justification and explanation are derived from a mastery of language. Such ideals make invisible the background within which description, justification, and explanation are embedded and have a life. Neither the interpretation of Kripke nor that of McDowell enables us to see that background. The deep problem for Wittgenstein is the problem of normative similarity and that can only be properly understood by examining the intersection of the two domains. The problem is one of accounting for, or understanding, our basic judgments of sameness of object or property (the first form of the problem) and sameness in continuing a rule. The problem of normative similarity in its second guise concerns how a method of projection can fix a standard for going on in the same way. As the builders language-game gives us a tool for examining reference so the child’s learning the natural number series gives us a simple but exemplary case for examining rule-following. Because the procedure for counting does not vary with the kind of object (unlike the builders game) or who the counter is (unlike the differentiated roles of practitioners of the builders game), this simple language-game enables us to focus on the way in which rules or procedures govern and/or justify practice. PI §143 is a learning game in which the initiate pupil acquires the ability to count and so to understand number. The grammatical mistake made by the mentalist is to insist “[t]hat the understanding itself is a state which is the source of the correct use” (PI §146). The learning situation is not as simple as this philosophical remark suggests. The particular applications made by the pupil are correct or incorrect, but the “source” of this assessment is not the pupil but rather the adult who already has mastery of the natural number sequence, that is, knows how to count. As Wittgenstein sees it, the mistake made by the Cartesian intellectualist is to see any instance of counting, whether that of the pupil or teacher, child or adult, as deriving from the same internal source, one that guides and justifies. This failure to distinguish the two domains supports, quite naturally, the skeptical solution Kripke proposes. It becomes impossible to distinguish correct continuation from community regulation. The child’s behavior is “regulated”; so if adult usage comes from the same source, the adults must be locked into a system of mutual checking. This is to read the child into the adult, with the result that justification is forfeited in favor of community control. In developing my own reading of Wittgenstein on rules, I shall concentrate on two arguments: the machine-as-symbol (PI §§193–4)—another failed fact for Kripke and the first horn of the rule-following dilemma for McDowell— and the paradox of interpretation argument (PI §201)—skepticism about meaning for Kripke and the second horn of the dilemma for McDowell. I agree with McDowell that PI §§193–4 is of special interest, but its place within the structure of Wittgenstein’s overall argument is not what McDowell thinks. It is a special kind of conflation argument, that of confusing the object of representation with the method of representation. This 157

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error is made concrete in the use of an actual machine to represent the rules by which it works. To remind us of this passage, let me quote a part of it again: The machine as symbolizing its action: the action of a machine … seems to be there in it from the start. What does this mean? … [It] means: we are inclined to compare the future movements of the machine in their definiteness to objects which are already lying in a drawer and which we then take out. (PI §193) What does it mean to hold that a machine could symbolize its actions? The idea is more clearly made with an example of a simple machine with identifiable parts that work together to produce an outcome. We could think of a watch, in terms of the material relations of its internal parts, as representing or containing the machine’s possible movements. The importance of this example is that the actual machine has an array of parts, the watch’s cogs and wheels, that relate to each other in physical ways that explain the movements of the hands. In displaying the internal parts of the watch we can thereby symbolize the possible actions of the watch, and even speak of the watch as the symbol of them. Here we have something that seems to meet the three conditions on an adequate theory of rule-following. The watch as symbol is an independent object; the relations among the internal components explain the actions of the watch, most particularly the movement of the hands; and finally the relations among the components can be said to justify the actions that are explained by the relations obtaining among the parts. The hour hand just touching the 12 is “justified” in this action by the fact that it is determined to move to 12 at the very time that it does. When we consider, however, the fact that watches can break down or wear out, we realize that we need an ideal watch if it is to determine the correct movements of the hour hand, “it may look as if the way it moves must be contained in the machine-as-symbol far more determinately than in the actual machine” (PI §193). The idealized watch seems to contain all possible (correct) actions in a determinate and determining way. As Wittgenstein expresses it, “if we know the machine, everything else, that is its movement, seems to be already completely determined.” The causal action of the actual watch which does determine the movement of the hands is conflated with the idealized machine-as-symbol, which is conceived as determining all logically possible continuations, all possible movement (PI §194). We bring the idealizing work of the machine-as-symbol together with the causal reality of the actual machine. In doing so, we conflate the caused action of the watch with the idealized set of predetermined possible movements. This is the place at which the ideal is mismatched with the causal. Like the machine-as-symbol, rules 158

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have a temporal dimension. But rules qua formulae, no more than the machine-as-symbol, contain all possible actions or determine all possible movements. To treat the actual machine as “containing” all possible correct movements is a grammatical mistake, as Wittgenstein would put it. The actual machine is taken to have ideal properties. In this way the actual clock, as the means of representation, becomes conflated with the object of representation, telling time. This conflation of the causal and the normative does not directly implicate the relation of master and novice. But there is an indirect relation. Just before he introduces the machine-as-symbol, Wittgenstein answers the question, How does the rule or formula determine the steps in advance of actual use?: It may now be said: “The way the formula is meant determines which steps are to be taken.” What is the criterion for the way the formula is meant? It is, for example, the kind of way we always use it, the way we are taught to use it. (PI §190) “The way we are taught” resides with that special relationship that obtains between the master of the practice and the novice, the initiate into the practice. The peculiar conflux of normativity and causality is the medium in which we live. Human beings cannot live wholly causal lives. It is part of our first nature that we acquire a second nature by being initiated into normative practices. But now it might be thought that interpretation can achieve what machine-symbols cannot. The application of rules is not fixed once and for all as suggested by the machine-as-symbol. The alternative is interpretation. Having established that the independence condition cannot be met, a natural response is to find that which can satisfy the guidance and justification conditions.17 Alluding to the arguments of the 80s, Wittgenstein enters his own paradox of interpretation argument. This argument is not simply a restatement of a regress argument though Wittgenstein is always sensitive to the possibility of explanatory regress when considering philosophical theories.18 He reiterates the threat of explanatory regress in PI §198 where he redefines the problem we are addressing, and with it he enters his second paradox argument. Though it has been called many things, and for good reasons—a skeptical argument,19 a reductio ad absurdum argument,20 a gerrymandering argument21—I will refer to it as a paradox argument. The paradox of interpretation argument is intended to show that the very distinction between correct and incorrect collapses from within what looks to be the best alternative to the idea that rules determine correct continuations by “containing” all possible correct continuations. Though interpretation doesn’t determine all continuations in advance, it does promise to satisfy the 159

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guidance and justification requirements. Interpretation selects and applies a method of projection, such as the principle of charity, in the use of words. In this way it guides and justifies linguistic action without resorting to a meaning object. Wittgenstein’s argument is a reductio ad absurdum: the very way in which interpretation explains and justifies action, namely, by the selection of a method of projection, opens the linguistic act to alternative interpretations of the rule. Since interpretation of any rule can be gerrymandered to accommodate any sequence of actions, anything one does can be interpreted to be in accord with a given rule, or conversely: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule … if everything can be made to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here. (PI §201) The paradox is that the philosophical theory that seems best suited to the problem at hand (how to go on correctly) eliminates the very phenomenon that it was to explain, namely, going on correctly or not. In avoiding the problem of meaning independence, interpretation renders any linguistic action indeterminate. But Wittgenstein, in rejecting interpretation as the way to fix the way to go on, rejects the consequences of that theory as well. He does not endorse a ubiquitous indeterminacy of meaning. Rather by rejecting the intellectualist orientation of traditional philosophical theories, he opens the way to negotiate a third position, a dynamic conception of language in which how we are initiated into language-games as well as the ways in which we are embedded in the world are integral, both naturally and culturally, to meaningful language. Again, it is part of our first nature to acquire a second nature.22

Two pleas for interpretation Donald Davidson’s theory of language provides one of the strongest defenses of an interpretationist theory of meaning. The method of interpretation, Davidson argues, is essential to a proper understanding of how meaning is fixed in a way that successfully bridges the requirements of systematicity and the demands of intentionality (that we are believers and actors). His challenge to Wittgenstein, then, comes from two interrelated sources: first, meaning requires logical form and, second, understanding requires interpretation. Though sophisticated language certainly involves considerable systematicity (not all of which is purely formal), Davidson’s idealized conception is just that: an idealized abstraction from the less than ideal reality of language use. The apparatus of formal logic is used in describing language in 160

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this way, but it is a fallacy to attribute features of the apparatus, the means of representation, to the object being represented, to our actual languagegames. Formal logic plays no deep explanatory role. What contributes to the sense that it does is the view of language as a totality that encompasses an infinity of possible uses generated by a finite set of resources. On this view, natural language must have the recursive structure of formal languages. This formal structure is required, it is thought, if language is to be learnable. Since the way language is learned is crucial to Wittgenstein’s account of meaning and rule-following, we need to address Davidson’s claim once more. The first point to note is that the reach of linguistic competence so understood is purely formal. The infinite number of sentences that we could construct or understand is a function of the recursive applicability of the logical operators, giving our linguistic competence infinite reach in the way that the natural number sequence is infinite. But the formal construction of new sentences is hardly the infinite reach of language that captures the imagination. As we noted earlier, the infinite reach of language in the robust sense must come from the open-ended character of our language games. Thus, Wittgenstein challenges the claim that our competence is infinite (in any interesting sense) and the claim that our resources are fixed and finite. What philosophers have taken to be the infinite reach of linguistic competence is the open-ended character of language use, which has nothing to do with formal rules. The use of signs within language-games is open to change unless we stipulate boundaries for particular purposes or reasons. This means that in many cases of novel language use, we simply don’t have, in advance of the occurrence of a possible linguistic act, an understanding of what that use means. Even a sentence that is quite familiar and homely, like “That is a chair,” might become unintelligible or problematic, say, if what we took for a chair disappeared and reappeared (PI §80). Furthermore, being well-formed according to purely formal considerations is not sufficient to guarantee that a sentence is meaningful. Here are two cases. Consider a well-formed sentence consisting of 20 assertoric sentences, strung together by conjunction. This is one of the infinitely many sentences that our linguistic aptitude encompasses. The iteratibility of logical connectives, as the source of our infinite aptitude, is hardly interesting if our concern is to be open to novel sentences. “It is 12 o’clock on the sun” is a well-formed sentence.23 All the words are meaningful (we could explain each of them); the sentence is constructed in accordance with our rules for syntactically well-formed sentences; various logical implications could be drawn (“it is not morning on the sun”). Yet it is nonsense. Given the sun’s essential role in time-telling (as part of the means of representation), it cannot be any specific time on the sun itself (any more than the standard meter stick can be or fail to be one meter long). There is no way to specify, in advance a demarcation principle that will distinguish, once and for all, meaningful sentences from meaningless ones. Yet the conception of linguistic competence as an infinite aptitude requires just this distinction. 161

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Closely related to the sentences Wittgenstein identifies as nonsense, we find sentences that have all the formal appearance of being empirical, and yet they are not (or need not be). Sentences like “This is a chair,” when used as a teaching device, or “All human beings have two parents”24 look superficially like empirical propositions but are not, on Wittgenstein’s account. They serve very different roles in language, distinct from that of reporting on some state of affairs in the world for which evidence could sensibly be sought. Such vital difference will never emerge from a truth-conditional semantics. “Meaning” therefore will not explain use, the very thing it is postulated to explain.25 Other well-formed sentences, like “One plays patience by oneself” (PI §248) or “Every rod has a length” (PI §251), are also problematic and raise questions for Davidson’s theory of meaning. These are grammatical, not empirical, propositions. Not only are there these counter-examples and problematic cases, it is also a fact that often when one does come to understand novel sentences, one does so by becoming trained into a new practice or language-game. There are shallow examples of this as well as deep ones. Entering a new social situation can leave one tongue-tied, not understanding what is said and not knowing what to say. Understanding terms like “mass” or “motion” as they occur in physics requires training in the theory. No analysis of the theoretical terms captures their contribution to the physical theory. No analysis can replace the training in the use of such words. The point of introducing these familiar cases is not to make an argument for the incommensurability of practices or language-games, but to underscore the fact that our mastery of language does not prepare us to understand every novel use of well-formed sentences. Our linguistic abilities are finite. Linguistic mastery does require a limited compositionality of meaning, but this is not because that mastery is infinite in its reach and so must have the structure of formal languages.26 Wittgenstein’s views on both the nature of language and the role of formal logic as a constraint on interpretation differ profoundly from Davidson’s. But Davidson does come to a point that is much closer to Wittgenstein’s own position, and the pressures for this shift—in Davidson’s later papers—derive from the methodology of interpretation. Let’s look at this first plea for interpretation. Davidson, in his late period, offers two responses to the paradox of interpretation argument. First, he denies that it applies to the role played by interpretation in his methodology for constructing a theory of meaning. And, second, he claims that though the conclusion of the paradox is sound, it does not matter.27 These are bold responses since, on the face of it, Wittgenstein’s paradox argument clearly applies to Davidson’s position. Just as any finite sequence of numbers can be compatible with an indefinite array of distinct functions, so can any exposed portion of language be shown to be compatible with distinct theories of meaning. If all that is required for being a correct use of language is being interpretable as a part of some theory of meaning or 162

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other, then the distinction between correct and incorrect interpretations, and so correct or incorrect theories of meaning, is lost. Davidson’s reply to this paradox is that it is really an instance of the problem of induction, and so it raises no special difficulties for him.28 More particularly, interpretation, as ultimately fixing correct vs incorrect uses or continuations, does not eliminate the very distinction between correct and incorrect. Rather it emphasizes the paucity of empirical evidence that is available to prefer one theory of meaning over another. So, Davidson concludes, the paradox argument is correct in showing that for any exposed language use, alternative, even gerrymandered, theories of meaning are available. Indeed Davidson’s very notion of a passing theory as all that is required for communication is the endorsement of gerrymandering. What this shows is not that interpretation is self-defeating but that any substantive use of interpretation must be accompanied with supplementary methodological devices. For Davidson these devices are the principle of charity and the triangulation of observation concepts and sentences. The first provides the coherence needed to rationalize what we say and the second provides the needed tracking of the world.29 The importance of these supplementary devices is considerably enhanced by Davidson’s changed conception of natural language itself. As noted earlier, in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” Davidson makes the dramatic claim that “there is no such thing as language … not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed,” a reversal from his earlier position.30 This reversal, it seems to me, is linked to a deeper appreciation of the Wittgensteinian conception of language. He is not just making the point, already established, that his theory of meaning provides an abstract description of a part of a competence, a description derivable from patterns of actual usage. The more dramatic claim is connected to his further argument that language is neither stable nor shared. Far from seeing this as a reductio ad absurdum, perhaps even a self-defeating feature of the methodology of interpretation, he treats it as a deeper insight into the autonomy of language use and the way in which language is secured to the world. He seeks to retain an explanatory role for interpretation, but one so austere that it does not require a shared stable language among speakers. Importantly, there is one point at which interpretation is anchored in the world, and that is by way of a social relation. That relation is not the I–we relation of an individual to a community of speakers. Rather it is an I–thou relation, a sociality of two. Mutual interpretability is required to anchor observation reports. There are three key points we will make at this time: First, the recognition that the paradox argument is (at least) a gerrymandering argument contributes to Davidson’s revised conception of language. Second, underdetermination of meaning is indeterminacy of meaning. To avoid this result will require considerable help from the supplementary devices. Thirdly, Davidson’s strategy of eviscerating language to retain 163

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interpretation cannot but fail. The way it fails renders interpretation either self-defeating or a shallow device that presupposes the sociality of language in a much more thoroughgoing manner. First to Davidson’s changed conception of language. Though sharing a stable common lexicon and stable set of logico-syntactic rules apparently occurs and facilitates communication, Davidson maintains that neither sharing linguistic conventions nor the stability of such conventions, even for the individual over time, is essential or necessary to communication. To speak a language is for each linguistic performance to be radically interpretable; that is, a theory of meaning can be constructed for each performance.31 The interpreter must construct, for each speech act, what Davidson calls a “passing theory” for the language the linguistic performance instantiates.32 Davidson’s view, driven by his holism and the interdependence of meaning and belief, is that an individual’s “language” constantly undergoes change, as is revealed by the changing theories of meaning that interpretation must construct from utterance to utterance in order to maximize true belief. His ground for saying this is the ease with which we accommodate malapropisms, slips of the tongue, and other forms of misspeaking in our conversations with each other. What we call “language” ordinarily or philosophically is an abstraction from the changing idiolects of individual speakers. Not merely, then, do we not share a language; we do not even speak a single language as individuals. This allows Davidson to accommodate later performances or different uses of words that are at odds with the predictions of the theory of meaning assigned to earlier usages. This seems to ease the pressure of underdetermination of meaning, by absorbing more evidence in the construction of new theories. But this way of evading Wittgenstein’s problem is illusory. Indeed Davidson’s account of the very ease with which we accommodate malapropisms and other kinds of misspeakings makes it questionable whether any linguistic performance is subject to normative constraints at all. In what way can misspeakings be identified as mistakes as long as they are interpretable in accord with some theory of meaning or other? Doesn’t Davidson’s own use of malapropisms interpreted to accord with the interpreter’s passing theory of meaning actually support the paradox of interpretation argument? The point of that argument is to show that interpretation cannot ground meaning, precisely because interpretations can always be gerrymandered to fit whatever verbal behavior occurs. Davidson seems to be endorsing just this idea in his denial that “language” exists. His passing theories are the gerrymandered fits between verbal behavior and some theory of meaning or other (typically the interpreter’s prior theory of meaning for his subject). Further, we can see that Davidson’s later conception of language jettisons the guidance condition, since interpretation comes after the event. Davidson’s interpretationalist strategy does not guide what is said; it finds an interpretation to fit the words of the moment. This is the natural consequence of his theory. 164

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What, then, protects him from the charge that the very distinction between correct and incorrect linguistic performance has collapsed? Davidson’s construal of the paradox argument as an instance of the problem of induction enables him to separate, or so he hopes, the substance of the argument from the conclusion Wittgenstein draws. The substance of the argument is the gerrymandering claim, a mark of inadequate evidence. The conclusion, to be rejected, is that no distinction can be drawn between correct and incorrect. As an instance of the problem of induction, the argument reveals no special problems about meaning or interpretation, but only the usual concerns about the underdetermination of theory by the available evidence. Acknowledgement of this is fully compatible (or seems to be) with the idea that the speaker’s meaning can be grasped correctly or incorrectly and that the speaker himself can continue correctly or not. The problem of induction as applied to meaning attacks the adequacy of any evidence available for deciding among rival hypotheses as to what the speaker means. It does not deny that something is meant. This is a very problematic line of defense for Davidson to take. Given that meaning just is whatever is recovered through interpretation, there is no difference here between indeterminacy and underdetermination. That he cannot succeed in replacing indeterminacy of meaning with the underdetermination of hypotheses about meaning is implicitly acknowledged when he says that: The fact that even all possible evidence with regard to the question what language a speaker or group of speakers is speaking might be consistent with many languages … ought not in itself to worry us. For we can agree that it is enough to know that a speaker speaks any of a set of empirically equivalent languages; indeed there is nothing to stop us from calling this set “the” language of the speaker.33 This attempt at a pragmatic resolution of the problem of indeterminacy does not protect Davidson’s position from the conclusion of the paradox of interpretation. Being primed to change one’s passing theory does not avoid the paradoxical conclusion that any theory (whether prior or passing) is but one of an indefinite range of gerrymandered theories. Denying that language exists, as Davidson does, is not denying that speech exists. But interpreted speech of the moment cannot avoid the challenge Wittgenstein raises. The only way to avoid the paradox is to find the applicability of a theory of meaning which is not itself constructed by the methodology of interpretation. Davidson does offer an alternative strategy in which interpretation plays an explanatory role. Rather than looking at the exposed speech to find evidence for the interpretation that specifies the correct meaning, he suggests that we find the normative contrast in the possible misalignment of the interpreter’s theory of the meanings of the speaker’s words and the speaker’s intention to be understood in a particular way. The interpreter’s theory of 165

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meaning is correct just in case it aligns with the intention of the speaker to be heard that way.34 Davidson puts the point this way: “an interpreter (correctly) interprets an utterance of a speaker only if he knows that the speaker intends the interpreter to assign certain truth conditions to his (the speaker’s) utterance.”35 Appeal to this intention gives us a way of drawing the distinction between what is correct and what seems correct. And yet this normative distinction is only apparent. There is a problem of circularity that must be avoided. The standard for assessing whether a particular T-sentence in the construction of the speaker’s language is correct is the intention of the speaker to be understood in that way. But, in the context of radical interpretation, the speaker has the intention only if interpretable as having it. Speaker intention simply does not have the requisite autonomy from interpretation to constitute the standard for correct and incorrect specifications of meaning. The nature of this problem underscores the work to be done by that indispensable supplemental device for interpretation, the principle of charity. Charity and the interrelation between language and belief comprise the necessary heuristic for constructing a theory of meaning for a language. The interpreter must maximize the true beliefs of the speaker. Using Davidson’s example of a malapropism,36 when Ace says “Ace will monotonize the conversation with witticisms too humorous to mention,” he intends to be understood with the T-sentence: “Ace will monotonize the conversation with witticisms too humorous to mention” is true in L-ace iff Ace will monopolize the conversation with witticisms too numerous to mention. So long as the interpreter constructs this T-sentence, communication between the two will be successful. Pointing this out doesn’t help with the problem of circularity that obtains between an interpreted meaning and the speaker intention. Individuating the intention using the resources of interpretation alone is no freer from the problems of gerrymandering than is the hypothesis constructed by the interpreter from the position of radical interpretation. As Kripke would put it, there is no fact of the matter as to which T-sentence is meant or understood. What really does the explanatory work in identifying the beliefs and T-sentences specifying meaning is charity, maximizing rationality and true belief. In practice, this is a matter of maximizing agreement between the interpreter and the speaker. The importance of agreement in specifying meaning reveals that the situation of radical interpretation is a myth, and an unhelpful myth as well. Agreement in what we say and the circumstances under which agreement is achieved show that much must be shared if we are to share a language. Charity, construed in this way, is Wittgensteinian form of life. This agreement cannot itself be a matter of interpretation. Only in this way is the paradox of interpretation to be avoided. The two person agreement in what is said and judged looks like an I–thou relation because only two persons are involved. But in fact it is an I–we relation, a communal agreement in what to believe. 166

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There is, however, a second way in which Davidson argues for the I–thou sociality of language, one that is quite different from the appeal to charity. This strategy also brings Davidson much closer to Wittgenstein. Davidson addresses the instability of language that his later view of language entails by finding a means for anchoring language use, or at least that of observational reports, to the world. Davidson comes to agree that his first reaction to the paradox argument, that it is the problem of induction applied to rules, was relatively shallow. It does not address the deeper problem of normative similarity, one that “demands reference to social interaction. Where I disagree with [Wittgenstein],” Davidson states, “is on how this demand is met.”37 Unlike Wittgenstein, this demand is not for conformity in behavior among the members of the community, but a demand for the mutual acknowledgement of the rationality of each participant. It is to be, and be treated, as an agent. Like Wittgenstein, Davidson finds the place for solving the problem of normative similarity, of what it is to go on in the same way, in the initiate learning situation. Here knowing that the teacher and the pupil mean the same thing is a matter of triangulation. The teacher says “chair” while looking at a chair; the child says “chair” while looking at a chair. The referent of “chair” is the result of triangulating the two perceptual causal relations and the sameness of vocables uttered by both teacher and pupil. It marks a very different way to defend the sociality of language. Davidson sees this as the fundamental I–thou relation, a relation of mutual recognition.38 And only through triangulation do we get an answer to Wittgenstein’s question, how do we determine what is the same in the use of a word. It is instructive to look at both Davidson’s and Brandom’s defense of interpretation and more particularly their respective defenses of I–thou sociality. Both agree that interpretation goes “all the way down.” Both agree that interpretation can be separated from the paradox of interpretation. And both agree that while a community view of rule-following is mistaken, there is a social dimension that is necessary to language, and that is the I–thou relation of mutual recognition or acknowledgement. We have seen that the methodology of interpretation does flounder over the paradox of interpretation, forcing Davidson to rely heavily on the principle of charity. That, as we saw, is a thinly veiled reliance on agreement, on conformity in judgment, i.e., a variant of the community view that we will examine in the next section. Brandom’s defense of interpretation involves disengaging its use from the paradox of interpretation and accepting Wittgenstein’s restriction of the term “interpretation” to “the substitution of one expression of the rule for another.” Both the argument and the recommendation are to be found in PI §201. Brandom understands the problem of normativity to arise from a dilemma, both horns of which have been found promising or even correct in accounting for the normativity of our practices. The first horn is what Brandom calls “regulism.” It is the view that there are rules, concepts or norms that contain once and for all the correct ways to use a rule or 167

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continue an application. All uses of the word that violate the rule or concept with which the word is associated, that is, are not found within the rule or concept, are incorrect. The inadequacies of this conception of normativity have already been established in the first section, above. The other horn of the dilemma is not interpretationism. Rather it is what Brandon calls “regularism,” the view that normativity is reducible to conformity of behavior, including verbal behavior within the community of language users. On Brandom’s view, the unanchored radical holism of interpretationist strategy is not the object of the paradox of interpretation. Rather the paradox of interpretation is a gerrymandering argument. Any use of a word can be gerrymandered to fit alternative continuations, and so alternative rules. This looks to be coherence with a vengeance, but that would be a mistake, according to Brandom. What the gerrymandering argument shows is that reduction to regularities cannot be correct. Thus, we have normativity all the way down. The import of this understanding is that some uses cannot be gerrymandered since they just are norm-following. The paradox of interpretation shows the ineliminability of norms. Brandom calls this Wittgenstein’s “normative pragmatism.” Though regulism and regularism are mistaken, this does not mean that there are no problems for Brandom. On Brandom’s view, norms are instituted within a society by the members of that society. They are not independently found in ideals that transcend our customs, nor in regularities that can be captured in physical description, whether of an individual in relation to the environment or to other members of the community. Rather “[n] ormative statuses” of individuals within a society “are instituted by normative attitudes.”39 To unpack this aphorism is to display the way in which Brandom preserves a place for both a full-blown coherentist conception of norms and beliefs and the sociality of language. The roles of coherentism and sociality in accounting for the normativity of our practices are captured, first, by Brandom’s inferentialist theory of meaning (the conceptual content of a sentence is its inferential role as premise and conclusion in the articulable space of reasons); and, second, by his normative phenomenalism (the norms governing the space of reasons are instituted by deontic attitudes). The space of reasons is an abstract space in which sentences play inferential roles in the context of the whole, or some well-formed part of the whole. This is Brandom’s pragmatist counterpart to interpretation of a formal language, Davidson’s position. Though differing in important ways, both are strongly coherentist in identifying sentences with places or moves within the space of reasons or a formal language. Both insist on the interdependence of meaning and belief. For Davidson, rationalizing true belief is the only path to identifying meaning. For Brandom, deontic interdependence of meaning and belief is a feature of his normative phenomenalism. Normative status (to be a player in the game of asking for and giving reasons) is instituted by the deontic attitudes of others. 168

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Brandom, like Davidson, begins with the position of the radical interpreter for the purposes of providing an account or description of the normativity of a speaker’s words. Brandom begins with the view that no naturalistic description will do to explain the normative status of an individual, the status of rational language user. We cannot but begin in medias res, which is why the situation of radical interpretation is so useful. Certainly the interpreter comes with his own language, and the presumption is that the speaker (or native) is using language. Yet for Davidson, the use of this device opens him to the charge of circular explanation.40 This charge is not resolved but evaded by appeal to the methodological importance of charity, a requirement of agreement between the speaker and his interpreter. And Davidson’s second strategy is that of explaining the meaning of an expression through the triangulation of the speaker, the interpreter and some salient feature of the environment. Only here in the relation between novice and master do we get an answer to Wittgenstein’s question, How do we determine what is the same in the use of a word? Brandom uses a different strategy for avoiding the charge of circularity. The situation of radical interpretation should be redescribed in such a way that the radical component is eliminated, that is, the requirement that the interpreter be wholly outside the community, viewing the natives as uttering vocables that change under varying environmental circumstances. The interpreter has a language, and thereby has a normative status as a responsible and rational person. For the situation of interpretation to be illuminating, we need to treat both parties to the interaction as equally subject to interpretation. The interpreter is part of the community, and as such his deontic status is a function of the normative attitude taken by his interlocutors. All are involved in mutual scorekeeping of the commitments, entitlements and permissions each holds in virtue of their words and in relation to the others. The key to avoiding the charge of circularity is Brandom’s normative phenomenology. Deontic status as a language user is secured by the normative attitudes taken towards the speaker. To be a participant in a linguistic practice is to be held responsible for one’s claims, and so to be responsible. Conferring this status on one another requires that we distinguish between what is implicit in the linguistic practice of a speaker and what is made explicit, say, by an interpreter. Making explicit is identifying what the speaker ought to say or do given what he has already said or done. As Brandom recognizes, “it can easily look as though the account of normative statuses as instituted by social practices is marching around in an unproductive circle.”41 The threatened circle is that our actual attribution practices institute inferential proprieties and so confer deontic status on the utterances of a speaker; yet attributing (or scorekeeping) practices themselves are constituted by implicit proprieties. In brief, we have explained one set of norms (inferential proprieties governing claims) by appealing to another set of norms (proprieties governing scorekeeping claims). Brandom’s way out of 169

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the circle is to combine Davidson’s justificatory use of the method of interpretation with Brandom’s own account of making doxastic commitment explicit. If we look only to members of the community engaged in mutual assessment of each other’s words for their place in the inferentialist space of reasons, we cannot avoid circularity in our explanations of each as an intentional rule-follower. But we avoid explicit circularity if we move to the position of the interpreter, who uses second-order logical vocabulary to assess the rationality and intentionality of the two speakers, that is, to take them as speakers. The explanatory gain is a function of making explicit what is implicit in the actions of the participants. The inevitable question is what is the source of the implicit proprieties of the interpreter? It seems that we have replaced circularity with regress. Brandom recommends, in effect, that we accept this. This just is accepting norms all the way down. There is no form of explanation of norms that can avoid the use of normative notions or principles. His suggestion marks an advance over the circularity of the Davidsonian strategy. It does so by using the expressive vocabulary of logic and normativity. This second-order advance provides the tools for assessing the intentionality and rationality of speakers within the community. Consequently, in replacing the problem of circularity with the threat of regress, Brandom holds that this is a way of characterizing what it is for normativity to go all the way down. I agree that this is a step forward, but it has not yet reached the right place.42 Normativity, for Brandom, is thus grounded in a fundamental I–thou relation that holds for participants in the community; and is, in effect, sanctioned by the interpreter’s second-order assessment of intelligibility.43 One final comment concerns the defense of interpretation as holding between two individuals. The paradigm example for Davidson is the child learning words from a parent. A special kind of triangulation between the players and the world is revealed. “Interpretation” in this context is the de facto agreement between child and parent in the learning situation, in which the use of the word “chair” is interpreted as being the same, as referring to the chair. This is a very important and telling shift in Davidson’s way of thinking of the problem of normative similarity. The importance of the learning situation cannot be overstated. Its importance does not ride just with the kind of explanation it can afford with respect to judgments of normative similarity, but with our character as language users. Brandom pushes the debate a further step through his recognition that the situation of radical interpretation must be replaced with our mutual interpretation. Through our normative attitudes, we institute the normative statuses of others. This is genuine I–thou sociality. Davidsonian triangulation, though very important, is not a genuine I–thou relation. It describes an I–we relation consisting of two players in which de facto convergence is the ground for sameness, not interpretation. What Brandom adds is the indispensable role of mutual 170

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recognition as constituting the status of the individual as a responsible rational being. Recognition is not interpretation. Where interpretation survives is with the distinction between what is implicit and making it explicit. Here there is a genuine place for interpretation. But, pace Brandom, I will argue that this is not essential to normative practice. In sum, the pleas for interpretation fail. Indeed it can be said that they fail in the eyes of their defenders. What has been discovered is I–thou sociality. For Davidson it is a kind of community view for two, and for Brandom it is the mutual acknowledgement of the humanity and agency of the other. The one anchors our observational terms to the world; the other secures for each of us a place in the space of reasons. Sociality is required for each of these achievements. We will now look to the classic expression of the community view of normativity, one that aims to accommodate both of these features.

The community view and reductionism Wittgenstein’s resolution of the paradox of interpretation is identified with “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” (PI §201). This examination will disclose the importance of regularity for speakers. This emphasis evokes two important objections: PI §206. Following a rule is analogous to obeying an order. We are trained to do so; we react to an order in a particular way. But what if one person reacts in one way and another in another to the order and the training? Which one is right? … The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language. PI §208. Then am I defining “order” and “rule” by means of “regularity”?—How do I explain the meaning of “regular,” “uniform,” “same” to anyone?—I shall explain these words to someone who, say, only speaks French by means of the corresponding French words. But if a person has not yet got the concepts, I shall teach him to use the words by means of examples and by practice.—And when I do this I do not communicate less to him than I know myself. PI §206 raises the objection that if we appeal to how we react as a matter of course or to how we were trained to respond to certain orders or situations, there is always the possibility of people reacting in different ways. If our trained reactions are the ground for our rule-following behavior, then don’t we lose any standard for what is correct or incorrect? Wittgenstein’s response is that our common behavior is the basis for answering the question, which one is right? This can look like Wittgenstein has replaced objective normative standards with conformity to majority practice. How can this be acceptable? 171

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PI §208 raises Wittgenstein’s problem of circularity in the account of rulefollowing. It looks as though Wittgenstein seeks to explain “rule” by appeal to “regularity”; and yet how can “regularity” be explained but in terms of what is the same. Such judgments of sameness invite an appeal to rules, which raises the problem of normative similarity once again. Wittgenstein’s response here is to hold that the circle cannot be broken for the linguistically competent: “The use of the word ‘rule’ and the use of the word ‘same’ are interwoven” (PI §226). So no reductionist account of rule-following, of our judgments of normative similarity, can be given. But the circle is broken for the individual, as it were, by the fact that the conceptual naif is trained into linguistic practices. How the initiate learner or novice is trained into a practice is constitutive of what the learner masters. Rules express regularities that can be passed on through training. Human languages are culturally heritable, and this must be accommodated in our account of language. Wittgenstein responds to these two dangers by arguing as follows: the loss of normativity by reducing what is right to “the common behaviour of mankind” and the loss of explanatory weight by defining or explaining “order” and “rule” in terms of “regularity.” Avoiding the first danger is now standardly attributed to any version of the community view of rule-following. The second danger—engaging in shallow circular explanation—is seen by some commentators as a virtue, expressing the autonomy of grammar. As Baker and Hacker express and defend it, grammar determines what is a correct use of language, but is not itself correct or incorrect. It is not answerable to the nature of reality, to the structure of the mind or to “the laws of thought.” Grammar is autonomous.44 The autonomy of grammar eliminates any essential connection between rulefollowing and reality, and thus supports a strong linguistic individualism without accounting for the way autonomous grammar guides us. The community view seems to do better at explaining the practical dimension of language use at the expense of the justificatory dimension; and the autonomy view retains the objectivity of rules and norms with little if any regard for how such rules guide. But what Wittgenstein wants, I shall argue, is the community view of rule-following without reductionism and autonomy without individualism. This strategy implicates the importance of the fact that natural languages are learnable and learned. Now first to the community view of rule-following: the regularities in play are nomological regularities. Although we have already rejected Kripke’s skeptical reading,45 nonetheless an examination of his version of the community view is useful, as it brings out several features that have come to be strongly associated with any version of the community view. These are the identification of the 172

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fundamental normative contrast with conformity and deviance in behavior, a verificationist bias in the conception of meaning, and a projectivist view of agency as a dignity mutually conferred by members of the community upon each other. All three of these features begin with the idea that normativity, meaning and dignity must somehow be added to, or projected upon, our behavior as animals, especially as noise-making animals. Kripke pursues his response to this second problem of normative similarity in two major stages, resulting in a hybrid skeptical solution. In the first stage, which covers most of the rule-following passages, Wittgenstein is held to draw the skeptical conclusion that there is no fact of the matter about what the individual means. Each assertion is “an unjustified stab in the dark.”46 We cannot know the truth conditions for the words we utter, and so no truth conditional account can be given for the meaning of our utterances. However, this theoretical result doesn’t hobble our practice since “ordinary practice is justified because it does not require the justification the sceptic has shown to be untenable.”47 Instead all that is needed to legitimize assertions that someone means something is that there be specifiable circumstances under which they are legitimately assertable, and that the game of asserting them under such circumstances has a role in our lives.48 Truth conditions do not license our day-to-day utterances. Rather assertability conditions (namely, the ordinary ways in which we accept or reject sentences) underwrite our utterances. The deep problem emerges, Kripke maintains, when this general assertability conditions theory of meaning is applied to our assertions about what we mean. A deep problem emerges because of the nature of the assertability conditions for meaning-statements.49 The assertability condition that licenses the individual to say “I mean such-and-such by … ,” according to Kripke, is “that he does what he is inclined to do.” His “feeling of confidence” supports his statement.50 This is the point at which “I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’” (PI § 217). On Kripke’s reading, passages such as this are Wittgenstein’s way of identifying the assertability conditions for meaning-statements. This makes for a uniform theory of meaning but, according to Kripke, it is not yet the complete story. So far the bite of skepticism is relatively mild, leading to a theory of meaning with close ties to verificationism, the view that the meaning of a sentence is the method for empirically verifying it. But, for Kripke’s Wittgenstein, the matter does not rest here. In the second stage, Kripke argues that this cannot be the whole story, for our usual concept of following a rule requires a substantive difference between thinking one is following a rule and actually following a rule. This difference is obliterated in the case of meaning-statements, for thinking that 173

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one is following a rule is following the rule, that one does mean something in particular. If I am confident that the plus sign means addition, then I mean addition.51 If we pay attention to the individual’s assertability conditions alone, all we can say is that he is licensed to follow the rule as it strikes him. But this falls afoul of the paradox of interpretation, for, then, anything and everything can be taken to be following the rule, and so the distinction between correct and incorrect action collapses. This reading of our bedrock judgment—“this is simply what I do”—leads Kripke to claim, on behalf of Wittgenstein, that we must look beyond the individual’s say-so to find sufficient traction to make the distinction needed for rule-following. “The solution,” Kripke says, “turns on the idea that each person who claims to be following a rule can be checked by others.”52 What the individual says can be checked for conformity or deviance from what the rest of the community would say under similar circumstances. The assertability condition for the individual’s meaning addition by “+” is his feeling of confidence that he does, under the proviso that how he acts, or would act, conforms to the way others act or would act. His say-so ends discussion of what he means, provided that he answers in the way others would answer given the same question. Thus, public checkability of the individual’s assertions and their conformity to community practice are conditions on the individual’s say-so warranting what he means. In other words, for Kripke, the skepticism raised by the paradox of interpretation argument targets a special class of statements, those for which the assertability conditions are identified with how things seem to the speaker. It is important to note that the statements that count as bedrock statements are those that are secured, if at all, by the speaker’s say-so, and these Kripke suggests are our semantic assertions. This diverges from Wittgenstein’s actual argument in at least three ways. First, bedrock judgments are restricted to meaning-statements that are not further analyzable. As will become clear, Wittgenstein identifies a much wider range of sentences, all counting as bedrock sentences or judgments. Not only “I mean s by ‘s’,” but also “the sentry box is red,” “4 + 4 = 8” (where this is the arithmetic statement and not a statement about the meaning of “+”), and other bedrock judgments that anchor language-games. Second, and closely related to the first point, Kripke reorients the paradox argument to concern the difficulties in distinguishing between how things seem to me (I am confident that I am adding) and how things are (that I am adding). Differing interpretations are compatible with the exposed portion of the game. Kripke reserves the paradox argument for the special class of semantic sentences, suggesting that the paradox does not arise for meaningful sentences in a general way. Other sentences are taken down, as it were, only by their reliance on the bedrock semantic judgments. The final point is that Kripke’s reorientation of the paradox argument effectively changes it into the private language argument, as typically understood. Even the way 174

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Kripke characterizes the problem of normativity, as one concerning how to distinguish adding from merely thinking one is adding, foreshadows the problem of normativity for sensation: how to distinguish is from seems. Given this, there is no surprise in finding that the private diary argument is anticipated. But even though Kripke’s skeptical argument misinterprets Wittgenstein’s paradox argument, his construction of the community view is illuminating in its account of the way in which community agreement is constitutive of the normative contrast. At the heart of Kripke’s “sceptical solution” is the claim that the community’s shared response is a brute fact about the community. Judgments as to correct or incorrect actions mask de facto conformity of behavior within the community and under the watchful eye of all for slippage. Normativity and the dignity we accord rule-followers reduces to de facto conformity and public checkability. This does look like a skeptical solution, for where we thought that the source that would bind together all our particular applications would also justify our binding them together, we find no such rationalizing source. Instead the source is how the matter strikes me and everyone else in my community. The commonality of our situation is external to what we do. We stand in a mutual policing relation to each other. Every community is, in effect, an authoritarian community. Reaction against the community view of rule-following is focused precisely on the verificationist and reductionist features of the two stages of Kripke’s version of the community view. There are (roughly) three kinds of objections to Kripke’s version of rule-following. First, it is objected that the same skeptical problem arises for the community that Kripke identifies as a problem for the individual. Whole communities could “follow” bent rules, no more having the resources to distinguish correct from incorrect community judgments than the individual does.53 The second objection is that such a view does not allow for creative change in the norms that govern our practices nor for the possibility of an individual being correct while the community is wrong. The community view is thus intolerably conservative. The third class of objections focuses on the behaviorist implications of the view, implications that are incompatible with genuine normativity or our dignity as actors. It turns the I–thou sociality into an illusion, thus disguising the reality of our situation. The community view, reduces our basic level utterances to “a mere brute meaningless sounding off,” for which “the possibility of going out of step with our fellows gives us the illusion of being subject to norms, and consequently the illusion of entertaining and expressing meanings.”54 This is a direct attack on the reductionist import of the community view. Kripke’s version of the “solution” to the problem raised by the paradox of interpretation is mistaken both as an account of normativity and as a reading of Wittgenstein, but it should not be misidentified with a crude version of the community view, a kind of majoritarian view, according to which what 175

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“plus” means is what the majority do. What we mean when we make a bedrock judgment, a judgment in which “our spade is turned,” such as “This is red” said of a fire engine in good light, is not “The majority say ‘this is red’ under such-and-such conditions.” Nor in making such bedrock judgments do we take as a criterion for the application of the expression “red” that the majority say “This is red” under such-and-such conditions. Wittgenstein explicitly disavows such interpretations: The justification of the proposition 25  25 = 625 is, naturally, that if anyone has been trained in such-and-such a way, then under normal circumstances he gets 625 as the result of multiplying 25 by 25. But the arithmetical proposition does not assert that. (RFM VI.23) And does this mean e.g. that the definition of “same” would be this: same is what all or most human beings with one voice take for the same?—Of course not. For of course I don’t make use of the agreement of human beings to affirm identity. What criterion do you use, then? None at all. (RFM VII.40)55 Clearly, our mathematical judgments, color judgments, and any other such judgments do not mean or assert anything about what the majority say or do. Nor is this part of Kripke’s position. And indeed no serious defense of the community view has ever held such things. Kripke offers instead a “constitutive view” of rule-following. Instead of rules or interpretations, de facto agreement constitutes the distinction between correct and incorrect usage of expressions. De facto or brute conformity in judgment and behavior is said to constitute what is correct, against which the deviant behavior of the individual is incorrect, just in virtue of being deviant. The contrast between correct and incorrect can only get a hold in the world as supervening on such behavioral conformity and individual deviance. I think that a version of the constitutive view is correct, but not the version that Kripke offers. That Kripke’s is a skeptical solution can be seen by the fact that the three objections to the community view just indicated do apply to his account.56 Kripke’s view of community practice as a mutually policing structure can be seen to follow from the way in which he identifies the assertability conditions for meaning-statements. The assertability condition for meaning-statements such as “I mean addition by the plus sign” is the feeling of confidence of the individual. The individualism that marks Kripke’s way of setting the problem of normativity up in the first place continues to exert its influence in the solution. The community then is needed to shore up the individual by shaping and sustaining his feelings of confidence in how to go on. This picture is one that supports the charges of 176

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reducing action to behaviors and agreement in judgments to behavioral conformity. On this view, our agreements, that is, our similar vocalizations under similar physical conditions, constitute our normative actions, our calculating, recognizing colors, and the like.57 Calculating would be a function of our agreement understood as our saying the same words under the same stimulus conditions. But this picture is one that Wittgenstein rejects as explicitly as he rejects majoritarian misinterpretations of his position. He says in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics: We judge identity and agreement by the results of our calculating; that is why we cannot use agreement to explain calculating. (RFM IV.8) What we need is an alternative way of characterizing the social dimension of normativity. To keep my version of the community view distinct from either the majoritarian or constitutive views, I shall call it a social conception of rule-following. What will certainly help in finding this alternative is to understand how Kripke’s constitutive view goes wrong. Getting what is right about the community view requires disentangling it from its association with epistemological and skeptical issues. Other commentators have emphasized this as well.58 My diagnosis goes beyond this point to bring out the misplaced individualism that distorts Kripke’s construal of the community view itself. This is part of the general failure to distinguish the domain of the novice and that of the master in Kripke’s development of the constitutive view. Kripke reads the child into the adult. Thus, he sees all normative action as behavior subjected to the external sanctions of chronic checking.

The individualist view and mystification Kripke’s view is in marked contrast to the views of those who endorse Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical commitment to the view that “[p]hilosophy puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.— Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to hide” (PI §126). Two defenders of this position are G.P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker, who have worked together, and separately, to defend the autonomy of grammar from attempts at analysis or theories that purport to reduce surface grammar to something deeper and different. While many of their criticisms of the community view strike home, their alternative interpretation commits its own failure to recognize the significance of learning to the philosophical problems addressed. Their mistake is to ignore the child for the most part, treating learning as, at best, a useful tool for specific problems. Even when they note matters of first importance, they reject the significance of what 177

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they have described. For example, they write of the child learning techniques that one must not so inflate the concept of a rule that a simple pattern which the child is taught to follow is not thought of as a rule (and hence that the child has mastered a technique without grasping a rule).59 One must deflate the concept of a rule so that the child’s actions can be seen to follow a rule. Approaching the language situation in this way risks treating the child as already a master of the practice. But it is precisely at this point of a child’s learning techniques, which is rule-following by courtesy, that we have a window on what it is to follow norms in a causal world. Over and against this they appeal to what they take to be “Wittgenstein’s most fundamental principle of the autonomy of grammar”:60 “grammar is autonomous, a free-floating structure that is not answerable to reality.”61 The autonomy of grammar plays an important argumentative and explanatory role in the criticisms that Baker and Hacker raise against the community view. This can be seen in their critical examination of Kripke’s skeptical interpretation of the paradox of interpretation and its aftermath.62 They emphasize, pace Kripke’s community view of rule-following that certain behavior just is adding or decorating if done in appropriate surroundings. Their central objection to the community view is that “[i]n place of that internal relation the community view substitutes the notion of community agreement, which is not an internal property of the rule.”63 The relation between a rule and the instances of its application is an internal relation. Minimally, this means that rule and its applications cannot be treated as independent of each other: “to grasp a rule is to be able to say what accords with it. There are not two separate operations of understanding, only one— an ability to judge that this and this and this accord with the rule that … ”64 The stress on the internal relation between a rule and its applications is their way of understanding the normativity of rule-governed practices. The adequacy of this approach depends on what explanatory or elucidary work the notion of “internal relation” is supposed to do. Baker and Hacker attribute three internal relations to rules: (1) “to understand a rule is to know what acts count as correct applications and what acts as incorrect ones”;65 (2) there is an internal “relation between an intentional act and a rule which is described by saying that in acting thus the agent followed this rule”;66 and (3) “acting in certain ways (what is called ‘acting in conformity with the rule’) are criteria for understanding a rule.”67 The italicized words all express the internal relations that are severed by the skeptical argument and only externally reconnected by the community view. These objections do find their mark with the majoritarian and constitutive versions of the community view. It should be noted, however, that much of their 178

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argument draws upon Wittgensteinian considerations that are not explicitly part of the rule-following passages. This enables them to develop more fully the explanatory work to be done by the appeal to “internal relations.” Baker and Hacker gain more explanatory, or perhaps descriptive, purchase for the notion of “internal relation” by contrasting each of its forms with some corresponding external relation: (1) understanding a rule is independent of exercising that rule by applying it; (2) the relation between the intentional act and the rule thereby followed fits the hypothetico-deductive model of explanation, according to which the intentional act is an instance of the rule construed as a hypothetical generalization;68 (3) “an individual’s behaviour is merely inductive or quasi-inductive evidence for his understanding a rule-formulation.”69 To externalize relations is to treat rules or concepts as empirical generalizations or hypotheses for which behavior is either (inductive) evidence for applying a rule in a particular case or an instantiation of a rule qua empirical generalization (depending on whether one is attempting to justify a hypothesis or explain an event).70 The community view, according to Baker and Hacker, treats rules as shorthand for empirical generalizations about behavioral conformity within a community. None of these external characterizations of rules captures their normativity. Internal relations are set by grammar, not the world. “Internal relations,” they tell us, “are the product of grammar, of linguistic conventions. Clarifying these is bedrock in philosophical elucidation of concepts. Trying to dig deeper leads to metaphysical and psychological mythology.”71 And [g]rammar is autonomous. Hence sceptical doubt about whether what is laid down in grammar as grounds for a proposition are really adequate grounds is not merely unjustified, it is literally senseless. For a denial that such-and-such is a ground disrupts an internal relation.72 So internal relations are “the product of grammar” and “what is laid down in grammar” are internal relations. We seem to be going round a rather tight circle. It is not clear how the appeal to grammar gets us any further than traditional appeals to acts of meaning, which in some mysterious way encompass their objects. If Wittgenstein’s critique of acts of meaning is successful, just why doesn’t a similar critique apply to the appeal to internal relations? Unless the notion of grammar is spelled out, it threatens to become another candidate for a “philosophical superlative,” the quest for which Wittgenstein seeks to undermine: You have no model of this superlative fact [grasping meaning in a flash], but you are seduced into using a super-expression. (It might be called a philosophical superlative.) (PI §192) 179

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Much of the content, given the notions of grammar and internal relation, is done negatively, by saying what rules are not. Rules are not statistical generalizations. They are not explanatory hypotheses. Our actions and judgments are not instances of such generalizations, nor do the former provide inductive evidence for the latter. This is certainly useful, but nonetheless this is presented as the consequence of something’s being grammatical, a concept or rule. We are still in need of a more positive characterization of grammar so that we can understand in what the internality of these relations consists. Baker and Hacker can be seen to agree with this request in their attempt to give grammar a more explanatory role. The most important expression of this, one repeated on several occasions, is that the autonomy of grammar consists in not being answerable to reality or anything else (unlike empirical propositions): Grammar is a free-floating array of rules for the use of language, but is not itself correct or incorrect. It is not answerable to the nature of reality, to the structure of the mind or to “the laws of thought.” Grammar is autonomous.73 The point, once again, of this negative characterization is to forestall any attempt at explaining grammar in terms of metaphysical or mental properties or in terms of the epistemological work of justification. Grammar, as the source of necessity and normativity, is not beholden to anything other than itself.74 For this reason, Baker and Hacker tell us, Wittgenstein’s “insistence that grammar is arbitrary is one and the same with his insistence that grammar is autonomous.”75 One is tempted to say, on behalf of this interpretation, that grammar “is bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’” (PI 217). Taking autonomy this way should lead to an examination of normative similarity in our bedrock judgments of what is the same as what and what it is to go on in the same way within a game. It does so for Baker and Hacker, but they remain caught in a rather shallow circularity: In the absence of understanding the relevant rule and knowing how to apply it, the command “Do the same” would have no meaning (RRP II 408). The very same point holds for other concepts whose explanations involve identity and difference. The use of “regular” and “uniform” is interwoven with the use of “same” and thereby too with the use of “rule” (PI 208). The grammatical connections are crucial to correct understanding of remarks relating rules and techniques to regularity.76 The problem of normative similarity needs a more robust treatment, one that accommodates the negative characterizations given by Baker and Hacker 180

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with a deeper understanding of bedrock practices. Their repeated assertion that grammar is not answerable to reality77 doesn’t satisfy this need. Strong quietist readings resist pressures for further explanation, but in doing so they risk the danger of mystifying grammar, a mystification that enlists the phrase “the autonomy of grammar” to provide the screen for rejecting further explanation or description. The autonomy of grammar view, as one that rules out finding any positive picture or conception of language or language-games, is a mistake. It is certainly correct that Wittgenstein does not think that language (or mind) can be captured in a single systematic theory. We have seen his grounds for rejecting such theorizing. It cannot but result in self-contradictory defeat. This does not mean, however, that we cannot provide an account of normativity and draw a more accurate picture of language as a loosely connected array of languagegames, changing in unpredictable ways. The attempt to construct systematic theories of language and the quietist delineation of sense from nonsense share a failing, and that is their focus on the domain of the master of language, on those who are linguistically adept. The irreducibility of the normative import of language leads one into viewing grammar as setting standards and criteria for understanding independently of social structure or our embeddedness in the world. This invites exactly the kind of reification of grammar that Wittgenstein holds has been the plague of philosophy. It threatens to open its own gap between grammar and actual behavior. Baker and Hacker’s discussion of the relation between rules and behavior looks to characterize the relation between our actual behavior (a part of reality) and rules and concepts that is very different from that of the empiricist. As they say at one point, “[t]hat an activity is rule-governed implies a certain regularity of behaviour.”78 If so, how then does grammar remain autonomous and arbitrary, that is, how can grammar not be answerable to reality? The reply is that grammar lays down rules, independently of reality, that have subsequent implications for regularities in the world: “It is, as it were, a regularity from the point of view of the rule, for the concept of a rule and the concept of doing the same are internally, conceptually related (PI 225).”79 They also argue that, though learning and training in techniques does occur, that we learn is not relevant to the content of the concept acquired. Indeed the child is seen as already participating in a normative practice, his learned techniques already rule-following. What matters is the linguistic cognitive competence, not its origin or genesis.80 What follows is that the relation between concept or rule and behavioral regularity and training is external. There is no way to become a language user. Grammar is autonomous. It does not answer to reality in any epistemological sense. Yet where applicable, grammar has implications for empirical reality.81 In this way it might be said that reality answers to grammar. Certain regularities and occurrences just are the following of a rule or the instantiation of a concept. This suggests that content of concepts/rules is 181

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fixed independently of the empirical regularities of human behavior or natural events. Is it, then, a kind of coincidence that these actual regularities conform to the internal requirements of a concept or rule? Or is it that the concept or rule is de facto instantiated in the actions of human beings? It is very difficult to characterize grammar independently of its realization in the lives of human beings. The two are entwined. Yet the autonomy of grammar externalizes that relation. This undermines the very point of the slogan, for it is to replace the slogans of the empiricist and others who treat the relation between rule and actions inductively or correlationally. This is recognized by Baker and Hacker when they say such things as “criteria of correctness are intrinsic parts of techniques.”82 Techniques are empirically acquired skills. Adding is just such a skill. Addition, an arithmetic operator, is normative. As such, addition is not answerable to reality (neither epistemologically nor metaphysically). Yet the techniques of arithmetic are just those we acquire in training. Our empirical training seems to constitute the technique. And technique is constitutive of the concept acquired. Crying out when hurt just is criterial behavior for pain. Our concepts do not answer to reality. Training doesn’t explain the content of concept mastery, for that content is holistic. Crying out is not evidence for being in pain. This is part of what it is to be autonomous. Yet our concepts and rules do successfully apply to the world. The question, how are they applied, does not arise for the quietist interpreter. It is enough that they do. This is the bedrock account of the relation of grammar to reality. The answer is that there is no relation: crying out occurs, training in techniques is widespread. And concepts and rules imply regularities. There is nothing more to be said. The cost of this is the notion of autonomy with which we began. The claim that grammar doesn’t answer to reality must be given up in the recognition that grammar is (a part of) reality. This is not the conclusion that Baker and Hacker draw. They want to retain the distinction between reality and grammar. This leads them to construe grammar as something akin to the conceptual, where the conceptual supports something like analytic truths. But Baker and Hacker reject this as well: Wittgenstein’s conception of a proposition of grammar does not mesh with the standard notion of an analytic truth. … The analytic/ synthetic distinction is framed in terms of the forms and constituents of type-sentences, whereas whether an utterance expresses a grammatical proposition depends not only on its form, but on its roles on occasions of utterance.83 Where we have occurrences of utterances that play a role in the languagegame of which they are a part, we have normative language-games. But our language-games are, through and through, part of reality. Grammar is answerable to reality; it is part of it. If we give up the notion of analyticity, 182

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as Baker and Hacker correctly urge, then a better way of characterizing the special status of grammatical propositions is required. That way is to recognize that grammar expresses normativity, and not empirical causality. This is most certainly correct. Our question now is what that comes to in Baker and Hacker’s conception of grammar. Grammar is cashed out in terms of specific grammatical propositions that function as norms or rules within languagegames. “1 2 3 … ” is a rule for counting; “the fire engine is red” is a standard for the color red; crying out is a criterion for pain. None of these grammatical propositions can be understood independently of the actual practices (or nearby practices). They do not have substance on their own. They come to be substantial in the way in which they are embedded in language-games. They are not analytic; they are not empirical. They do not answer to reality; they have no content independently of reality. The most that can be said, using the resources currently available to us, is that grammatical propositions are not empirical propositions; and more positively grammatical propositions concern normativity. But grammatical propositions themselves do not explain what is normative about themselves. Rather: they are calibrations or techniques of inference.

Notes 1 The structure of this debate has affinities with an earlier one concerning what a theory of truth should or should not do. In that debate, the issue was whether the nature of truth (as correspondence or coherence, for example) should also be the test for truth. See Michael Williams, “Coherence, Justification, and Truth.” 2 As Crispin Wright points out, quite correctly, in one of his criticisms of formal theories of meaning, “if the theorist’s aim was merely to formulate a theory knowledge of which would suffice for competence in the object-language, there would not necessarily be any point in observing Davidson’s constraints [i.e., that the theory be finitely axiomatizable and that the mode of derivation of each meaning-delivering theorem reflect the structure of the relevant sentence]; no reason why it would not serve his purpose to axiomatize more simply, even if infinitistically, the descriptive part of a theory which met those constraints” (“Rule-Following, Objectivity and the Theory of Meaning,” 111). 3 There are others who claim that such arguments reveal the necessary conditions that any empirical psychology should meet. Thus, Dennett in an early paper argues that the constraints on artificial intelligence (AI) modeling reveal necessary constraints on any psychological theory, and thus AI constitutes a universal psychology. See his “Artificial Intelligence.” Dennett takes an interpretationist strategy to be psychologically robust. 4 This point has already been made in Wittgenstein’s contrast between ostensive definition and training. The problem of association has evolved into the problem of application. Labeling is not the issue, but successful use. 5 Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 30. 6 I first characterize the target of the rule, following considerations in this way in “Rules, Community and the Individual.” 7 Wittgenstein takes this conception of understanding to be the third thesis that defines the Fregean picture of language: “the assertion consists of two actions,

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8

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entertaining and asserting … and that in performing these actions we follow the propositional sign roughly as we sing from the musical score” (PI §22). When discussing the Fregean picture in the first and second sections of Chapter 2, we postponed examination of this third thesis in deference to Frege’s antipsychologism. Now it is time to examine the psychologistic picture associated with the representationalist theory. Kripke interprets these arguments as showing that any facts about our interior life (whether mentalistic or neurological) are descriptive only and so cannot account for the normativity of understanding rules. He discusses a number of candidate facts about the subject that might be taken to constitute what the subject means when he uses the expression “plus”: conscious accompaniments, a dispositional state, a machine state, an intuition. Kripke’s central argument against all these candidates is that none can account for the normativity that is involved in meaning plus. Any of these may be compatible with the exposed practice of the subject, but all are equally compatible with different ways of going on. See Colin McGinn, Wittgenstein on Meaning, for a defense of a functionalist account. Though I find many of Kripke’s particular arguments against deriving normative content from a descriptive base sound, Wittgenstein is not arguing in this way. Moliere, Le malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid), B.F. Skinner makes repeated use of this form of argument in his attacks on mentalistic explanations of behavior. See, for example, Skinner, Science and Human Behavior, ch. 3; and About Behaviorism, ch. 1–2. Also, Ryle, Concept of Mind. For a reply to this objection, see Fodor and Chihara’s classic paper, “Operationalism and Ordinary Language.” Wittgenstein’s concerns here prefigure the contemporary debate between those who espouse an eliminativist position with respect to our “folk psychology” of understanding and those who argue that the folk psychological position is ineliminable. What Wittgenstein foresees are the problems that arise if there is a mismatch between our ordinary intentional descriptions and a scientifically delineated architecture of the mind. This remains a major problem for cognitivist theories of mind. See Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science, for a carefully argued case that our folk psychology cannot align in the requisite way with the constructs of cognitive science. In this work, Stich thinks that the conclusion is that the “entities” of folk psychology are to be eliminated. For the ineliminability of folk psychology, see Horgan and Woodward, “Folk Psychology Is Here to Stay.” Also see Horgan and Tienson, Connectionism. Wittgenstein does treat neural explanation and cognitivist or mental explanation differently. Cognitivist explanation is a “summing up” explanation, and as such is explanatorily empty. There cannot be independent criteria for individuating these hypothesized interior machines, independent, that is, of our ordinary concepts of understanding. Some of the issues involved here will be discussed in later chapters. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 7. Also see Fogelin, Wittgenstein, who developed independently a Humean skeptical interpretation of the rule following passages. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 22. I am using Simon Blackburn’s shorthand for distinguishing to (what we know to be) the correct continuations from those that are incorrect or bizarre new rules. See his “The Individual Strikes Back.” McDowell, “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule.” Also see McDowell, “Meaning and Intentionality”; and Mind and World. McDowell, “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” 256. Cf. p. 219.

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18 Wittgenstein uses the regress argument in BB, esp. p. 3 and pp. 11–12, when he tries to show that bringing an appropriate image to mind is unnecessary in accounting for understanding, a forerunner to the cube argument that initiates the rule-following critique. 19 Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language; and Fogelin, Wittgenstein. 20 Pears, False Prison, vol. 2, ch. 17; Wilson, “Kripke on Wittgenstein and Normativity”; and Meredith Williams, “Rules, Community and the Individual.” 21 Brandom, Making It Explicit, ch. 1. 22 McDowell also defends the centrality of our acquiring a second, cultural nature in his own attempt to find a middle way between the horns of the master dilemma— the Myth of the Given and the Myth of Coherence—in finding a satisfactory solution to the problems that beset us. His analysis of the rule-following problem takes the form of a dilemma between theories of super-rigid meaning and indeterminate interpretation. There too he suggests the key to finding the third way lies with the fact that we acquire a cultural nature. 23 Of course, Davidson can rule such sentences out of order as well by appeal to consistency and charity in constructing a theory of meaning. I include this example nonetheless because the way in which Wittgenstein rejects it as nonsensical is quite different from a Davidsonian strategy. 24 This proposition might become an empirical one, were in vitro fertilization to develop into growing a fetus outside of the womb or developing a fetus using genetic material from a single person. Such speculation is only science fiction, but it provides a context in which the proposition that every person has two parents might be challenged. 25 I take this issue up in the first section of Chapter 7. 26 There are two separate issues about the infinite reach of our understanding. One is the idea (under discussion in this chapter) that understanding extends to an infinite array of sentences. The other concerns our ability to grasp the notion of infinity as a positive idea. This concerns whether we can understand claims like the number of primes is infinite or the natural number sequence is infinite. The point of contact between these two is the idea that the applicability of rules is infinite in its reach in a way that is similar to the way in which the natural number sequence is infinite. The rule, in some sense, contains an infinite number of applications. This infinite number of applications (contained in the rule) is real in the same way that the infinite number sequence is real. This notion is one that Wittgenstein clearly rejects. 27 Davidson, “Social Aspect of Language,” 3. Also see Davidson, “Second Person.” 28 Ibid., 258. 29 We can see in this McDowell’s characterization of the problem that any theory of language faces: how to combine the appropriate systematicity of language with its connection to the world. 30 Davidson, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” 446. 31 This can be seen as a shift from Davidson’s earlier treatment of interpretation. In his earlier work, it is quite natural to treat the method of interpretation as describing what actually goes on in the linguistic exchanges between speakers. Certainly, earlier objections to Davidson included the point that we simply do not engage in such acts of interpretation in much of our linguistic interaction. Where we do, it occurs against the background of noninterpretive understanding. See for example, Hacking, “Parody of conversation”; and Dummett, “‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’: Some Comments on Davidson and Hacking.” 32 It should be noted that when Davidson speaks of constructing a passing theory, he does not mean that the interpreter literally constructs a theory. Rather the passing theory is a representation of the interpretative stance that the hearer

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33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

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brings to the situation. Some might prefer to call it a “specification of meaning” for the speaker’s words. Davidson, “Second Person,” 257. Davidson, “Social Aspect of Language.” Also see Davidson, “Second Person,” 258–9. Ibid., 258. Davidson, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs.” Davidson, “Social Aspect of Language,” 8. See my “Social Basis of Normativity”; and “Wittgenstein and Davidson on the Sociality of Language.” It is instructive to compare Davidson and Brandom on use of the methodology of interpretation. Rather than try to devalue the paradox of interpretation, Brandom seeks to show that it is really a symptom of the ineliminability of norms, or what he calls, Wittgenstein’s “normative pragmatism.” The most important elucidatory work done by radical interpretation is to disclose the fundamental importance of the I–thou relationship, one of mutual acknowledgement of the rational agency of the other. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 49. See pp. 252–3. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 627. For a full discussion of Brandom’s treatment of the problem of normativity, see my “Social Basis of Normativity.” This is my way of putting the matter, not Brandom’s, though I do think that Brandom should be sympathetic. Brandom discusses this in terms of different levels of intentionality and normativity. It is this that allows him to avoid a pernicious form of circular justification. Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein, 40. Most commentators reject Kripke’s interpretation. It is much more difficult to find someone who defends Kripke. For such a defense, see Kusch, Sceptical Guide. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 17. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 77–8. We can see that Kripke’s skeptic would not be impressed with Davidson’s way of specifying truth conditions. What this underscores is that an appropriate T-sentence, namely, “‘S’ means addition by ‘+’” is true in “LS iff S means addition by ‘+’” does not explain meaning; rather it specifies the meaning of the sentence structurally identified on the left-hand side. The right-hand sentence makes essential use of the very thing we want explained, namely, “meaning” itself. So, the problem is merely postponed, and can be seen either to generate a regress or to be open to the paradox of interpretation. Dummett would endorse this criticism: a theory of meaning/understanding must invoke publicly manifestable meaning-contents. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 88. It seems fair to say that this is how John Searle would respond to this problem, given his response to Quine’s indeterminacy of translation argument. In “Indeterminacy, Empiricism, and the First Person,” Searle maintains that there is an important asymmetry between the first- and third-person cases: “When I seek to understand another speaker, I seek to acquire in his case what I already have for my own case. Now, in my own case, when I understand myself, I know a great deal more than just under what external conditions I hold what sentences true. To put it crudely: in addition, I know what I mean” (p. 141). That certainly expresses a feeling of confidence. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 101.

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53 Blackburn develops this objection in his article “The Individual Strikes Back.” 54 McDowell, “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” 337. The quotation taken from this article is part of McDowell’s trenchant criticism of Crispin Wright’s version of the community view. For Wright’s view, see Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics, esp. ch. 12, “Anti-Realism and Objectivity”; and “Strict Finitism.” 55 Also see RFM III.65 and 71, VI.17 and 49; Z §§429–31; and OC §654 for further passages that bear upon such crude construals of the community view. 56 For a different interpretation of Kripke’s characterization of the “sceptical solution,” see Wilson, “Kripke on Wittgenstein and Normativity.” Wilson argues that Kripke is not attributing meaning skepticism to Wittgenstein, despite his analogy to Hume. Rather the paradox of interpretation argument is a reductio ad absurdum directed against theories of meaning that result in such meaning skepticism. I agree with this reading of Wittgenstein’s argument, but do not agree that this is Kripke’s reading. 57 This can be seen in Kripke’s insistence that the conditional that underwrites judgments that an individual means addition, e.g., takes the contrapositive form: “If Jones does not come out with ‘125’ when asked about ‘68 + 57’, we cannot assert that he means addition by ‘+’” (Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 95). And coming out with “125” is coming out with what the majority would say. 58 See, for example, Baker and Hacker, Scepticism, Rules and Language; Budd, “Wittgenstein on Meaning, Interpretation and Rules”; Collins, “On the Paradox”; and Goldfarb, “Kripke on Wittgenstein on Rules.” 59 Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein, 164. 60 Ibid., 164. 61 Ibid., 37. 62 Baker and Hacker, Scepticism, Rules and Language, an excellent critical examination of Kripke’s interpretation of the problem of rule-following and its solution. 63 Ibid., 75. 64 Ibid., 96. 65 Ibid., 100–1. 66 Ibid., 101. This point bears upon Davidson’s attempt to account for the possibility of error by appeal to the speaker’s intention to be understood in a certain way. Where Baker and Hacker find a very tight connection between following a rule and intending to follow a rule, Davidson finds it between speaking and intending to be understood in a certain way. 67 Ibid., 103. 68 Ibid., 101. 69 Ibid., 103. 70 This reminds us of Davidson’s attempt to avoid the paradox by insisting that it is a variant on the problem of induction. The exposed portion of the rule is the only empirical evidence we have for what rule is being followed. Writing “125” is empirical evidence that the subject intends to add (and thereby follow the rule for adding). But subsequent evidence may undercut the limited initial evidence available to us. Baker and Hacker’s criticisms apply here as well. 71 Ibid., 124. Also see Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein, esp. chs 2 and 6. 72 Ibid., 99. 73 Ibid., 40. Also see 240 and 329ff. This passage reminds us of Crispin Wright’s defense of a community view. For Wright the community just goes; for Baker and Hacker, grammar “just goes.” Something is wrong with their conception of the structure of the problem.

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74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

Ibid., 240, 329ff., and 332. Ibid., 331. Ibid., 169. Also see 237. Ibid., 40, 329, 330, 332. Also see 164, 237, 240. Ibid., 44. Cf. 162. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 44–5. Also see Forster, Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar. In a nuanced interpretation, Forster aims to show that grammar is arbitrary (most significantly because there is no epistemological justification) and yet is constrained by factors, by “one’s very human nature or by one’s upbringing within specific social practices and traditions” (p. 67). 82 Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein, 163. 83 Ibid., 268.

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Rules and regularities 189 The public basis of normativity 195 The social basis of normativity: the negative argument 204 The social basis of normativity: the positive argument 210 The first question to be asked in the light of the discussion in Chapter 5 is “where does Wittgenstein take us?” If he is providing an account of rulefollowing that retains the necessity and normativity of rules (pace the reductionist temptation) while rejecting any form of objectified meaning (pace the intellectualist approach to meaning) and offering more than the autonomy of grammar appears to do (pace the temptation to mystification), just what is it? What is the “way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation” (PI §201)?

Rules and regularities For present purposes, the pivotal passage is PI §198. There Wittgenstein makes a fresh start by asking a different question: Let me ask this: what has the expression of a rule—say a sign-post— got to do with my actions? What sort of connexion is there here?— Well, perhaps this one: I have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react to it. This suggestion is followed immediately by the objection: But that is only to give a causal connexion; to tell how it has come about that we now go by the sign; not what this going-by-the-sign really consists in.

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This objection misses a crucial feature of the reply, which is that the connection is between my trained reaction and a signpost, not a piece of wood poking out of the ground. Wittgenstein explains: On the contrary; I have further indicated that a person goes by a sign-post only insofar as there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom. This passage introduces the key elements of Wittgenstein’s alternative. First, we need to change our way of looking at the problem, to ask different questions, for the very way we have posed our problem has directed us towards a mentalistic solution, namely, a solution in terms of some interpretive act or decision or the like. Secondly, training into a custom or social practice is the way in which we come to follow rules. Taking the process of learning into account is crucial to our understanding of linguistic understanding. Instead of looking first to traditional semantic relations or notions like interpretation to explain meaning, we need to look to the process of learning to use words. Thirdly, because training and learning are the vehicles of acculturation (acquiring our second nature), to recognize the importance of learning is to appreciate that meaning, and the normativity associated with it, is a social phenomenon and so the individual cannot be radically isolated from the community. And finally, in being trained, the individual has come to master a technique: “ … and now I do so react to it” (PI §199). At the heart of Wittgenstein’s picture are the social character of meaning and the relevance of learning to semantic issues. Each introduces a new approach, respectively, to what I have been calling the justificatory (the standard-setting) dimension and the practical dimension of rule-following. The key to this reorientation is to recognize that at the end of any interpretation, justification or rule application, “my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act without reasons” (PI §211); and “[i]f I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’” (PI §217). And what I do “when I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly” (PI §219). Wittgenstein’s appeal to the metaphor of blind obedience is his way of emphasizing that there is a bedrock of rule-following which is normative without interpretation and is objective without objectified meanings. Blindly obeying rules or making bedrock judgments are ways of acting in which we act with right though not with justification (where justification implies self-awareness). This contrast between bedrock practices in which we act with right (but not justification) and higher level practices that involve justification or interpretation is a crucial feature of Wittgenstein’s later views. Bedrock practices are illuminated by attention to the domain of the novice, while the higher level practices belong to the domain of the master, in which bedrock 190

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technique and certainty ensure the ease of communication and activity within the language-game. Displaying this contrast between bedrock and higher practices (and so between the domain of the novice and the domain of the master) is implicated in each of Wittgenstein’s four master arguments. The failures of the self-defeating theories make visible different dimensions of the background. But where Wittgenstein gives his most explicit and thoroughgoing treatment of the background is in On Certainty. Bedrock practices form a background of the obvious and the certain, whose certainty is never even explicitly noted, with the result that their character and role are obscured. They dissolve the second problem of normative similarity in an appeal to the obvious, to what we all agree upon without reflection. The evaluative dimension of the bedrock is not epistemic, though it is normative. Before developing this further, it is necessary first to remove an important misconstrual, one that is strongly associated with the community view of rule-following, both by some advocates and many, if not all, critics. It is the claim that Wittgenstein seeks to replace a normative account of bedrock practices with a causal, presumably neobehaviorist, account of our actions and judgments at this basic level. Certainly such a construal fits Kripke’s Humean interpretation of the problem and its solution, which replaces a rational grounding with a causal explanation of belief fixation. So, too, the metaphor of blind obedience and Wittgenstein’s insistence on reasons running out, leaving only what we do as a matter of course, suggest to many that at bedrock level, there is only the behavior of the herd animal, habituated to its environment and constrained by its fellows. John McDowell has voiced the inadequacy of this characterization of bedrock practice: Now there is a temptation to understand [Wittgenstein] on the following lines. At the level of “bedrock” (where justifications have come to an end), there is nothing but verbal behaviour and (no doubt) feelings of constraint. Presumably people’s dispositions to behaviour and associated feelings match in interesting ways; but at this ground-floor level there is no question of shared commitments—everything normative fades out of the picture.1 McDowell’s basic objection is his “disbelief that a position in which this is how things are at the basic level can accommodate meaning at all.” Moreover, McDowell insists, rightly, that “by Wittgenstein’s lights, it is a mistake to think we can dig down to a level at which we no longer have application for normative notions (like ‘following according to a rule’).”2 McDowell’s objection to this characterization of bedrock practice is both general (that normativity cannot be accounted for in purely behaviorist and causal terms) and particular (that this cannot be a correct interpretation of Wittgenstein’s own views). I concur with these claims. Normativity cannot be squeezed from purely causal resources nor is Wittgenstein in any 191

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way attempting to do that. He is, however, interested in the relation between causal features of our position in the world and the normative structure of language-games. This is one of the marked distinctions between the Tractatus and the later work. In the Tractatus, causal explanations are irrelevant to philosophical issues, both methodological and substantive. Cause does not figure in delineating the bounds of sense. Neither does it play any explanatory role in the world conceived as the totality of facts. “Belief in the causal nexus is superstition” (TLP 5.1361). In the later philosophy, that aphorism cannot get a foothold. Wittgenstein seeks to understand the relation between causal and semantic/normative matters anew as we see in his discussion of the word–object connection. Meaning is not a matter of word–object causal relations, even though certain of our language-games require such causal relations. Likewise with rule-following. Bedrock practices are normative, though our training into them is a causal process that calls for a cognitive division of labor between the novice and the linguistically competent. Wittgenstein sees two important causal factors implicated in our participation in language-games: our innate sensory sensitivities to certain physical properties of the world and our susceptibility to social training. Where the empiricists have thought that only the former were philosophically relevant, Wittgenstein understands that our shared reactions to training are equally important. Though causal factors are relevant to rule-following, a purely causal account cannot make space for the basic normative distinction between correct and incorrect actions. The problem of normative similarity thus requires coming to terms with the kind of regularity that is involved in our bedrock practices and judgments. Our bedrock judgments of sameness are not guided by any rule, interpretation or criterion of identity.3 These are the judgments we make blindly but with right. They are normative, yet inform the regularity with which we act. The question, then, is what kind of regularity is implicated in blind obedience to a rule? We can draw on the Kantian distinction between two kinds of rulefollowing.4 These are rule-conforming behaviors and rule-obeying behaviors. Rule-conforming behavior is behavior that, as a matter of fact, conforms to some rule or instantiates a law, but does not conform in virtue of an understanding or recognition of the rule or law. Such behavior could occur in a causally determined way, as the instance of a causal law, or it could conform to a rule through pure happenstance. The behavior of a dog walking along a road with the flow of traffic conforms to our right-hand drive convention, but such behavior is neither the instance of a causal law nor the result of the dog’s recognition of the convention. Rule-obeying behavior, on the other hand, is done, as Kant puts it, from a conception of the law. It is behaving as a result of recognizing and applying rules to the situation. Such behavior involves both a game (the moves that are being made in obeying a rule) and a metagame (the game in which the rules are stated and can be drawn 192

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upon).5 The metagame vocabulary enables one to make explicit the rules, inferential commitments, intentions, beliefs and so on that are implicit in the game proper.6 Though most people learn to drive correctly by studying the traffic laws and driving accordingly, a person might have learned to drive without ever having consulted the traffic laws explicitly. Yet he might well drive in accord with the laws and conventions of good motoring. Such a motorist would be acting in accord with the law, but not from a conception of the law. But such a motorist would also be doing something more than merely acting in accord with the law. This distinction between acting in accord with the law and obeying the law, important though it is, conceals a third kind of regularity, one that Wilfrid Sellars calls “pattern-governed behavior.”7 This third kind of behavior should be the focus of bedrock rule-following. Pattern-governed behavior exemplifies an abstract pattern or a part of a pattern, not as an instance of a causal law nor as mere happenstance nor as a result of self-consciously obeying a rule. This kind of complex behavior cannot be individuated except in terms of its place within an abstract pattern. A pigeon that happens to stretch its neck and open wide its beak in accord with the mating dance of the albatross does not do so in virtue of this mating pattern, although the albatross does. The beak-opening behavior of the albatross is not mere opening wide as it is for the pigeon, but is an integral part of its mating dance. Sellars’ favored example of pattern-governed behavior is the dance of a bee that communicates the location of a field of nectar-bearing flowers. The particular movements of the bee are part of a complex dance, not accidentally, but essentially—they are performed because they are part of the dance. But this is done without a conception of the dance, without a set of instructions for how to perform it. The explanation for, and individuation of, the particular movement is given by its relation to the complex patterned whole. A particular wiggle occurs because of the dance of which it is a part. The identification of the wiggle can only be given by its place and role within the dance as a whole, and so it is explained as occurring because of the dance. This can tempt us into treating the description of the dance, an abstraction, as identifying an object—a mental object—that causes the bee to wiggle when it does. This is precisely the reifying move that both Sellars and Wittgenstein seek to avoid. Sellars looks to avoid this temptation by holding that [i]t is open to us to give an evolutionary account of the phenomena of the dance, and hence to interpret the statement that this wiggle occurred because of the complex dance to which it belongs—which appears … to attribute causal force to an abstraction, and hence tempts us to draw upon the mentalistic language of intention and purpose—in terms of the survival value to groups of bees of these forms of behavior.8 193

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As Sellars’ example shows, holistic individuation of an action can tempt one to reify the abstract pattern of which the action is a part in order to make it the cause of the action in the form of an intention or purpose, construed mentalistically. This is a mistake, not only for the bees’ wiggles, but for our bedrock judgments. The difference between the bees and ourselves is that the bees’ patterns of behavior are hard-wired and to be explained in evolutionary terms whereas our patterns are social and socially transmitted.9 Initiate learning is the acquisition of pattern-governed ways and techniques of behaving, behavior that can only be understood in terms of its place within a structured language-game. Wittgenstein’s bedrock practices involving our fundamental judgments of sameness and the obvious are such pattern-governed practices. This is to say that the verbal behaviors and the actions with which they are associated are no more requests or reports except in the context of a language-game than the bee’s wiggles constitute information outside the context of the dance. Just as the bee’s wiggle occurs because of its place within the complex pattern of the dance, so our reports, requests, and the like occur because of their place within the complex structure of the language-game. And, as the “language” of the bees can be abstracted from their dances and expressed in the form of rules,10 so can our patterns of linguistic behavior be abstracted and expressed in the form of rules of grammar. The difference here is that we can make the ascent to talk about our pattern-governed behavior.11 Bedrock judgments cannot be assimilated to an epistemic or theoretical model. Nonetheless they are normative practices. One consequence of this is that Wittgenstein rejects the ubiquity of the epistemic model of beliefs which is tied to structures of hypothesis, justification, doubt and error. Judgments of sameness and techniques for going on in the same way set the standards for sameness themselves (as part of the language-game). Our bedrock practices, our judgments of what is obviously the same, are certain for us. We make them unreflectively and as a matter of course. By our making them, a system of propositions is held fast and with them a background picture of the world and our place within it. If we cannot understand the normativity of these bedrock practices in terms of the familiar epistemic model, as what we do from a conception of the law and so with justification, how is the normativity and necessity of rule-patterned practice to be explained? Wittgenstein’s new way of thinking about the normativity and necessity of rule-following is in terms of patterngoverned techniques that implicate the community. The normativity of rulefollowing is grounded in community agreement over time; and the constraint or necessity of rules is grounded in our forming a second nature, in coming to see the obvious, which is achieved through a process of acculturation. From the epistemic perspective, to follow a rule blindly is to reach that bedrock in the chain of justification where “one’s spade is turned.” It is to 194

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act, in the now famous phrase, “with right but without justification” (PI §289). The chain of justification terminates with what has become our second nature, with what stands fast for us in our particular actions and judgments. That which is self-evident is precisely what we accept without justification or need of independent justification. The very logic of patterngoverned actions presupposes a context of structure, and that is provided by the actual harmonious interactions of a group of people. The focus of Wittgenstein’s critique is directed primarily against the idea that the mind of the individual can provide that structure. But neither can a Platonized abstract structure, whether a theory of meaning or an autonomous grammar, successfully address the problem of normative similarity. The structure we need is a social structure, that is, the dynamic interactions of a group of people in sustaining certain regularities, customs and patterns of action over time. For the rest of this chapter, we shall consider the way in which the normativity of bedrock practices is public and social, and in the next chapter we shall take up the necessity of such norms and their connection with how we learn language.

The public basis of normativity Understanding is an acquired practical skill, which regularizes our own behavior in relation to regularities in the world, both natural and social, by reference to norms or standards of correctness. As Wittgenstein tells us, the concepts of “rule,” “same” and “agreement” are interwoven (PI §§234–5). How they are interwoven shows how understanding is public and social. Language mastery is public in that understanding must be manifested in action over time. Without self-regularization, regularities in the world are invisible to the subject.12 This is a requirement not just for others, but for the subject herself. Language mastery is social in that an individual does not have the resources for creating and sustaining the norms that govern our bedrock practices. The public basis and the social basis for normativity each implicate one of the two serious problems Wittgenstein identifies upon turning to his own picture of rule-following. These were identified in Chapter 5 as the reductionist problem of conformity (PI §206), where normativity seems to reduce to group conformity, and the problem of circularity (PI §208), according to which the explanation of rule-following in terms of “regularity” and “the same” is vacuous and so fails to address the second problem of normative similarity. In turning to the public basis of normativity, we must take up the charge of circularity. We’ll begin with the least controversial claim in interpreting Wittgenstein. A rule-following practice is a regularity that is displayed over time. To understand a rule is to engage correctly or successfully within a practice. Understanding is thus a way of acting, not just on a single occasion, but over time: 195

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Is what we call “obeying a rule” something that it would be possible for only one man to do, and to do only once in his life? … It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. (PI §199) Hacker and Baker, along with others, argue that the text supports only this idea of a practice as a regularity over time, not as a social regularity.13 Understanding, on their view, is a fully individual possibility and responsibility. This individualist interpretation, I shall argue, is not correct but we need first to see the justification for the view that understanding must be exhibited or manifested publicly over time. What is Wittgenstein’s rationale for this? Is it a form of verificationism, as many have thought? Is it a consequence of Wittgenstein’s rejection of any form of objectified meaning? Can it even be separated from the issue of whether Wittgenstein is an individualist or not with respect to rule-following? That meaning is use and understanding is action are two closely related ideas. The defense of these views is primarily negative, deriving from the failure of theories of objectified meaning and their “paradoxical” alternative, interpretation, to provide an adequate account of linguistic competence. Indeed, the paradox of interpretation suggests to many that this argument undermines any notion of the future projection of a concept or rule. David Bloor has called this “the thesis of meaning finitism”: This is the thesis that the established meaning of a word does not determine its future applications. The development of a languagegame is not determined by its past verbal form. Meaning is created by acts of use. Like the town, it is constructed as we go along.14 More recently, Bloor has elaborated on this idea, opposing it to the meaning determinism criticized in the last chapter, and identifying it with “an inherent indeterminacy” that “nothing can overcome,”15 an indeterminacy closely allied to that of Quine. But Bloor’s thesis of meaning finitism runs together two distinct issues, resulting in his defending an overly reductionist conception of meaning as use. First, Bloor takes Wittgenstein’s criticisms of meaning determinism (the critique of objectified meanings and the paradox of interpretation) as establishing the indeterminacy of meaning. Second, Bloor contrasts the idea of our applications being determined by “logic” or “meanings” in some philosophically inflated sense with the idea of our applications being determined by a “gamut of causes, starting with the psychological and ending with the sociological.”16 The unavoidable indeterminacy of meaning creates an explanatory gap that is to be filled by psychological and sociological causes of behavior. On this reading, Wittgenstein 196

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is a scientific naturalist in the manner of Quine, though Wittgenstein favors sociology over behaviorist or physiological psychology. This characterization of Wittgenstein’s position is misleading. Rather than crediting Wittgenstein with a new picture of language, it keeps him within the picture he is trying to replace. I have already argued that Wittgenstein’s critique of ostensive definition does not entail Quinean inscrutability of reference (Chapter 3). On the contrary, Wittgenstein rejects indeterminacy in our judgments of the obvious. To say, as Bloor does, that “we could take our concepts or rules anywhere, in any direction, and count anything as a new member of an old class, or of the same kind as some existing finite set of past cases,” is a mistake.17 In giving up the metaphor of a rule containing all possible applications (in advance of any particular application), we do not thereby open the possibility of taking all our concepts in any direction. That idea buys into the notion that imagined bizarre projections are real possibilities and so raise genuine doubts about the correctness of the way in which we proceed as a matter of course. Wittgenstein’s argumentative strategy is to show that the alleged indeterminacy of meaning is a function of a mistaken philosophical theory of meaning, not a feature of our ordinary judgments. Meaning determinism is self-defeating, but indeterminacy of meaning, or meaning-finitism, is not the conclusion to draw. Meaning-finitism occupies the same logical space as meaning-determinism, its contrary. As such, the conclusion of indeterminacy discredits the theory that produces it. The point that Wittgenstein does make that can be confused with meaning finitism is that any rule or concept we use has an open texture. Situations, unforeseen and perhaps unforeseeable by ourselves, could stymie our natural reactions and make it unclear what would be the right thing to say or do. Equally, language is open-ended in that there is no sense to the idea that language is complete. New language-games can and do emerge. But the open texture and open-endedness of our language should not be identified with the idea that we could do anything with our concepts, go in any direction.18 On the contrary, open-endedness depends on massive background stability. Bloor’s conception of meaning finitism, because it is tied to the idea of meaning determinism, involves the collapse of the very notion of regularity, which is precisely the argument of the paradox of interpretation. Understanding then is not going on in any way, but going on in the correct way. The internal relation between rule and applications can be explicated as follows. The applications constitute a regularity or pattern, one of going on in the same way. The rule as an abstraction from the applications is not a summary of what an individual or group of individuals has been doing. Such a summary is an inductive generalization that is devoid of normative force. Rules have a normative force that is explained, not in terms of abstract objects, but in terms of applications and how we learn to make such applications. As higher level abstractions, rules can themselves become part 197

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of a game, but their roles in such higher-level games depend on the background bedrock practices in which they play no part. Wittgenstein explains “rule” in terms of regularities, regularities that are specified in terms of going on in the same way. And what counts as going on in the same way is just what is expressed by the rule. “Regularity” does not seem to have the requisite independence from “rule” to provide the sort of explanation we are seeking philosophically. How does Wittgenstein avoid the threat of circularity? We need an appeal to regularity that doesn’t already implicate rules for sameness, that is, the very features that we are seeking to explain in terms of regularities. Wittgenstein’s response to the threat of circularity is to appeal to the learning situation. Only here is the circularity broken: How do I explain the meaning of “regular,” “uniform,” “same” to anyone? … if a person has not yet the concepts, I shall teach him to use the words by means of examples and by practice. [ … ] I do it, he does it after me; and I influence him by expressions of agreement, rejection, expectation, encouragement. I let him go his way, or hold him back; and so on. Imagine witnessing such teaching. None of the words would be explained by means of itself; there would be no logical circle [my italics]. The expressions “and so on,” “and so on ad infinitum” are also explained in this teaching. A gesture, among other things, might serve this purpose. The gesture that means “go on like this,” or “and so on” has a function comparable to that of pointing to an object or place. (PI §208) Clearly for the pupil, Wittgenstein’s warning to the philosopher “Don’t think, look!” (PI 66) applies doubly, first, because the novice cannot think appropriately at all, i.e., hasn’t the requisite concepts, and secondly, because only by looking to the particular examples as displayed by the teacher can he acquire the sense of what is obviously going on in the same way, that is, can he come to judge as the teacher does. Wittgenstein elaborates this same point in Part VI of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (written in the same time frame as Part I of the Investigations): Instruction in acting according to the rule can be described without employing “and so on.” … The effect of “and so on” will be to produce agreement going beyond what is done in the lessons, with the result that we all or nearly all count the same and calculate the same. (RFM VI.45) 198

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It is clear that Wittgenstein thinks that description of the learning situation is sufficient for explaining our judgments of similarity. The novice acquires the skill of acting and judging as the teacher does through example and practice. The training gesture for “and so on” is akin to that of ostensive pointing, Wittgenstein maintains. This explanation does not appeal to concepts, rules, regularity or uniformity though, like ostensive definition, it can succeed only against the right cognitive and environmental background. The ostensive gesture of either kind is useless in isolation or when used in a frivolous manner. Wittgenstein’s discussion of both kinds of ostensive gesture is not to replace the semantic work of ostending with the causal work of conditioning, but to show the division of cognitive labor that displays the intersection of our causal position in the world with the normative structuring of our practices. When we abandon the reductive and other ambitions inspired by false pictures, and associated bad questions, we can see that the only legitimate question is how the child, and so ourselves as a species, gets into the normative dimension. In assimilating training in rules with ostensive teaching of categories, Wittgenstein lets us know that training in rules requires stage-setting as much as ostensive training in categories. There must be a background stage against which it is effective: the role of the teacher and the natural reactions of the pupil. The teacher provides the cognitive background and normative structuring against which the utterances of the novice can be evaluated. It is a fact about training in a custom that it has the effect of bringing the novice to agree with the teacher in her judgments of what is the same or what it is to continue in the same way. What we see in this discussion is Wittgenstein’s concern to realign the causal and normative factors involved in rulefollowing action. Just as ostensive teaching exploits the causally based perceptual sensitivities we have to objects and properties in the world, so training into practices exploits the malleability of our behavior and responsiveness to sanctioning. Neither of these causal propensities, which we share to some degree with many other animals, is to be confused with normative structuring, governed as it is by standards of correctness, not laws of causal connection. These natural dispositions for acquiring regularities in our lives are exploited in initiating the novice into normative regularities. This explanation of a game or concept given by way of example and training is adequate to explain initiate learning. It does not presuppose that the child has the concepts of regularity or sameness. The child just comes to act in accord with the game or concept. What is taught sets the standard. Strictly there is no explanatory circle in explaining language to children. They learn through ostensive training and without the assistance of concepts or theories of the relevant sort. But it is natural to object that the teacher does have the requisite concepts, beliefs and theories. And so these cognitive resources are implicit in the explanation that we give of the child’s learning. 199

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Circularity, it would seem, gives way to regress, as we turn our attention to the teacher and ask for an explanation of her cognitive resources. For every explanation we supply of a child learning through ostensive training, we find ourselves encumbered with a cognitively rich teacher or trainer, and still no explanation of the norms that inform our conceptual abilities that is independent of someone’s being cognitively competent. There are two components to my reply. First, iteration is not regress. The concern that a regress has been initiated arises from the failure to distinguish an explanatory regress from the fact that all of us learned language in this way. This historical iteration of teachers-cum-children is not part of the explanation of the initiate learner’s learning. This is not an explanatory regress. It is biological iteration.19 Second, evolutionary explanation is acceptable in explaining the emergence of tool-using, norm-using, language-using animals. We can now see the importance of recognizing the normativity of the builders game (Chapter 2). Their language-game is akin to a tool-using practice, a primitive but nonetheless normative engagement with each other and the world. We can now explain why Brandom and Goldfarb, both of whom reject the normativity of the builders’ practice, are mistaken in taking the most sophisticated language as the standard for all language. The question then must change. What we really want is an explanation of the emergence of tool-using, norm-using, linguistically competent human beings. This is a matter for evolutionary theory. Here the danger lies with abstracting from the minutiae of change something like a linguistic pattern, which is then treated as itself having causal powers. The linguistic pattern that emerges doesn’t cause the first human being to talk. That would be circular. The linguistic pattern doesn’t predate and explain the linguistically competent performance. Once again, the upshot is that appeal to the learning situation to explain the novice’s acquisition of linguistic and cognitive skills does not initiate an explanatory regress. Appeal to the acquisition of techniques and concepts does not require that our novice already has these techniques or concepts or any others without which he could not learn. The pupil goes on in the same way because he has been trained in the appropriate regularities. The cost of this explanation of the interconnection of “regularity” and “same” is that the pupil must display his learning publicly. The regularities at work are public behavioral regularities. To think “and so on” without public acting is to want “the same” to play its usual role but without “regularity.” This Wittgenstein argues cannot be. In realigning the causal and normative factors as he does, Wittgenstein offers us a different perspective on the two kinds of moves Sellars identifies as language entry (and exit) moves, transitions from that which is not part of a game to a position within the game (or vice versa), and intralanguage moves, moves within the game itself:20 200

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the moves in a language game as pattern governed behaviour are exactly the moves which, if the game were played in a rule obeying manner, would be made in the course of obeying formation and transformation rules formulated in a metalanguage game.21 In a rule-obeying game, the moves are identified explicitly in terms of the game’s formation and transformation rules. Formation rules correspond to language entry/exit moves; transformation rules to intralinguistic moves. But in a pattern-governed game, one must turn to the circumstances under which “an organism which has learned a language game come[s] to behave in a way which constitutes being at a position in the game.”22 The organism does not apply rules in order to place herself in a position in the game. Rather she has learned to act in such a way that she is thereby acting within the game. Thus her actions occupy varying positions within the game: In the first place, one can obviously be at a position by virtue of having moved there from another position (inference). Yet not all cases of being at a position can arise out of moving there from a prior position. … Surely [“observation sentences”] are positions in the language game which one occupies without having moved there from other positions in the language.23 Given certain important qualifications, we have used Sellars’ discussion of the language entry/exit moves to illuminate Wittgenstein’s view of word– object relations.24 Now we need to consider assimilating his view of rulefollowing to the intralinguistic moves within the language-game. Language is, for Sellars, an inferential structure involving (at least) two kinds of inferences, logical inferences and material inferences.25 Logical inferences, though certainly part of our more sophisticated language-games, are not sufficient to explain (or describe) all of the systematic features of a language-game. More fundamental are the material inferences, inferences by which we move from “This is A” directly to “This is B,” and not by way of a major premise “If this is A, then this is B.” Material inference does not have the structure of modus ponens (or any of the other argument forms of a natural deductive system). To require the conditional premise in every such inference initiates the regress made famous by Lewis Carroll in his story of Achilles and the Tortoise.26 What Sellars identifies as material inferences, Wittgenstein describes as rule-following moves that express the grammar of the language-game. Sellars sees his material inferences as a kind of a priori synthetic and thus akin to conceptual truth.27 Wittgenstein’s appeal to grammar also shares something with the idea of conceptual truth.28 But there is also an important difference between the two. Sellars thinks of language as an abstract object with a complex inferential structure that obtains among sentences of assertoric form, that structure consisting both of 201

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logical inferential connections and material connections. Wittgenstein, as I argued in Chapter 2, introduces the notion of a language-game in part to break with this totalizing picture of language in favor of the use of words in the context of action and its surroundings. So where Sellars is interested in a move like “This is a kitten” to “This is a baby cat,” a material inference, Wittgenstein would prefer the following: A calls out “Look at the kitten!” and B coos gently. This difference is further reflected in the way each conceives of the transitional moves from a place, as Sellars puts it, outside the language-game to a position within the game, a language entry rule (or formation rule). Language entry transitions are paradigmatically expressed by observation sentences. The report “This is red” is an entering move into English. It is a move in a language, not because the expression “red” refers to a property in the world, but because it warrants other inferential moves, such as “This is a primary color,” a material inference, and “This is the color of Santa Claus’ coat,” a logical inference (perhaps) involving other beliefs in the doxastic network. The important point, in using this to understand Wittgenstein, is that the Sellarsian transition from having a certain visual experience to the sentence “This is red” is not a move in English. The visual experience itself is a causal episode and, as such, not a position within a language, according to Sellars. “This is red” occupies a position in English only when (and if) it is inferentially connected to other positions within the game. Such behaviors, that is, uttering “This is red” when stimulated appropriately, are causally tied to the environment but acquire the status of a linguistic position only in virtue of inferential connections to other sentences within the language. Thus, Sellars maintains that “the hook-up between rule-regulated symbol activity and the external environment rests on the meshing of rule-regulated symbol activity with what I referred to as ‘[causally] tied behavior.’”29 Sellars speaks of “symbol behavior” as that which is both causally tied to the environment (and so explicable in terms of our sensory systems) and has inferential connection to the rest of language.30 Our causal embeddedness in the world constrains our language-games, but it is not to be construed in semantic terms. Sellars develops a parallel account of the language exit transition, the transition from a position within a language to a place that is not part of a language. This he develops as the relation between intentions and action. Thus, Sellars sees our moves within language—an abstract inferential structure—as wedged between two causal points: our perceptual relations to the world and our behavioral effects on the world. Neither perception nor behavior is part of language. Wittgenstein rejects this classic picture of language as a “superstructure” (Sellars’ own expression) mediating perceptual input and behavioral output. The way we see the world and our action in the world are part of the language-game, a part which cannot be reduced to counterpart sentences caught 202

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up in a network of logical and material inferences. The pattern-governed behaviors we engage in are not all utterances of sentences but include various kinds of behaviors, gestures, facial expressions as well as verbal utterances. The language-game is “the whole, consisting of language and the actions in which it is woven” (PI §7). Yet Sellars lays claim to something like this as well: I think that Wittgenstein was right in finding an ineffable in the linguistic situation, something which can be shared but not communicated. We saw that a rule, properly speaking, isn’t a rule unless it lives in behavior, rule-regulated behavior, even rule-violating behavior. Linguistically we always operate within a framework of living rules. To talk about rules is to move outside the talked-about rules into another framework of living rules.31 The logical inferences and material inferences that constitute our language are drawn in our actions and judgments; they are not, as a matter of principle, first thought and then put into action (though this can happen). Nonetheless, there is a tension between Sellars’ metalanguage description of a language (a superstructure mediating input and output) and his claim to agree with Wittgenstein’s insistence that “we always operate within a framework of living rules”—a line of argument reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s learning argument, though Sellars’ argument apparently initiates an explanatory regress that we cannot but live with.32 Wittgenstein aims to defend a way of seeing and a way of acting as part of participating in a languagegame. But such seeing and acting require our causal embedding in the world both with respect to our sensory sensibilities and our responsiveness to training. For Wittgenstein, pace Sellars, this causal embedding is within language. The challenge for Wittgenstein is to describe how such normative–causal actions within language-games are not to be reduced to or analyzed in terms of two components, the causal element and the normative element. Understanding a language for Wittgenstein cannot but be displayed in how we act and judge. The critique of the classical picture of language in favor of the expanded notion of a language-game leaves no space for the idea of understanding as independent of what we do since all rulefollowing is a matter of what we do, that is, of how we act verbally and in other ways. Behavior as a criterion for understanding is not a matter of behavior’s being necessarily good evidence for understanding, as many have construed Wittgenstein’s notion of a criterion.33 Behaving in certain ways is understanding.34,35 Once again, this is a metaphysical point, not an epistemological one. Understanding is a matter of one’s own behavior becoming regularized such that one’s normative actions engage with the world and others. 203

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The social basis of normativity: the negative argument36 The crux of the matter concerning whether normative practices must be social turns on whether an isolated individual can (in principle) engage in behavior that is normatively guided, that can go against a rule or not. In considering such a case, it is important to note that we are concerned with a radically isolated individual, that is, someone who has never been in contact with a community. There is no problem for the social view in allowing for an individual who has left society and yet continues to engage in rule-following practices, and indeed goes on to invent new practices for herself.37 The challenge comes from the idea that the radically isolated individual could create and display behavior with the regularity and complexity of the rulefollowing sort. Baker and Hacker, for example, who champion a regularity interpretation of rule-governed activity, see no problem in this, even for the radically isolated individual, for “it is his behavior, including his corrective behavior, which shows both that he is following a rule, and what he counts as following a rule.”38 What is needed for solitary rule-followers are “regularities of action of sufficient complexity to yield normativity.”39 According to these authors, the social aspect of meaning is not an essential aspect of meaningfulness. “It is quite wrong,” they say, “to suppose that distinctions between appearance and reality are inapplicable to an individual in isolation, or are ones which that individual cannot employ.”40 In holding this, they are maintaining that the distinction between correctly following a rule and making a mistake can be displayed in the complex regularities of behavior of the individual, most importantly corrective behavior. Showing this is complicated further if we consider the important difference between rule obeying behavior and pattern-governed behavior. The textual defense for this individualist view focuses on the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s use of “practice” and “agreement.” Wittgenstein’s use of these expressions, Baker and Hacker maintain, has nothing to do with rulefollowing being a social practice; rather their significance is to show that rule-governed activity is a form of action over time, not a form of thought. Rule-following, they agree, must be public and temporally extended, but is not necessarily social. Discord is not, first and foremost, discord among participants, but discord between an action and the pattern of which it is a part. I think that this is a misinterpretation of Wittgenstein’s use of these two key expressions, not in every case, but in many. He uses them both to express a regularity over time in which later actions agree with earlier ones,41 and also to state agreement among the practitioners of a practice.42 Addressing this problem requires sorting out these different uses. Will the individualist account do? Let me ask the obvious first question. What are these “regularities of action of sufficient complexity” that Baker and Hacker appeal to? What kind of complexity is required? After all, we know that insects and animals can and do display behavior of remarkable

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intricacy and complexity without our attributing a normative character to their behavior. Clearly, the kind of complexity Baker and Hacker are looking for is corrective behavior. Sanctioning is the hallmark of normative regularity. But how is corrective behavior to be identified as such? Baker and Hacker’s example (derived from Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics43) of a Robinson Crusoe using a decorative pattern is intended to answer this question. We are told that “he might use the pattern – ... –... as a rule or pattern to follow in decorating the walls of his house; when he notices four dots in a sequence he manifests annoyance with himself. He goes back and rubs one out, and perhaps checks carefully adjacent marks, comparing them with his ‘master-pattern’.”44 Our Robinson Crusoe acts as we would act if we were following a master-pattern. Insofar as our isolated individual’s behavior counts as being corrective, it is only by assimilating it to our corrective practices. Behavior wildly different from our own, bearing no discernible similarity to our practices of correcting, is simply not corrective behavior. What is corrective behavior for us is thereby corrective behavior for Robinson Crusoe. The dispute between the individualist view and the social view is whether this necessary affinity between ourselves and another is to be explained in terms of the autonomy of grammar which is applicable to individual and community alike; or whether Robinson Crusoe’s behavior must be explained in terms of his nominal membership in our community, that is, his assimilation to our practices. How the master-pattern is construed is a test for how we think of his behavior. Is the master-pattern a standard for Crusoe in virtue of the grammar of the game? Or is it a standard for Crusoe in the sense that we take “Slab!” said by the builders to mean “Bring me a slab!”? If the latter, then the master-pattern is no more really a standard for Crusoe than builder A really means “Bring me a slab!”. This is what nominal membership in a community comes to. It is, in effect, a form of anthropomorphism. The error is to read back into Crusoe’s behavior a complexity that belongs to our own. Yet even giving Crusoe nominal membership in our practice of decorating, correcting is highly interpretive. There is no way to distinguish corrective behavior from a modification of the rules or from the termination of one game for another or from the introduction of an exception permitted by the rule beyond this imagined assimilation. Crusoe’s behavior, precisely because it is so impoverished, can as readily be assimilated to practices other than our own. This is a matter of imaginative interpretation, not grammar. Perhaps the master-pattern warrants systematically altering the pattern inscribed, so that the four dots Crusoe put down as he was continuing the sequence were correct, and Crusoe’s gesture that we took as a sign of selfcriticism was rather a sign of tedium, his examination of the master-pattern and his subsequent behavior a rejection of that master-pattern for another. Other stories could be told that change the interpretation of his behavior and the rule he is purported to follow.45 205

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Crusoe (or Wittgenstein’s caveman) is more similar to Wittgenstein’s builders than to ourselves. The builders were introduced, in part, as a device to bring out what was wrong with the Fregean conception of language. Though far removed from a full-fledged language, precisely in missing the logical structure of full-fledged discursive language, the builders game makes the case for the primitive meaningful use of words. Without these words and the sanctions associated with them for correct and incorrect use, the coordination of their behaviors would cease, and it would no longer be possible to engage in the building game. The builders are an important intermediary link between conditioned behavior involving the external reinforcements and full linguistic practice with its complicated inferential structure and internal sanctions. The builders have the simplicity of conditioned behavior with the internal normative structure of doing things correctly or wrongly. Why isn’t Crusoe’s behavior a primitive rule-following, that is, a primitive form of making intralinguistic moves from the inscription of two dashes to an inscription of three dots and so on, just as we wanted to say that the builders were engaged in primitive acts of “referring” to various stones and so making language entry and exit transitions? Within the builders game, there is room, for the builders as well as ourselves as observers, to distinguish playing the game from not playing and to distinguish playing as one ought to from not doing so. Internal sanctioning distinguishes ways of going on correctly from mistakes or even jokes (cf. PI §42). The prescriptions internal to the practice are those that are taught the children of this tribe (cf. PI §6). Why isn’t Crusoe in the same intermediate position? We can see the affinities to our own artistic practices as well as the obvious differences. Why deny Crusoe a normative, even though primitive, practice? And how would seeing Crusoe as obeying a rule improve our understanding of the normativity of our language-games? Could Crusoe be a philosophical tool in Wittgenstein’s repertoire for criticizing the theories of rule-obeying he seeks to undermine, in the same way that the builders game is a tool in examining denotational theories of meaning? There is a crucial methodological difference between the two. The builders, like the other salient language-games46 Wittgenstein introduces in the Investigations, play a methodological role in his argument against representational theories of meaning. The intelligibility of the Crusoe thought experiment, on the other hand, seems to presuppose the very theory of rules that he seeks to undermine in the central passages of Part I. Here it becomes important to look at the surroundings within which Crusoe engages in his activity. What takes the place of the coordination of behaviors between the two players in the Crusoe case is his engaging in self-corrective behavior. To have a bearing on normativity, Crusoe must play two roles in the game, the one who follows the rule and the one who evaluates the move or knows the criterion of success in following the rule.47 Mistake, implicating a sanctioning or corrective structure, is a necessary part of a normative practice. That is 206

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precisely what is difficult to locate in Crusoe’s behavior. The “corrective” behavior, as the original argument brings out, is fully compatible with Crusoe engaging in different activities. So what further manifestations are required to show that Crusoe is under an obligation to a master-pattern? The requisite regularity must be stretched out further in time, to create multiple instances of conforming to a rule. Regularities of the requisite sort over time are the only devices available in the Crusoe case to show the normativity of the practice. If we observed Crusoe to strike his forehead, return to the “master-pattern,” and then continue with his series of dots and dashes every so many minutes or every so many feet, and then once again strike his forehead, then we would cease to see this activity as a self-correcting one. Instead the apparent manifestation of error would take on the color of a ritual of some sort or a mechanical tick that would make it more appropriate to assimilate Crusoe’s behavior to that of the Sphex wasp than that of a rulefollower. If we never observed Crusoe to engage in corrective behavior again but to produce the same sequence of dots and dashes without deviation, and we never saw any other evidence of corrective behavior, it is not at all clear that we would agree that the cave-drawing was a rule-obeying practice, that he was following a master-pattern. Wittgenstein himself holds that our caveman Crusoe is doing something that is akin to following a rule, but falls short of that: There might be a cave-man who produced regular sequences of marks for himself. He amused himself, e.g., by drawing on the wall of the cave: –. – –. – –. – –. or –. –..–...–....– But he is not following the general expression of a rule. And when we say that he acts in a regular way that is not because we can form such an expression. (RFM VI.41) This is because “only in the practice of a language can a word have meaning” (RFM VI.41), and “the phenomenon of language is based on regularity, on agreement in action” (RFM VI.39).48 I want now to examine the passages within which these quotations are taken, for they raise a number of important questions for understanding Wittgenstein. The sections we want to understand are RFM VI.39–49. The discussion of these passages concerns the same issues that Wittgenstein is discussing in PI §§198–242, the passages in which he presents his alternative picture of rule-following. RFM VI.39 takes up Wittgenstein’s discussion of rulefollowing after concluding, in RFM VI.38, that “interpretation comes to an end.” RFM VI.39 opens with the claim that “the phenomenon of language is based on agreement in action” where this is contrasted with the idea 207

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that language is based on justification (of the sort that might be provided by an interpretation). Our first question is whether, by “regularity” and “agreement in action,” Wittgenstein means regularity or agreement in action over time only (as those defending an individualist interpretation of Wittgenstein insist) or agreement in action over time among practitioners (as all variants of the social view maintain). In the context in which he introduces his caveman (in RFM VI.41), however, it is clear that the agreement in action Wittgenstein is concerned with is agreement among human beings. Immediately following his claim that language is based on agreement in action (not interpretation or justification), Wittgenstein says that “here it is of the greatest importance that all or the enormous majority of us agree in certain things” (RFM VI.39; also see 241–2). Appeal to such agreement as well as his numerous references to what concerns human beings or mankind run throughout these final ten passages of Part VI.49 He concludes Part VI with the statement that “the agreement of humans that is a presupposition of logic is not an agreement in opinions, much less in opinions on questions of logic” (pace the crude majoritarian view). This agreement among us expresses a certainty that is indispensable to any language-game.50 There is, as we shall see, an important link between similarity and certainty. If it is so clear that Wittgenstein is appealing to the “agreement of humans” in his alternative to the paradox of interpretation and that he denies that the isolated caveman is “following the general expression of a rule,” how can so many commentators read this as agreement in action over time? The primary exegetical reason is that Wittgenstein does not unequivocally say that more than one person is required for a practice although he does explicitly say that more than one action is required.51 He seems close to requiring a social dimension to normative practice without actually endorsing that claim. Even in the passages under consideration now, Wittgenstein begins with the use of “agreement” that is plausibly construed as “agreement among actions over time” (RFM VI.39) though he moves unambiguously to social agreement in the subsequent remarks. Let me defend the idea that social agreement is a requirement on normative practice by a further examination of Baker and Hacker’s Crusoe. First, let us note that their Crusoe and Wittgenstein’s caveman differ in a rhetorically important respect. Baker and Hacker’s Crusoe has a masterpattern (an expression of a rule) while Wittgenstein’s caveman does not. Normative regularity must be objective, that is, it must be constrained by something other than the individual’s intuition, decision or disposition. For Baker and Hacker, that something is the master-pattern. The introduction of the master-pattern looks like it provides the objective standard whereby Crusoe’s behavior is the “following of the general expression of a rule,” but this makes Crusoe’s behavior rule-obeying rather than pattern-governed behavior. But rule-obeying behavior, like naming, always involves a metagame 208

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as well as the game itself. The meta-game has its own rules, the rules for consulting a master-pattern and applying it. Thus, appeal to the master-pattern invites us to introduce the idea of a hidden complex structure that lies behind Crusoe’s actions and makes Crusoe like ourselves in mind, as it were, if not in deed. This is exactly the same philosophical mistake that occurred in the attempt to impose the Fregean picture of language on the actions of the builders. This is obviously unacceptable to Wittgenstein. But something like this must be done to make Crusoe’s behavior support the autonomy of grammar. In conclusion, the attempt to construe Crusoe’s behavior as a normative practice falls afoul of the following trilemma: Either we give Crusoe nominal membership in our practice (an imaginative exercise only); or we smuggle some form of objectified meaning or interpretation back into the picture (by way, e.g., of a master-pattern); or we are left with mystifying phrases like “grammar is autonomous.” Wittgenstein’s use of the builders game early in Part I of the Investigations adds a feature to that game that cannot possibly be part of the life of the radically isolated Crusoe. At PI §6 in the Investigations, Wittgenstein asks us to “imagine that the language of §2 was the whole language of A and B; even the whole language of the tribe. The children are brought up to perform these actions, to use these words as they do so, and to react in this way to the words of others.” Language-game §2 is acquired; it is transmitted from generation to generation by way of the training that the children receive.52 Communication and learning are not secondary features of language. Normative practices cannot but be socially acquired practices. The individual hasn’t the cognitive or behavioral resources to generate a regularity in behavior that is not either a causal regularity (behaviorist conditioning) or a causally fixed pattern-governed regularity (the “hard wiring” of the bees’ dance or the complicated performances of the Sphex wasp). The learning situation is precisely one in which there is a cognitive and normative division of labor between the actions and judgments of the novice and the background against which the identity of the actions is fixed and corrections can be made. This is a negative argument for a social dimension to rule-following. Before turning to the positive argument for the sociality of language, we need to address a particularly forceful polemical objection. Simon Blackburn asks the rhetorical question, how can adding an additional person saying the same thing as the speaker he joins turn the speaker’s senseless utterance into meaningful speech?53 This does indeed make the social view look absurd. But the venom can be drawn from this question more easily than might be thought. So how can adding an additional person transform meaningless vocalizations into meaningful speech? We need to look more closely at the situation we are being asked to find unobjectionable. First, we note that Blackburn is describing any utterance of any master of language. As I have already argued, nothing in the social view requires that an isolated speech act of a linguistically proficient person is impossible. Second, if we switch to 209

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the domain of the novice or child, the situation is quite different. The child hasn’t the linguistic or cognitive skills to report anything, to say anything, without the support of the linguistically competent. That there is this cognitive and linguistic division of labor is evident empirically as well as philosophically. The cognitive background that I have argued is necessary for speech is taken away from the isolated child. The vocalizations of the young child are not yet autonomous speech. Third, suppose we consider the situation of the isolated adult. Even here there can be seen to be an erosion of linguistic skills. So the point made by the social view is hardly absurd. On the contrary, it is palpably real for any language user. The objection can be raised that these are only empirical considerations. The child growing up in isolation and even the isolated adult are known to suffer cognitive and linguistic deprivation. If these are but empirical considerations, it can be urged that they are irrelevant to a philosophical account of language and linguistic competence. There is no a priori argument for the sociality of language. This looks like a powerful reply so long as we ignore the diagnostic critiques of the representationalist theory of language. These critiques, as we have seen in two cases, make visible the elements of the background without which language is impossible. With the negative argument, we back into the sociality of language.

The social basis of normativity: the positive argument The most familiar positive argument states that the basic normative contrast can only be identified with the difference between the deviant behavior of the individual and the conforming behavior of the majority. What is correct or incorrect is a matter of individual actions in relation to communal action. What the community “does” is neither correct nor incorrect. As Crispin Wright memorably puts it, “the community just goes.”54 This is the constitutive version of the community view. The intuitive appeal of this claim derives in large part from the elimination of the traditional alternatives. If Wittgenstein has successfully shown that neither an appeal to a mental apparatus nor Platonic forms nor interpretation is coherent, there is nothing left, it would seem, but our behavior in social groups. This strategy remains committed to a reductionist solution to the problem of normative similarity. If such an explanatory strategy is bound to fail, as I have argued in the last chapter, in what sense is language necessarily social? Though Wittgenstein does require collective agreement in our bedrock judgments and actions, this is not to be understood as involving either the semantic reduction of the majoritarian view or the unmasking thesis of the constitutive view. “Right” is not what we say is right: But the logical “must” is a component part of the propositions of logic, and these are not propositions of human natural history. If 210

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what a proposition of logic said was: Human beings agree with one another in such and such ways (and that would be the form of the natural-historical proposition), then its contradictory would say that there is here a lack of agreement. Not, that there is an agreement of another kind. (RFM VI.49)55 Nor is agreement a surrogate for a genuine normativity that does not exist. Prescriptions internal to the language-game do not mask external pressures to conformity. Just as Wittgenstein does not endorse an indeterminacy thesis as the consequence of his critique of ostensive definition, so he does not endorse an unmasking thesis as the consequence of his paradox of interpretation. As we have seen, treating either ostensive definition or interpretation as semantically fundamental fails because each involves a confusion of the domains of novice and master, and so a failure to understand human normativity. Defenders of ostensive definition read the adult into the child while the defenders of the community view read the child into the adult. What then is the importance of community agreement if Wittgenstein is not endorsing a skeptical unmasking thesis? There are three positions that can be developed here. The first is that community agreement is a requirement for communication but not a condition for normativity itself. Agreement in some judgments and linguistic conventions is necessary for successful communication. This is (though not for Davidson) an unexceptional claim and is minimally what Wittgenstein is after. But I do not think that this goes deeply enough. The second position can be identified as a Davidsonian one. This is the claim that a necessary condition on the interpretability of a language is the assumption of rationality. Interpretation requires that we treat the speaker as a rational being, that is, as a being who accepts mostly true beliefs. In Chapter 5, I argued that this principle of charity is tantamount to Wittgensteinian (collective) agreement in judgment. The methodology of interpretation is only applicable against a background of enormous agreement between the interpreter and the speaker. This makes interpretation an unnecessary detour in successfully understanding another. But the objection can be raised that the argument of Chapter 5 shows only that interpretation is practically idle, not practically idle. Is the principle of charity a methodological principle required for interpretation or is it a de facto agreement that is necessarily constitutive of being a speaker and thinker? If a methodological principle, then taking the intentional stance towards the speaker (that is, treating the speaker as a rational agent) is explanatorily fundamental, and agreement flows from this.56 If, on the other hand, agreement is actually constitutive of being a rational agent, then the appeal to interpretation all the way down is not just practically idle, it is theoretically idle. The stronger position is Wittgenstein’s. To secure this stronger result, we must show why community 211

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agreement is required for normativity, given that we have rejected both the majoritarian view and the constitutive view. This third position is the one I shall defend. We rejoin the two pleas for interpretation discussed in the second section of Chapter 5.57 Davidson acknowledges that in treating the paradox of interpretation argument as an underdetermination argument only, he has not addressed the deeper problem of normative similarity: “I have only contended that a common practice isn’t necessary for communication if each speaker goes on more or less as before. I have given no answer to the question what it is to go on as before.”58 Davidson does provide an answer to this question, one that, like that offered by Wittgenstein, “demands reference to social interaction. Where I disagree with [Wittgenstein],” Davidson states, “is on how this demand is met.”59 Brandom, too, holds that normativity goes all the way down, so that no reductionist account can be given.60 But he thinks an I–thou relation of mutual acknowledgement is required. Our status as participants in the discursive game of giving and asking for reasons is instituted by treating each other as rational beings. In brief, the debate can be put this way: Is it a demand for conformity in behavior, a demand that the speaker behave as others do? Or is it a demand for the reciprocal recognition of the rationality of each participant? This disagreement can be characterized as asking whether the social dimension of language is an I–we relationship (the relation between the individual and members of a community)61 or an I–thou relationship (one of acknowledgement between two individuals).62 Is communal agreement a function of mutual recognition; or is mutual recognition a consequence of communal agreement? Which form of sociality is explanatorily more fundamental? We can find passages in the Investigations that express the importance of both forms: If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments. (PI §242) My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. (PI II.iv) To address this question—which form of sociality is explanatorily more basic—we need to return to the problem of normative similarity. Which form of sociality (if either) is necessary for resolving the question, what is it to go on in the same way? Wittgenstein’s argument turns on his anthropocentrism, long shared by Davidson,63 and the novice–master structure of the learning situation, to which Davidson also turns in his later work. 212

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The sociality of language in both its forms is revealed in the learning situation. Becoming a language user is acquiring our second nature through enculturation. For Wittgenstein, that we become language users is philosophically significant whereas it is not for Davidson. This affects the way each sees the usefulness of the learning situation in addressing the problem of normative similarity. We briefly mentioned in Chapter 5 that Davidson takes his solution to the problem of what it is to go on as before to be a defense of the I–thou form of sociality. This is Davidson’s “triangulation argument.”64 With this argument, we see an interesting convergence between Wittgenstein and Davidson, both in matters of substance and method. Nonetheless, it is a convergence that is embedded in quite distinct pictures of language. Here is Davidson’s first version of the triangulation argument: Suppose that each time I point to my nose you say “nose.” Then you have it right; you have gone on as before. Why do your verbal reactions count as “the same,” i.e., relevantly similar? Well, I count them as relevantly similar: I find the stimulus in each case the same, and the response the same. You must also, in some primitive sense, find my pointings similar; the evidence for this is your similar response. … by yourself you can’t tell the difference between the situations seeming the same and being the same. … If you and I can each correlate the other’s responses with the occurrence of a shared stimulus, however, an entirely new element is introduced. Once the correlation is established it provides each of us with a ground for distinguishing between getting it right and getting it wrong.65 The correlation of responses to a stimulus, that is individuated itself (partly) in terms of the responses of the two, creates the space for individuating kinds of responses and so distinguishing the same response from those that differ. There is something independent of its merely seeming to the speaker to be the same, and that is whether the responses are shared. In saying that the responses are shared, Davidson means that the behaviors are the same. This is not a notion of normative similarity, but the sameness of instances of the same causal law. Davidson takes his triangulation argument to provide the ground for a substantive distinction between the normatively correct and incorrect, one that permits a subsequent contrast between the intention of the speaker and the interpretation of the interpreter. Earlier we saw that this contrast failed to provide a way out of the circularity problem. Davidson hoped that the interpreter’s attribution of belief could be correct or incorrect depending on whether the interpreter’s attribution fits the intention of the speaker. This attempt at explanation failed because it explained the normative dimension of linguistic attribution in terms of the speaker’s intentions which are themselves individuated only 213

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from within the space of normativity. That the speaker intends to mean such-and-such or to go on as before requires “a ground for distinguishing getting it right and getting it wrong, going on as before, or deviating.”66 This can only be found, as Davidson puts it, with the second person. Davidson continues to reject any appeal to linguistic convention to play this role, on the grounds that it too can only postpone addressing the real problem of normative similarity. Triangulation, on the other hand, among the stimulus and the responses of the two persons provides an anchor for a substantive contrast between correct and incorrect without appealing to shared convention or intentions of either participant. A two-person sociality is required for language use. As noted earlier, because it is two persons, Davidson calls this an I–thou sociality. But it is really an I–we sociality that is established; that is, what is important is the coordination of the verbal behaviors of the two participants within the triangulated situation. This is the relation between the interpreter and the interpreted in the situation of radical interpretation. Interpretation, to get up and running, requires triangulation. He thus concludes that there is an ineliminable social aspect to language. It is the replacement for Quine’s use of stimulus meaning as the entering wedge into constructing a translation or theory of meaning. This permits him to show that the triangulated structure can be exploited to answer Wittgenstein’s challenge. The correctness or incorrectness of an attribution of meaning is not a function of the conformity or deviance in the individual’s linguistic behavior in relation to community behavior. Rather coordination with another’s responses to the world is required. This is an important contribution. But the situation of radical translation or interpretation has been changed. The interpreter is no longer the objective observer of the antics of the native or of the interpreted. The interpreter is on the ground with the interpreted in using the triangulation as the device to initiate interpretation. In Davidson’s first triangulation argument he has not fully understood the significance of this shift in the status of the interpreter, from outside the sphere of action of the interpreted to a member within the situation. Wittgenstein would put this point by saying that Davidson locates the significance of triangulation in the wrong philosophical context, in the intellectualized context of constructing an interpretation of the utterances of another. Rather we should see its significance in connection with that elusive phrase that there is “a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation” (PI §201). At the heart of Wittgenstein’s examination into the foundations of our judgments of sameness is his use of the learning situation as exemplary in displaying ways of grasping rules without interpretation. The learning situation makes visible the intersection of causal and normative features within language-games. Answering the problem of normative similarity is a matter of showing how the novice becomes a participant in the language-game. The 214

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learning situation is for Wittgenstein what the situation of radical interpretation is for Davidson. Both are presented as fundamental thought experiments or cases in which the conditions necessary for language show most clearly. Davidson takes the situation in which we must interpret—the use of malapropisms—to be paradigmatic of all language while Wittgenstein takes the situation through which we all pass—initiate learning—as paradigmatic in displaying the background of the obvious and certain. The situation of radical interpretation presents us with one in which the interpretability of the noises made by the speaker, and so the ascription of meaning and belief to the speaker, does not presuppose that the noises are meaningful or that the speaker is a believer.67 The subject is treated as alien to the interpreter. The learning situation is one in which the noises of the child are taken for meaningful acts when they are so only by courtesy. The child is treated as a member of the community. In brief, the situation of interpretation renders the participants alien to each other while the learning situation requires assimilating the child before the child can speak. The two situations embody a curious inversion of the interpreted subject and the child. One can turn the relation of interpreter to interpreted into an I–thou relation of mutual recognition only by locating both within the community. This is something that is understood quite clearly by Brandom. He avoids the problems that ensue with the myth of radical interpretation by holding that normativity goes all the way down.68 Interpretability of vocalizations is held to be the source of our status as language users. But interpretability fails to extract a stable theory of meaning if it can draw only from the subject’s behaviors. There is no way to get the normative from the mere behaviors and vocalizations of individuals. Brandom insists that we must start with mutual recognition or acknowledgement of each other as believing, judging beings. Our normative attitude towards the other institutes his status as an intentional being within the space of reasons. Our deontic scorekeeping of each other’s commitments and permissions constitutes treating others as responsible for the consequences of the claims that they make. This “normative phenomenalism,” as Brandom calls it, is sufficient to anchor our linguistic and normative lives to the world and each other.69 One is a rational agent in virtue of being treated as such by others. This is an important insight, but one that needs to be situated within a different picture. The interpretationist strategy Brandom adopts from Davidson leads to treating the I–thou relation as something constructed from the mutual interpretations of the other as a rational language user. For Brandom, however, there is no situation of radical interpretation. We are always in medias res.70 Some might think that this is an unfair objection to Davidson’s defense of his theory. He does, after all, turn to the learning situation himself. He presents this as a variant on the triangulation that is required to anchor interpretation to the world. After his early paper, “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Language,”71 discussed in Chapter 5, language learning plays no 215

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role in Davidson’s thought for a very long time. It is therefore all the more striking that his second formulation of the triangulation argument is given in terms of “a primitive learning situation,” the child’s learning his first language: Involved in our picture there are … three similarity patterns. The child finds tables similar; we find tables similar; and we find the child’s responses in the presence of tables similar. It now makes sense for us to call the responses of the child responses to tables. Given these three patterns of response we can assign a location to the stimuli that elicit the child’s responses. The relevant stimuli are the objects or events we naturally find similar (tables) which are correlated with responses of the child we find similar. It is a form of triangulation: one line goes from the child in the direction of the table, one line goes from us in the direction of the table, and the third line goes from us to the child. Where the lines from child to table and us to table converge “the” stimulus is located.72 However, though Davidson sees that the learning situation is relevant, he is not able to see everything that it can tell us. This passage contains an ambiguity that obscures the asymmetrical relation between child and adult. Davidson treats the similarity patterns both as causal patterns and as normatively constrained. The child’s finding tables similar is a matter of her natural reactions towards medium-sized objects. The adult, on the other hand, recognizes that this is a table, thus bringing into play the concept of a table. The similarity in the child’s and the adult’s responses includes such behavior as walking around the table and placing and removing objects on and from the surface of the table. But most importantly (and this is what Davidson has in mind by the patterns of response), both we and the child say “table” in the presence of tables. The child’s vocalization has a clear similarity to our own judgment that this is a table. Both involve the use of the vocable “table,” a shared linguistic sign. These similarity patterns converge on “the” stimulus only if the adult’s response is taken to set the standard for what in the stimulation situation is “the” stimulus, taking Davidson’s own use of scare quotes to bring this out. Assimilating the child’s responses to our own is what Wittgenstein calls taking an attitude towards the child as ensouled. Such an attitude of recognition is a genuine expression of the I–thou relation. This is the second form of the sociality of language. Wittgenstein retains an important place for both kinds of normativity while endorsing neither the I–we form of sociality nor the I–thou form as these are now conceived in the debate between advocates of the community view and advocates of interpretation. Elements associated with each are indispensable to the initiate learning situation. To see this requires a different picture in terms of which we can understand the sociality of language. 216

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The analogy with the standard meter stick is very helpful in this context. Again, let me note the main features of this example. It is a standard of measurement. As a norm, it does not report or describe states of affairs, though it can be used to do so. There are three important dimensions to its being a standard of measurement. First, the actual bar that is used, the one stored in Paris, is not inherently representational or normative. But it does have empirical properties that enable it to function as a standard. Most importantly, the metal bar is rigid. It can be engraved or scored. It does not shrink or deteriorate over time. These empirical properties are essential to the metal bar’s being used as a standard of measurement. These, then, are the empirical or material properties of the standard or norm qua physical object. The second feature is the calibration of the metal bar. The empirical properties of the metal bar enable the bar to be scored, but such scoring is not a natural property of the bar. (Unlike the rings of a tree that are naturally “scored” for age.) The metal bar would be a much less useful item if it could not be calibrated for more refined and precise measurements. Finally, there is the function or purpose of the bar itself. That can only be found within a community having selected the material bar to do measuring work. The purpose of the bar is to set an objective standard for all measuring devices that measure lengths, and that purpose, in this case, is a matter of convention. The problem of normative similarity both for naming and rule-following is that no intellectual solution or causal reduction succeeds. Human normativity is expressed through bedrock judgments of sameness. These judgments constitute normative standards by which properties of the world can be measured. Understanding how this is so requires an adjustment to our understanding of the relation between normativity and causation. This can be seen in applying the model of the standard meter stick to our bedrock judgments of the obvious. Two exemplars for bedrock judgments are “This is red” said of a fire engine, and “5 follows 4” in the natural number sequence. They are the sort of judgments very young children acquire. On analogy with the standard meter stick, these judgments of the obvious are calibrations that the young child undergoes no matter what. The child is “scored” for color, for number continuation, for objects over time. This “calibrating” is a causal process, but in being so calibrated the child comes to judge the world for color, for number, for objects.73 The material properties that we must have in order to judge the world must have the right sort of rigidity to support a standard over time and the right degree of flexibility to permit scoring. The material that is necessary for the construction of our “yardstick” judgments are our shared natural reactions, including our perceptual sensitivities to certain physical saliencies in the world and our malleable behavior. This “common behaviour of mankind” (PI 206) is the material without which bedrock judgments of the obvious cannot be made. Training is the medium in which this common 217

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behavior, that is, our natural differential responses to aspects of the world, is exploited in teaching judgments of normative similarity. This common behavior of mankind is exploited in the calibration of the child. To come to play color games requires that the novice be calibrated with the basic colors. Seeing a blue sky or judging whether this color goes better with that requires being able to judge the world for color. This is analogous to our judging objects for length. Here too the use of a measuring device is calibrated in such a way that we can judge that the table is shorter than the rug. Such measuring does not involve judgment that this meter stick is marked with lines tagged with numerals “1,” “2” and so on, though of course the bar is so scored. No one who has learned to use the meter stick is required to go through that exercise of checking the scoring or the material of the stick. We just use it appropriately. This takes us to the third component of measuring devices. To what purpose is a standard constructed? With standards like the meter stick that question is answered in terms of the interests or needs of the human beings who construct it. But with our own bedrock judgments, there is no purpose beyond the fact that we must measure the world in one way or another. That is what it is to be a creature whose first nature is to acquire a second nature. We cannot but acquire such norms.74 As Wittgenstein says in On Certainty §475: I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination. Our bedrock judgments, then, exploit our “common behavior” to calibrate the novice, who is blind to the calibrations—being the vehicle that embodies them—and alternatively blind to the role they play in the subject’s life. Now we can assess where the two forms of sociality fit in this picture of the normativity of the human form of life. For Wittgenstein, the individuation of stimulus and response (and so what counts as the same or not) is a function of our shared reactions to stimuli in the environment and our shared responses to training. Just as the length “one foot” would be an incoherent notion if the wooden yardstick were subject to shrinking and expanding in variable and unpredictable ways, so “going on as before” would be incoherent if our reactions in a common stimulus situation differed in variable and unsystematic ways, whether this is variability across individuals or variability over time.75 Both the rigidity of our natural reactions and that they are shared are necessary for a response to count as going on in the same way. This is the insight the community view seeks to express. Where the community view goes wrong is in holding that the correctness of the 218

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judgment consists in that community agreement. Community agreement, I– we sociality, contributes to the empirical rigidity required for judging. Community agreement is part of the material to be used in fixing the standard; it is not the standard itself. I–thou sociality has been variously characterized as the mutual recognition of the intentionality of all participants and the attitude towards another as “an attitude towards a soul” (PI II.iv). The second phrase, Wittgenstein’s, carries with it moral connotations. The proper location of I– thou sociality within this picture of normativity is the second dimension, the calibration of the child. Within the initiate learning situation, the master of the practice must have this attitude towards the child as ensouled. This is required for the successful calibration of the child. This attitude is not that of interpretation. Learning the obvious is done for the most part blindly, for both child and adult, and so it becomes unrecognizable as the background, in its obviousness and ineliminability, against which we speak and act. In sum, to participate in a normative practice is a matter of establishing a second nature by being initiated into pattern-governed behavior through training in which the cognitive and normative labor is divided between the novice and the master. Grammar is not independent of our lived practices, of our harmonious agreement in action and judgment. But the community is not required in order to police the actions and judgments of all members, but in order to sustain the articulated structure within which understanding and judging can occur and against which error and mistake can be discerned. We can now also see more clearly what Wittgenstein means by the way of following a rule that is not an interpretation, captured in his remark: “I obey the rule blindly.” Our bedrock judgments and actions are blind in the sense that no recognition of a rule or a standard is required of the individual in order to carry out the applications. Indeed “sighted” rule-following—that is, actions that result from explicit application of a rule—presupposes the mastery of a technique which displays the correct continuation in its actual applications. What is correct is shown in what we do. The applications create the space for abstracting the rule. Our actions are blind in a second sense as well. Though shared reactions are required for language learning and for sustaining normative practice, we, once we have mastered language, are blind to the community in that we act and judge without checking with others. With respect to bedrock practices, any individual who has mastered language can speak with authority and representatively for the rest of the community.76 Finally, we act blindly in the sense that grammar is not a set of conventions decided upon by the community or any subset of it. It can only be inherited through a process of socialization. This is what Wittgenstein means when he says that “the language-game … is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there—like our life” (OC §559). 219

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Notes 1 McDowell, “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” 341; and Mind and World. Also see RFM IV.8. 2 McDowell, “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” 341. 3 See RFM VII.40. 4 I. Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. 5 The structure of rule-obeying behavior is thus like that of the naming game discussed in Chapter 3. Naming is a metagame in which a piece or marker within an ongoing game is given a name. 6 See Brandom, Making It Explicit, where he provides an excellent and nuanced defense of an inferentialist semantics. 7 I am taking this distinction among three kinds of regularity from the work of Sellars, “Some Reflections on Language Games.” There are similarities here with Dretske’s conception of a structuring cause. See Dretske, Explaining Behavior. He distinguishes between the triggering cause and the structural cause of an event’s occurring: “The first type of cause, the triggering cause, causes the process to occur now. The second type of cause, the structuring cause, is responsible for its being this process, one having M as its product that occurs now” (p. 42). His structural cause is close to Sellars’ notion of pattern-governed behavior. 8 McDowell, “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” 326. 9 The distinction between pattern-governed and rule-obeying behavior is allied to that drawn in the cognitive sciences between following rules explicitly and implicitly. The reason that I prefer to follow Sellars’ way of drawing the distinction is that it does not commit one to the view that every structured practice can be described as a series of moves governed by a set of rules. It is an attempt to avoid the ubiquity of descriptions and explanations of behavior in terms of rules and representations. I think that it is doubtful, if not impossible, for all behavior to be so described or explained. Sellars, however, would be much more comfortable with the current computationalist approach to the mind. Indeed his preferred way to describe learning language or concepts is as habits which “can be compared to the setting up that part of the wiring of a calculating machine which takes over once the ‘problem’ has been ‘punched in’” (Sellars, “Is There a Synthetic A Priori?,” 313). What I call the “calibration” of the novice through training into bedrock judgments (fourth section, above) is similar to what Sellars has in mind in this passage. Yet even though there are many similarities in the arguments and views of Sellars and Wittgenstein on language, there is an important difference in their respective views of mind and so with respect to the role to be played by scientific psychology. Sellars’ view is that much that philosophers had thought should be explained by abstract objects will in fact be the subject matter of psychology, most significantly, the adoption of a conceptual framework will be explained by learning theory, not by appeal to abstract objects. See “Is There a Synthetic A Priori?” In a sense, as I am interpreting Wittgenstein, he would agree with this. But there is an important divide between the two. Wittgenstein is deeply skeptical about the possibility of scientific psychology, while Sellars thinks that is precisely where certain traditional philosophical questions are to be answered. Also see Sellars, “Language, Rules and Behavior.” 10 See Frisch, The Dancing Bees, ch. 11, “The Language of the Bees.” 11 Sellars argues that not all learning can be learning to obey rules nor can all rulefollowing be a matter of obeying rules. In “Is There a Synthetic A Priori?,” he argues that it is “a radical mistake” to think that semantical rules are the means whereby “basic factual terms acquire extra-linguistic meaning” (p. 312). Also see

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“Language, Rules and Behavior,” esp. pp. 302–5. In “Some Reflections on Language Games,” he argues that not all learning to play games can be learning to obey rules since “learning to play a game at the rule obeying level does presuppose that the patterns and activities involved belong to the organism’s repertoire of available discriminations and manipulations” (p. 349). David Pears makes this point in his excellent treatment of the Philosophical Investigations, The False Prison, vol. 2. Certainly Baker and Hacker, Wittgenstein, support this, but also see Colin McGinn, Wittgenstein on Meaning; Tait, “Wittgenstein and the ‘Sceptical Paradoxes’”; and Budd, “Wittgenstein on Meaning, Interpretation, and Rules.” Bloor, Wittgenstein, 25. For a more recent statement of meaning finitism, see David Bloor, Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions, ch. 2, “Meaning Finitism,” pp. 19–20: “According to meaning finitism, we create meaning as we move from case to case. We could take our concepts or rules anywhere, in any direction, and count anything as a new member of an old class, or of the same kind of some existing finite set of past cases. We are not prevented by ‘logic’ or by ‘meanings’ from doing this, if by these words we have in mind something other than the down-toearth contingencies surrounding each particular act of concept application.” Also see Wright, “Meaning Finitism.” Bloor, Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions, 25–6. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 19. Even a concept giving us wide latitude with respect to use does not enable us to go in any direction. Consider the following passage from the Investigations: “An indefinite sense—that would really not be a sense at all [Wittgenstein’s interlocutor says].—this is like: An indefinite boundary is not really a boundary at all. Here one thinks perhaps: if I say ‘I have locked the man up fast in the room—there is only one door left open’—then I simply haven’t locked him in at all; his being locked in is a sham. One would be inclined to say here: ‘You haven’t done anything at all’. An enclosure with a hole in it is as good as none.—But is that true?” (PI §99) Wittgenstein’s final question clearly raises questions about that tempting judgment. A related kind of circularity is addressed by way of the self-referentiality of cultural institutions. The most frequently given example of the self-referentiality of normative practices is the institution of money. Pieces of paper and metal disks have the status of money only when the institution of money exists. The existence of such an institution depends upon the beliefs of those participating. People must believe that the pieces of paper and metal disks can be used in exchange for goods and services. Nothing exists as money outside of the institution that accords certain objects that special status. This is of a piece with Wittgenstein’s repeated argument that no object, property or event has an inherent status as a norm or is inherently representational. The status of norm, standard or representation must be accorded some object or property within an institution or custom, as Wittgenstein prefers to say. There is no way to explain money except by appeal to money. See Searle, Construction of Social Reality, esp. ch. 2; and Bloor, Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions, esp. ch. 3. See Sellars, “Some Reflections on Language Games,” 327–9. Sellars, Construction of Social Reality, 328. Ibid., 328. Ibid., 328. Sellars, it will be recalled, uses a concept of language that is narrower than Wittgenstein’s notion of a language-game. See the earlier discussion of Sellars in Chapter 3.

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25 Brandom in Making It Explicit develops and extends this Sellarsian inferentialist conception of language in detail. Brandom explicates the notion of a material inference in terms of deontic scorekeeping, construing the inferential structure in terms of moves that are required or permitted, in virtue of the position one stands in. 26 Carroll, “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.” 27 It is precisely this feature of Sellars’ work that Richard Rorty, though greatly indebted to Sellars’ criticisms of empiricism, repudiates in favor of Quine’s thesis that any form of analyticity, conceptual truth, necessary truth, and the like are deeply suspect. See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, ch. 4, “Privileged Representations.” But we have already seen reasons to find Quine’s position too restrictive, and inadequate. In treating everything as an empirical hypothesis, Quine leaves no room for the logical connective tissue that must exist among hypotheses, nor can he provide an adequate understanding of the normativity of language. 28 Wittgenstein does say that there are propositions that “can understandably be called a synthetic a priori proposition” (RFM IV.39), most notably certain mathematical propositions: “The distribution of primes would be an ideal example of what could be called synthetic a priori, for one can say that it is at any rate not discoverable by an analysis of the concept of a prime number” (RFM IV.43). A fuller discussion of Wittgenstein’s notion of grammar and the autonomy of grammar will be developed in Chapter 7. 29 Sellars, “Language, Rules and Behavior,” 141. In many ways, Sellars’ view is close to the position of a two-factor conceptual role semantics for mental representations. See Block, “Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology.” Block distinguishes conceptual content from the reference of a representation, identifying the former with the place of the representation in the network as a whole and the latter with the causal relation the representation has with a property in the world. However, the similarity ends here. Block and others who look to the causal relation as itself a kind of reference relation make a similar mistake on Sellars’ view. The semantics of a language depends upon our causal embeddedness in the world, but the causal connections are not themselves semantic connections. 30 Sellars, “Language, Rules and Behavior,” 141–2. 31 Ibid.,154–5. 32 I say that “apparently” an explanatory regress is initiated. Certainly a regress of sorts is initiated: a metalanguage with its own rules is necessary for talking about the (unselfconscious) use of the rules of the object language. The rules of the metalanguage could in turn be the object of scrutiny by way of a meta-metalanguage. This iteration, so long as it is not intended to explain how rules explain, is not an explanatory regress. It is just a formal iteration. 33 See, for example, William Lycan’s classic paper on this issue, “Non-Inductive Evidence.” 34 Colin McGinn objects to the manifestation requirement by way of what he calls a “subtraction argument.” This argument turns on Wittgenstein’s concession (if it is that) that it is possible to understand a rule provided at least one rule is applied one time. McGinn uses this as the wedge for a slippery slope argument in which the manifestation requirement reduces to the absurd condition that one must have applied one rule more than once in order to be an understander and all other rules could be understood though never applied. See Colin McGinn, Wittgenstein on Meaning, 131ff. For a full treatment of this argument and the way in which it goes wrong, see my “Rules, Community, and the Individual.” 35 We see here in this contrast the distinction that Baker and Hacker have been at pains to draw. They are certainly right in drawing the contrast between externalist

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accounts of rule-following and internalist accounts. My disagreement with them is over the explanation that they provide for this phenomenon in terms of the “autonomy of grammar.” The argument of this section deepens and extends the discussion of Robinson Crusoe in my article “Rules, Community and the Individual,” 172–7. Consider RFM VI.41 where Wittgenstein says “Certainly I can give myself a rule and then follow it. But is it not a rule only for this reason, that it is analogous to what is called ‘rule’ in human dealings?” Baker and Hacker, Scepticism, Rules and Language, 39; my italics. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 39. See, for example, PI §199; RFM I.158, VI.41, VII.25. It is in fact rather difficult to find many passages in which “agreement” or “regularity” are used explicitly to refer to a regularity over time rather than an agreement among people. See, for example, PI §241; RFM I.22, 35, 66, 116, 153, 163; III.67, 60; IV.2, 31; VI.21, 30, 49; OC 156. RFM VI.41. Baker and Hacker, Scepticism, Rules and Language, 39. This objection against nominal membership solving the problem is related to Hume’s objection to the use of the argument from design to “establish” the nature of God as unitary, infinite, etc. Hume’s argument is that inferences from the orderliness of the universe to the metaphysical properties attributed to God are the work solely of the imagination and the minimal constraint of preserving logical compatibility between what is observed and the story told. See Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part IV. These include the simple grocer of PI §1, the colored squares of PI §48, the standard meter of PI §50, the pupil learning the natural number sequence of PI §143, the private diary of PI §258, and the beetle-in-the-box game PI §293. This way of stating the issue is David Pears’ preferred characterization. See his False Prison, vol. 2, ch. 15, at the end of which Pears summarizes the conclusion of his argument as follows (p. 422): “A practice can be established only when there is an acknowledged connection between a sequence of attempts and a sequence of independently checkable achievements. No skill can be acquired and maintained without a viable criterion of success independent of the fact that the attempt has been made—if there were no such criterion, what would have been attempted?” In the context in which Wittgenstein says that “the phenomenon of language is based on agreement in action,” “agreement” means “agreement among practitioners.” Immediately following his claim that language is based on agreement in action, Wittgenstein says that: “Here it is of the greatest importance that all or the enormous majority of us agree in certain things.” In the passages from RFM that I am discussing here (Part VI §§39–49), Wittgenstein refers to “humans,” what is “human,” or “mankind” 12 times: VI.39 (2), 41, 43 (2), 45, 47, 48, 49 (4). There is no question that he is concerned with human beings in general following rules. He takes it that there is a ground common to all human beings. It is important to note that Wittgenstein appeals to human beings in general, not to particular societies. Indeed it is not until the latter part of On Certainty that he raises the issue of cultural relativism at all. And even there he raises it in connection with beliefs that conflict with science. We shall discuss this matter in the fourth section of Chapter 7 (“Normativity and ‘Psychologized’ Necessity”). This key theme in On Certainty will be discussed more fully in the fifth section of Chapter 7 (“Learning, Trust and Certainty”).

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51 PI §199; and RFM VI.21. 52 See RFM VI.42: “If one of a pair of chimpanzees once scratched the figure – –in the earth and thereupon the other the series | – – | | – – | etc., the first would not have given a rule nor would the other be following it, whatever else went on at the same time in the mind of the two of them. “If however there were observed, e.g., the phenomenon of a kind of instruction, of shewing how and of imitation, of lucky and misfiring attempts, of reward and punishment and the like; if at length the one who had been so trained put figures which he had never seen before one after another in sequence as in the first example, then we should probably say that the one chimpanzee was writing rules down, and the other was following them.” 53 Blackburn, “The Individual Strikes Back.” 54 Wright, “Anti-Realism and Objectivity,” 220. 55 Also see RFM VI.23 and RFM VII.40. 56 Brandom defends a version of this position that he calls “normative phenomenalism.” To be a rational agent and so guided by norms is to be taken by others to be such an agent. See Brandom, Making It Explicit, 46–58. 57 For my earlier discussion of this debate between Wittgenstein and Davidson, see “Wittgenstein and Davidson on the Sociality of Language.” 58 Davidson, “Social Aspect of Language,” 8. 59 Ibid., 8. 60 For a fuller discussion of Brandom’s account of normativity and its relation to intentionality, see my “Social Basis of Normativity.” 61 Advocates of some version of the I–we relation include Crispin Wright, Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics; Bloor, Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions; and Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. I am following R. Brandom’s lead in using the expressions “I–we relationship” and “I–thou relationship” to express these two forms of the social in language. See his Making It Explicit, chs 1.V and 8.VI. 62 Two distinct versions of this I–thou sociality have recently been developed. One is developed by Robert Brandom in Making It Explicit. Brandom focuses on the complementary roles of attribution and commitment; and the other is Davidson’s triangulation argument developed in “Second Person” and “Social Aspect of Language.” I shall argue that Davidson’s position involves a confusion of these two forms of sociality. 63 Davidson would repudiate the expression “anthropocentrism” since he holds that starting with what we hold to be true is both inevitable and unobjectionable. See his “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” In an important sense, Wittgenstein would agree with this. 64 See Davidson, “Second Person,” 262–5; and “Social Aspect of Language,” 8. 65 Ibid., 8. 66 Ibid., 8. 67 See Davidson, “Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” where he says that “[i]f we want to illuminate the nature of meaning and belief, therefore, we need to start with something that assumes neither” (p. 147). 68 See Brandom’s discussion of the I–thou relationship in Making It Explicit, 71, 598–601. 69 Ibid., 627. 70 Ibid., 626–731. 71 “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Language.” 72 “Second Person,” Davidson 263. 73 Pears, Paradox and Platitude, also emphasizes the importance of Wittgenstein’s appeal to techniques of language use in accounting for that linguistic regularity

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that is indispensable to any language-game. He also appeals to the language of calibration, especially when characterizing our sensory systems: “our sensory apparatus has to deliver reliable information about the world in which we live, and so, to that extent, it is like a battery of physical measuring instruments that need to be tested on our environment and calibrated” (p. 52). 74 Unless, as noted before, a child lives in a radically impoverished environment. Such a contingency does not produce a “natural” child, only a cognitively and linguistically crippled one. 75 This is the point of Wittgenstein’s beetle-in-the-box argument (PI §293). Also see PI §80 (the disappearing chair), 142 (shrinking lump of cheese) and 270 (“mere ornament”). 76 Stanley Cavell emphasizes this important point in his Claim of Reason.

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Two Forms of holism 227 Stage-setting: conventions without decisions 234 Background technique: necessity without metaphysics Normativity and “psychologized” necessity 247 Learning, trust and certainty 254

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The background rigidity required for rule-following implicates necessity and its place within normative practices. Necessity is the other side of normativity. While the “ought” of normativity requires that there is no causal necessity to what the practitioners do in fact, “the hardness of the logical must” points to what must be done and how matters must stand for any who participate in the game. Norms have practical as well as legitimating roles. The practical dimension concerns the character of the obligation created by the norm for the practitioner, the hardness of the logical must. For Wittgenstein, the obligations of bedrock practices are not optional for the agent. So, the way of following a rule that is not a matter of objectified meanings or interpretation is going on in the way that one must as a participant in the game. The problem of normative similarity is resolved within this alternative picture, but it brings with it the need for a re-examination of logical and conceptual necessity. A simple appeal to the autonomy of grammar or the logical principle of non-contradiction is no more satisfactory in responding to this philosophical issue than an appeal to the brute fact of conformity in behavior was. Wittgenstein works with a substantive distinction between grammatical propositions and empirical propositions, a distinction that is akin to the classical distinction between necessary and empirical truths (as well as its linguistic counterpart, the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions). Where the tradition explained this distinction in metaphysical terms or in those of objectified meanings or stipulated conventions, Wittgenstein draws it in terms of the distinction between what plays a normative role within a practice and what moves are within that practice. This results (like conventionalism) in a blurring of the distinction between the necessity of 226

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mathematics and logic, on the one hand, and the “conceptual necessities” of empirical language-games, on the other. A fuller examination of the background against which moves are made in the language-game will provide insight into the character of necessity.

Two Forms of holism What the radically isolated individual cannot provide for himself is the background against which ostensive definitions can be given, reference fixed, judgments made, rules followed, or engagement in pattern-governed action made to occur. Wittgenstein’s discussion of the background can be broken into three distinct though related forms, all of which reflect what I shall call his “heterogeneous holism.” The first of these concerns the stage-setting or surroundings required for linguistic or intentional actions: a great deal of stage-setting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense. (PI §257) A coronation is the picture of pomp and dignity. Cut one minute of this proceeding out of its surroundings: the crown is being placed on the head of the king in his coronation robes.—But in different surroundings gold is the cheapest of metals, its gleam is thought vulgar. There the fabric of the robe is cheap to produce. A crown is a parody of a respectable hat. And so on. (PI §584) The second is the background of techniques of application for moves within a practice: The proof, like the application, lies in the background of the proposition. And it hangs together with the application … the proof stands behind the rule as a picture that justifies the rule. (RFM VI.2–3) The proposition [“12 inches = 1 foot”] is grounded in a technique. And, if you like, also in the physical and psychological facts that make the technique possible. (RFM VII.1) Finally, there are certainties within our practices that are held fast by what we say and do. They are certain in virtue of the way in which they are implicit in our practices: 227

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What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it. (OC §144) I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility. (OC §153) These three forms of the background are stage-setting, mastery of techniques, and the background certainty of our normative actions and practices. The discussion of each of these involves philosophically loaded expressions— concepts, necessity, certainty. Wittgenstein, it seems to me, seeks to retain a descriptive and explanatory role for each of these expressions, but one freed from traditional philosophical theories of language and mind. He wants concepts without meanings, necessity without metaphysics, and certainty without knowledge. Each form brings out an aspect of the contrast Wittgenstein seeks to make between “blind” action and “sighted” action, between acting as a matter of course and acting reflectively. Each form illuminates an aspect of mind. Stage-setting is crucial, not only to public ceremonies and action, but also to his discussion of sensations and intentional states. The role of background techniques in rule-following is important in unpacking Wittgenstein’s cryptic remark that there is an analogy between the foundation of mathematics and the foundation of psychology. The discussion of background certainty highlights features of Wittgenstein’s holism that concern the nature of belief and perception. These three forms of the background are each implicated in the heterogeneous holism that distinguishes Wittgenstein’s brand of holism from that of either the early Quine1 or Davidson.2 Though various holistic theories have emerged—functional role (or conceptual role) semantics, inferentialist semantics, coherentist theories of justification or knowledge, functionalist theories of belief and the other propositional attitudes—each involves the picture of a system consisting of nodes connected to each other by way of some set of rules or laws. Sentences are the nodes of linguistic systems. Hypotheses are the nodes of epistemic systems. Beliefs and desires are the nodes of psychological systems. But each node can only be individuated in virtue of its role within the system as a whole. Thus, the nodes are not the building blocks of the systems they compose, but are abstracted from the systems of which they are a part. Because of his opposition to atomistic theories of meaning and belief, including his endorsement of the interdependence of belief and meaning, Wittgenstein’s thought has been aligned with that of Quine and Davidson. It is useful to draw on Wittgenstein’s critique of ostensive definition in 228

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identifying important differences between Wittgenstein’s views on these matters and the Quinean perspective. Homogeneous holism originates with Frege’s context principle and arguments extending that basic insight to the full-blown radical holism of Quine’s writings. According to radical holism, the sentence is a node embedded within a logical network of other sentences, each bound more or less tightly to others, such that “the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science,” as Quine puts it in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.”3 Quine thus eliminates meaning altogether from his account of language in favor of an epistemic holism, the nodes of which are empirical hypotheses bound by logical, evidential, and pragmatic connective tissue. We know already that Wittgenstein rejects Quine’s indeterminacy of meaning and inscrutability of reference in favor of shared judgments of the obvious and the domestication of reference. So too he would reject Quine’s radical holism. Our use of language, the system of beliefs of which our use of words is a part, the hardness of the logical must, and the certainty with which we act and believe, cannot be understood in terms of empirical hypotheses and pragmatic considerations. Wittgenstein’s brand of holism draws upon two traditions, only one of which he shares with Quine. The first of these is Frege’s context principle; and the second is the influence of Gestalt psychology as well as that of the progressive educational movement of which Wittgenstein was a part between the two world wars.4 Combining ideas and arguments from these two traditions results in a heterogeneous holism that distinguishes his position from the Quinean approach in four important ways. (1) First, though beliefs and language do form systems according to Wittgenstein, and so bring with them some of the same problems that face any holistic account, the background to particular instances of language use and belief is not just more of the same, as I would like to put it; that is, more beliefs, hypotheses or collateral information from within the network of beliefs. The background, in all three of its forms, cannot be understood simply in terms of more beliefs in the network of beliefs, no matter how tightly bound together. They are not simply nodes within the system. Stage-setting involves both further background belief in something like the Quinean sense and a strong externalist component in the form of the particular physical and social surroundings within which a linguistic action is performed. The background of techniques cannot, on pain of paradox and regress, consist in further beliefs or rules. And background certainty takes us to beliefs of a radically different nature from beliefs qua empirical hypotheses. This first difference warrants calling Wittgensteinian holism “heterogeneous.” (2) The second way in which Wittgensteinian holism differs from Quinean holism is that there is a plurality of holistic systems of beliefs and concepts, some of which are semantically and psychologically independent of others. These are Wittgenstein’s language-games. This claim requires some care since Wittgenstein makes both methodological and explanatory use of the 229

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notion of a language-game. Despite this complication, the point stands. Wittgenstein’s holism is not the radical holism of a single system of empirical hypotheses sustained and modified in response to the causal impingement of the physical world and pragmatic evaluations. It is a form of molecular holism. (3) The third difference concerns the nature of the connective tissue within a system or language-game. Where Quine characterizes the systematic relations among the nodes in logical terms, Wittgenstein construes them as inferentialist moves within games that are better characterized in Sellarsian terms as “material inferences” in contrast to logical inferences. Material inferences are inferential moves not warranted by principles of logic, but substantive moves from which logical principles can be abstracted.5 Wittgenstein’s grammatical propositions and remarks about criteria can be seen as concerning material inferences, the fundamental moves within language-games that are not mediated by logical principles.6 (4) The final difference concerns the place of certainty within systems of belief. Certainty for Quine is a pragmatic evaluation, reflecting our unwillingness to revise some of our beliefs. For Wittgenstein, the distinction between what is certain and what is dubitable runs much deeper than that. In brief, holistic views can be characterized along two dimensions: the number of networks permitted (the single network of radical holism or the plurality of networks of molecular holism) and the complexity permitted with respect to three dimensions: the nodes of a system, the connective tissue, and the epistemic status of the nodes. Heterogeneous holism requires drawing a strong distinction between what belongs to the network of beliefs itself and the background that is required for the functioning of the network. The background features of Wittgenstein’s language-games include causal embeddedness, environmental and social surroundings, techniques of application, and background certainties. To make the case for heterogeneous holism requires that the key arguments against atomism and in favor of holism be re-examined since these arguments seem to support radical holism. Two of the most important contemporary arguments are Quine’s attack on the analytic–synthetic distinction (and its allied notion of necessity) and the widespread attack on epistemological foundationalism and its privileging a given element in experience. This myth of the Given is as closely tied to Sellars’ name as the museum myth of meanings is to Quine’s. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty uses both Quine’s and Sellars’ arguments to good effect in his own persuasive defense of pragmatism.7 Rorty emphasizes what he sees as the complementary strengths and weaknesses of the two positions. Quine is thoroughgoing in his repudiation of analyticity, necessity and all such related notions, but remains tied to foundationalism’s myth of the Given in the way in which he privileges sensory stimulations (the causal surrogate for the sensorily given experience) as the ultimate court of appeals for any claim to knowledge. Sellars, on the other hand, effectively diagnoses and attacks the myth of Given, which is 230

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indispensable to any foundationalist theory of knowledge, but remains wedded to some form of conceptual truth or a priori synthetic propositions. Rorty seeks to combine both attacks, thus eliminating any place for traditional theories of language or knowledge by repudiating Quine’s lingering empiricism and Sellars’ neo-Kantianism. Wittgenstein too can be seen as combining complementary strengths and weaknesses of the Quinean and Sellarsian positions, but he does so in a very different way. Wittgenstein would accept Quine’s critique of analyticity (and conventional truth), but, pace Quine, he retains a place for something akin to conceptual truths, namely, grammatical propositions. Equally, he would accept Sellars’ critique of the Given, but pace Sellars, he insists on a place for the obvious and the certain. Where Rorty and Wittgenstein differ, then, is in the morals each draws from the critique of the tradition. For Rorty there is only a negative moral. The end of the Cartesian problematic, with its distinctive conception of mind and knowledge, is the end of philosophy. For Wittgenstein, on my reading, the critique of the Cartesian tradition as he develops it brings an alternative picture of language and mind to our attention, one that gives rise to its own set of philosophical problems, problems centering around the normativity of our language-games. Let’s turn now to these two argumentative strategies for defending radical homogeneous holism. Quine’s radical holism is closely tied to his rejection of the analytic–synthetic distinction: The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a manmade fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. … it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements, which hold come what may.8 Without analyticity, beliefs of any kind can be nothing but empirical hypotheses standing in logical, evidentiary and associative relationships to each other. Rules, including the laws of logic, are but more empirical beliefs, distinguished only by their strong and systematic interconnections with other beliefs. For that reason, we are loathe to alter or give up any, as that would force dramatic changes in belief throughout the web. There are no meanings or certain knowledge that provide an anchor for our beliefs. Reference is hostage to ontological theories that lie outside the categories of the web we use in our dealings with the world.9 Necessity too is “no higher or more austere … than natural necessity; and in natural necessity, or our attributions of it, I see only Hume’s regularities.”10 The only regularities we find are nomological ones. The “necessity” of logical truths is a function of how deeply embedded these truths are in our 231

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network of beliefs. Their immunity to revision is decided on empirical pragmatic grounds, tied to our interests, natural conservatism, and practical constraints of time and energy: Our system of statements has such a thick cushion of indeterminacy, in relation to experience, that vast domains of law can easily be held immune to revision on principle. We can turn to other quarters of the system when revisions are called for by unexpected experiences. Mathematics and logic, central as they are to our conceptual scheme, tend to be accorded such immunity, in view of our conservative preference for revisions which disturb the system least; and herein, perhaps, lies the “necessity” which the laws of mathematics and logic are felt to enjoy.11 Quine assimilates the necessity of mathematics and logic and the necessity of conceptual or analytic truths, and explains both forms of necessity as deeply entrenched empirical generalizations, protected from revision by the centrality of their position within the web of belief. Wittgenstein accepts this broadly positivist assimilation and, like Quine, sees the necessity of conceptual connections and the necessity of logic and mathematics as philosophically the same. But he rejects the explanation Quine offers. So long as one understands “necessity” in terms of highly prized empirical beliefs, one cannot but go wrong. Rules of entailment and inference cannot themselves be further nodes in the network of beliefs. Their role as the connective links among the sentential nodes is dissolved if they themselves are but further sentential nodes within the total theory. The systematicity of language requires a different account of rules and necessity. As we have seen, Davidson recognizes this in his insistence that logical form is an indispensable constraint on interpretation. There are systematic requirements that any language user must meet as well as substantive empirical constraints. Both Dummett’s and Davidson’s challenges to Wittgenstein are challenges to meet this requirement of systematicity. Dummett’s challenge was couched in terms of the need to privilege the assertoric form while Davidson’s was couched in terms of the indispensability of logical form. The demands of systematicity support the claims for logical necessity as distinct from entrenched belief while allowing, it would seem, for the repudiation of conceptual necessity. A rejection of the picture of language each offers is not, however, tantamount to a denial of the systematic features of language. Wittgenstein does deny that all systematic features are logical, and he does deny that all language-games are systematically related. Nonetheless, there is the hardness of the logical “must” that Wittgenstein seeks to understand. He pursues this through an examination of mathematical necessity and mathematical proof without restricting his insights to mathematics and logic. In this Wittgenstein is like Quine. But, for 232

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Wittgenstein, grammatical necessity is deeper than the explicitly logical necessity of the formal sciences. In this he disagrees with Quine. In addition, he reverses the order of explanation that Davidson assigns logic and logical form. Necessity is the connective tissue of pattern-governed practices—causal necessity for the hard-wired patterns of intricate animal behavior and grammatical necessity for the acquired patterns of normative human practice. It is the grammatical necessity of normative practices that Wittgenstein seeks to understand. It is a necessity without metaphysics. The second line of argument supporting homogeneous holism comes from objections to foundationalist theories that privilege sensory experience as the source and ultimate justification for all claims to knowledge. Sellars’ argument against the myth of the Given identifies one of the key difficulties for the empiricist foundation.12 The core mistake in the appeal to sensory experience as epistemologically privileged, according to Sellars, lies with an ambiguity in the use to which the notion of “sense content” or “sensory experience” is put. A “sense content” is treated both as a particular, the object of our sensing, and as a form of noninferential knowledge. Sellars’ attack on foundationalist theories of knowledge that traffic in the myth of the Given leads him to endorse an epistemological holism according to which even our apparently most secure noninferential judgments, observation judgments, involve other beliefs as justifications. In particular, Sellars argues that our acceptance of observation statements at face value places them in the space of reasons, which, for Sellars, is a matter of playing a role within an inferential system that is governed by principles of rationality. There cannot be a claim to knowledge or belief that is independent of justificatory links to other beliefs. Observation statements are equally subject to this restriction. Observation statements are warranted by the generalization that we are for the most part reliable reporters on what we are in a good position to see. Thus, Sellars would see in Quine’s attempt to replace sensory experience with sensory stimulations, using the notion of stimulus meaning as the vehicle for connecting the causally induced stimulations with the inferential network of belief, another instance of trafficking in the myth of the Given. Quine exploits an ambiguity in his talk of “stimulus meaning,” construing it in both a causal way and an inferential way. But that is precisely the move that Sellars shows to be fallacious. Inferential structures are norm-governed structures; moves within such structures are not instances of causal generalizations. For Sellars, our perceptual relation to the world is causal, but a causally induced perceptual state can trigger an entry move into the inferentially articulated space of reasons. But Sellars, as we have already seen, does hold that norm-governed structures require a place for rules and something like conceptual truths that express necessary connections of two kinds, logical inferences and material inferences. Material inferences support a kind of a priori synthetic judgment. 233

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With Sellars’ rejection of foundations for our knowledge comes the rejection of a place for certainty in our claims to knowledge. Yet Wittgenstein rejects the repudiation of certainty without thereby endorsing epistemological foundationalism or the myth of the Given. As the foundationalists understood, knowledge and indeed any form of believing requires that some things be held with certainty. This certainty is not epistemic for Wittgenstein, it is not a form of knowing, but a way of living, shown in what we do and say. This is a second way in which Wittgenstein’s holism is heterogeneous. This is the epistemic heterogeneity of foundational or framework certainties—substantive certainty without justification. The obvious includes that which we accept with right but without justification (cf. PI §289) and background certainties we swallow whole without thereby acting irrationally or gullibly (cf. OC §§143, 235). Both of these ideas conflict with the usual understanding of epistemological holism and so call for close examination. First, we need to address the question, How does Wittgenstein conceive of necessity and the systematicity of language?

Stage-setting: conventions without decisions Here as elsewhere, failure to distinguish between the domains of master and novice can result in our mistakenly reading the child into the adult or the adult into the child. The result is to see us human beings as either all in the position of the child, vulnerable and open to constant checking, or all in the position of the adult, with the full cognitive apparatus of knowledge, justification and hypothesis-testing equally available to the child and adult. Both ways of understanding our situation obliterate the crucial role played by the background, and lead either to a strongly behaviorist or a strongly intellectualist picture of language and life, both of which Wittgenstein rejects. We are neither isolated animals responding to environmental stimuli with only external reinforcements of reward and punishment shaping our behavior, nor are we isolated geniuses constructing theories about the world and drawing out the logical implications. As perpetual novices, we could never move into the arena of normative practice. As always masters, we must all be Athenas springing fully formed from the head of Zeus. We cannot but make moves in a game. The philosophical theories fail to accommodate a crucial feature of our form of life, namely, that we become participants in concrete particular language-games through a process of learning.13 Stage-setting, the first dimension of the background, is associated with two important ideas in Wittgenstein’s later thought: that actions must be seen in the context of their surroundings and that there is an important difference between bedrock practices and the more sophisticated games of knowledge, justification and interpretation. Stage-setting, like the other dimensions of the background, mastery of technique and certainty, can only be properly understood from within the master–novice structure. Wittgenstein repeatedly 234

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appeals to the public surroundings or circumstances in which actions and judgments occur. Just as no object can be a means of representation unless embedded in an ongoing practice, so no behavior can be an action except in appropriate surroundings. These surroundings set the stage within which actions and judgments are what they are. Consider again Wittgenstein’s use of a coronation: A coronation is the picture of pomp and dignity. Cut one minute of this proceeding out of its surroundings: the crown is being placed on the head of the king in coronation robes.—But in different surroundings gold is the cheapest of metals, its gleam is thought vulgar. There the fabric of the robe is cheap to produce. A crown is a parody of a respectable hat. And so on. (PI §584) It is obvious that an event like a coronation requires a particular public, social and temporal setting. As with crowning, so with ostensive definition: stage-setting does virtually all of the work in ensuring success. All actions of the master of a practice implicate a spatial, social and temporal setting, though they need not be such obviously institutional events as a coronation. Naming per se does not explain how words are used meaningfully any more than crowning explains the differential treatment of certain individuals. These prominent actions owe their significance—their identity even—to the background of established practices. They are reflective second-order acts, using words to explain words and ritualized action, to mark special treatment. The importance of such second-order acts is that they open the possibility of self-conscious reflection upon, and so modification of, the practices in which they occur. When Wittgenstein talks of surroundings, he does not clearly distinguish between background linguistic-doxastic competence and background as public surroundings. What then is the connection between these two ways of construing the stage? The connection has to be understood in terms of Wittgenstein’s rejection of the idea that belief is an internal mental state or process. Believing itself is a matter of acting, including saying appropriate things, in appropriate circumstances. Doxastic competence is a skill. Wittgenstein’s treatment of intentionality bears crucially on how we are to understand the relation between cognitive competence and public surroundings. The picture of the web of belief obscures the relation to stage-setting. This picture connects belief to the public world only at the periphery where sensory experience impinges upon the web, causally producing the appearance of new sentential nodes within the web. This picture of a massive doxastic superstructure is common both to representationalist and inferentialist theories of language in their over-intellectualized forms. The web of belief is an abstract structure that is related to an individual believer either by way of a 235

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counterpart set of dispositions to behave linguistically (Quine’s way) or by way of a counterpart set of mental representations and mental processes housed inside the subject (the way of the representationalist theory of mind) or by way of an articulated inferential structure (Brandom’s way). The web of belief, how it is individuated and how it is realized, is set over and against the public world of our utterances and actions. That is the very picture Wittgenstein rejects, and on two fronts. One front has already been discussed. Wittgenstein’s language-games are a plurality. There need not be systematic connections among all the languagegames we engage in, even though there will be overlapping similarities among games (cf. PI §67). Our more esoteric domains of inquiry are clear examples of this. Adding “superstrings” to our talk of the ultimate material of the universe does not affect the way physicists (much less anyone else) play soccer or buy groceries. As Wittgenstein says early in the Investigations, If you want to say that this shews [the builders game] to be incomplete [because it only contains orders], ask yourself whether our language is complete;—whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (PI §18) This passage not only supports the idea that language is best not thought of as a totality. It also points to the relative independence that certain languagegames have from much that we do in the ordinary course of events. The second front concerns the heterogeneity of Wittgenstein’s molecular holism. For Wittgenstein, believing is first and foremost a way of acting in the world. That way of acting includes for us linguistic actions that are part and parcel of the moves we make within the language-game. Language entry and exit moves implicate our causal embedding in the world. Material inferences are normative pattern-governed moves within a game. They are norms, not in being represented as rules for moves, but in being moves we make as a matter of course in playing the game, moves that are made because of their place in the pattern. Acquiring further beliefs is acquiring the ability to make further moves in familiar games or new ones. Linguistic moves are actions performed in the world. The web of belief is an abstraction from our practices, not the basis of our practice. The same holds for reference. And just as reference cannot ground our semantic and cognitive relation to the world, so the web of belief is not a superstructure that mirrors reality more or less accurately.14 On Wittgenstein’s view, using language or having beliefs is not a matter of mirroring the world, but of making normatively constrained moves in public circumstances. This takes us to the second idea associated with the notion of stagesetting, one that must be understood in terms of the master–novice structure. 236

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Indeed it is with respect to ostensive learning that Wittgenstein actually uses the phrase “stage-setting.”15 The adult or teacher must set the stage for the initiate learner. This involves, as noted earlier, a cognitive division of labor. The novice makes proto-judgments while the adult provides the background competence, that is, the ability to make the inferential moves that constitute the child’s expression as both holophrastic (having an implicit syntactic structure) and meaningful (being a move, e.g., a request or report, within a languagegame). The child’s action is what it is only against the background of its historical and public setting: its status is thus ensured not, by his own competence, but by that of the adult. This dependency upon the adult community has a further consequence. For many performances of a novice, there is simply no fact of the matter as to whether she understands correctly or not, whether she has got the point of the ostensive training or not. This indeterminacy for the novice is a function of the fact that the background has not been secured for her. Such indeterminacy as a rule does not hold for the master. Initiate learning is not instruction but enculturation into bedrock practices, practices that put in place the yardsticks for “measuring” normative similarities that enable moves within the game. Bedrock practices, which are not created by naming or applying rules, set the stage for more sophisticated forms of teaching such as naming. The initiate learning situation is not an epistemic context but one of calibration and norm-setting. Bedrock judgments, the result of calibration, do not stand in need of justification in the way that a theory or hypothesis does. Nor does justification of ostensive definitions go beyond an appeal to knowing the language, which is just a way of asserting that one is competent to pick out exemplars for the uninitiated. The question of justification arises neither for the master of the practice nor the novice. The pupil learning the natural number sequence does not need to justify his claim that “the sky is blue” or that “5” follows “4”; he only needs to get it right. Getting it right does not involve having a justification, that is, an independent proof of correctness or evidence for acceptability of the judgment. On analogy again with the meter stick, measuring the table for meter length does not require justifying or validating the scoring of the stick. It is enough for its use that it is a meter stick. The correctness of the meter stick lies with its relation to the standard meter stick in Paris. Analogously, the master’s judgment of how to carry on is the standard for correctness for the pupil, but it is not the justification. Nor need the master have any justification independently of her own judgment in the situation. The master, no more than the novice, has a proof for why “5” follows “4,” or why a cloud-free sky is blue. Learning bedrock practices is coming to share a sense of the obvious with the practitioners of the practice without which, as we have seen in two cases thus far, the problem of normative similarity cannot be answered. Initiate learning is acquiring the norms that enable one to make moves in the logical space of reasons where justification is at issue. 237

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Though the issue of knowledge and justification does not arise for the novice, the question of legitimation is foremost. There is a concern with checking what the novice does against the training given by the master. This is what the majoritarian community view misidentified as the meanings of the expressions that are acquired. The actions and judgments of the novice are subject to correction. But this correction is not a matter of justifying the correct judgments or actions in the situation. It is to bring the novice into conformity with what the masters do. Such blind obedience is distinctive of the relation between the novice and master. The novice is not able to see the meaning or significance of the words and actions of the master. What Wittgenstein is arguing is that the child’s acceptance of the authority of the adult is both what happens in fact and what is required to sustain a form of life, and thus provide the context within which knowledge proper can be pursued. Questions of knowledge and justification can only arise against the background of that which is fully taken for granted. Issues of legitimation do not pertain to the master of a practice who has an authority just in virtue of being linguistically competent. There is no question of licensing the master or checking up on her. The relation among peers is different from the master–novice structure. Failure of understanding in the master does not indicate the need for correction (or if it does, the master herself is able to make the correction), but some kind of physical or mental disorder. For understanding is shown in continuing correctly as a matter of course. In acting with right, the master is not under the scrutiny of others though she does judge in accord with them. In being acculturated into this community, this form of life, the individual is enabled to speak for the community without justification for what she does and without being checked by others in the community. The use of enculturation is the production of autonomous practitioners. The important point being made now is that applying an epistemological framework to the learning situation, and so to Wittgenstein’s resolution of the rule-following considerations, distorts what is at the heart of his position. That is an understanding of the normativity of human life. For Wittgenstein, this is the deepest philosophical problem, not knowledge of the world or even of others. These epistemological matters cannot be understood aright until the problem of normativity is resolved.16 Bedrock “rules” of normative similarity just are the observational judgments of the obvious. These are Sellars’ language-entry rules. But where Sellars sees them as involving moves from positions that are not in language to those within it, Wittgenstein’s wider conception of the language-game views them as part of language in the way that any standard is part of a practice. They constitute norms within an ongoing practice. Such norms can be understood to be conventions in that they require social agreement and are not reducible to causal description, but they are not stipulations. They are not a matter of decision or of choice.17 This voluntarist interpretation is 238

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just the view Wittgenstein thinks that we are tempted to pursue once we appreciate the rule-following difficulties. But, like Platonism and mentalism, it is a mistake, even if an understandable one: “It would almost be more correct to say, not that an intuition was needed at every stage, but that a new decision was needed at every stage” (PI §186). We no more decide what to do with each application of addition than we consult the Platonic form of addition. We cannot but accept the bedrock norms of our language-games. In this way, they are akin to causal requirements. That they constitute standards for judging what is the same is what imposes restrictions, through the cognitive division of labor, on what the initiate learner in the language-game ought to do and say. The master–novice structure of the learning situation reveals the relation between our causal embeddedness in the world and the normative constraints of our linguistic practices. In focusing on the domain of the novice, we can see that the novice is subject to a range of causally based constraints on behavior and sensory sensitivity. These constraints fall far short of fixing a definitive range of behaviors or perceptual discriminations. Yet it is a mistake, as we have seen, to take up this slack between nomologically based constraints and the range of possible behaviors with an appeal to rules of either a mental or linguistic nature. Nor can the novice bootstrap herself up through inductive extrapolation. Wittgenstein’s critique of ostensive definition displays the need for normatively structured stage-setting. And his deeper paradox of interpretation argument and Davidson’s triangulation argument show that the individual cannot establish normative similarity among properties. Differential response to environmental properties cannot be the alternative: as critics of behaviorism long ago showed, “response” and “stimulus” cannot be individuated without the use of the intentional idiom.18 The intentional idiom is a normative one. One must look to the domain of the master, to the linguistically competent, to provide the normative constraints on behavior. The competence of the adult and the triangulation that occurs (as a matter of fact) between adult and child fixes the stimulus for the child.19 It is important to remember that in fixing which property is “the” stimulus, as Davidson put it, triangulation involves both similarity patterns between the adult’s response and the child’s response and taking the adult’s response to fix the property qua exemplar to which they both respond. An acquired conformity in behavior is required for language use, a conformity explained by our training as initiate learners. The conventionalism of our bedrock practices of classification is thus to be explained, not in terms of decisions or nomological constraints on our behavioral repertoire, but in terms of our ostensive training into normative practices. Wittgensteinian practices are conventional in being normative.20 But we could no more exist without language-games than we could without food. The very distinction between nature and culture is irretrievably blurred in the case of human beings. We are naturally cultural beings. 239

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Children deprived of any human culture do not become natural human beings, they remain stunted—the natural human being is the socialized human being. This is Wittgenstein’s point in saying that speaking is as much a part of our natural history as walking and eating (PI §25). Yet as I emphasized in the discussion of the community view of rulefollowing, collective vocalizations in a common environment do not constitute observation judgments any more than the collective howling of wolves constitutes a dialogue. What the adult brings to the learning situation is not just a prior ostensive training, a training tied to external sanctions of punishment and reward. The adult connects the paradigmatic judgments of the obvious with a complex inferential structure that is tied to the capacity for self-correction. This marks two shifts, one from external sanctions to internal ones and the second from the primitive language-games of early childhood to the inferentially complex ones of full mastery. Both shifts involve the introduction of intralinguistic moves, not just the simple entry and exit moves of the novice. This requires an understanding of the shift from the necessity of causes to the necessity of “rules,” that is, to the hardness of the logical “must.”

Background technique: necessity without metaphysics Stage-setting arguments are used by Wittgenstein both to emphasize the public contextual embedding of normatively structured actions and to focus on the background competence involved in ostensive definition. Stage-setting thus has a double use. Traditionally these two dimensions of stage-setting have been construed as a divide between mind and world, a contemporary form being the web of belief, with emphasis on its internal systematicity and impingement at the periphery. This threatens, as McDowell has argued,21 to leave the web unconnected to the world in the right sort of way. For McDowell, the web of belief has only external causal relations to the world, which can induce belief without incurring responsibility for belief. The problem, according to McDowell, is that this leaves us with a conception of experience that does not allow the world to exert a rational constraint on our beliefs since mere causal connectedness can never be rational grounding. But McDowell, it seems to me, mislocates the problem. The deep source of the problem is not how the web of belief connects to the world, but the very picture of the web of belief. As we saw in the previous section, Wittgenstein seeks to leave this picture behind, replacing it with a conception of belief as contextualized and rooted in action. Believing is thus already displayed in the public moves the participant makes within language-games. Though Wittgenstein does not advocate logical behaviorism, he does hold that believing eventually involves its expression in doing appropriate things in appropriate surroundings. Believing is already being situated in public surroundings. Mind can’t be divided from the world, because it is already 240

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part of the world expressed through our participation in language-games. The normative dimension, as we have seen, requires a social calibration of the individual that enables him to be a “measure” of relevant similarities in the world. Believing what we ought to believe requires that we first grasp the obvious. Participating in such bedrock practices is neither volitional nor optional. We cannot but come to judge with the community, unless we are (unnaturally) isolated from human society, in which case we cannot judge at all. Where stage-setting emphasizes the role of surroundings, background necessity focuses on the participants and their intralinguistic mastery of language-games. Here the focus is not the natural reactions of the novice to ostensive teaching, but her openness to training that is essential to mastering inferential moves within a game. Wittgenstein searches for a better understanding of the language-game as a normative practice that is nonetheless subject to the kind of necessity that characterizes “the hardness of the logical must.” Two strategies are available for characterizing this aspect of the background, a Kantian approach and a Rylean approach. A Kantian approach views our language-games as presupposing transcendental conditions for their possibility. Kantian interpretations of Wittgenstein treat Wittgensteinian grammar as the linguistic counterpart to Kant’s categories of the Understanding.22 The background becomes the transcendental conditions for judgment. A Rylean approach, on the other hand, seeks to show that “knowing that” always presupposes “knowing how.”23 Just as Ryle made extensive use of infinite regress arguments to buttress his central claim that propositional knowledge must be grounded in knowing how to apply rules, representations or knowledge claims, so Wittgenstein can be seen to be arguing in much the same way. Though his position has affinities with both of these strategies, it would be a mistake to identify Wittgenstein’s position with either. As we saw in Chapter 5, the paradox of interpretation is not simply another version of the regress argument, forcing one to look either for a necessary stopping point within the chain or for something outside the chain altogether. The paradox argument is a genuine reductio ad absurdum, revealing that the very distinction between correct and incorrect applications collapses, given an interpretationist theory of meaning. The way out of the paradox is neither to find self-interpreting acts nor to look for something that is independent of normativity to ground normativity. Rather the knowhow that grounds our interpretations and is the background of blind obedience is normatively structured. In its clearest form, it is mastery of technique. Our moves within a language-game implicate a shared sense of the obvious, not only with respect to salient objects and properties in the world, but also with respect to obvious moves within the game. What is obvious in these intralinguistic moves is precisely what philosophers have designated necessary 241

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connections. The necessity of these inferential moves, whether logical, mathematical, or conceptual (all grammatical), can only be explained by appeal to the learning situation in which the novice is trained into the techniques of proof, entailment, or material inference. Wittgenstein does not think that the necessity of formal inference (mathematical proof and logical entailment) is of a metaphysically different kind from that of material inference, his criterial connections (made explicit in grammatical propositions). Both involve the mastery of techniques the structure of which is displayed in the initiate learning situation. Terms like “necessary” express our sense of the obvious. There is no metaphysical justification for these techniques though language-games and human psychology are impossible without them. Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics24 provides an excellent window on his understanding of technique and mastery of technique. Part VI concerns the acquisition of concepts, and in particular mathematical concepts.25 How we learn these techniques has profound implications for the special justificatory status of proof and its grounding in our background judgments of what is obviously the same. The “radical explanations” he offers for the justificatory status of proofs appeal to how we are trained in the mastery of mathematical techniques. The effect of such training is to see the hardness of the logical “must” as a “lesson … drawn from the scene” (RFM VI.7; cf. PI §437). In mathematics, especially geometry, proofs and the techniques used in their construction can be made especially clear and so illuminate more generally the character of necessity within our languagegames. Wittgenstein is not committed to the view that moves within any language-game must be subject to such discrete techniques of application as one finds in geometry. Rather techniques and the necessity with which they are associated form a family of related phenomena. But any clarity we can reach with respect to necessity in mathematical proof will illuminate this family of cases as did the natural number series for going on in the same way. Mathematical proofs, Wittgenstein tells us, “give propositions an order. They organize them” (RFM VI.1), and they do so in a special way: “The concept of a formal test presupposes the concept of a transformation-rule, and hence of a technique” (RFM VI.2). A proof is a pattern of propositions, a way of “organizing propositions” in accord with transformation rules. Yet understanding proof in terms of transformation rules merely postpones the account of necessity that we look for. Explaining the necessity of proofs in terms of transformation rules raises its own question. Just how is the necessity of transformation rules to be explained? It would seem that transformation rules require rules of application. But Wittgenstein rejects this step.26 Instead he embeds the transformation rules in a practice of application, which provides the background against which the proof can be constructed. This is what Wittgenstein calls a “technique.” It is a skilled activity, not a further set of rules, and as a skill it is normatively structured. 242

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To make these general remarks more concrete, let us take as an example of a proof and its relation to transformation rules, Euclid’s proof for the infinity of prime numbers.27 This proof justifies the proposition that the prime numbers are infinite. Here it is:28 Let a, b, c, … k be any prime numbers. Take the product abc … k and add unity. Then (abc … k+1) is either a prime number or not a prime number. (1) If it is, we have added another prime number to those given. (2) If it is not, it must be measured by some prime number, say p. Now p cannot be identical with any of the prime numbers a, b, c, … k. For, if it is, it will divide abc … k. Therefore, since it divides (abc … k+1) also, it will measure the difference, or unity: which is impossible. Therefore in any case we have obtained one fresh prime number. And the process can be carried on to any extent. What is crucial is that the proof consists of a set of instructions for finding a new prime number, given any finite set of prime numbers. These rules include certain rules of logic (like modus ponens and assumption introduction) and rules of calculation (add 1 to the product of all the exposed prime numbers).29 To construct this proof we must be able to use the rules of logic and of calculation. These rules themselves involve techniques of inference and calculation. Wittgenstein is painting a picture that is now familiar to us. Computational systems are hierarchically designed such that a set of basic algorithms or effective procedures do particular work in the manipulation of symbols in accord with the directions of a program. The same algorithms can be used in different programs to realize different results. What matters then is the recipe for the order in which the algorithms are to be used and the character of the algorithms themselves. Wittgenstein is working with just this idea in his discussion of mathematical proof. But in place of algorithms, he identifies techniques for manipulating symbols. Using modus ponens or assumption introduction involves techniques for identifying premises, drawing conclusions and constraining options. Adding, multiplying, dividing involve techniques for manipulating numerals to maintain equivalencies. The proof itself is a recipe for using these techniques in an ordered fashion to create the desired result as stated by the mathematical proposition that the number of primes is infinite. The meaning of that mathematical proposition is given by its proof. It is not a metaphysical proof concerning the totality of prime numbers. Rather it expresses the fact that for any finite set of prime numbers, it is always possible to construct another, and this process is 243

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indefinitely repeatable. It is a constructive proof that leaves the future open, as it were, rather than “linked” to a fixed set. Wittgenstein explicates the close relations among mathematical proposition, proof, and transformation rules in terms of conceptual or grammatical connections. A proof is an organized pattern of propositions that provides a “picture” of the proposition that the number of primes is infinite. But the background techniques involved in calculating or drawing inferences are activities, ways of applying the rules in the actual construction of a formal test. The foundational questions concern issues of application and so the production of regularities. For Wittgenstein, issues concerning application can only be explained in terms of the techniques of rule use. The techniques constitute what it is to go on in the same way, and the techniques themselves are not open to fully explicit formulation or interpretation. Nor can they be reduced to causal regularities of a neurological sort (the hard-wiring of a machine code or neurological processes that are the terminus of interpretations). Techniques are shown for what they are in the learning situation, a situation that reveals their normative character. We are not just subject to causal effects. Rather through the self-discipline required to master techniques, the future is open to us. The role of technique opens our lives to the future in virtue of two important features: … only through a technique can we grasp a regularity. The technique is external to the pattern of the proof. One might have a perfectly accurate view of the proof, yet not understand it as a transformation according to such-and-such rules (RFM VI.2). His first point cannot be emphasized too much. To put the point negatively, we cannot recognize a regularity unless we have some way of applying or implementing a rule. In other words, we can recognize regularities in nature, in society, in mathematics only to the extent that we can regularize our own behavior.30 Using a technique is engaging in self-regulating behavior. The regularities (and so similarities) of nature are not forced upon us by some kind of natural resemblance or causal necessity alone; nor are they available to us by way of some principle of identity. This repetitive and self-regulating behavior that marks the mastery of technique is the basis for what counts as going on in the same way. Judgments of sameness are a function of our own repetitive regulated behavior in virtue of which we can grasp other regularities. Selfregulated behavior is constrained behavior, not in virtue of being an instance of a physical law, but in virtue of the subject being trained in techniques. Constraint, repetitive regular behavior, and normative judgment of sameness go together.31 We “measure” the world only to the extent that we are calibrated. We can highlight this point by contrasting the way in which Wittgenstein and Kripke make use of infinity in connection with the rule-following 244

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passages. Infinity is tied to our mastery of techniques. A technique is a way of doing something as an act with a future. It opens the future for us. Exercise of a technique is an action that plays a role in the construction of a mathematical proof (as we have just seen) or a move that is a position in a pattern governed activity. By tying infinity to techniques in this way, mastery of techniques, by virtue of its very nature, orients us to the future. Kripke, interestingly, in his construction of his skeptical argument, appeals to infinity differently. The explanatory work done by appeal to infinity is tied to the idea of an infinite, or at least, indefinite range of alternative interpretations of any given action. It is interpretation that anchors an infinity of possible alternatives, and because of this the future is closed. There just is the ceaseless parade of possible interpretations that stymies the exercise of techniques. The second feature of technique states that: “the technique is external to the pattern of proof” (RFM VI.2). There are no propositions that are part of the proof that describe the technique for applying the transformation rules constituting the steps of the proof. So one might see the proof written out and yet not be able to “understand it as a transformation according to such-and-such rules” (RFM VI.2). This is the situation of one who has not studied mathematics or logic and sees a proof or derivation written down, but does not understand how or why the successive lines of the proof or derivation are introduced. That individual cannot see a proof in the pattern of propositions, for he does not see it as an organized pattern in which the conclusion must be what it is. How we see things is a matter both of what is obvious and what must be, and both of these are on display in the initiate learning situation. The pattern into which the child is being taught cannot be recognized as such until the subject has mastered the techniques for using the rules through the actual repetition of constrained behavior. The child or novice must act out the part if she is to see the pattern. The apparent pointlessness or obviousness of a move does not thereby indicate that it is irrelevant to the training. On the contrary it may be just what is most important. It is what the master sees, and the novice must acquire. It is against the mastery of the background techniques that a proof is differentiated from a mere series of sentences.32 We mark that difference syntactically. A proof is stated non-temporally, whereas the activity of proving a mathematical proposition is temporally bounded (cf. RFM VI.2). Wittgenstein is interested in precisely this move we make from taking the activity of testing to be “so to speak, experimental” to taking it as a proof for a mathematical proposition. A list of sentences is no more a proof than a list of objects is a description of a state of affairs. This, it would seem, is the lasting lesson of the Tractatus. Structure or organization must be added to get a proof or to get a state of affairs. Normative similarity judgments of how to go on in the same way, involving the mastery of techniques, are part of that structuring. But Wittgenstein is not a pure formalist, as it might now sound. The meaningfulness of mathematics is not simply a matter of markers being 245

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manipulated in accord with algorithms. Wittgenstein explicitly rejects this formalist account after his brief flirtation in the Philosophical Remarks. Pace a formalist conception, Wittgenstein says: I want to say: it is essential to mathematics that its signs are also employed in mufti. It is the use outside mathematics, and so the meaning of the signs, that makes the sign-game into mathematics. (RFM V.2) Concepts which occur in “necessary” propositions must also occur and have a meaning in non-necessary ones. (RFM V.41)33 It is essential to the meaningfulness of mathematics that sticks can be collected and bundled, one by one, into sets of 20, that 5 apples and 6 oranges combine to give us 11 pieces of fruit. The very devices used in first learning arithmetic, devices that Plato disparaged as the mere empirical stepping stones to a higher mathematical reality, are the anchor to the world that makes mathematics meaningful. If mathematics were a purely formal game, with no substantive connections with our activities in the world, it would be of no interest; indeed it would not be mathematics, Wittgenstein claims. He extends this same point to logic, continuing with RFM V.2 quoted just above: Just as it is not logical inference either, for me to make a change from one formation to another (say from one arrangement of chairs to another) if these arrangements have not a linguistic function apart from this transformation. This insistence that the meaningfulness of the formal sciences must be tied to the use of “formal” expressions in some ongoing practices in part explains Wittgenstein’s special interest in geometry, the most visual and constructive of mathematics.34 In conclusion: The paradox of interpretation argument shows the need for background techniques of application that are not themselves expressible in sentential or propositional form. Exercising techniques is our way of going on that is not a matter of interpretation. This is a strong form of heterogeneity. Because background technique cannot be captured in any description or set of rules, it can only be shown in the context of a language-game.35 The place where it is best shown is the place where it is acquired—in the context of the initiate learner. How we learn these techniques is constitutive of what we learn precisely because what we learn cannot be separated from the context of use. Techniques can only 246

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be shown and that is what occurs in initiate training. What this also indicates is that, echoing Plato on art, denotational theories of meaning are twice removed from linguistic reality: Ostension, as fixing meaning, presupposes a system of beliefs which in turn presupposes background techniques of use. The second problem of normative similarity is deeper than the first.

Normativity and “psychologized” necessity Wittgenstein preserves an important explanatory role for necessity and its allied notions of concept and grammar, but that role is not that of special truths to which thought must conform. Wittgenstein’s insight is to see its normative role in our language-games. Necessary propositions make explicit material and logical inferential warrants. Though necessary propositions have assertoric form, their primary function is to express rules.36 In eschewing a metaphysical account of necessity, Wittgenstein turns to the only two sources that seem to be available: conventionalist accounts of necessity and psychologistic accounts.37 Wittgenstein’s attempt to come to terms with the hardness of the logical “must” leads him to accept aspects from both these strategies without endorsing either. In effect, the conventionalist account can tell us something about the “must” (what is prescribed) and the psychologistic account something about the “hardness” (that we cannot but so act). Yet the Fregean objections to formalism and psychologism must be respected. The question is whether Wittgenstein is successful in combining the goodness, as it were, from each of these three positions without incoherence. From the conventionalist perspective, these are our rules that license moves within the game. From the psychologistic perspective, it is an important fact about us that we are trainable into these practices. And from Frege, Wittgenstein accepts the principle that the normative “ought” cannot be reduced to a descriptive “is.” Necessary propositions, paradigmatic mathematical propositions, are expressed non-temporally. What the non-temporal syntactic marker indicates, as we said above, is the normative role played by both the proof and the proposition it supports:38 How do you test for a contrapuntal property? You transform it according to this rule, you put it together with another one in this way; and the like. In this way you get a definite result. You get it, as you would also get it by means of an experiment. So far what you are doing may even have been an experiment. The word “get” is here used temporally; you got the result at three o’clock.—In the mathematical proposition which I then frame the verb (“get,” “yields,” etc.) is used non-temporally. (RFM VI.2) 247

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As we saw in the previous section, the proposition that there is an infinite number of primes is, for Wittgenstein, a rule and the proof “a blue-print for the employment of a rule” (RFM VI.2). As such, it “stands behind the rule as a picture that justifies the rule” (RFM VI.2). So, a proof justifies a rule not by deducing certain eternal features of numbers that the metaphysical proposition describes. Nor does it provide inductively based evidence for extrapolating a mathematical generalization. Rather the proof justifies the rule by showing how the rule is to be used. It “teaches us a technique of finding a prime number between p and p! + 1. And we become convinced that this technique must always lead to a prime number > p. Or that we have miscalculated if it doesn’t” (RFM VI.6). We do not discover the members of a metaphysically existent series, but use an iterative technique to generate new members: “The concepts of infinite decimals in mathematical propositions are not concepts of series, but of the unlimited technique of expansion of series” (RFM V.19). The proof as a picture justifies the rule, not by showing how things are (a representationalist conception of justification), but by showing how to produce what must be. It is a blueprint for producing certain results. The elements of this expressivist picture are not isomorphic to some (pregiven) possible state of affairs, but instructions for creating an isomorphism between a (normative) proposition and what actually occurs: A proof leads me to say: this must be like this. … What does “it must be like this” mean here in contrast with “it is like this”? [ … ] I want to say that the must corresponds to a track which I lay down in language. (RFM III.30) What we are focusing on now is the character of the constraint imposed by the rule whose technique is mastered. The passage just quoted clearly suggests a conventionalist view. The source of this temptation lies with the recognition that necessary propositions are normative rules, for which one seeks the author or legislator who imposes this. It is akin to the temptation to think that we decide, at each step, how to follow a rule. And, like that temptation, it points to something that is correct in a sense, namely, that there is no metaphysical track laid out for us to follow.39 What is correct in conventionalism is that necessity is a function of rules governing behavior, that we are the source, in some sense, of these rules, and that there are not different kinds of necessity (logical-mathematical, conceptual, etc.). Thus, we can see Wittgenstein’s treatment of the mathematical case as providing the prototype for the necessity of the grammatical propositions of the Investigations40 and the propositions that hold fast of On Certainty.41 Grammatical propositions and propositions that hold fast are no more straightforward truths (whether metaphysical truths or truths by 248

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virtue of meaning) than is the mathematical proposition that the number of primes is infinite. Like that mathematical proposition, they are expressions of norms in the form of assertoric sentences. The justification that proofs afford their rules is due to the normative role played by the proof as a blueprint or recipe for getting the desired result. It shows how to obtain the results one ought to get if one has grasped the concept or rule. It does not, however, predict what will happen. If I don’t follow the proof or if I get distracted in the middle of things or if I think “who cares?” or if any other of an indefinite range of contingencies occur, I won’t construct a prime number. This underscores the fact that “what I derive from the picture is only a rule. And this rule does not stand to the picture as an empirical proposition stands to reality.—The picture does not shew that such-and-such happens. It only shews that what does happen can be taken in this way” (RFM VI.5), namely, as following the rule correctly or not. The use creates the space for the concept. The empirical statements, “she is constructing a prime number using the proof as her blueprint” or “she has constructed a new prime number,” each assert an action at a time. The normative proposition “the number of primes is infinite” does not relate to its picture, the proof, by asserting or predicting an action at a time. Rather the normative (or grammatical) proposition is an atemporal device for assessing what happens as correct or incorrect. This will become clearer when we discuss Wittgenstein’s “learning circle.” As we have seen in the first two master critiques, Wittgenstein argues that no object is inherently normative, and that the individual mind cannot be the source of norms without generating a circular explanation or paradox. So in whatever way rules are ours, it is not by way of each individual’s decision or intention. It is here that the social dimension of our language-games makes itself felt. In shifting attention from the individual mind and its intentions to the social coordination of the behavior of participants in practices, we shift our perspective on the foundations of language as well. Communication, understood first and foremost as reporting on the state of the world or the speaker, is not foundational to language use. Rather, as we saw with the simple builders, the coordination of behavior is the striking feature of primitive language-games (where that coordination is not “hard-wired” as is the coordinated behavior of many animals and insects). If the obligatory character of necessity is not based on epistemic grounds (on evidence or argument for the truth of a necessary proposition) and is not a species of nomological necessity, how is that obligatory character to be understood? Wittgenstein’s answer is not that of Kant, for whom our individual autonomy as free rational agents is the transcendental condition for normative action. Rather Wittgenstein’s answer is that the obligatory character of necessity is a function of our acquisition of background techniques in initiate training. It is precisely through our being, as children, neither fully autonomous agents nor mere causal machines that the prescriptive dimension of norms can be realized. It is through initiate acquisition of bedrock practices 249

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that we grasp the obvious and the necessary. Initially we don’t even recognize propositions that we will come to regard as obvious or even necessary as either of those things. Initiate learning is marked by that same blind acceptance of ways of going on that Wittgenstein appeals to in his reaction to the paradox of interpretation. As we saw, Quine’s failure to eliminate indeterminacy is explained by his misunderstanding of the conditions that must be met for language use, namely, the mastery of the bedrock practices that provide the background of shared judgments of normative similarity. For Wittgenstein, grasping a normative necessity is to be explained in terms of “signif[ying] that the learner has gone in a circle,” not in terms of the learner’s having rationally intuited the number system or tested various hypotheses concerning the use of numerals or responded to new stimuli under changing conditions of reinforcement. The kind of circle involved in initiate learning is not a form of vicious circularity. The learning circle is temporally bounded. It is the actual process of teaching a pupil how to multiply, for example. The pupil begins and ends with the same mundane activity of getting a mathematical result. Something as simple as the activity of multiplying 8 by 9 to get 72 can be both the start and the end of the learning circle. Nothing is different in the expression of the arithmetic proposition. At the beginning of learning and at the end of learning (when the pupil sees that 8 times 9 must result in getting 72), the same expression is inscribed “8  9 = 72.” What differs is the normative status of that proposition for the pupil. The vehicle of that change in status is the pupil’s growing mastery of a cognitive skill or technique for using numerals. These skills are modes of behavioral self-regulation that constitute going on in the same way in relation to established procedure. What overcomes the abstract problem of indeterminacy in naming and interpretation is that we can be, and are, trained in certain ways. Developing techniques of use creates the regularities necessary for the judgments of similarity or sameness without which language is impossible. An isomorphism is created between the techniques we have acquired through training and certain natural regularities. But it is the set of techniques (in part) that determines which natural regularities are salient for us (color, shape, size). As Wittgenstein puts this point in the Remarks, “the phenomenon of language is based on regularity, on agreement in action” (RFM VI.39). In the learning situation, regularity is guaranteed because no alternative way of responding is permitted or accepted or even envisaged. The novice is alternative blind. The role of the teacher is crucial here, for the resources available to the pupil are not simply his sensory stimulations but an environment shaped by the teacher. The learning circle moves from the experimental activity of testing in which the pupil’s reactions are met by the teacher with sanctions of praise or correction to the activity of testing in which the result comes to be seen as necessary, as what must be, as setting an internalized standard of correctness for the pupil: 250

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It is as if we had hardened the empirical proposition into a rule. And now we have, not an hypothesis that gets tested by experience, but a paradigm with which experience is compared and judged. And so a new kind of judgment. (RFM VI.22) This change is the result of the learning circle. Bringing to light what is involved in adopting a concept reveals a strong link between the process of learning and what is learned, for the training itself is constitutive of the concept acquired. To adopt the concept is to acquire the technique, and technique can only be shown and practiced. What some might see as an explanatory gap between the statement of activity and the statement of rule is filled by the acquisition of technique in the learning situation. The training into judgments of normative similarity (becoming calibrated or acquiring norms) is the explanation of how a temporally extended activity becomes the expression of a norm. Understanding the learning circle and the importance of technique to mastery, we can see that certain thought experiments are incoherent. These all turn on treating what is a temporally extended phenomenon, that of acquiring the technique for applying a concept or rule, as something that occurs instantaneously. Some argue that the genesis of a cognitive ability is irrelevant to its content. A child might receive an arithmetic pill: He takes the pill in the evening and wakes up with an understanding of addition, subtraction and the like. The flaw in this thought experiment is the failure to recognize the significance of background technique. The training is not explicable in terms of rules, beliefs or any other cognitive vehicle. Yet that is just what is required for the success of these thought experiments. One cannot insert the relevant information into a pill precisely because it is not information that is required. Techniques are acquired through practice and exercise. Testing is essential. Wittgenstein’s “psychologism,” if it can be called that, differs importantly from classical psychologism.42 The prescriptive role in our lives of mathematical, logical and other grammatical propositions is a function of the background techniques that we acquire in initiate training and their associated world-pictures. It is through the acquisition of such bedrock practices that we grasp the obvious and necessary. Only by taking an object or sentence not as the particular object or inscription that it is, but as a standard by which behavior is shaped, can the pupil come to the view that things must be a certain way, and only by coming to hold that things must be this way can a pupil acquire concepts or the use of rules at all. In this sense, the “hardness” is a psychological fact. The “hardness” of the logical “must” is like the rigidity of the meter stick. Without it we cannot measure the world or play the game. As the stick could not measure the length of the table if it were subject to contracting and expanding, so too we cannot add two numbers if we cannot exercise the technique, acquired through initiate training, 251

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to add. We must be regimented in certain ways in order to make possible doxastic and epistemic systems. These interrelated networks presuppose blind obedience to the background without which they cannot exist. Notice that to say this is not to say that normative pronouncements within a language-game describe the psychological regularization that makes playing the game possible. Such pronouncements express the commitments that make the game what it is. To confuse these points would be to make a mistake similar to the one we found in connection with the community view of meaning: the mistake of thinking that “this is the correct way to go on” means “going on in this way accords with community practice.” Community agreement makes practices possible. Techniques of application are in the background of linguistic moves themselves. Such techniques are not further beliefs, propositions or sentences within a web or network of other beliefs or propositions. This is why they can only be shown, paradigmatically in the learning situation. Mastering such techniques is mastering basic inferential and logical transitions. The language of technique is especially useful in discussing mathematics and logic, where the iterated application of a relatively small set of transformation rules is involved. Counting, the proof for the infinity of primes, and modus ponens provide clear cases of the application of techniques for introducing or manipulating symbols. Just as categorization of ordinary middle-sized objects (a chair in normal circumstances) gives us judgments of the observationally obvious. This doesn’t mean that all uses of language within a language-game involve such (relatively) isolable techniques as one finds in counting or constructing another prime number using Euclid’s proof as a blueprint for doing so. Family resemblance reigns here. So, when Davidson objects to using the mathematical case in this more broadly explanatory way, he misses the point of Wittgenstein’s use of it as a prototype for understanding linguistic competence more generally. Davidson criticizes Wittgenstein as follows: Wittgenstein does, of course, treat meaning something in much the same way he treats following some procedure, such as adding in arithmetic. But there is a clear distinction between the cases [meaning something and following a procedure], which explains why we ordinarily use the word “rule” in one case and not in the other. In the case of adding, there is an explicit procedure for arriving at an answer; we can learn and describe the procedure, and it is appropriate to call the procedure or its description a rule. We normally follow no procedure in speaking; nothing in the everyday use of language corresponds to taking the sum in adding.43 Davidson focuses on the procedural aspect of mathematics in objecting to Wittgenstein’s view of background technique. Such procedures (one can 252

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almost hear the phrase “effective procedures”) are not part of the everyday use of language. We don’t have a technique for continuing a conversation (or if we do, the conversation is a superficial, “mechanical” way of talking) as we have techniques for multiplication. But Davidson overlooks another aspect that I have been emphasizing with respect to Wittgenstein’s resolution of the paradox of interpretation. The techniques for manipulating symbols in the correct manner cannot be spelled out in rules, but can only be shown and so require that we all respond to the training in these techniques in the same way. The point that I emphasize is not that effective procedures underlie or describe everyday conversations, but that the mastery of techniques of use involved in both ordinary linguistic competence and the mastery of procedures of mathematics involves our blind shared reactions to initiate training. Meaning something demands shared blind obedience to the inferential commitments that constitute our rules of the language-game. This is what Wittgenstein brings out in his appeal to custom. We need to return to a passage Wittgenstein uses to introduce the problem of understanding rules: “But how can a rule shew me what I have to do at this point? Whatever I do is, on some interpretation, in accord with the rule.” – … Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning. … Let me ask this: what has the expression of a rule got to do with my actions? What sort of connexion is there here?—Well, perhaps this one: I have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react to it. But that is only to give a causal connexion; to tell how it has come about that we now go by the sign; not what this going-by-thesign really consists in. On the contrary; I have further indicated that a person goes by a sign-post only in so far as there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom. (PI §198) To understand the implicit contrast between the “merely” causal and the customary is to see how Wittgenstein reworks our understanding of the causal and the normative. Initiate training is not intelligible except in relation to custom. We have already seen, by analogy with the standard meter stick, how we are to understand or conceive the relation between the two. In virtue of our sensory systems and behavioral malleability, we can be initiated into practices or customs. The former are the empirical properties that enable us, once properly calibrated, to measure the world for certain properties and, once subject to training, to acquire the techniques necessary for participation in practices or customs. Our agreement in judgments is a further empirical property that helps provide the “rigidity” necessary for 253

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objective judgments of normative similarity. We share the natural rigidity of our sensory systems and the trained rigidity of social custom. This trained rigidity is not absolute in all cases, but without it there would be nothing to change.

Learning, trust and certainty There is a third dimension to the background in addition to stage-setting and exercise of technique: the certainty and trust that is part of any languagegame. Certainty is characterized negatively, as pertaining to that which is not open to doubt, not subject to mistake, not in need of evidence.44 Doubt or mistake with respect to bedrock certainties indicates an abnormal situation or even mental disorder, not poor epistemic habits. Just as with his alternative conceptions of normativity and necessity, we find that Wittgenstein ties certainty to how we learn to participate in language-games. Thus, the picture of language as a motley of indefinitely many language-games, rather than a single articulated system, is presupposed in Wittgenstein’s discussion of certainty. What Wittgenstein calls “certainties” covers cases as diverse as “This is a hand,” “Cats don’t grow on trees,” “My name is MW,” and “The boiling point of water is 100° C.” There are two kinds, however, that attract much of the attention in On Certainty: (i) Propositions like “this is a hand” or “this is red” said of a British pillar box or “Napoleon was exiled to Elba” look like straightforward empirical propositions but are not.45 They are normative, that is, they stand as exemplars or paradigms within a language-game. And (ii) there are propositions that are “held fast” by how we judge and act. These include “the earth has existed since long before my birth” or “human beings are conscious.” These are not exemplars that might be used in teaching the child; rather they are implicit in all the things we do. Let’s take up the first kind of certainty, those judgments that look like ordinary empirical claims yet are not. Wittgenstein uses both generic examples, like, “that’s a book,” “that’s a towel,” “this is a hand,” and examples drawn from his three illustrative cases, mathematics (“12  12 = 144” [OC §43]), color recognition (“the English pillar box is red” [OC §526]), and history (“Napoleon existed” [cf. OC §§163, 185]).46 All provide examples in which, ordinarily, mistake is not possible, doubt cannot be entertained, and evidence is not required. Significantly, according to Wittgenstein, these judgments of color, calculation and even historical fact need to be accepted at face value by the novice, whether the initiate learner is just acquiring color terms, or the advanced novice, the pupil just learning mathematics or history. Much of Wittgenstein’s discussion of these exemplary judgments concerns the domain of the novice, of the child learning language or the pupil learning mathematics, history or science. Part of learning is accepting such paradigmatic judgments as certain, thus constraining the range of acceptable moves 254

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within the language-game. These judgments set standards for judging. If one cannot believe and act on these judgments, one cannot learn what things are called or learn to calculate or to do science or history. There are important differences between the initiate learner (the child acquiring language) and the advanced learner (a pupil learning higher mathematics, history or physics). For now we shall consider the initiate learner, as the case of the advanced learner depends upon the treatment of the initiate learner. Since all initiate language learning involves recognitional skills, all language-learning games make use of paradigmatic judgments: “Every language-game is based on words ‘and objects’ being recognized again. We learn with the same inexorability that this is a chair as that 2  2 = 4” (OC §455). Exemplary judgments are judgments of normative similarity. As such they are the calibrations of the child. In this context believing is prior to knowing. The doxastic attitude of the novice persists in the life of the master, underwriting the master’s system of beliefs. Certainty is shown in our doxastic convictions and attitudes. It is a form of believing that cannot be assimilated to knowing despite the fact that Wittgenstein ties certainty to foundationalist metaphors, such as the river-bed analogy (OC §96) and bedrock judgments (PI §§217–19; OC §414).47 This animal-like unavoidable believing bridges our first nature to our second nature, one that can take for granted normatively structured first nature in order to pursue our various doxastic and epistemic ends (cf. OC §358–9). It is important that, though normative, these propositions look like empirical propositions. In this way, certainty of meaning is tied to certainty of fact, indeed, is indistinguishable: “If you are not certain of any fact, you cannot be certain of the meaning of your words either” (OC §114). Believing with certainty is unavoidable and should not be mistaken for our being irrational or gullible. We cannot be anything but subject to norms including Wittgensteinian certainties. The alternative is literally death or madness. Becoming subject to norms and certainties in initiate learning is to depend on, and thereby trust, the support of others within the community. As we have already seen, this is not just a matter of the child’s biological weakness, but, even more importantly, of her cognitive and psychological dependence. So, how we come to accept background certainties reveals much about the ways in which they are held. Exemplary judgments are precisely of the sort that are explicitly used in teaching children language. “This is a hand,” “that’s a zebra,” “there is a towel” are all judgments that one can readily recognize as the sorts of things that adults say to young children. These exemplary judgments do play a normative role in shaping the linguistic competencies of the child, but not, pace Augustine, by naming. The child lacks both the semantic notions and substantive beliefs about the world that are necessary for ostensive definition. First language use is thus marked by the semantic and epistemic innocence of the novice: 255

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Naturally, the child who is just learning to speak has not yet got the concept is called at all. (OC §536) Can one say of someone who hasn’t this concept that he knows what such-and-such is called? (OC §537) The child, I should like to say, learns to react in such-and-such a way; and in so reacting it doesn’t so far know anything. Knowing only begins at a later level. (OC §538) The epistemic innocence of the child is expressed as a complete trust in the adults. This trust is displayed in the child’s believing what she is taught, what the adults around her say: “The child learns by believing the adult. Doubt comes after belief” (OC §160). The point that Wittgenstein is making is that the child has no choice but to accept what the adult says. Trust in the adult is in no way optional. This is not due either to decision or coercion.48 The child simply has no system of beliefs in terms of which alternatives could be formed. What the child learns is not an ever-growing system of propositions (nodes in a web of belief) but a complexity of behavior in which the use of words is an integral part: “Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc. etc.—they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc. etc.” (OC §476). In learning to do these things with these objects, and to use these words in connection with these actions, the child becomes a participant in our various language-games. In doing so, she thereby judges with us that this is a chair and this is a hand and this is a zebra. The affinity with the primitive game of the builders is clear, and so are some of the implications. In this context, the most important affinity is that neither the builder nor the child, in their “judgments,” are entertaining existence hypotheses concerning slabs or chairs. They work with no hypotheses at all. Their believing is not of an epistemic sort and so cannot be modeled as a set of hypotheses standing in various logico-evidential relations to each other.49 What is so learned, and what is acquired in the process of learning, is a system of beliefs that has a character quite different from that of a system of hypotheses. Such beliefs are foundational in providing the cognitive background without which knowledge, hypothesis, and doubt are impossible. They are normative in creating the logical space for what is obvious to the individual, thus connecting the individual to the community in a shared set of bedrock judgments and actions. This logical space of the obvious is without alternatives for the initiate learner. She is alternative-blind in her reactions and normative training. Higher-level linguistic complexity is provided by the adult and extended by courtesy to the linguistic acts of the child. Yet 256

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bedrock practice, our ways of going on as a matter of course, acquired in initiate learning, provide the necessary background to higher-level linguistic activities, such as asking for the names of things, pursuing knowledge, forming hypotheses and opinions, doubting, and making mistakes. The advanced student learning history or physics is not in the position of the initiate learner. Nonetheless the structure of the advanced student’s learning resembles that of the child learning language. For this reason both can be seen to occupy the domain of the novice. It might be thought that this could not be so. The advanced student in history or physics is learning theories supported by evidence, mastering laboratory techniques and research strategies. It seems clear that the student is learning hypotheses and confirmation supported by inductive evidence. This is correct, but how he learns is not by way of hypothesis formation and confirmation. Rather, like the initiate learner, the advanced student must trust his teachers before he can dispute with them, and he must take what he learns as certain: “The schoolboy believes his teachers and his schoolbooks” (OC §263). If he does not, and indeed the advanced student need not accept what he is told, unlike the initiate learner who has no choice in the matter, the student is ineducable: A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as the existence of things, the meaning of words, etc. The teacher says “Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don’t make sense at all.” (OC §310) The structure of learning is that of initiate learning. First belief and trust, and then space for doubt and disagreement. This is true even when learning how to construct and evaluate hypotheses. Important to novices of both kinds is the role played by the second class of propositions that express certainties and play a critical role in our language-games. This second class of propositions comprises those that “hold fast,” as Wittgenstein puts it. These include such propositions as “The earth has existed since long before my birth,” “there are physical objects,” and also “I have never been to the moon,” “all human beings have two parents.” These are as much a motley as the class of exemplary judgments. This second class of certainties differs from the first in two important regards. First they are not themselves norms; and secondly they are or can become associated with some world-picture. As such they are the source of worldpictures that become insinuated into language-games awaiting “discovery” by a philosopher or other reflective thinker. Some of these propositions have historically been of special interest to philosophers, propositions like “there are physical objects.” Others, like “cats do not grow on trees,” “every human 257

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being has a brain,” “I have never been to the moon,” express a world-picture specific enough to be part of our scientific world-picture. These propositions, unlike exemplary judgments, are not explicitly taught or learned, but are acquired in the process of learning: This system is something that a human being acquires by means of observation and instruction. I intentionally do not say “learns.” (OC §279) Wittgenstein himself uses three different analogies in his attempt to find an adequate characterization of these propositions though I shall discuss only two in this context: the river-bed, axial and hinge propositions.50 Each tries to express the way in which propositions of this special class constitute part of a background of certainties that are not claims to knowledge and yet stand as foundational certainties within our practices. It is this that leads him to say that they are there, like something animal, like life itself. Wittgenstein’s metaphor of “the axis around which a body rotates” is especially apt because it indicates how the implicit proposition has the status it does: I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like an axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility. (OC §152) He exploits the analogy with an axis to show how a complex system has structure without a structuring agent. The axis is the point at the center of the rotating body, derived by an abstract mathematical formula. That abstract role is to be played by an axial proposition in relation to a world-picture. The dynamics of the system hold the axial proposition in place. What we learn explicitly brings with it commitments that are, as Wittgenstein says, “swallowed down”: A child learns there are reliable and unreliable informants much later than it learns facts which are told it. It doesn’t learn at all that the mountain has existed for a long time; that is, the question whether it is so doesn’t arise at all. It swallows this consequence down, so to speak, together with what it learns. (OC §143) An indefinitely large and diverse array of propositions is “swallowed down” with our learning what we do. An axial proposition is not a logically positive force, organizing our system of beliefs. They are the implicit background that 258

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“emerges” with any dynamic language-game. The danger to the philosopher is to treat them as metaphysically substantive claims. The point here is not the diagnosis of philosophical error, but the characteristics of the background acquired by the initiate learner and implicit in the competence of the master. It does not name an entity or positive force that explains the rotation of the bodies around it. It characterizes the relation of what we say and do to what is logically and explanatorily implicit whether or not we ever make that content explicit. This is a logical point about the background and its structure of certainty. The second analogy is the appealing image of the hinges on which a door turns. This analogy draws attention to the epistemic requirement that some things are exempt from doubt if inquiry is to be possible at all: The questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn. (OC §341) The mathematical proposition [12  12 = 144] has, as it were officially, been given the stamp of incontestability. I.e.: “Dispute about other things; this is immovable—it is a hinge on which your dispute can turn.” (OC §655) Wittgenstein emphasizes that exempting some things from doubt within a language-game is an epistemic requirement and not simply a practical constraint: But it isn’t that the situation is like this: We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put. (OC §343) The constraint on examining every proposition we hold is not due to a lack of time or the impossibility of examining everything at one time. Rather investigations themselves, to be about anything, to raise a question at all, require some things which remain fixed, that are “incontestable.” When we focus on these two kinds of propositions that stand fast, we can see that it is a mistake (or misleading) to construe Wittgensteinian propositions that hold fast as either framework propositions, i.e., as setting a priori constraints on what moves can be made, or as foundational propositions, providing the epistemic base for moves within the game.51 Both analogies support Wittgenstein’s particularism and the view that such propositions are immanent in a practice, not the basis from which moves within a game are 259

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made or justified. Wittgenstein’s particularism is clearly in evidence in the following: We got to know the nature of calculating by learning to calculate. (OC §45) This is how one calculates. Calculating is this. What we learn at school, for example. Forget this transcendent certainty, which is connected with your concept of spirit. (OC §47) The very nature, that is the logic, of calculation (and by implication any other practice) is fixed by the particular moves one makes in the game. One learns what mathematics is by learning to count, by learning to add and subtract, by learning the multiplication table. It is fundamental to Wittgenstein’s position that any concept or rule or principle is to be explained in terms of particular judgments and not the other way round. What are explicitly identified as concepts or rules are the abstractions from the particular applications and judgments we make. They do not ground those judgments or applications, either practically or epistemologically. Wittgenstein connects his particularist conception of our language-games with an explicit rejection of a metaphysical account of certainty. Both the axial analogy and the hinge analogy show the place of propositions that stand fast as certainties within our language-games, while nonetheless being compatible with the fallibility of human knowledge and an openness to conceptual change. Because Wittgenstein is trying to avoid the representationalist description of language, he is led to characterize our background believing as an attitude we display rather than a representation we accept: “it’s not that on some points men know the truth with perfect certainty. No: perfect certainty is only a matter of their attitude” (OC §404). This background of certain believing is closely tied to Wittgenstein’s notion of a form of life and the way in which he seeks to contrast language use as essential to our form of life as speaking animals with the more familiar picture of language as a representational system that is added to our lives. This is what he is getting at when he says in On Certainty that “my life consists in my being content to accept many things” (OC §344) and “now I would like to regard this certainty, not as something akin to hastiness or superficiality, but as a form of life. But that means I want to conceive it as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were, as something animal” (OC §358–9; also see OC §559). The believing of the epistemically innocent novice requires trust before there can be doubt or questioning, and action before there can be reflection or hypothesis formation. Exemplary judgments are devices for training the novice in the actions involving the use of words. Such training does require a 260

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range of natural reactions and discriminatory perceptual competencies on the part of the novice. And it involves the explicit teaching of words and judgments, making the holophrastic utterance of the child fundamental. It is fundamental not for the representationalist’s reason, namely, that the child is making simple hypotheses about its sensory stimulations. The child hasn’t the semantic and epistemic resources for such sophisticated cognitive acts. Rather the child acts with the word in the pursuit of her activities and desires. In using words as part of her action, the child’s utterances are viewed as holophrastic from the adult’s point of view while, from the perspective of a child playing, they are closer to the calls of the builder. But the most important fact for Wittgenstein is that the human need for the normative structuring provided by the linguistic community is nonnegotiable. It is as much a part of our natural history as eating or walking. Without it there is madness, not an animal form of life. And as language is a public social practice, so the individual mind, as ordered by language, is displayed, and indeed exists, in and through a public social practice. The mind as normatively structured cannot be the individual interior realm hypothesized by Descartes. What Descartes mistakes for the inner mental space of the mind is our second-order capacity for reflection upon our beliefs and experiences. It is as much a mistake to try to model all of the mind on this second-order reflective capacity as it is to try to model all of belief on hypothesis and its relation to evidence. This deep connection between our psychology and the normativity of practices is key to Wittgenstein’s mature thought. Our psychological lives are normatively structured, and so we must be situated within a community of rule-followers acquiring mastery of the content of our standards through initiate training. The normativity of our practices (the logic of these practices) is rooted in our shared sense of the obvious and the necessary, in what we do as a matter of course.52 The “conventionality,” as it were, of what we do as a matter of course is on display in the learning situation. This “conventionality” is not a matter of decision, volition or individual intention. So, it is not rooted in our psychology as an independent ground for the acceptance or adoption of conventions, rules or concepts. The ground of necessity lies, as we saw in Chapter 6, in our coming to see that “matters must be like that.” This has implications, not just for logical necessity, but for our psychology, our mental lives. In conclusion, Wittgensteinian certainty is not Cartesian epistemic certainty.

Notes 1 Paradigmatic “early Quine” is the Quine of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” and Word and Object. Quine in his work from the 1990s modified his views, and in particular his radical holism in favor of a “molecular” holism. See his Pursuit of Truth.

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2 Though I mention Quine and Davidson together in their commitment to radical holism, the grounds for their commitment differ in important and interesting respects. Quine’s holism derives primarily from his repudiation of the analytic– synthetic distinction whereas Davidson’s holism derives from his commitment to the hypersystematicity of language. This will be discussed shortly. 3 Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” 42. 4 For an excellent discussion of the development of Wittgenstein’s thought during his middle period, see Medina, Unity of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy. 5 Sellars, “Inference and Meaning.” Also see R. Brandom’s important development of this Sellarsian idea in Making It Explicit. Material inferences are substantive moves within the game. These are moves like the inference from “Fido is a dog” to “Fido needs food to live.” Material inference is more akin to the action of builder B when he hears builder A call “Slab!” than it is to the relation of a conclusion of a deductive argument to its premises. Treated as a logical entailment it would require an hypothesized premise of the form “If x is a dog, then x needs food to live.” But no such major premise is required for a material inference; indeed that is precisely what is excluded. 6 Gilbert Harman’s distinction between inference and logic is relevant here. See his Change in View. Harman argues, in a way that is quite compatible with Wittgenstein’s views, that inference cannot be assimilated to logical deduction. Harman and Wittgenstein would disagree over the proper characterization of doxastic inference. Harman urges that inference is inference to the best explanation and so explanatory coherence is the key to the connective tissue within a system of beliefs. Wittgenstein’s use of material inference cannot be treated as inference to the best explanation. Harman, it is noted, has changed his views on these matters. See Harman and Kulkarni, Reliable Reasoning. Material inferences are closer in some respects to the Kantian idea of a priori synthetic propositions. This is Sellars’ construal. See his “Is There a Synthetic A Priori?” Wittgenstein’s position, as we shall see, is more complicated than this. 7 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, ch. 4, “Privileged Representation.” 8 Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” 42. This passage seems to restrict his holism to the sciences, from the soft sciences of geography and history to the hard sciences and even the pure ones of mathematics and logic. Yet his development of this picture extends it to our ordinary beliefs concerning objects like brick houses and physical objects in general. “Science,” he tells us, “is a continuation of common sense,” so no sharp distinction can be drawn there. The “totality of our beliefs” that Quine refers to are all our beliefs, whatever the subject matter. Also see Glock, Quine and Davidson. 9 See Quine, “Ontological Relativity,” Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. 10 Quine, “Necessary Truth,” 56. 11 Quine, Methods of Logic, xiii, cited in Hookway, Quine, ch. 5. Also see Quine, “On the Application of Modern Logic,” and, with Ullian, Web of Belief. 12 Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” For general treatment of Sellars’ philosophy, see deVries, Wilfrid Sellars; and O’Shea, Wilfrid Sellars. Also see R. Brandom’s commentary on Sellars’ essay: Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with a study guide by Robert Brandom. 13 In those rare cases in which a child survives radical isolation from meaningful human contact, the child loses even the capacity to be a novice, except in the most vestigial sense. See Itard, Wild Boy of Aveyron; Maclean, Wolf Children; Chandland, Feral Children; Curtiss, Genie; and Rymer, Genie. 14 This is the conception that supports the coherentist picture of the web of belief as “a frictionless spinning in a void,” in McDowell’s apt phrase. See McDowell,

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15

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Mind and World, 66. Also see Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, for what remains one of the strongest critiques of this view. “Stage-setting” is in fact only used in PI §257, the beginning of the private language argument in which Wittgenstein is explicitly connecting his discussion of sensations with that of the early examination of ostensive definition of object terms. Cf. PI §§6 and 10. Stanley Cavell is notably the first to defend such a reading of the later Wittgenstein in his book, Claim of Reason. Here I am echoing two of Cavell’s central claims about the Investigations: that we have a fundamental relation to the world that is not epistemic, and that each competent speaker is representative of the community of other members. I endorse both of these points, but I do not find Cavell’s interpretation of the fundamental relation we have to the world correct. He sees in it a deep and lingering skepticism that is the source of our anxiety and uncertainty. I, on the other hand, see Wittgenstein as finding in that relation the obvious and the certain. If Cavell means that there is an intellectualized uncertainty, then the claim to anxiety rests on a misunderstanding of the background. If it is a practical uncertainty, its genesis is the failure to acquire the full background. It is the reflective philosophical examination of that “bedrock” that is the source of skeptical anxieties. For a vigorous defense of the voluntarist interpretation of rules in general and mathematical propositions in particular, see Frascolla, Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics, ch. 3. Rules and mathematical propositions are “stipulated conventions” for which “the internal relations are created by the decisions that, case by case, we are inclined to take regarding what follows from a general rule, i.e., by the decisions that, case by case, determine the meaning of the description ‘the result of the correct application of the rule’” (p. 120). See the two classic critiques of behaviorism, Dewey, “Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”; and Chomsky, Review of B.F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior. See my discussion of the triangulation argument in “The Limits of Systematicity,” the fourth section of Chapter 4. Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, attempts to provide a naturalistic basis for our normative judgments, one that explains the capacity we have for coordinating our behavior in terms of natural selection. Much that Gibbard attempts in this work is fully compatible with what Wittgenstein is doing. That causal explanations of aspects of our behavior can be pursued is never rejected by Wittgenstein, though he would not agree to the large naturalistic conclusions that Gibbard seeks to draw. It is important to note that Gibbard both explicitly excludes an account of the normativity of language in his evolutionary theory of normativity, and that he holds that “a norm, we might say, is a linguistically encoded percept” such that “ … we should think of the motivation I have been calling ‘normative’ as motivation of a particular, linguistically infused kind” (p. 57). What Wittgenstein is concerned with is precisely such linguistically infused normative motivation. McDowell, Mind and World. See, for example, Pears, Ludwig Wittgenstein; Morawetz, Wittgenstein and Knowledge; and Lear, “Leaving the World Alone.” Also see my “Wittgenstein, Kant, and the ‘metaphysics of experience’.” Searle, Rediscovery of Mind, ch. 8; and Dreyfus, with Dreyfus, “Why Skills Cannot Be Represented by Rules.” Both pursue contemporary Rylean strategies in trying to better understand the nature of the background to which any holistic approach to mind and language is committed. Part VI of RFM was written during the period (1941–4) just before Wittgenstein worked on Part I of the Investigations (1945). It is important to note that of all the Nachlass material collected together in the revised edition of RFM, only Parts I and

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25 26

27 28 29

VI are presented complete as Wittgenstein wrote them, without editorial revision or rearrangement. All the other parts have been subject to varying degrees of editorial revision. I want to thank David Stern for drawing this to my attention. Parts I, III and VII of the Remarks are also important sources for this issue. Taking this step would assimilate this mathematical case to the case of using the cube-drawing as our standard for picking out cubes. Here we need a method of projection, and so a regress is initiated. A rule of application for a transformation rule would also be a method of projection. This discussion of Euclid’s proof derives from my examination of it in “Etiology of the Obvious,” esp. §§2 and 3. Euclid, Thirteen Books of the Elements, 413. If one performs the formal test by actually applying the transformation rules step by step, it becomes quite clear that, as Wittgenstein says, the concept of a proof presupposes the concept of transformation rules. We’ll follow Euclid in specifying a set of prime numbers as the total set. This is the hypothesis that will force the construction of a new prime number. Let 2, 3 and 5 be the prime numbers. Take the product of 2, 3 and 5, and add 1.2  3  5 = 30 + 1 = 31. Then 31 is either a prime number or not a prime number. (1) If it is, we have added another prime number to the list of prime numbers, and so it was not complete. (2) If it is not, 31 must be divisible by some prime number, p.

30

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Now if p is identical with any of the prime numbers 2, 3 or 5, it will (evenly) divide 30. Since p is also to divide (evenly) 30 + 1, then p must divide 1 evenly which is impossible. On the basis of this contradiction, we reject the hypothesis we began with (that 2, 3 and 5 are the only prime numbers) as the source of the problem. A crucial lemma reveals a contradiction in any attempt to avoid this result. The proof forces the construction of a new prime number. Pears made me aware of this important point in False Prison, vol. 2, which he sums up by saying that “[w]e discover the regularities in nature’s behaviour only by first establishing regularities in our own behaviour” (p. 371). Also see Pears’ more recent work, Paradox and Platitude, ch. 2. This is an oversimplified account of the relation between self-regulation and judgments of sameness. There are many cases of rule-following, even quite simple cases that are not repetitive in the way that has been emphasized here. Teaching children to share is teaching a rule, but one that can be realized in a variety of ways, from sharing toys by dividing them up to sharing a swing by waiting in line. I owe this point and example to John Deigh. The mathematical example is useful precisely because so many of the techniques involved are not multifaceted in this way. Even if there is more than one technique for, say, adding or multiplying, whichever technique is used, its mastery is mastery of addition. This will have implications for how Wittgenstein sees the relation between behavior and an intentionally describable action. Behavior itself can be seen and isolated from the background against which it is intelligible as an intentional action. This is one of the points of analogy between psychology and mathematics. Also see RFM II.35 and V.39. This is, of course, importantly related to Wittgenstein’s criticism of the idea of mathematical infinity and the sublime: “If you can show there are numbers bigger than the infinite, your head swirls. This may be the chief reason this was invented” (LFM, p. 16). Wittgenstein never gives

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up this idea that it is the philosophical imagination that drives the esoteric reaches of mathematics (RFM V.29; italics in original): The geometrical illustration of Analysis is indeed inessential; not, however, the geometrical application. Originally the geometrical illustrations were applications of Analysis. Where they cease to be this they can be wholly misleading. “What we have then is the imaginary application. The fanciful application.” 34 This has implications for Wittgenstein’s examination of psychology and its status as a science. An important issue for scientific psychology is whether its theoretical concepts and principles must stay in contact with our everyday psychological concepts. For those who argue that scientific psychology need not be tethered to our “folk psychology,” Wittgenstein would reply that the scientific concepts, like formal concepts, must retain contact with our folk psychological notions. 35 This is what leads Hintikka and Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein, to maintain that “the ineffability of the semantic” is central to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. They pursue this idea by characterizing “the role of language-games as the basic semantical links between language and reality” (p. 212). They are certainly onto something correct in Wittgenstein. Techniques of application can only be shown, not described. It is in this way that the Tractatus’ doctrine of showing survives in human form. 36 For an influential expressivist account of normative language, see Blackburn, Spreading the Word and Essays in Quasi-Realism. However, Blackburn holds out for a distinction between expressive and robustly representational varieties of meaning. For a generalized version of expressivism, incorporating a deflationary approach to truth, see Price, “Naturalism without Representationalism,” and Price and Macarthur, “Pragmatism, Quasi-Realism, and the Global Challenge.” Price is much more Wittgensteinian in spirit than Blackburn, at least on my reading of Wittgenstein. For what may be an even more radically quietist view than that of Price, see Horwich, “A World without Isms.” 37 As Jose Medina brings out very clearly, Wittgenstein can be seen to be struggling with the two great targets of Frege’s critical eye, formalist theories of logic and mathematics and psychologistic theories. Both theories succumb to difficulties in accounting for the objective character of logic and mathematics. See Medina, Unity of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy. 38 See Shanker, Wittgenstein and the Turning-Point. 39 For an excellent examination of this temptation to find the “rails to infinity,” see C. Wright’s book of that title, Rails to Infinity. See especially “Rule Following, Objectivity and the Theory of Meaning” and “Rule Following, Meaning and Constructivism.” 40 Examples include “Only you can know if you had that intention” (PI §247), “Every rod has a length” (PI §251), “One plays patience by oneself” (PI §248), and “Another person can’t have my pains” (PI §253). 41 Examples from Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, include “Here is a hand” (OC §1ff), “the earth has existed since long before my birth” (OC §84ff), and “every human being has two human parents” (OC §239ff). 42 Historically, Wittgenstein can be seen to reject Frege’s strong distinction between the logical and the psychological, but not by a return to the old forms of psychologism represented by J.S. Mill in the nineteenth century. Rather it is his way of questioning the claim that a theory of meaning and/or understanding aims to provide an abstract description of linguistic competence without regard to its relevance to actual linguistic acts. 43 Davidson, “Second Person,” 259–60.

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44 See M. McGinn, Sense and Certainty; and Moyal-Sharrock, Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Both defend the thesis that Wittgensteinian certainties are not claims to knowledge. In opposition to this, Michael Williams (in conversation) argues that Wittgenstein holds that “knowledge” or “I know” are more complex than either McGinn or Moyal-Sharrock allow. Though On Certainty opens with a strong contrast between certainties and knowledge, Wittgenstein later brings out what are meant to be unproblematic cases of certain knowledge. 45 For an excellent discussion of Wittgenstein’s treatment of G.E. Moore’s proof of the external world, see Michael Williams, “Wittgenstein’s Refutation of Idealism.” Also see G.E. Moore, “A Defence of Common Sense” and “Proof of an External World,” both in Moore, Philosophical Papers. 46 History is an interesting kind of case for Wittgenstein. With this he applies the structure of the background to language games of a more specialized and culturally localizable sort. Except for mathematics which has a special place in his considerations, all other cases concern bedrock practices of a sort shared by all societies. In extending this structure to the practice of history, Wittgenstein opens the door to the possibility of cultural relativism. 47 See Stroll, Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty. 48 This is an important point since some want to assimilate the way in which a child acquires beliefs—simply in the process of growing up—as akin to “brainwashing.” But it is a mistake to assimilate initiate acquisition of belief with the coercive manipulation of belief. 49 We can see then that Wittgenstein’s conception of normative certainties and our believing them does not fit Brandom’s inferentialist account of meaning. Brandom takes the assertion as fundamental to any theory of language. And his notion of explicitation is intended to make explicit all the beliefs implicit in the acceptance of an assertion. This assumes that the best way to model a system of beliefs is as a system of sentences with different inferential connections among them. In Brandom’s case the most important of the inferential connections are those expressing the commitments and entitlements that an assertion has for the speaker, where these commitments and entitlements are themselves expressed as sentences which in turn have their own set of commitments and entitlements, and in this way they form a holistic system. This view makes Brandom a homogeneous holist. This is just how Wittgenstein does not want to think of normative certainties, their role as background to our assertions, and other linguistic acts. 50 I will not discuss the river-bed analogy, which emphasizes the familiar Wittgensteinian theme that no sharp or fixed boundary can be drawn between these certainties and empirical propositions: “It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid” (OC §96). The salient features of this analogy are the ideas that thought and action require a “channel” if they are not to become random and chaotic and that there is no eternally fixed distinction between what can be part of the channel and what flows through the channel. This analogy invites, for some unfortunately, a historicized reading of Wittgenstein. 51 See M. McGinn, Sense and Certainty for a defense of the framework interpretation; and Stroll, Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty, for a defense of the foundationalist interpretation. 52 See my “Etiology of the Obvious.”

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The problem of normative similarity 3: consciousness 268 The epistemology of subjectivity: paradox of self-knowledge 269 The ontology of subjectivity: paradox of sensation 283 Cartesian thought experiments and the expressivist view 289 Criteria, deception and the new problem of other minds 299 Wittgenstein’s treatment of mind in the second half of the Investigations (from PI §243 to the end) can be seen to parallel his treatment of language and meaning. As we shall see in the first section, the argument known as “the private language argument” (PI §§243–315) explicitly invokes the early critique of the representationalist theory of language by questioning the use of ostension in fixing the meaning of sensation-terms. This idea that ostension can fix reference is essential to the private language argument. Yet, as we saw in Chapter 3, the apparent success of ab initio baptism is the result of conflating ostensive training and ostensive definition. This conflation makes it seem that semantic norms can be derived from nothing more than an articulate sound’s or mark’s being in physical proximity to an object. But no norm, no paradigm judgment, no exemplary object can be squeezed from this combination. Recognition of this mistake domesticates reference, alerting us to the stage-setting that is required for any ostensive definition to succeed. Reminders are appropriate devices for bringing home this point. But a philosopher who is committed to a representationalist picture of the relation of thought to the world looks for a set of special names and special objects that realize the kind of connection he thinks necessary for semantic relations to exist at all. Wittgenstein’s examination of this strategy is linked to the problem of consciousness, the third problem of normative similarity: the conditions of identity and reidentification for states of consciousness, exemplified in the occurrence of sensations.

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The problem of normative similarity 3: consciousness Against the background of his critique of ostensive definition, Wittgenstein turns to the idea that “a name ought really to signify a simple” (PI §39), as though the problem with securing semantic reference results from our not looking for the solution in the right place. We ought to be looking for simple objects instead of resting content with our ordinary complex ones. The failure is a failure in our obligations to reason, a slackness in thought that is to be shunned. In putting the mistake this way, the philosopher-cum-representationalist turns from an epistemological strategy for securing the word–world link to a metaphysical strategy: the peculiarity of names and objects themselves. The indispensable connection between the earlier examination of names and the turn to consciousness at PI §243 can be seen most clearly by identifying the conflation arguments that prefigure the paradox of consciousness arguments (“the private language argument”). By identifying grammatical confusion, the conflation arguments provide critical diagnoses of the mistakes that hold fast a bewitching picture. Wittgenstein pairs these conflation arguments with paradox arguments. Only the paradox arguments can destroy the picture by showing how it is self-defeating. The conflation arguments that are relevant to this discussion occur midway between the opening Augustinian picture of language learning (PI §1) and the paradox of thought (PI §95). Against the allure of the imperative that “a name ought really to signify a simple,” Wittgenstein uses two ordinary objects in his diagnostic language-games. Each respects the two constraints on the construction of methodological language-games. They must be simple games embodying the key features of the philosophical theory in question; and they must avoid the use of proprietary terms. The language-games are: the color chart of PI §48 and the standard meter stick of PI §50, already made familiar to us. The conflation arguments using them provide a diagnosis of the confusion that keeps alive the hope of a “representationalist solution” to the word–world relation. They are paired with the two paradoxes of consciousness that are the focal point of this chapter. It is very important strategically to see that there is not just a single “private language argument.” Rather Wittgenstein gives us two distinct paradox arguments. These paradoxes of consciousness address what we might call “the epistemology of subjectivity” and “the ontology of subjectivity.” The paradox of self-knowledge, which uses the private diary language-game (PI §258), builds on the diagnosis provided by the color-chart conflation argument, directed to the representationalist’s imperative that a name must signify a simple. The second paradox argument exploits the diagnosis of the view that there is a necessary substance in the world that is the measure of reality. As will be recalled, this diagnosis uses the standard meter stick language-game. It prepares the way for the paradox of sensation, the center

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of which is the beetle-in-the-box language-game (PI §293). Together these arguments are a powerful critique of the Cartesian conception of the inner, which “discovers” the first-person perspective as a special epistemic entry into the realm of the mental, and an ontology of mental objects as a peculiar “natural kind,” intentional phenomenal objects. Descartes’ theory of ideas underwrites this unified theory of mental states. Everything from experiencing warmth to recognizing the identity of ordinary objects to contemplating God’s essence is attending to ideas.1 The contemporary bifurcation of mind into the phenomenal and intentional minds makes a significant break with the unified Cartesian theory of mind. Not only is there an explanatory gap between the neurophysiological and conscious states, but also between the intentional and phenomenal minds. Wittgenstein thinks that this second explanatory gap is the source of the paradoxes of consciousness. A further surprise is that he does not think that the first “explanatory gap” is paradoxical: PI §412. The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain-processes … Now bear in mind that the proposition which I uttered as a paradox (THIS is produced by a brain-process!) has nothing paradoxical about it. The second explanatory gap—that between intentionality and consciousness—is the background to the problem of consciousness. The paradox of self-knowledge and the paradox of sensation reveal the inner incoherence of the Cartesian picture of consciousness. One source of contradiction is found in the epistemology of subjectivity, and concerns the cognitive relation we, as subjects, have to our own sensations. The other concerns the ontology of subjectivity, in particular the characteristics the Cartesian view attributes to sensations. It is important to note that these contradictions result from the Cartesian theory’s very own explanatory “machinery.” The way the theory explains consciousness eliminates consciousness. That’s the objection.

The epistemology of subjectivity: paradox of self-knowledge Can the representationalist theory of consciousness succeed where a representationalist theory of language fails? Success will turn on securing a referential bond between word and mental state or object, without the need for stage-setting or training in a technique or background abilities. The “private language” passages (roughly PI §§243–315) aim to disclose the self-defeating “machinery” of the Cartesian picture. These passages begin with a critical examination of the Cartesian account of the epistemology of subjectivity. The fact that the contents of consciousness are modeled on bodily sensation seems to protect experience from Wittgenstein’s earlier 269

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stage-setting and rule-following arguments. No surrounding context, no range of background beliefs, no particular skill or technique is required for experiencing a sensation or, by extension, for visual or other forms of sensory experience. Feeling a pain or “experiencing red” is thus unlike identifying a slab, using a yardstick, or creating a color chart. Yet the paradox of self-knowledge shows that without stage-setting of some sort or mastery of techniques, the notion of knowing anything is bankrupt. In setting standards for correct use, “mental” objects do no better than the ordinary objects that we have already seen to fail. As we shall see, their deficiencies are covered by the “discovery” of special properties of the mind. But they are only covered up, not removed. Thus, the Cartesian theory stumbles over its own version of the problem of normative similarity. The conflation argument: PI §§48–9 As with the first two problems of normative similarity, Wittgenstein constructs a language-game that is tailored to satisfy the requirements of the philosophical theory under scrutiny. This language-game is that of starting and keeping a special kind of diary. This diary is special in that no one but the diarist can read it, that is, can see the marks as meaningful. The game is initiated by the diarist’s naming a particular experience or sensation “s.” The subject can go on to inscribe the name “s” whenever she has a s subsequent to the initial baptism. Here we have a paradigm of the representationalist demand for a name–named relation holding between simple sign and simple object. The sign is simple because the subject introduces it as only the name for the sensation. The sensation is simple because it can only be named, not described: a rather small circle but one that is viewed positively by the mental representationalist.2 This language-game meets the conditions specified by the Cartesian theory of consciousness without using proprietary terms of the theory itself. It does not use the array of technical terms associated with discussion of the subjectivity of mind, beginning with “subjectivity” and including “privileged access,” “incorrigibility,” “incommunicability,” “epistemic transparency” or even “representation.” If the diary game can be successfully played, then neither the stage-setting essential to ostensive definition nor the mastery of techniques acquired during initiate learning is exploited in identifying the simple elements of a game. Neither public ostensive explanation nor mastery of social techniques is required for recognizing a sensation. Because only the one who baptizes the sensation can understand the concept expressed by “s,” the diary is semantically private. It is the burden of the critic, it would seem, to show that such private definitions require the public stage-setting or shared learned mastery of techniques that language in general requires. The special features of consciousness “discovered” by the Cartesian seem to avoid the problems that hobbled the representationalist theory of language.3 270

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But if escaping these problems comes at the cost of self-defeating contradiction, then no matter how tightly the circle is drawn, the cause is lost. The idea that sensations or sensory experiences can constitute the meanings of the terms of a private language needs explicating, for contrary to the description just given, it is difficult to understand how a red flash, tickle, or pain could be a meaning. We can grasp that there is a correlation (not a language-game) between sensation-name and sensation—indeed it is generally agreed that our sensory systems are detection systems; that is, the presence of certain environmental properties or bodily states is correlated with the occurrence of certain sensory states. So we can grasp how the occurrence of a sensation might trigger a disposition to say (or think) “s.” But the private diary game is not simply the instantiation of a detection system: “s” only when s. Sensory systems are detection systems only when (a) there is a general correlation between an environmental event and sensation, but not when there is an initiating act that starts the system off and sets the standard for membership in the generalization that obtains (or not);4 and (b) there is a linkage between input and output, the machinery of which we might investigate further. By contrast, the private diarist is one who puts in place a semantic rule for the use of the symbol “s” in relation to mental occurrences of the s-type, such that the correlation holds subsequent to this baptism. Evidence for such a mechanism is ruled out by the defining features of the private diary. The rule can only be put into place by baptism, that is, by ostensive definition. Mental baptisms must therefore be able to do what public linguistic baptisms cannot. Private rules, it must be urged, can be introduced by directly associating a symbol with an experience, provided that the symbol is a simple name and the experience a simple mental object. If this is allowed, the baptism works without stage-setting or technique by virtue of the peculiar metaphysical properties of both name and sensation. On this view, the metaphysics of sensation, rather than the epistemology of sensation with its implied background cognitive competence, provides the stage-setting. Ostensive definition is usually seen as solving an epistemological problem (how do we know what “s” means?) rather than a metaphysical problem (what are the properties of “s” and s that permit, or perhaps necessitate, their standing in a name–named relation). Whether our knowledge of experience is incorrigible or the result of privileged access is of secondary importance to a sensation’s being a metaphysical simple. This highlights the importance of the conflation arguments of 48 and 50. So, we should revisit these arguments. How does the confusion made by the advocate of the representationalist theory of language in pursuing a principled distinction between what is simple and what is complex contribute to the private diary argument? Recall that, in PI §48, Wittgenstein introduces an ordered set of nine squares, each being colored red, black, green or white. The letters “R,” “B,” “G” and “W” are used to designate correspondingly colored squares. The question is: what 271

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counts as the simple elements in this game? The natural answer is: the colored squares are the named elements. We can write strings of letters that say that the squares in that set are ordered and colored in a particular way. Wittgenstein’s example is the sentence “RRBGGGRWW.” He tells us: “Here the sentence is a complex of names, to which corresponds a complex of elements. The primary elements are the coloured squares. ‘But are these simple?’—I do not know what else you would have me call ‘the simples,’ what would be more natural in this language-game?” (PI §48; italics mine) What error lurks in this innocuous looking case? In his diagnosis, Wittgenstein begins by reminding us that there are different ways of identifying the simple elements in the game: “But under other circumstances I should call a monochrome square, ‘composite,’ consisting perhaps of two rectangles, or of the elements of colour and shape” (PI §48). What is needed to respond to the philosophical demand for metaphysical simplicity is something absolutely simple, for which no change in circumstances or associated beliefs can affect its status as simple. The apparent autonomy of our natural response—that we seem not to draw on other sources of knowledge in identifying a red square as a simple object—opens our response to being reconstrued in epistemologically inflated terms. Our natural response, in its immediacy and certainty, is taken to be a special kind of naming, one fitted to identifying simple objects. The advocate of the Cartesian theory takes this error of identifying a natural response with an inflated epistemological claim for a “philosophical discovery,” the discovery of what I shall call, “true naming.” The objects of true naming can only be named (cf. PI §49). Two conflations are implicated in what we take to be the obvious simples in this language-game. The first and most serious confuses our natural reaction in the situation with identifying absolute simplicity. The second aims at the distinction between naming and describing (or predicating). The Cartesian conflates, or fails to keep distinct, two ways of construing our “natural response” to the color chart. Our natural response to the color chart identifies the colored squares as the simple components. First, in learning the language-game for colors, our natural reactions are preconditions for successful training. They do not involve any cognitive baggage in the form of inference, evidence or holistic weighing. As such they are part of the background for linguistic competence in the use of color-words. These reactions make initiate learning possible. Once the novice is fully competent, that is, is acculturated, the background that made this possible induces a sense of the obvious—what is simple (in this language-game)—and fades from view. The primitive reaction is identified with our linguistically informed response to what is obvious, which is taken—mistakenly by the Cartesian—as a window onto the foundation of the practice. Social acculturation renders the subject autonomous in recognizing colors, and so confident that he is identifying the simple elements independently of anything or anyone else. As an autonomous agent, he thinks he can keep the private 272

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diary as imagined. His natural response to the color chart, in its immediacy and certainty, is derived from his primitive natural reaction and is taken to name an absolute simple. The natural or obvious reaction to the question, once again, what are the simple elements of the game? is taken to reveal our capacities for true naming. Our method for identifying simple objects is, for metaphysical reasons, inflated in its epistemological properties. It is our need for metaphysical simples that supports the special epistemic powers of true names, and not the other way around. This need is itself the need for certainty. Certainty cannot be eliminated from our lives, but it can be distorted or mistaken for other things (like absolute simples). The confusions concerning names and simples play a critical preparatory role in our understanding of private ostension. The search for what is metaphysically simple is for that which cannot be described, but only named. If it could be described, then it could share its properties with other things and thus would reveal its factual structure, a structure that is unavoidably complex. If the squares of the language-game are the simples, then “R,” e.g., must name the red-square element. If “R” is a predicate expression, then “R” does not name the element; it describes the element. It says that the element is red. That propositional content of the predication reveals factual complexity. This leads to the second conflation: naming and describing (predicating) are collapsed. But Wittgenstein insists that “naming is a preparation for description. Naming is so far not a move in the language-game” (PI §49). Making the distinction between “R” as a name and “R” as a predicate reveals two allied mistakes. The conflation of naming and making a move in the game, of setting a standard and using the standard, is of the same kind as taking our natural response (using an expression) as epistemologically suited to recognizing simplicity itself (true naming). True naming derives from our having conflated a natural response, in its immediacy and certainty, with what is absolutely or inherently simple. Whether one considers true naming a confused idea or a profound discovery, it is clear that the epistemic properties of true naming are shaped by the metaphysical demands for simplicity rather than by the cognitive abilities of the one who names. Our natural reactions, shaped through learning, are replaced with the “discovery” of a new epistemic principle, that of privileged access to simple incommunicable objects. Privileged access embodies the second conflation, that between naming and describing. Conflation here is seen to be what is special about privileged access. Privileged access can do what ordinary ways of knowing cannot. The private diary game is supposed to illustrate the relation between sensation-terms and sensations, using the “discovery” of true names. The true naming relation between signs and sensations supports a theory of privileged access. To name a sensation (the simples of consciousness), the subject must have an access that is appropriate to sensations, that is, access that respects 273

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the requirements of true naming. True naming is immediate and certain, and wholly independent of auxiliary factors. Background factors like stage-setting (required for ordinary ostensive definition) or mastery of techniques (a mastery acquired through training) or inferential embedding are irrelevant to true naming. Securing a name for a simple object must be cognitively encapsulated.5 The diary game meets this description. Methodologically, the diary game is the perfect tool for examining the picture of mind as consisting of a self directly aware of the mental states that constitute its contents of consciousness. The theory of privileged access is a hypothesis constructed to meet the prescription “a name ought really to signify a simple” (PI §39; my italics). The diary game is very simple (PI §258). The diarist names a particular sensation he currently undergoes, and then undertakes to keep a record of occurrences of that same sensation. Wittgenstein insists that naming is preparation for description. But the private diarist’s naming is not like this. Such a shift would compromise the foundational work to be done by naming as the sole creator of meaning. So the act of naming must be taken both to secure a naming relation between sign and mental state and to generate a rule or method for applying that same sign (as name) to further sensations identical to the baptismal sensation. It is irrelevant, from the representationalist point of view, whether subsequent occurrences are reoccurrences of the ur-sensation or occurrences of ontologically distinct and yet qualitatively identical s’s. This is the way the representationalist must treat the apparently distinct linguistic acts of naming and describing. It is crucial to the explanatory work that is done by naming that the semantic relation between particular uses of the sign “s” and particular sensations s be the same whichever ontology obtains. The explanatory gain promised by the appeal to true naming exploits the impossibility of distinguishing name and predicate, a prosaic distinction irrelevant to true naming. Pace Wittgenstein, the Cartesian must claim eliding the distinction is not a confusion but the fundamental source of semantic normativity. True naming will explain the distinction between “is right” and “seems right” for occasions on which the diarist writes an “s” in her diary. The cost of using true names to explain this normative contrast is that the semantic guarantee linking word to the world is accessible only to the diarist. To meet the special requirements of naming s “s” and renaming only s or other s’s “s,” the sensation must be indescribable and so incommunicable. The dispute between the diarist and Wittgenstein is whether it is possible to have a language-game initiated by naming indescribable objects. Wittgenstein argues that such a game results in “paradox: … whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right’” (PI §258). By eliding name and descriptor in the interests of identifying absolute simples, true naming renders impossible the very distinction it is supposed to explain. But we have not yet seen the full scope of representationalist confusions that render such recognition impossible. That 274

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is to come with the paradox of self-knowledge and finally the paradox of sensation. Paradox of self-knowledge: PI §258 We begin by noting that there is no problem with the idea of an individual, who has mastered language, keeping a diary of the occurrences of various sensations. Someone who gets headaches repeatedly might well keep a diary to try to discover the cause. There is nothing incommunicable about this; one can imagine her keeping it in consultation with her doctor who has asked her to become self-conscious about when these headaches occur. But in doing so the subject avails herself of all manner of stage-setting: that she is going to keep track of headaches of a certain kind for the purpose of consulting with her doctor; that the headaches are so severe that she must lie down in a darkened room; that the slightest movement causes her to wince. The very way of describing the project shows how the stage is set (cf. PI §261). The representationalist—here the Cartesian—is concerned to break all these ordinary connections in order to display the primary semantic connection between true name and sensation. All other connections are inessential.6 For the private diarist, no other context is required for the baptismal act to secure the naming relation. There is a cost to achieving this metaphysical insulation. For example, children cannot be taught the language of sensation. We must suppose, as Wittgenstein says, that the child is a genius and can invent the sensation language herself (PI §257). Wittgenstein’s sardonic way of putting the point—that far from being the “easiest” thing to do,7 naming is the most difficult, indeed, impossible act to perform—foreshadows the paradox to come. From the Cartesian representationalist perspective, stagesetting, the acquired mastery of techniques, the certainties of mental life are all so much clutter, obscuring the basic semantic connection between name and sensation, a connection realized through each individual’s private access to a realm isolated from the world. We are all private diarists, isolated from the world but secure in our special semantic relation to a set of sensations. So far, nothing has been said that addresses the subject’s relation to the semantic relation holding between names and sensations. The standard setting in which the subject names a sensation is subject to two constraints. The first is that it cannot put in place a mere detection system. The subject consciously baptizes a sensation with a name. The future relation between name and sensation is fixed at that time. No generalization of the kind necessary to underwrite detection systems is required. Secondly, the relation holding between names and sensations is normative. A standard is set. Subsequent to this standard setting there are correct and incorrect ways to use the name. This normative act of naming fixes the contrast between “is right” and “seems right.” The explanation of the semantic relation must be able to accommodate the subject’s going wrong. 275

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Wittgenstein uses the private diary argument to show that the explanatory machinery of true naming fails on both counts. The representationalist solution to the first problem—how to relate the subject to the name practice— provides a piece of the machinery that is missing in a mere detection system: the “discovery” of privileged access. Privileged access allows a subject to consciously inaugurate a semantic relation by an original act of naming. This should enable her to determine when it only seems to her that she is having a sensation. Yet, Wittgenstein argues, it is precisely privileged access that eliminates the distinction between “is right” and “seems right.” The point of Wittgenstein’s private diary argument is to show that the notion of consistently applying an expression of a private language, a true name, is contentless because no standard is set in the first place, the first place being the act of naming itself. Thus, the target of the private diary argument is the idea that the subject can baptize a sensation in virtue of having that sensation.8 Section 49 draws out the general conclusion that naming and describing are conflated. True names are not descriptions but they must do the work of descriptions. This conflation lies behind both the epistemic relation of privileged access and the consequence of the theory of private naming, that the diary names cannot communicate anything to others. This is a loss, according to the Cartesian, but an acceptable one, the cost of finding a way to accommodate the peculiar content of the name– named relation. So, we must ask, why doesn’t the baptismal act of naming set a sample, at least for the subject, the beneficiary of her special epistemological relation to her own sensations? A definition surely serves to establish the meaning of a sign.—Well, that is done precisely by the concentration of my attention; for in this way I impress on myself the connexion between the sign and the sensation.—But “I impress it on myself” can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connexion right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. (PI §258; my emphasis) This is why Wittgenstein describes the baptismal act as taking on the aura of an idle ceremony. Because private ostension cuts all links with the stage-setting that alone would show the place of the expression in a practice, the private diarist cannot make the normative distinction between “is right” and “seems right.” It is not just that the diarist is handicapped by her isolation: it is that she does not have the resources to draw any normative distinction. So far as true naming is concerned, “seems to be an s” does just as well as “is an s.” The diarist, in using the special name/descriptor content, cannot but find s’s where it strikes her that there are s’s. The diarist can only “name” a sensation by writing down the mark “s” whenever she is inclined to do so. 276

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None of the usual consequences of meaning something follow. So we can see now that the reason that the content of a private language is incommunicable to others is that it is incommunicable to the subject herself. Wittgenstein puts the point this way: “in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound” (PI §261). Inarticulate sound-making is where the private diarist starts and ends. The collapse of private ostension into inarticulate sound just is the phenomenology of eliminating a normative contrast. Here is another way to describe the paradoxical consequences of the theory of true names and privileged access. The full weight of our problem comes with the special epistemology of subjectivity, an epistemology designed to answer the metaphysical problem of finding mental simples. Subjective (true) names can only name subjective simples. These simples, being ontologically subjective, are seemings. Thus, the subject names seemings. The metaphysical characteristics of seemings, that they are absolutely simple and so indescribable, ensure that true naming does not allow for distinguishing “is right” from “seems right.” No more can the special epistemology of the true names allow for the difference. For the Cartesian, this is not seen as a problem but as the discovery of a special kind of knowledge, involving incorrigible awareness. If it allowed for a substantive difference between uses that are right and uses that seem to be right, it wouldn’t be a name and so wouldn’t inherit the special epistemology that defines true subjective names. The tight circle we saw earlier between names and simples becomes a stranglehold on names and their subjective simples. This highlights the contrast with the natural and spontaneous recognitional capacities of the trained subject, a player in a non-private game.9 Training in the exercise of these capacities is rooted in our natural, that is, primitive, sensitivities to certain objects and properties. These natural primitive reactions to the world are exploited in training, the upshot of which is the recognition of what is obvious. What looks like a virtue of the Cartesian view—an epistemology that cannot fail to relate names to simples—becomes paradoxical when we consider the consequences of this view. No distinction can be drawn, at the baptismal moment or subsequently, between “is right” and “seems right.” To apply a name to a sensation that differed from the baptismal object would be a failure to name and a failure to exercise special access to the object. To allow room for this normative distinction is to lose the logical space for true names (whose epistemology guarantees connection to a subjective simple) and with it the special explanation of the representational relation between names and sensations. So the special explanation of the representational relation between “s” and s results in eliminating the normative relation. Yet it was by providing the explanation of normativity that the representationalist hopes were placed on subjective ostension. The explanatory failure of private languages is camouflaged by the special epistemology shaped to meet the metaphysical demands of the name–named relation. The elimination of 277

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any normative contrast is presented as the “success” of privileged access. Our knowledge of our subjective states is said to be “infallible.” But we now can see that the real “meaning” of privileged access is not providing infallible knowledge, but the elimination of normative contrast, the very thing the epistemology of subjectivity was supposed to explain. This is the paradox of self-knowledge.10 Interim: memory and “subjective justification” Despite the criticism of inner ostension as an idle ceremony, its allure remains great, guaranteed by the apparent specialness of mental phenomena. The ontology of subjectivity emerges as the target of the next two stages of the private language passages. The specialness of sensations is expressed early on by Wittgenstein’s interlocutor who states that “once you know what the word stands for, you understand it, you know its whole use” (PI §264). This passage expresses a confused understanding of the relation between the means of representation (word) and what is represented (the represented object or known object). This confusion, or as some might think of it, this creation of a new philosophical entity, must be disentangled in the second two stages of Wittgenstein’s diagnostic examination of the subjective “language” of consciousness. In the middle stage of the private language passages, Wittgenstein examines true naming from the side of the supposed epistemic transparency of the mental state that constitutes the exemplary experience, a transparency that is preserved in the memory of that experience. The suggestion is that the mental object, in virtue of being transparently known, does set a standard for the correct use of “s” provided that it is preserved in memory. This additional complexity, the representationalist might hold, is sufficient to warrant the claim that the subject’s use of “s” involves more than the mere inclination to say “s” from time to time. There is a “subjective justification” for saying “s” that relieves the private diarist from the charge of arbitrariness on the occasions when she writes “s.” She has, then, a genuine judgment of sameness, secured by memory, which is the minimum required for engaging in a language-game. She has overcome the tyranny of her inclinations of the present moment, for she has embedded the baptism (writing “s” now) in an inferential setting (if baptismal “s” earlier and “s” now, then s-now is identical to s-earlier), simple but nonetheless rich enough to provide a normative structuring for the use of “s.” Memory secures that later tokenings of “s” are the same as the baptismal tokening of “s.” Inferences of identity are permitted, where “seems identical” can be distinguished from “is identical,” by relying on memory to distinguish them. Memory must be the mediating state that warrants the inference from s now to “s” now by way of “s is the same as s earlier.” One can think of Wittgenstein’s next question as asking whether the apparent normative complexity allowed by the appeal to memory (or the 278

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memory image) is epistemic in nature. He objects that such a “subjective justification” of memory is illusory. Here is what he says at PI §265: Let us imagine a table (something like a dictionary) that exists only in our imagination. A dictionary can be used to justify the translation of a word X by a word Y. But are we to call it a justification if such a table is to be looked up only in the imagination?—“Well, yes; then it is a subjective justification.”—But justification consists in appealing to something independent.—“But surely I can appeal from one memory to another. For example, I don’t know if I have remembered the time of departure of a train right and to check it I call to mind how a page of the time-table looked. Isn’t it the same here?”—No; for this process has got to produce a memory which is actually correct. If the mental image of the time-table could not itself be tested for correctness, how could it confirm the correctness of the first memory? As others have noted, in this passage Wittgenstein seems to abandon his usual modes of argument and to endorse a general skeptical argument about the reliability of memory.11 Wittgenstein seems to claim that a public timetable will do the job of determining whether one has remembered the time of departure in a way that memory cannot, that memory is inherently unreliable. But the argument is not a general indictment of memory. Rather it targets the idea that personal memory must have a foundational authority if it is to play the justificatory role assigned it. Wittgenstein’s first discussion of memory occurs much earlier at PI §56— just after the two conflation arguments of 48 and 50 that we are discussing in this chapter, and it is part of Wittgenstein’s examination of the search for indestructible simples to provide the unchanging referents of names. PI §56 asks the reader to consider looking to memory to do the work the indestructible objects were to do: But what if no such sample is part of the language, and we bear in mind the colour (for instance) that a word stands for?—“And if we bear it in mind thus it comes before our mind’s eye when we utter the word. So, if it is always supposed to be possible for us to remember it, it must be in itself indestructible.”—But what do we regard as the criterion for remembering it right?—When we work with a sample instead of our memory there are circumstances in which we say that the sample has changed colour and we judge of this by memory. But can we not sometimes speak of a darkening (for example) of our memory-image? Aren’t we as much at the mercy of memory as of a sample? (For someone might feel like saying: “If we had no memory we should be at the mercy of a 279

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sample.”) … Suppose that the colour struck you as brighter on one day than on another; would you not sometimes say: “I must be wrong, the colour is certainly the same as yesterday”? This shows that we do not always resort to what memory tells us as the verdict of the highest court of appeal. We can see the striking similarity between PI §56 and §265—both raise the issue of appealing to memory as a way of justifying the use of a word; both concern the role of the memory-image as a means of representation (or standard for correctness); both are preceded by a discussion of the view that the referent of a word is its meaning, a view which gives pre-eminence to the role of ostensive definition. Thus, there is reason to believe that an examination of PI §56 may well shed light on PI §265. Paradigmatic objects—samples—acquire their normative status in virtue of the way in which they are used in language-games, not in virtue of any peculiar properties intrinsic to the objects themselves. To be sure, certain material properties may be required if the object is to play a paradigmatic role: the rigidity of a metal bar or the smooth surface of a piece of cardboard is as necessary to these objects acquiring normative status as our own physical capabilities (having the dexterity to pick up and hold metal rods or the visual sensitivity to a certain range within the color band). But physical properties are not sufficient for normative status. This has led some philosophers to search for paradigms of a non-physical sort. Public samples like metal bars and sheets of colored cardboard, it would seem, can only acquire their normative role derivatively. “Original meaning” must therefore derive from something different. Many hold that the stable source of meaning is, surprisingly, the mind and in particular memory. I say “surprisingly” because the stability of mind and memory requires the support of the public and social environment. This is an empirical point but apt in a context distinguishing material properties and normative role. The memory-image, Wittgenstein urges, is at the very least in no better an epistemic position than ordinary public objects. He ends PI §56 with the claim that “we do not always resort to what memory tells us as the verdict of the highest court of appeal,” thus concluding with the reminder that memory is one resource among others. The arguement of PI §265 complements that of PI §56: if one tries to make personal memory the highest court of appeal—that is, if one tries to make memory the sole resource for securing a normative role for a mental state—the memory-image becomes epistemically irrelevant. The mistake was not in misidentifying which objects could play the privileged role of anchoring ostensive definition (memory-images rather than cardboard samples), but in believing that there must be epistemically privileged objects at all, a “highest court of appeal,” and that the memoryimage has special properties that enable it to occupy this epistemic position. In truth, there is no sole source of authority, still less a personal one. 280

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The difficulty with the memory-image as a privileged means of representation is not a question of the general reliability of memory (a skeptical argument), but the futile search for that which could secure the “meaning” or content allegedly found in the baptismal object itself. To see Wittgenstein’s argument more clearly, it is worth while presenting two arguments that it can be confused with. The first, epistemological argument, is that any justificatory appeal to memory must itself be justified. This line of thought initiates a classic skeptical regress. This is not Wittgenstein’s argument. The second is Plato’s explanatory regress, the Third Man argument. According to this, the explanatory work that memory supplies in our judging, say, that this is a duck, itself needs explaining for the same reason. If there is a problem explaining why the paradigm-duck and later-duck are both ducks, such that we need memory to link the two, then there is a problem with how the paradigm-duck, the later-duck, and the remembered duck are all similar. Wittgenstein builds on this Platonic argument. Memory of the baptismal object is held to create the logical space for the distinction between “is right” and “seems right”—the space in which the memory-image of the baptismal object is to be compared with some current mental state which will be in accord with that memory-image, that is, similar to that memory-image, or not. But this way of creating normative space for claiming a distinction between “is right” and “seems right” creates a slippery slope. The memory-image itself must be correct, that is, it must be similar to the baptismal object, say a duck, if it is to measure subsequent experience, other ducks. So we must explain why a judgment subsequent to fixing the baptismal object is correct (or not). The explanation for why paradigm-duck and later-duck are both to be called “ducks” is that memory of the paradigm duck is used to measure the creature at hand. In this context, to measure the creature is to note the similarity between memory and current experience. The problem arises because if we need the memory-image to link the baptismal object and the later-duck (in order to establish the similarity between baptismal-duck and later-duck), then we need an explanation for the similarity between the baptismal-duck, the later-duck and the memory-duck. The regress is initiated. The peculiar character of this regress is that it concerns the content of fixing a standard, remembering that standard, and using it to measure the world subsequent to the baptism itself. This is not just the ordinary regress of justifications; but rather the peculiar regress initiated by appeal to memory. It is the content of the memory that is to justify subsequent uses of “s.” The content of the memory that is to justify the first subsequent judgment is that same content of the paradigm-object set by baptism. The regress of memories is forced by the need to preserve the content from one memory to the next. Thus, the justificatory work to be done by memory, namely, to preserve the baptismal object as the norm for the use of “s,” is an illusion. Memory (of the sort 281

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being appealed to) cannot iterate in any interesting or informative way: “as if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true” (PI §265). The illusion is that of creating a standard in the first place. That failure cannot be remedied by memory because there is nothing to preserve. The argument of PI §265 can then build on that of PI §56: only with connection to other dimensions of a human life can memory play a role in conserving meaning over time. Only then are acts of remembering available as a check, and then memory is neither especially vulnerable nor especially strong in credentialing the use of an expression. In attempting to characterize the memory-image as privileged, the proponents of private languages strip away the very context that would enable the memory-image to function as a representation. Wittgenstein’s point, once again, is not that memory is especially vulnerable, but that the memory-image, when so isolated from any context, cannot function as a means of representation whereby a standard of correctness is preserved. It is not just that the rememberer cannot distinguish a memory-image from a passing image, but that there is no ontological distinction between memory-image and passing image. The “memory” image does not carry this special role within itself, as it were, but only in a context of use. And that means that there is the rememberer, and the requirements that enable that person to remember. It is for this reason that justification of the memory-image is either empty or a repetitive chain of episodes that can reach no further than the memory to be justified. The lost baptismal object remains lost. If we artificially isolate the memory-image, as we must if it is to help the private diarist, and the role it is to play in understanding and justification, not only is it no stronger than other resources for securing normative practices, it cannot play the role of representation at all. The memory-image must be understood in relation to the phenomenon of remembering. And remembering of the sort at stake here, for Wittgenstein, is not an ineluctable inner mental process, but the exercise of an acquired intentional disposition that stands in complex inferential connections to other beliefs, experiences and actions. In brief, the metaphysical powers attributed to the public object or to the mental image reflect, on Wittgenstein’s view, our training into techniques of using words in connection with the public object or training into a language-game of remembering, where such training relies both on our shared reactions and our established social custom. Thus, the lesson of PI §56 was forgotten in the dreamlike role that memory was thought to play in the diarist’s life. The arguments of the first two stages point to the same general conclusion: Private namings and rememberings eliminate normative distinctions. And in so doing, they reveal that the private “namings” and the “rememberings” and their “known objects” are but the fantasia of a vivid 282

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imagination that pretends to the metaphysical isolation required for such private events. Public practices are truly fundamental here. Without inferential embedding and general linguistic mastery, ostensive definition is futile gesturing. Without a public practice and a technique of use, a “sample” is a meaningless piece of cardboard or a passing image. The stage-setting and background techniques required for understanding and representation preclude the possibility of a private language, even for a child-genius.

The ontology of subjectivity: paradox of sensation The reply to the arguments considered so far will be that they leave out the most important thing, namely, the experience itself. Even if the private object could not itself be the means of representation, nonetheless its occurrence is the point of our language-games of consciousness. So, philosophers are drawn to the idea that a private language is possible in a modified sense. This involves the idea that the language of sensation has the dual dimensions of a Fregean semantic theory. The referent of sensation talk is the sensation, and its sense is determined by the normal public and social criteria: What am I to say about the word “red”?—that it means something “confronting us all” and that everyone should really have another word, besides this one, to mean his own sensation of red? Or is it like this; the word “red” means something known to everyone; and in addition, for each person, it means something known only to him? (or perhaps rather: it refers to something known only to him). (PI §273) To introduce this modified sensation language is to remystify the notion of “reference.” This mystification is revealed first by the conflation argument that prepares the way for the paradox of sensation. In this pair of arguments, the conflation argument shows how sensation is to be taken as the measure of mind, or at least of consciousness; and the paradox argument shows that sensation so construed is irrelevant to life: Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle.” No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.— … —But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language?—If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something. (PI §293; italics in original) This simple language-game reveals the self-defeating character of the explanatory work to be done by this private referring. Before turning to the details 283

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of this argument-pair, we can note certain important parallels with the work done by the builders game. The builders game is a simple language-game but one displaying primitive normativity. It is used to combat a philosophical view of reference as semantically fundamental. Wittgenstein’s point in using a simple normative practice is that everything that is relevant to a semantics of reference is on view here. To accept the critique is to domesticate reference. The idea of a private language brings in reference once again, mystifying it in the explanatory work assigned it, and undoing what we have already learned. Conflation argument: PI §50 To understand how the beetle-in-the-box argument can show that the something in the box might just as well be nothing, in a convincing way, we need to remind ourselves of the conflation argument given at PI §50.12 This argument continues the critical examination of the claim that true names and absolute simples are needed for the possibility of language. PI §50 examines the claim, made in the Tractatus, that there must be something to which “we can attribute neither being nor non-being” (cf. TLP 2.021 and 2.0271). These are the indestructible simple elements, the necessary metaphysical foundation of reality. Like the meter stick, there is one thing of which it is true that it is neither one meter long nor not one meter long. This is “true” of the standard meter stick because it is the standard. The key to dissolving any puzzlement is to recognize that saying this is “not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a metre-rule.” This much has already been discussed. There is a further diagnostic point. Let us consider Wittgenstein’s opening comment on the ontology of simple elements in the Tractatus: “if everything that we call ‘being’ and ‘non-being’ consists in the existence and non-existence of connexions between elements, it makes no sense to speak of an element’s being (non-being)” (PI §50). The analogy with the meter stick is to help diagnose the error that is made: to confuse a normative role with categorical properties. In the Tractatus, this is to make the simple objects (the elements) the measure of reality: “Objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot be composite” (TLP 2.021). The normative role of objects is taken for a metaphysical feature: “If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true” (TLP 2.2011). Simple objects are the measure of whether a proposition is true or not. It’s neither true nor false that objects subsist. It’s neither true nor false that the standard meter stick is one meter long. Each is the standard for its respective domain. The sentences beginning with “it is neither true nor false” are attempts to treat the normative role as a peculiar property of the object qua standard. In each case, the normative role is mistaken for a metaphysical essence of the object or stick.13 284

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Paradox of sensation: beetle-in-the-box The modified private language arguement acknowledges the force of the arguments against semantic atomism and arguments against the idea that there could be private unteachable meanings preserved in memory. The search for a special class of names, true names that can designate only simple objects, is given up in favor of allowing sensation-talk greater semantic complexity. This modified language allows our sensation-talk to have a public and socially viable use while insisting on a private referent for the term. To quote PI §273 again: Or is it like this; the word “red” means something known to everyone; and in addition, for each person, it means something known only to him? (or perhaps rather: it refers to something known only to him). (PI §273) What Wittgenstein attempts to show (PI §§270–315) is that this appeal to the object of private reference, in a context of public use, is as vacuous as the appeal to private knowing: “a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism” (PI §271). To show that the private referent is “not part of the mechanism,” he must show that it is rooted in a theory of sensations that guarantees their irrelevance. The sensation as idle wheel is the ontological mirror of the inarticulate private diarist (cf. PI §261). The isolated subject aims to name sensations for herself alone. Her entries only mime those of a real diary, her inarticulateness mistaken for metaphysical depth. Now we find Wittgenstein concerned with a new pretense, that of a subject whose participation in the public practice of sensation-talk is given an illusory anchor in something that need not even exist. The modified explanation is as self-defeating as the private diary, but for different reasons. Wittgenstein opens his critical examination of the ontology of subjectivity by suggesting that the philosophical appeal to reference provides no explanatory leverage on the problem of normative similarity: Of course, saying that the word “red” “refers to” instead of “means” something private does not help us in the least to grasp its function; but it is the more psychologically apt expression for a particular experience in doing philosophy. It is as if when I uttered the word I cast a sidelong glance at the private sensation, as it were in order to say to myself: I know all right what I mean by it. (PI §274) Wittgenstein describes a simple language-game that captures the essential features of the modified theory. In PI §293, we are asked to consider a

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language-game in which the word “beetle” refers to something accessible to the subject alone while nonetheless having a public use or sense: Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle.” No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.—But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language?—If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something; for the box might even be empty.—No, one can “divide through” by the thing in the box, it cancels out, whatever it is. That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of “object and designation” the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant. Some might interpret Wittgenstein as endorsing the view that the experience of pain “drops out as irrelevant.” It might be thought that this expresses his own view of pain. But it is not Wittgenstein’s view of consciousness that threatens to eliminate sensations: it is the Cartesian theory. On the view we are now considering, experiences are communicable, in that there is a shared public language of sensation, while remaining essentially private. Reference to a private subjective entity14 is part of the language-game of sensation. As Wittgenstein’s interlocutor puts it, “‘But you will surely admit that there is a difference between pain-behaviour accompanied by pain and pain-behaviour without any pain?’—Admit it? ‘What greater difference could there be’” (PI §304). The “paradox” of this modified theory of sensation, as Wittgenstein calls it at PI §304, is that in giving pre-eminence to sensation qua subjective object as that which explains the difference between being in pain and not being in pain, the theorist eliminates any explanatory role for sensation. The “beetle in the box” argument displays this paradox of sensation. The beetle–“beetle” relationship fits the “object and designation” model of linguistic usage, while the language-game using the word “beetle” is constrained by our natural reactions under varying circumstances. This is the modified picture of a private language. The private beetle–“beetle” relationship is embedded in a larger public practice. The two are accommodated in a broadly Fregean manner: the sense of the sentence in which “beetle” is embedded is given in criteriological terms while the referent of the word is beetle. This model makes two demands on the beetle. The first is ontological: the beetle is whatever occupies the box. It is in virtue of its occupying the box 286

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that utterances of “beetle” refer to the beetle. Second, the beetle, in its very existence, is the substance of the box playing a role analogous to that of the simple objects of the Tractatus. As we saw just above, simple objects are the substance of reality. Their role as the measure of what is sayable (a normative role) was confusedly “explained” by their having special metaphysical properties. The beetle-in-the-box argument exploits a similar confusion in showing the self-defeating character of the modified view. Both demands contribute to solving the problem of normative similarity for sensations, the problem of fixing identity conditions for states of consciousness. The beetle solves this problem just by being. Like the simple objects of the Tractatus, the beetle is the substance of subjective reality and so the content of sensation-talk. The beetle is pure subjectivity, which is the measure, then, of anything’s being conscious. We can see then that an ontological solution, not an epistemological one, is being sought for this problem. This isn’t even about our privileged access to the contents of the box, though we do have that. Rather it is about the presence or absence of the beetle, a presence that secures an ontological anchor for the language-game of sensation. Indeed to play this role it may not even be necessary for the subject to look inside his box. The important theoretical point is that the content of our box owes nothing to the clutter of the social public context of “beetle” talk. On analogy with the picture of true names referring to simple objects, the term “beetle” refers to a subjective simple, the beetle. And as we saw with the notion of simple objects, to be the necessary substance of the world is to be the ultimate measure of all that is real. That is what it is to be the substance of reality. So too for the “beetle”–beetle relation. Sensation, as the ultimate substance of consciousness, and so mind, must itself be a subjective reality that cannot be measured mentally, because it is the subjective measure of consciousness. Just as simple objects require special metaphysical properties (their internal essence), which secures their role as substance, so sensations require special metaphysical properties, a translucent selfidentifying subjectivity. The special metaphysical properties attributed to simple objects (their intrinsic combinatorial powers) and to sensations (intrinsically self-illuminating states) are what determine their fitness to play a normative, standard-setting role. The ontological subjectivity imposed upon the beetle as the ultimate measure of consciousness protects the beetle from itself being measured (just as the meter stick cannot itself be measured for length in meters). A consequence of this is that each beetle in measuring consciousness is as unique as the meter stick is unique in measuring one meter. It is vital for the utility of the meter stick that its secondary empirical properties render it recognizable and applicable under many different circumstances. This is just what is ruled out in the case of the beetle. The beetle, i.e., the subjective sensation, has no such secondary properties by which it could itself be reidentified. Such properties might include the criterial properties for having a beetle or 287

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being in pain. But these have already been rejected, by the modified view, as irrelevant to the identity of the pain or beetle itself. The subjective sensation only measures consciousness (in the right way) provided it cannot be reidentified by secondary empirical properties. To be reidentifiable would require the beetle to have properties other than the purely subjective ones of the moment of occurrence. For a sensation to be reidentified as the same sensation at a different time would require applying the measure (the sensation) to itself. This is just the idea of applying the meter stick to itself. It is a form of nonsense. So applying the sensation to itself cannot be done. On the modified view, it can’t be done because the subjectivity of the norm is the metaphysical ground for its being the ultimate measure of consciousness. As a measure it cannot measure itself. And as the ultimate measure of consciousness it cannot be measured by anything else, including other mental states, like memory or belief. As a result, the sensation (as measure of consciousness) cannot explain the relation between word, sensation, and criterial behavior and circumstances. The metaphysical uniqueness of the beetle as a subjective object—which was thought to insulate its normative role from a miscellany of what the Cartesian must see as merely contingent behaviors, utterances, other mental states—renders it unfit as a measure of sensation. Such an object, metaphysically secure in its unique identity, cannot be part of the machinery. It has no properties beyond the metaphysical property that supposedly renders it the measure of conscious states. Any further properties would forfeit the independence of the sensation from other aspects of the language-game. The beetle itself, for ontological reasons, can have no association with the use of the word “beetle.” For the word to have a use, conditions of normative similarity must be met. The object that sets the standards of sameness ipso facto cannot be unique. It is the very individuality and uniqueness of the object that privacy seeks to ensure and that language and reality cannot accommodate. The beetle “drops out of consideration.” The philosophical moral to be drawn, according to Wittgenstein, is that it is a mistake to construe the “beetle-in-the-box” language-game on the model of “object and designation.” On this model, the object must make a difference to the use of the designating expression. Yet to respect the ontology that is imposed on subjectivity renders the subjective “state” irrelevant to the explanation of sensation utterances or any other unnecessary clutter. As the argument of PI §293 shows, the very attempt to preserve the special status of the pain paradoxically results in eliminating any explanatory role for the pain itself. The experience of pain drops out as irrelevant just as the beetle does. It makes no difference whether the pain is an enduring entity (a lifelong event, perhaps), something that constantly changes (a temporally distributed “object”), or nothing at all. But if a nothing serves as well as a something, then the object of designation, i.e., that which is supposed to make a difference (indeed the difference) to the designation, is eliminated. 288

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Transforming sensations into such private objects removes them from the human form of life. It is important to note that the beetle is rendered irrelevant not only to others but to the subject herself. There may be nothing in the box or something that undergoes constant change, but whether there is something or nothing makes no difference even to the person whose box it is! It is not Wittgenstein who is denying the reality of sensations, but the Cartesian who attempts to construe sensations as isolable unique entities that are intrinsically calibrated to measure consciousness. The attempt to make such private mental objects the ultimate standards of calibration renders them “not a part of the mechanism.” If one thinks that the private sensation does have a use, namely, to guide the subject in his application of the word “pain,” then we have come full circle, for this is the full-fledged version of a private language and subject to the first two stages of the private language argument. Sensations are not objects (encumbered with their accouterments and yet which disappear when stripped of them), but states of living organisms, states characterized by an array of distinctive responses and reactions. The conclusion, Wittgenstein tells us, was only that a nothing would serve just as well as something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here. The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts—which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or anything else you please. (PI §304) The problems surrounding Cartesian privacy arise from applying a specialized, perhaps esoteric, “object and designation” model to sensations, and thereby all states of consciousness. Sensations are necessarily bound up with their public, behavioral and physiological features. The deformation of those features results in the deformation of conscious experience. Our pain is the pain of organic creatures.

Cartesian thought experiments and the expressivist view An important part of the defense of the Cartesian theory of mind is the use of thought experiments intended to establish the intelligibility of its conception of the private arena of inner episodes. The pivotal arguments of Descartes’ First Meditations are the dream argument, which is to establish that there is no intrinsic experiential difference between dream experience and waking experience, and the evil demon hypothesis, used to support the 289

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possibility that all experience could be a dream. This tradition of argumentation continues into current debates about the nature of consciousness. Currently, two of the most influential arguments for the conception of consciousness as involving qualia use thought experiments of this general type. In one, the thought experiment is used to resurrect the myth of the Given: the idea that there is a form of experiential knowledge that is distinct from and prior to propositional knowledge. Here we are asked to imagine a brilliant neural scientist, who has spent her entire life in a black-and-white room and during that time acquired a comprehensive knowledge of perception and its neurophysiology. Although she has a full scientific understanding of color perception, nonetheless, it is argued, she does not know what red is until she is released from her prison and confronts a ripe tomato for the first time.15 The second thought experiment features the zombie, a humanoid creature who is behaviorally and physiologically indistinguishable from humans and yet has no conscious experience of the world or its own body.16 The imaginability of this creature shows, it is argued, that there is no essential connection between behavior/physiology and consciousness. The first revives the notion of knowledge by acquaintance (the target of the private diary argument) and the second revives the ontological privacy of subjective experience (the target of the beetle-in-the-box argument). It is important to remind ourselves that Wittgenstein cannot reject the method of thought experiments tout court, since he himself engages in the construction of language-games, often artificial, to shed light on philosophical problems. The builders game, the beetle-in-the-box game, or alternative forms of counting are obvious examples. So, what, on a Wittgensteinian view, is objectionable about Cartesian thought experiments? How do the private language arguments discredit them? Wittgenstein does much to impugn these Cartesian possibilities even before bringing the beetle-in-the-box argument to bear. Clearly, he thinks that the conception of consciousness that allows for such possibilities results in the paradoxes of consciousness. As we have seen, this is a conception of sensation in which the alleged object of consciousness drops out as irrelevant in the very situations in which individual experience is important. The notion of experience that is necessary for the intelligibility of the Cartesian thought experiments is not commonsensical but part of a self-defeating theory of mind. As the interpretationist theory eliminates the distinction between correct and incorrect uses of a rule or expression, so the Cartesian theory eliminates the role for experience to play in our lives. Since it is obvious that there are correct and incorrect ways to continue a sequence, it is the interpretationist account of rule-following that has to go, not rule-following itself. In the same way, it is obvious that whether a person is in pain or afraid makes a difference to his life. The moral is that the Cartesian theory is to be impugned, not the experiences themselves. 290

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Wittgenstein combats the picture of the private arena with an alternative one in which sensation cannot be disassociated from the reactive context within which experience is embedded. As with ostension and rule-following, he insists on examining the learning situation, asking: “how does a human being learn the meaning of the names of sensations?” (PI §244). This question is a way of asking “But how is the connection between the name and the thing named set up?” (PI §244). If we want to understand how words refer to sensations, we need to look to how we learn “the meaning of the names of sensations,” that is, how we acquire sensation concepts. With respect to the connection between word and object, Wittgenstein tells us that ostensive teaching or training “can be said to establish an association between the word and the thing” (PI §6). And with respect to the connection between rules and actions, Wittgenstein asks, “What sort of connexion is there here?—Well, perhaps this one: I have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react to it” (PI §198). In a similar vein, Wittgenstein answers his question as to how words refer to sensations by the following: Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, the natural, expressions of sensations and used in their place. A child hurts himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behavior. (PI §244) The similarity of this reply to his earlier remarks on ostension and rulefollowing is striking. In each case, Wittgenstein appeals to the training of the novice within the context of a practice or custom. Though each answer has behaviorist connotations, none is offered as a reductively behaviorist theory of language acquisition, still less as a reductively behaviorist account of meaning. PI §§198 and 244 are each offered as a description of what ordinarily happens. Each says that this is an adequate answer to the question that has been raised. And finally each suggests an interesting tentativeness in putting this kind of answer forward, as though alternative explanations might be available. At PI §6, Wittgenstein says of ostensive teaching that “it will form an important part of the training, because it is so with human beings; not because it could not be imagined otherwise.” At PI §198 and PI §244, Wittgenstein introduces his appeal to training as a way to answer the questions about following a rule and the meaning of sensation-words with the words “here is one possibility.” How are we to understand this tentativeness? It clearly suggests that there might be other possible explanations or other ways in which the connections could be effected. This contingency of our language-games and how they are acquired creates the illusion of an apparent gap between word and object, 291

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rule and action, word and feeling—an act of ostensive definition for the word, an interpretation of the rule, and, as we are examining in this chapter, a pure referring to a private episode. But as we have seen, ostensive definition cannot fix meaning for words ab initio as it presupposes the linguistic competence it is to create. The applicability of rules cannot await interpretations as this renders the rule useless since it can constrain nothing. And now we have examined the private language passages. If the importance of sensations (and by extension the inner) in our lives awaits our individual acts of identification, then paradoxically, sensations are irrelevant to our lives. We are left with no explanation for how sensation words connect to their various uses. It becomes difficult to understand even the familiar fact that as children we were trained in the uses of these words by our parents and other adults. So we should welcome the demise of the private object. The languagegame of sensation involves no special mystery unless we choose to create one. But perhaps a private language can be self-taught precisely because the sensations themselves are transparent to the subject. To be in pain is to know pain. Though no ordinary child can construct a language for herself, perhaps, as we indicated above on Wittgenstein’s behalf, a child genius could succeed at such an endeavor. The child, then, and Mary the neuroscientist might be thought to be in the same perceptual situation when the child experiencing red thinks “red” for the first time and Mary, knowledgeable of everything to do with red, experiences red for the first time. On the Cartesian view, the child and Mary at that moment are thought to be in the same experiential state: they both know that they see something red. As we saw above, the idea that the child could create a sensation language by naming individual sensations is fantasy. It requires that the child be Mary, that is, that the child have the background mastery necessary to deploy concept terms of the requisite sort. This, of course, is what the child was supposed to gain for herself by baptizing sensations. We have seen why this idea fails. But do we learn anything by the comparison of the child’s situation with that of Mary? The point to note is that the child and Mary ought to be in the same experiential state if the Cartesian picture is correct. The child must surreptitiously “become” Mary in her cognitive abilities if she is to name her sensations and know that she sees red. The point of the first stage of the private language argument is that no one isolated from all learning could perform this act of baptism. Experiencing pain is not knowing that this is pain. Experiencing pain is being in an animal-like state. It becomes a state of knowing only if the child is a competent participant in the relevant language-games. To think that a child, deprived of early learning, knows that she is in pain when she is indeed in pain is fantastic. She suffers, but she does not know that she suffers. Blurring the line between the human and the animal provides the motivation to endow the child with the cognitive resources of Mary. Mary’s position is not identical to that of the child. Mary has the cognitive competence required for stage-setting, though she has never before been 292

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in a position in which seeing a red object could initiate a move in the language-game of colors. She learned something new about colors in virtue of being able to make moves within the color language-game that she could not make before but for which a place had been prepared. That her reactions and recognition are moves in the game is a function of her knowledge; that they are new moves is a function of her new way of being causally embedded in the world. Mary does not just experience red; she sees red. The child without learning is causally embedded in the world though in the way that animals are. Experiencing red or suffering pain are endured by the child, without understanding or recognition. The experiential states of the child and Mary are worlds apart. While the Cartesian theory of mind requires that their experiential states (experiencing red) are the same, they are not and cannot be. This is because there is no recognized item, common to their experiences, that sets the measure of red or pain. This is a mistake of the Cartesian picture of mind, the mistake of assuming that the child, despite her inarticulateness and cognitive innocence, has experiences like the adult’s in their cognitive characteristics. Belief that this is so requires the Cartesian conception of mind—mind is transparent and lucid to the subject. It must have, in other words, the metaphysical properties that we have seen render it irrelevant to the explanatory task at hand. The advocate of the Cartesian picture of experience attempts to render this self-defeating character a surprising explanatory virtue, one that reveals the existence of ontologically free-standing episodes in the universe, variously called sensa, sense-data and qualia. The defect of the theory, that it has no explanatory connection to behavior or even other mental states, is construed as the metaphysical peculiarity of this kind of thing.17 The first two stages of the private language argument show that the private sensation can play no role in setting a standard for the use of a sensation term. No criterion of identity for the Cartesian sensation, that is, the incommunicable sensation, can be generated. The subject simply hasn’t the resources for individuating her experiences in a way that allows for reidentification over time and for transferring this idea to another living being. The source of this inability is not that the subject is not a genius, but that the inner episode, ex hypothesi, is cut off from the conditions that make reidentification (and so identification) possible. Trying to establish a norm through introspective naming is like taking the isolated lines of the ruler as themselves constituting a length. These conditions of publicity and sociality are incompatible with the Cartesian experience as an incommunicable, unique, private something. The price of Cartesian transparency, insofar as we can make sense of this, is the pointlessness of the Cartesian episode. The second influential Cartesian thought experiment, that of the zombie, acknowledges the pointlessness of experience at its inception since the conclusion of the various zombie arguments is that experience has no causal connections to either perceptual input or to behavioral output.18 This thought 293

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experiment turns on the claim that our zombie counterparts are identical to ourselves in every way but in conscious experience. Thus, whether the occurrence of conscious experience is a source of knowledge or not, that experience has no role to play in our behavior or thought. What goes wrong in this Cartesian thought experiment? Wittgenstein takes up this kind of case from the opposite direction.19 Instead of unconscious humanoid zombies, he considers a stone in pain. Wittgenstein explores the example from the first-person perspective. “Couldn’t I imagine having frightful pains and turning to stone while they lasted?” asks Wittgenstein. His response to this is the following: And if that has happened, in what sense will the stone have the pains? In what sense will they be ascribable to the stone? And why need the pain have a bearer at all here?! And can one say of the stone that it has a soul and that is what has the pain? What has a soul, or pain, to do with a stone? (PI §283) According to Kripke, the metaphysical problem with the Cartesian thought experiment consists of a special difficulty that arises in trying to “transfer the idea [of feelings] to objects outside myself.”20 In extending the use of the expression “pain” to others, one must presuppose that sensations like pain have a bearer, a self, to which the sensations belong. It is this presupposition, Kripke contends on behalf of Wittgenstein, that blocks the intelligibility of ascribing sensations to others. This is because the notion of the self as the bearer of mental states is empty. The notion of a self has no explanatory power. Wittgenstein objects, on essentially Humean grounds, that he has no idea of a “self” with respect to his own case, let alone that of others. This suspicion of the concept of a self, Kripke identifies as continuous with the Tractatus rejection of the notion of a self. The Tractatus rejects the notion that the “I” refers to a self on the grounds that the self is the limit of experience and so cannot be part of the world as a member of some state of affairs. Thus any talk of a self is strictly speaking nonsense. Kripke is certainly right that Wittgenstein is raising a serious question about the notion of the Cartesian self, that substrate for Cartesian episodes. But his strong identification of the later Wittgenstein’s philosophical motives and arguments with Hume’s is misleading. It is not that Wittgenstein introspects and fails to find a self, as Hume did, but that the philosophical idea of a Cartesian self or soul cannot replace the idea of a living human being. He doesn’t repudiate the idea of the self for verificationist reasons, but for being metaphysically too anemic to do the explanatory work of the idea of the living human being. That I do not transfer feelings to stones, that I am filled with pity for this man, that I cannot be in error about whether I am in pain: none of these can be explained in terms of a Cartesian self. If we endorse 294

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the Cartesian conception of sensation, we thereby “abrogate” the normal language-game: if I assume the abrogation of the normal language-game with the expression of a sensation, I need a criterion of identity for the sensation; and then the possibility of error also exists. (PI §288) To accommodate the Cartesian notion of sensation, the Cartesian conception of the self must be substituted for our normal sensation language-game involving living human beings. The point of the private language argument is that this substitution eliminates sensation. If we grant our experiential expressions their ordinary use, Wittgenstein asks, “what right have [we] to speak in this sense [i.e., of a private sensation as well as] of a representation or piece of information—if these words were rightly used in the first case?” (PI §280). The way the Cartesian talks about the self is wildly at variance with our normal language-game of expressing sensations and attributing them to others. Here Wittgenstein is attempting to shift the burden of proof to the advocate of Cartesian privacy. His question draws attention to the fact that we have to work to create the climate in which the need for a private language is felt: Look at the blue of the sky and say to yourself “How blue the sky is!”—When you do it spontaneously—without philosophical intentions—the idea never crosses your mind that this impression of colour belongs only to you. And you have no hesitation in exclaiming that to someone else. (PI §275) These reminders apply not only to color and other “secondary qualities,” but also to paradigmatic sensations such as pain.21 Just as we react to the color of the sky, so we express our own pain and react to the pain of another. The natural home of sensations and feeling is the embodied person who is fully part of the public domain. Wittgenstein’s objection to the Cartesian thought experiment is that it involves falsifying the character of experience itself. This falsification derives from a misunderstanding of our capacity to deceive others about our experience. Our capacity to simulate pain or hide our grief or pretend to be unafraid is misconstrued as requiring an ontological gulf between our sensations (and other experiences) and our behavior that expresses them. The demands for a background are as pertinent to psychological experience as they are for mathematical propositions. Having lost sight of the background required for grasping and using mentalistic concepts, the Cartesian makes the move that creates “the philosophical problem about mental states and about behaviourism,” namely, 295

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The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them—we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. (PI §308) This first step, necessary for the Cartesian thought experiments to seem plausible, is what Wittgenstein challenges. Our concept of pain does not refer to some logically private process or state, for which pain-behavior is the contingent publicly available evidence. Rather acquiring a language-game, whether that of medium sized objects or mathematics or sensation, is a matter of coming to master techniques of language use that issue in taking much on trust and as holding with certainty. Wittgenstein captures this background to our psychological concepts by describing it as “an attitude towards a soul” (PI II.iv). “Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious” (PI §281). What is fundamental, the necessary background to our mental lives, is neither the inner process nor the outer behavior but the living human being. Our mentalistic and psychological language-games all implicate this background certainty. The philosophical picture that begins with experience as inner process and leads to proprietary notions of reference and behavior must negate this background certainty, and yet that is the very background that makes experiential talk intelligible at all. The indispensability of this background is the focus of Wittgenstein’s examination of the inverted Cartesian case. He asks, we will recall, “couldn’t I imagine having frightful pains and turning to stone while they lasted?” This possibility is raised in the context in which Wittgenstein asks “what gives us so much as the idea that living beings, things, can feel?” (PI §283). Wittgenstein juxtaposes his rejection of the traditional argument from analogy as the source of our idea that living things can feel with the fact that we do not extend this idea to stones or plants. As with ostensive teaching and learning to follow a rule, believing that living things feel and stones do not reflects our very different attitudes “to what is alive and to what is dead. … All our reactions are different” (PI §284). The bedrock of our language-games with psychological concepts is our reaction to the living and the inanimate: “What has pain to do with a stone. … And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties [about ascribing sensation] disappear” (PI §283 and §284). Wittgenstein—as with his treatment of other certainties that are constitutive of language-games—construes this certainty as an attitude we have towards things in the world, an attitude expressed in our actions and reactions. Here, as elsewhere, he uses the word “attitude” to distinguish this form of believing from claims to knowledge and its allies, hypotheses, surmises, opinions.22 As Wittgenstein so strikingly puts it, we are “not of the 296

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opinion that [another] has a soul” (PI II.iv). A stone feeling pain can only be a fairy tale, and as such, is parasitic on the use of our ordinary mentalistic vocabulary. This means that fairy tales like the feeling stone are intelligible up to a point. It matters, when playing along with a fairy tale, not to ask too many questions. Thus, a fairy tale of the feeling stone can do nothing to establish sensation as an inner episode separable from all behavioral and physiological expression. For Wittgenstein, full recognition of this background belief-cum-attitude undercuts the Cartesian characterization of the asymmetry between first-person and third-person ascriptions of psychological states. Wittgenstein rejects the epistemological characterization of the asymmetry, a characterization that falls out of the conception of sensation as an inner state to which the subject has privileged access. This first misstep is the application of the model of object and designator to sensation. The asymmetry does not lie in different ways of knowing sensations—through privileged access or through inference by way of the observation of behavior. But rather the asymmetry lies in the difference between expressing sensation and reacting to such expressions. It is the difference between groaning and responding to a groan. This is Wittgenstein’s expressivist view of sensations and our sensation talk. It is a view that ties the expression of sensation to the presence and acceptance by another.23 Wittgenstein’s expressivism with respect to sensations and emotions is realized at two levels. There are the natural expressions of sensation and primitive emotion—wincing in pain, giggling when tickled, drawing back in fear.24 And there are the cultural expressions of those sensations, expressions that build on the natural ones and come to replace or complement them through linguistic socialization. Our sensation language-games are built upon this bodily expressive character of pain, tickles, hunger, thirst and the like. One can hear Wittgenstein saying, as he does of other certainties immanent within our language-games, that this naturally expressive dimension of sensation is “there—like life [ … ] like something animal.” Such “natural responses” include both the behavioral and physiological expression of the living being who feels and the reaction of others to that person (or animal). Sensation talk in its sophisticated form becomes richly descriptive, but it is built on a simpler and more purely expressive use of language, which is never wholly left behind. There are three important points here. First, the natural expression of sensation, the unity of the phenomenon, is lost in reductive attempts to construe the sensation as a detachable inner event contingently associated with bodily movements, or behavior of a restricted sort. Second, the epistemic model introduced by Descartes distorts our understanding of the asymmetry between the first- and third-person. And third, because of these distortions, we misunderstand the source of our difficulties with others. There is a problem of other minds but it is not one that grows out of solipsism or the egocentric predicament. This final point will be discussed in the next section. 297

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The metaphysical and epistemological issues are, of course, bound together. The background certainties and bedrock practices of our languagegames draw, as we have seen already, on shared natural reactions such as those that Wittgenstein appeals to in his discussion of sensations. The epistemic model of Descartes belies the fact that “language does not begin in some kind of ratiocination” (OC §475). Linguistic understanding does not begin in knowing something, but in doing something. Here we must remind ourselves that when Wittgenstein speaks of “language” in his late work, he means the extended notion of a language-game, of a normatively structured practice involving linguistic utterance as part of our ways of acting. Wittgenstein’s expressivist view is part of his examination of the foundations of psychology in much the same way that his constructivism in mathematics results from his inquiry into the foundations of mathematics. So, when he asks at PI §283 “what gives us so much as the idea that living beings, things, can feel?,” we should recognize that he is not looking for a psychological answer. He is looking for what creates the logical space within which we can use psychological expressions. As he prefers to put it, the grammar of our sensation talk implicates behavior. Just as a mathematical proof is not a device that lifts us over the dividing line into a direct appreciation of mathematical truth, but is rather a blueprint for using the proposition proved, so the criterial connection between behavior and feeling is not the evidential one into which the Cartesian model attempts to convert it. The behavior and reactive context in which pain occurs are part of the state of pain itself. The private language considerations have shown that the egocentric predicament cannot be the basis from which I acquire the idea that living beings feel. The Cartesian thought experiment violates the background that is essential to the experience of pain and other sensations. These most bodily of experiences cannot exist sans body.25 Earlier I asked how Wittgenstein can object to the Cartesian thought experiments, given his own methodological use of language-games. We now see that the Cartesian and Wittgensteinian thought experiments differ in crucial respects. Wittgenstein’s language-games must “fit” the philosophical theories he seeks to explore and undermine. Secondly, though simplified they must be drawn in terms of ordinary phenomena, not specially introduced philosophical fictions. So Cartesian thought experiments, on the other hand, are designed to help establish a philosophical theory, and they typically appeal to fantastic or science fiction possibilities. These include Descartes’ evil demon hypothesis, and its contemporary counterparts, brains in vats, zombies, and androids. These bizarre possibilities are intuition pumps, as Dennett puts it,26 intended to engage our imagination in support of a philosophical theory. Cartesian thought experiments appeal to the fantastic to change our perception of the ordinary whereas Wittgensteinian thought experiments appeal to the ordinary to undermine the illusions created by the fantastic. 298

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Criteria, deception and the new problem of other minds Wittgenstein’s expressivism with respect to sensations can be seen to be the counterpart to his appeal to the blind obedience of bedrock rule-following. We can see this quite clearly in the following four pairs of passages, the first of each pair coming from the end of the rule-following discussion and the second from the end of the private language discussion. Pair 1 PI §211. … my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act without reasons. PI §289. … to use a word without a justification does not mean to use it without right. Pair 2 PI §213. A doubt was possible in certain circumstances. But that is not to say that I did doubt, or even could doubt. PI §288. That expression of doubt [I know what “pain” means; I just don’t know if this, that I have now, is pain] has no place in the language-game. Pair 3 PI §215. We seem to have an infallible paradigm of identity in the identity of a thing with itself. PI §290. What I do is not, of course, to identify my sensation by criteria. Pair 4 PI §216. “A thing is identical with itself.”—There is no finer example of a useless proposition … PI §298. The very fact that we should so much like to say: “This is the important thing”—is enough to shew how much we are inclined to say something which gives no information. The first two pairs express Wittgenstein’s own view that linguistic moves within bedrock practices and sensation language-games neither require justification nor admit of legitimate doubt (or error), while the second two pairs counter the temptation to become metaphysical at just the point where there is nothing substantive to be found or said. The point of introducing these pairs of passages is to show that on Wittgenstein’s view our language-games involving mental or psychological concepts have the same structure of moves made against a normatively shaping background as do our language-games in general. The mind is not a privileged or special arena either epistemologically or metaphysically. The “mind” concerns an overlapping heterogeneous array of language-games all of which involve our causal embedding within the world, both natural and social, as much as does any game with slabs, chairs or colors—or, for that matter, mathematical games. For central

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to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is his aim to show that there are no metaphysical chasms separating language-games involving ordinary objects, numbers, and mental states. This is not to say that there are no differences between these games. Obviously not: language is a motley. But differences are not dualisms. Wittgenstein’s alternative picture requires us to give up the Cartesian view of sensation as an inner event only symptomatically connected to the natural and trained reactions of one who is in pain or afraid. That alternative, as I have said, requires that we see how our language-games involving sensations are normatively structured in the same way as nonpsychological language-games. How can we understand sensation-talk in connection with the three elements of the background discussed in Chapter 7? All three elements of background are involved in sensation-talk, and with them associated forms of normative judgment: paradigmatic judgments, propositions as rules, and propositions that hold fast. The first are associated with teaching and explaining meaning; the second, with the techniques of our bedrock practices; and the third, with foundational certainties that inform our picture of the world. But there is another dimension of normativity that is distinctive of psychological concepts which has important implications for the kind of certainty constitutive of our psychological language-games. That is the normative evaluation of the subject’s sincerity or lack of it. This evaluative dimension helps explain the asymmetry between first- and third-person psychological ascription. But first to the stage-setting required for sensation talk. Wittgenstein, in introducing the expressivist view, links sensation talk to the way in which we learn it, as a replacement for our natural reactions. Teaching a child “It hurts!” or “I’m in pain” as a replacement for crying is as much a form of publicly based teaching as training a child to participate in the builders game. As with ostensive teaching (or ostensive definition), stage-setting is required. The private language argument showed us that sensation talk cannot be assimilated to private object talk. The background, then, will be appropriately different. That stage-setting is provided by both the child’s natural expressions of pain, crying, wincing and the like, and the adult who exploits that natural expression as criterial for being in pain. Just as the builders’ actions are open to view and must be so if the game is to be taught through ostensive training, so pain must be open to view if the child is to learn sensation talk. For sensation talk to be learnable, sensation must be publicly accessible. Importantly, as the paradigmatic judgment “This is a chair” is a measure of normative similarity among objects that human beings can differentiate, so “It hurts!” is a measure of sensation—they are states that humans naturally express physiologically and behaviorally. And as “This is a chair” is a measure of sameness only if there is (minimally) successful triangulation among two persons and an object, so “It hurts!” is an expression of pain only if there is successful triangulation among two 300

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persons and behavior. To be a normative replacement for the natural expression of pain, that natural expression must be constitutive of pain. Our sensation language-games must exploit natural expressions of injury to the body in the same way that our naming language-games must exploit our natural reactions to salient features of the environment. Those natural expressions and reactions do not constitute a rule or norm for what should be counted the same as what. To become more than mere correlation between verbal sounds and causal stimulation, the paradigmatic judgment must become a tool in a language-game. It must serve to determine how one ought to go on at bedrock or how one and others ought to react to the person in pain. The triangulation involved in teaching paradigmatic sensation talk aims not just at calibration that enables the child to measure the world (as with ostensive teaching) but also serves as entry into the moral world of how we act towards each other. So, moral life, in this broad construal of “moral,” is subject to a division of labor as much as the stagesetting for paradigmatic judgments of the environmentally obvious involved a cognitive division of labor. Just as bumping into a chair can help usher a child into the world of medium-sized objects, so experiencing and expressing pain offers the entry into the moral world of concern or lack of concern. We turn now to the domain of the master in examining the psychological competence of the adult, a competence abstracted in the form of propositions as rules, or grammatical propositions. These are statements of the criterial relations that obtain between sensations and behavior. This takes us to the second form of the background, the place of necessary connections within our sensation language-games, involving the mastery of techniques. Not only must sensations be on view if sensation talk is to be learned, but learning sensation talk likewise requires learning to recognize sensation when it is on display. The mastery of this technique is an indispensable part of the language-game. As with any technique, it cannot be fully described, explained, or reduced to a set of rules or physical features. Techniques can be shown and mastered in the learning context. Such learning and mastery depends upon the child responding in appropriate ways to the training. Coming to see the other in pain is the other side of the coin in coming to express sensation linguistically. Just as we come to see that “4” cannot but follow “3,” so we come to see that another is in pain or is afraid. We see the pain or fear in the face and the behavior. Someone who cannot see this in another has a pathological condition as surely as someone who cannot learn the natural number sequence. Wittgenstein emphasizes two points here. First, one can see the pain or fear of another, without hypothesis, the use of evidence, or inference, as readily as seeing that this is a slab or that this is a correct application of a rule. This is the point that Wittgenstein is underscoring when he asks us to “think of the recognition of facial expression” (PI §285). We see a grimace or scowl or smile or kindly expression. This does not involve taking measurements of the face or the identification of muscular contractions. It is obvious 301

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that a person is afraid or in pain. Second, our reaction is directed to the person. Pain and fear are states of the person, and this is reflected in the fact that we respond to the person, not to the alleged inner object. Both of these points about our concept of sensation indicate the ways in which Wittgenstein is not a behaviorist. Pain-behavior is not evidence for the inner pain, much less necessarily good evidence. If we cannot see behavior as part of the mental state, we are blind to human psychology. Indeed, blind to human beings. Behavior can be an expression of a psychological state only if it is constitutive of that state. Otherwise, there isn’t an expressive relation, only a contingent one based on causal connectedness or on mere happenstance. To try to press the contingency of the relation in order to establish that there are two discrete relata, the sensation and the behavior, is to make a mistake on the order of treating the relation between “5” and “2 + 3” as merely contingent, as an empirical matter. Getting “5” is criterial for understanding addition itself. Getting the correct answer to the arithmetic problem is overdetermined, “overdetermined” in that we don’t understand addition if we don’t get that very answer to that problem. It is this sort of normative constraint on what counts as understanding that Wittgenstein calls a “matter of grammar.” A tell-tale mark of the conceptual constraint is the participants’ expressing that constraint in terms of necessity. That hardness of the logical “must” is found in such cases. The moral impact of refusing to see pain in the child’s weeping is taking the child (or the adult) for a machine.27 Pain-behavior is criterial for pain in the way that getting 5 is criterial for having added 2 and 3. Getting 5 is not evidence that the adding function went on inside the subject; nor is crying always and everywhere merely symptomatic evidence that a person is distressed, though in an appropriate context it can be. In both cases, there must be background techniques for the use of the relevant expressions. In learning arithmetic, we learn the techniques for addition and subtraction, for which getting the correct answer to problems is criterial for having mastered the concept of addition or subtraction. In learning sensation talk, we master techniques of recognition of the natural behavioral expressions, for which hearing a groan as expressing pain is criterial for having mastered the concept of pain. In learning to avow sensations, we thereby learn to recognize them in others. To press this analogy further, consider the difference between a very young child who can utter the string, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5” but cannot use these numerals to count objects and the child who has mastered the technique of counting objects. Without mastery of this technique, the former child does not understand the natural number sequence. So, a person who can see sincere crying, but cannot recognize sadness, does not understand what sadness is. Grammatical statements expressing these criterial relations between kinds of behavior and mental states are rules, the mastery of which are the techniques for engaging in sensation language-games. 302

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These behavioral criteria, once again, are not merely evidence that warrants an inference to the occurrence of the inner event, but are themselves part of being in such a state. One sees a person in pain as one sees an angry face. It is crucial to the child’s learning sensation talk, and thereby entering the moral domain, that the parent or other adult sees that the child is in pain. That sets the stage for the paradigmatic expression of “Ouch! That hurts!” said to the child. These very actions, reactions, and judgments hold in place the certainty that living human beings feel. In other words, we get the very idea that living beings feel, not from drawing an inference from one’s own inner condition to others, but in participating in the language-game of sensations in which the proposition that living beings feel holds fast. This is not an inductively supported generalization nor a rash assumption on our part, but a certainty that is constitutive of the very practices we engage in. We cannot doubt it. This is the third element of the background, that of certainty. In our earlier discussion of language and meaning, we saw that Wittgenstein identifies the normative dimension of language with the correct versus incorrect usage of words, a usage that can only be understood in terms of patterns of linguistic action within temporally extended language-games. That use conception of meaning has its psychological counterpart in his expressivist view of sensation and feeling talk. The normative standard within our psychological language-games is a standard set by sincerity, as Wittgenstein says, not truth but truthfulness (PI II.xi, p. 222). Just as Wittgenstein seeks to break the hold of the representationalist picture of language, so he seeks to break the hold of the Cartesian picture of the mind as an inner arena of events accessible to the subject alone. Sincerity concerns the genuineness of expression of a sensation, feeling or emotion. It is the spontaneous expression of feeling, which originates in our natural primitive reactions and is elaborated in our learned reactions. If one takes sincerity as the positive pole of this standard of evaluation, then one can see that the negative pole must be pretense or deception. Once we appreciate that the normative continuum along which sensation utterances are evaluated is not that of being true or false to the facts, but that of sincerely or disingenuously expressing sensation or emotion, then we can recognize how the asymmetry between first- and third-person ascriptions must be understood. First-person avowal is an expression of the psychological state the subject is in, a form of learned expression that builds on and can replace the natural expressions of that state. In being so trainable, the subject’s “authority” extends from the natural expression to the learned forms of expression. (“Authority” must be put in scare quotes since it suggests an epistemic authority on the part of the subject with respect to his inner hidden states.) “Authority,” on an expressivist view, concerns the spontaneity and genuineness of the expression. What the subject genuinely expresses provides the last word on what the subject experiences or feels. It is a status accorded the 303

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subject, not as special knower, but as special actor. Uttering the words are psychological actions, elaborating the emotional or sensation state, not reporting on its independently given characteristics, independently, that is, of the subject’s own verbal and other behavioral reactions. This view of the normative character of psychological speech and the status extended to the subject is fully consonant with the way Wittgenstein understands behavioral criteria, the character of third-person ascriptions, and the way the mental can be hidden. Third-person ascription and the role of behavior in our psychology cannot really be discussed separately. How we think of expressive behavior to a large extent determines how we think about third-person ascription, in particular, whether we think of it as necessarily inferential or not. Third-person ascription of sensation or emotion is, of course, based on seeing and/or hearing the person. Her behavior, in an appropriate context, can be used as evidence or justification for a psychological ascription. However, the primary role of behavior is not that of evidence. Nor is the third-person ascription to be understood, first and foremost, as an inference drawing on behavioral evidence. This is the point that Wittgenstein is making in the following passage: A doctor asks: “How is he feeling?” The nurse says: “he is groaning.” A report on his behaviour. But need there be any question for them whether the groan is really genuine, is really the expression of anything? Might they not, for example, draw the conclusion “if he groans, we must give him more analgesic”—without suppressing a middle term? Isn’t the point the service to which they put the description of behaviour? “But then they make a tacit presupposition.” Then what we do in our language-game always rests on a tacit presupposition. (PI II.v)28 If one insists on putting things like this—“our language-game always rests on a tacit presupposition”—in relation to our current explanation, one runs the risk of saying something misleading. Axial propositions of which this is one are held fast in our practices. They are not independently standing epistemic grounds for judgments like “he is in pain” said of a groaning patient. It would be a mistake to construe this appeal to tacit presupposition as searching for the grounds from which the doctor and nurse infer (unconsciously perhaps) that the patient ought to get more analgesic. In these surroundings, it is certain that the groan is genuine and expresses the pain of the patient.29 That this is certain holds fast the principle that human beings feel. There is, of course, an asymmetry between first-person avowals and thirdperson ascriptions. But that asymmetry is not one between direct knowledge of an event as opposed to merely indirect knowledge of that same event. 304

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A third party can see the pain or grief or joy of another without inference or evidence, that is, with immediacy, just as we can see complex objects noninferentially. The asymmetry is between expressing the sensation or emotion and recognizing the sincerity of that expression. This is not to say that we can never be in such a position of uncertainty with respect to another. Indeed we can. Rather, the point is that we cannot be in such an epistemic relation to others everywhere and at all times. The authority of the firstperson avowal is not that of a special kind of knowledge nor is the uncertainty of a third-person ascription a function of unavoidable inference. Especially we cannot be in this relation to the child, the emotional novice. That criterial connection itself is connected to our experience of human beings, in pain, acting in certain characteristic ways. These characteristic behaviors are the spontaneous natural reactions that we and certain animals display when hurt, hungry, frightened or satisfied. It is an indispensable fact about us that as infants we cannot simulate pain or other sensations and emotions. Wittgenstein asks rhetorically, “are we perhaps over-hasty in our assumption that the smile of the unweaned infant is not a pretense?—And on what experience is our assumption based?” (PI §249). There are two important points that Wittgenstein is making here. First, such innocence is indispensable because the sensation language-game could not be taught at all without such innocence, just as it could not without the spontaneous natural behaviors associated with pain, satisfaction and other such states.30 And secondly, that infants cannot pretend is held fast in our practices of teaching psychological expressions. This is not established experientially even though we would not have the language-game unless there were primitive, natural expressions of emotions and sensations: “For it wouldn’t have been said that the planets had to move in circles, if it had never appeared that they move in circles” (RPP II §609). Pretense requires this foundation of primitive expressions as well as a capacity for reflection that comes only with full language mastery. The picture of an infant, then, is of one whose psychological life is transparent to us. This kind of transparency suggests that with the infant there is no private domain at all. That transparency, however, is quickly occluded with learning the concept of pain: “The child that is learning to speak learns the use of the words ‘having pain’, and also learns that one can simulate pain. This belongs to the language-game that it learns. Or again: It doesn’t just learn the use of ‘He has pain’ but also that of ‘I believe that he has pain’” (RPP I §142). The learning situation discloses the inferential connections that are involved in mastering the techniques for using psychological expressions. The concept of pain implicates the concept of the appearance of pain. That we can pretend to sensations and emotions that we do not have creates the logical space for that which is hidden from view, and so inner. Wittgenstein is struck by the complexity required for pretending to a sensation or emotion that one does not have. The very complexity required rules 305

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out very young children and animals from the domain of pretenders. The natural “truthfulness” of an infant or dog in expressing its feelings is not a sign of sincerity, for sincerity is possible only when pretense is also possible. Both must be learned: “A child has to learn all sorts of things before he can pretend. He has to learn a complicated pattern of behaviour before he can pretend to be sincere” (RPP I §§868–9; also PI II.xi, p. 229). This complexity of behavior requires not only the mastery of language, especially psychological language whose concepts are explicated in terms of the behaviorally expressed states, but also the ability to mimic behavior31 and to form motives and reasons for acting. The very complexity that creates the logical space for motivated and sincere expressions of mind opens space for pretense. The complexity of the behavior that is involved in pretense reveals a second and deeper form of indefiniteness with respect to both first-person avowals and third-person ascriptions of psychological concepts. The ascription of psychological states involves “conclusions,” as Wittgenstein puts it, which are “the consequences of meaning” (PI II.xi, p. 218). Psychological concepts, like any other kind of concept, have an inferential structure in virtue of which they have “the consequences of meaning.” But there is an indefiniteness with respect to the applicability of psychological concepts that does not accrue to ordinary observational concepts and certainly not to mathematical concepts. It is this indefiniteness, as well as the possibility of pretense, that creates the new problem of other minds. This indefiniteness and the uncertainty that accrues to our understanding of the psychological lives of others is the topic of the final part of section xi of Part II of the Philosophical Investigations. This section, probably the most discussed of Part II, addresses the problem of “seeing as,” the Gestaltists’ favorite way of approaching the study of perception. The exegetical question is why Wittgenstein ends a sustained examination of “seeing as” with a discussion of the indefiniteness of psychological attributions. What is the philosophical connection between the two? The vehicle of transition is the word “ambiguity.” We experience a word that has two distinct meanings quite differently as we use it successively with each meaning. One can experience the word “March” now as a month and now as a command. Wittgenstein notes that the immediacy with which we experience the meaning of a word seems no different from the immediacy with which we perceive changing aspects in perception of Gestalt shift. The difference in the experience of immediacy lies with what is not immediate or occurrent at all, namely, the inferential structures that form the background to the perception of a duck or the experience of a command. These differing background structures concern “the consequences of meaning.” Each use “permits certain conclusions … Meaning [something] is not a process that accompanies a word. For no process could have the consequences of meaning” (PI II.xi, p. 218). The consequences of meaning for psychological concepts, Wittgenstein is arguing, may have an indefiniteness that reflects their distinctive background 306

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techniques of application. The place to look for the differences between psychological, mathematical and other concepts is not in the ontological sphere, a search for different kinds of objects, but in the background to judgment. Background techniques, implicit inferential structure, and certainties held fast disclose the differences. Though Wittgenstein is often interested in drawing out similarities between the psychological and the mathematical, here he draws an explicit contrast. Where mathematics relies on techniques as recipes, the sincerity of a person, or the lack of it, is a matter for better or worse judgment, judgment that often relies upon imponderable evidence: Is there such a thing as “expert judgment” about the genuineness of expressions of feeling?—Even here, there are those whose judgment is “better” and those whose judgment is “worse.” … What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct judgments. There are also rules, but they do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them right. Unlike calculating-rules. (PI II.xi, p. 227) The techniques of application in mathematics assure agreement in judgment among participants. Training in mathematics is directed to achieving just this agreement in the application of techniques. But with respect to people’s psychological lives, the concepts involved do not require or admit of such routine agreement. These differences are expressed in the kind of certainty that informs the two language-games: “The kind of certainty is the kind of language-game” (PI II.xi, p. 224). Wittgenstein opens his discussion of the “indefiniteness” of our understanding of others with the claim that “I can be as certain of someone else’s sensations as of any fact. But this does not make the propositions “He is much depressed,” “25  25 = 625,” and “I am sixty years old” into similar instruments. The explanation suggests itself that the certainty is of a different kind.—This seems to point to a psychological difference. But the difference is logical” (PI II.xi, p. 224). Wittgenstein makes two key points in this passage. First, the kind of certainty that is part of our psychological language-game is not that of mathematics. And, second, the difference is logical, not psychological. Wittgenstein has already made this point with respect to rulefollowing. There, Wittgenstein countered the temptation to think that we are under a psychological compulsion when we apply words in the way we do with his conclusion that blind obedience is a logical requirement of rulefollowing itself. Again, a structure of certainties, of that which is held fast within a context of inquiry, is a logical requirement on inquiry or the language-game itself. It is not a psychological failing on the inquirer’s part. The difference in certainty is a difference in the grammar of psychology and mathematics. Human psychology itself rests on a “substratum of mastery of 307

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techniques and judgments” in terms of which the normative structuring of our feeling and intentional lives is realized. Judgments of psychology, unlike judgments within mathematics, do not assure agreement in the domain of the master. There is room for disagreement without, however, characterizing psychological judgments as merely subjective. The evidence that is involved is not just the obvious behavior to which proponents of the Cartesian conception of the Inner appeal. Evidence quite often includes “imponderable evidence”: “ … subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone. I may recognize a genuine loving look, distinguish it from a pretended one (and here there can, of course, be a ‘ponderable’ confirmation of my judgment). But I may be quite incapable of describing the difference. And this is not because the languages I know have no words for it” (PI II.xi, p. 228; cf. LW I §§936–7). Yet it is also possible that “given the same evidence, one person can be completely convinced and another not be. We don’t on account of this exclude either person from society, as being unaccountable and incapable of judgment” (RPP II §684), as we would if there was such disagreement concerning a mathematical statement. So, there is a kind of evidence for one’s judgments concerning others, which calls for good judgment, not proof, judgment that is derived from experience. Not everyone will be a good judge of these matters, just as not everyone has a strong musical ear. Though there are obvious cases in which we would agree in a psychological judgment (“If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me” [PI II.xi, p. 223]), “there is in general no such agreement [as we find with judgments of color made by those who are normal perceivers] over the question whether an expression of feeling is genuine or not” (PI II.xi, p. 227). This is a case where agreement over the obvious does not ensure agreement over the unobvious, not even agreement eventually and in principle. This is the indefiniteness of the psychological. This indefiniteness and the way in which it is tied to the possibility of pretense is what can make the mind of another become hidden. People can pretend and so quite literally hide their feelings from others; the evidence can be imponderable; agreement among reasonable people cannot be assured in every case. All of this becomes on the Cartesian theory of mind grounds of the existence of an inner arena of private events, where every event is transparently what it is to the subject and equally is hidden from others. On the Cartesian view, the mental events and states themselves are not indefinite and temporally complicated, but are cut off from public view. It is this that creates the uncertainty and the disagreement. For Wittgenstein this crude understanding of the problem of other minds is clearly a misunderstanding of the proper explanation of the uncertainty and disagreement. The proper explanation lies with the complexity, subtlety and nuance that pervades psychological behavior along with the pretense and dissimulation that is always possible among masters of language. Both create the sense of hiddenness and depth. Much of this “hiddenness” concerns the consequences of meaning, 308

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that is, the inferential structure that is implicated in attributing any particular psychological concept.32 This is the new problem of other minds. I call it “new” because it is a form of uncertainty that presupposes another dimension of certainty. The separation of one individual from another rests on the certainty that we are human beings. No skeptical problem of other minds survives Wittgenstein’s critical analysis. There can be real difficulties understanding the thought and feelings of another. But the traditional “problem of other minds” is not their source. Thus, the diagnosis of the traditional problem does not remove them: it reveals them for what they are—part of being human.

Notes 1 This general representationalist theory of mind enables, perhaps even requires, Descartes to use the theory of ideas uniformly across many different mental activities. The most important is the assimilation of sensory perception and (cognitive) understanding. This remark must be qualified immediately, as Descartes himself was aware of the tensions within his theory of ideas, particularly in the assimilation of sensations to (cognitively rich) ideas: “Nature also teaches me, by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst, and so on, that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit” (Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Sixth Meditation). The theory of ideas as a universal theory of mental content requires even those aspects of mind most intimately associated with the physiology of the body, namely the sensations of pleasure and pain, to be assimilated to the disembodied mind. The experience of pain is so integrated with the state of the body and is so unlike ideas, paradigmatically the ideas of mathematics or God, that it is tempting to treat, as many of us now do, ideas as exemplary of intentionality and sensations as exemplary of the phenomenal. Although Descartes himself thought that the faculties of the understanding and volition were the only ones essential to the mind, nonetheless the more animal-like faculties of perception, imagination and sensation were integrated into the picture of the activity of an immaterial substance. In the process, Descartes radically changed our conception of perception itself, from the means for seeing ordinary objects to a process resulting in the production of sensation-ideas. 2 Since I will be recurring to this “small circle,” I want to state more fully just what it is. First, the circle is answering to the normative imperative that “a name ought really to signify a simple” (PI §39). A true name, we might say, has only a referent or designation. It is not subject to any further analysis or definition. An (absolutely) simple object (or property) is one that can only be named, not described. So, a true name is tailored to designate a simple object. The diary language-game is intended to meet these requirements for the name–named relation. The circle is small because the relata are mutually tailored to “fit” each other. If a true name, then the referent is a simple object. If a simple object, it can only be named. This small circle, incurred by the theoretical terms introduced, should not be confused with what I call the learning circle which concerns the move we all make from nonautonomous players in a language-game to mastery of the game. David Pears’ interesting interpretation of the “private language argument” (he too rejects the idea that there is a single overarching argument) cites a circle of his

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3 4

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own, between sensory reporting and physical situations. Pears says: “If this is circular, it is, at last, the circle of our lives” (Paradox and Platitude, 2). I am very sympathetic to this way of putting the matter, though I think that appeal to the learning circle, which implicates both the physical environment and the social world, is sounder. See Chapter 3 and the last section of Chapter 7 (“Learning, trust and certainty”). These are the confusion of what is proper to the domains of novice and master; confusion of ostensive definition and ostensive training; the confusion of secondorder properties of language with linguistic entities. Even artificial detection systems, like thermostats, presuppose and exploit causal generalizations. The idea of a baptism, on the other hand, is the idea of initiating a generalization. At least that is the way in which we need to understand it for now. Later the discussion will open up to consider the fact that even detection systems that exploit causal regularities can survive, as detection systems, with few positive instantiations. Cf. Fodor, Modularity of Mind. This difference will map onto the distinction between the empirical properties of a measuring device and its normative properties, as that which measures. This will be discussed more fully in our treatment of the ontology of subjectivity. I am alluding here to Descartes’ claim in the Second Meditation that the mind is the easiest thing to understand. See Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. The baptismal act can be divided into two dimensions or two acts: the act of naming and the subsequent use of the name consistent with the standard set at baptism. Many commentators have interpreted the private diary argument as attacking the second act, the consistency of subsequent applications of the term. It is argued that such a purely subjective check or an uncheckable check is inadequate. This line of argument fails, I think, because it turns the private language argument into a skeptical argument that generalizes beyond the Cartesian private language. For the full development of this objection, see Meredith Williams, “Wittgenstein on Representations, Privileged Objects and Private Languages.” Also see Saunders and Henze, Private-Language Problem. Here it is important to note that Wittgenstein uses the term “natural” in two ways. First there are the primitive untutored ways of reacting to the world. These provide some of the background bedrock that sustains and informs what we identify as obvious, as a result of having acquired linguistic mastery. Wittgenstein also refers to these judgments of the obvious as natural, meaning that they are not made inferentially. There is another line of argument in these private language passages that reaches the same conclusion that the two approaches to the private diary argument do. This line of argument emphasizes background mastery of a technique rather than private ostensive definition. From the opening arguments of the Investigations, we know that the success of ostensive definition presupposes linguistic mastery and so cannot be the source of that mastery. Yet the activity of the diarist must be understood to occur wholly independently of any linguistic mastery. Otherwise the “definition” will not be private, that is, incommunicable to others. If private ostensive definition is to provide an explanation of the distinction between is right and seems right, then “s” cannot name a simple seeming. So if the diarist identifies s as a sensation, linguistic mastery is already involved (PI §261). There is then no principled incommunicability with others. If we eliminate all background mastery, then the inscription of “s” has no use unless it is discovered to correlate well with some public phenomenon, like rising blood pressure (PI §270). Such a

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correlation could support the notion that “s” is a signal or detector of rising blood pressure. In either case in which the inscription of “s” has a use, those diary entries would not be incommunicable, though for different reasons. In the first case, the linguistically competent diarist shares the language-game of sensations with others. In the second, the diary as part of a detection system is communicable in the same way to both the subject and to others. In short: if incommunicable to others, incommunicable to self. Otherwise, if “s” truly names a seeming, there can be no distinction between seems right and is right. Yet that is the basic normative distinction that naming was to explain. Fogelin, Wittgenstein, presses this interpretation. He argues in ch. 12, “The Private Language Argument,” that Wittgenstein is trafficking in general skeptical arguments. See “Objects and Paradigms,” the third section of Chapter 3. Obviously the disanalogies are considerable. Once again Wittgenstein has constructed a simple language-game to illuminate complex philosophical theories and to display their mistakes. A crucial disanalogy is that the meter stick actually exists, having readily recognizable physical properties in addition to its normative role. Simple objects have no natural properties in addition to their metaphysical properties. What is important to note is that the discussion of the private diary concerned the epistemological subjectivity of sensations while the beetle-in-the-box arguments concern the ontological subjectivity of sensations. See Searle, Rediscovery of Mind, where the distinction is emphasized between the epistemological and the metaphysical conceptions of subjectivity. F. Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia.” Searle, Rediscovery of Mind, ch. 3. Also see Chalmers, Conscious Mind, where he defends the view that the “hard problem” of consciousness forces us to acknowledge the existence of qualia; the zombie thought experiment is the primary device he uses to develop his argument. See Chalmers, Conscious Mind, ch. 10, “The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.” Ibid., 274. After a lengthy discussion of various thought experiments, intended to show the reality of qualia as distinct from behavior or physiology, Chalmers concludes only a nonreductive functionalism is supportable: “To establish the logical determination of experience by functional organization, we would first have to establish the logical supervenience on the physical, which I have argued cannot be done.” We see a similarity of structure between these two thought-experiments: Mary, experientially innocent and yet the all-knowing neuroscientist and the cognitively innocent child genius; and now the nonfeeling zombie and the feeling stone. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, postscript. It is interesting to note that Wittgenstein’s use of argument by reminder is quite effective in this context. Such descriptive arguments have force once the major diagnostic arguments are complete. Wittgenstein’s use of “attitude” is distantly related to the philosophical notion of “propositional attitude.” It is not associated with a theory of force or propositional content. Wittgenstein intends the word to connote a fundamental and mutual recognition that obtains among human beings. This is related to the central role mutual acknowledgement plays in general in our status as language users. Brandom, Making It Explicit, ch. 1. See Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are. Even Descartes makes this point in his attempt to survey all the different kinds of ideas that the mind can entertain. He appeals to these most primitive of

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26 27

28 29

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experiences (ideas) to show that we cannot be located in our bodies as pilots are within the ships they steer. See Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Sixth Meditation. See Dennett, Intentional Stance, passim. Consider Wittgenstein’s discussion of this: “But can’t I imagine that the people around me are automata, lack consciousness, even though they behave in the same way as usual? … But just try to keep hold of this idea in the midst of your ordinary intercourse with others, in the street, say! Say to yourself, for example: ‘The children over there are mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism’” (PI §420). For an excellent discussion of the difference between “external” explanations of rule-following behavior and explanation in terms of internal relations, see Baker and Hacker, Scepticism, Rules and Language. This passage is also found in LW I §§352–3. Robert Brandom’s inferentialist semantics draws on cases like this as essential to the meaningfulness of language. Wittgenstein is drawing attention to the place that material inference can have in our language-games. We act on inferences like that from “he’s in pain” to “he needs an analgesic.” Brandom’s approach can help understand the point Wittgenstein is making about our mentalistic vocabulary and the context of its use. See Brandom, Making It Explicit. See LW II, p. 55: “But let’s assume that from the very first moment a child was born it could pretend, indeed in such a way that its first utterance of pain is pretense.—We could imagine a suspicious attitude toward a new-born child: but how would we teach it the word ‘pain’ (or ‘hurt’)? Say in a questioning tone. Then we might have to view consistent behaviour as proof of genuineness.” See, for example, the following: “Knowing what someone looks like: being able to call up an image—but also: being able to mimic his expression. Need one imagine it in order to mimic it? And isn’t mimicking it just as good as imagining it?” (PI §450) Without being reductively behaviorist, this point is related to Ryle’s idea that the ascription of psychological predicates provides an inference license. See Ryle, Concept of Mind, 121–7.

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Wittgenstein’s critical and diagnostic investigations disperse the fog of theory, allowing us to see our practices with new eyes. When we do, we acquire a new picture of ourselves as language users. In this new picture, the social character of language-games, our cultural inheritance, comes to the fore. The fact of learning is the lynchpin of Wittgenstein’s later thought. I opened with two familiar strategies for approaching the later Wittgenstein: the constructive reader emphasizes the positive insights of the Investigations; the quietist insists on the metaphilosophical remarks that deny any place for theory, thesis or explanation in Wittgenstein’s thought. My alternative reading identifies a complex interweaving of the diagnostic and the positive. The two are intimately connected. A consequence of the critical diagnostic work is a positive picture. Wittgenstein’s appeal to the learning situation is the pivot on which we move from diagnosis of mistaken theorizing to a picture of the background. As Wittgenstein says, One must start out with error and convert it into truth. That is, one must reveal the source of error, otherwise hearing the truth won’t do any good. The truth cannot force its way in when something else is occupying its place. To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth. (RFGB, p. 119) Two marks of having negotiated that “path from error to truth” are the recognition of the social character of language and the significance of learning, as a methodological and explanatory tool. There is no clear boundary between diagnosis and the emerging of a new picture. With each critical master argument, logical space is cleared such that we see the roles of stage-setting, mastery of technique, and certainty: all the factors constituting what I have called the background. The ease and smoothness with which we play our language-games necessarily involve blindness to that background. It takes an effort of thought to 313

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see what we ordinarily take for granted. Although we are all blind to the background that supports linguistic mastery, the philosopher is blind in a second way. He is blind to our blind obedience, and he seeks to fill that bedrock space with his own occult objects and forces with paradoxes masquerading as discoveries. This is seen most evidently in the Cartesian conception of consciousness: the mind is radically self-contained and complete in itself. No external factors can directly effect or be effected by the content of consciousness. Only this conception—of a radically self-contained content—secures Cartesian certainty, and so infallible knowledge of our own minds. This picture uses the elements of the normative background in a distorted way. The stage-setting is provided by the peculiar insularity of mind. Techniques for using our mentalistic vocabulary are replaced with the privileged access we have to a private world. Finally, Cartesian certainty is an epistemic certainty. Yet infallible knowledge and epistemic certainty are illusions, devices for disguising the self-defeating consequences of the Cartesian theory itself. Human certainty is tied to trusting others and is implicit in our acting and interacting with others and the world. Our natural reactions to pain in ourselves and others are the bedrock on which we are taught the expressive use of sensation terms. This expressive role of language remains essential to our concept of sensation even when a more sophisticated use of the terms emerges. One of the primary conclusions of the book is that we are more likely to find an accommodation between naturalism and normativity in the nexus of cause and norm in initiate learning. The Wittgensteinian picture provides a way of combining a naturalist outlook with the ineliminable role of normativity in our practices and in our learning. Initiate learning is a time of calibration, in which we acquire the skills and techniques to make judgments of normative similarity that constitute the bedrock we share with our fellows. With the acquisition of this second nature, we achieve the epistemic status of knowers and enter the space of reasons. But while the space of reasons is an indispensable part of the normative environment of the sophisticated speaker and actor, it does not exhaust it. Initiate learning fixes the normative bedrock without which there would be no space of reasons for the agent to enter. As Wittgenstein says: I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination. (OC §475) Wittgenstein seeks to make visible that primitive basis in all our uses of language. The philosophers’ blindness to our own blindness leads to the 314

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construction of the theories of language and mind in an attempt to transform that primitive logic into formal logic, our natural expressions of sensation and emotion into reports, and the motley of language, and thereby belief, into the homogeneous network of beliefs tied to a language constrained by the virtues of systematicity. These theories are self-defeating. In removing them, Wittgenstein’s “normative naturalism” can be seen.

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324

INDEX

agreement 67, 166, 170, 175–78, 194–98, 204, 211, 219, 223n41, 238, 252; in action 88, 177, 207–10, 219, 223n48, 250; in judgment 167, 210–12, 219, 253, 307–8 alternative-blind 105–6, 218, 250, 256 analyticity 83, 85, 182, 222n27, 230–31 animals 44, 46, 49, 53, 80, 173, 199–200, 204, 234, 249, 260, 293, 305, 318 argument forms: conflation 3, 13–15, 18–19, 21, 100, 103, 121, 268, 271, 279, 283; paradox 3, 6, 13–16, 18–19, 21, 100, 268; reductio ad absurdum 13, 15, 98, 159–60, 187n56, 241; regress, 13–14, 145, 159, 185n18, 241, 281 assertibility condition(s) 61, 76n80, 173–74, 176 assertion: ambiguity of 30, 37, 69n1, 114, 140n3; as explanatorily fundamental 26–27, 58–59, 62, 64, 68, 266n49; and judgment 30, 69n6, 70n20; primacy of assertion thesis 26–27, 30, 37, 39, 51, 62–63, 71, 111n38, 115 assertion sign 27–30, 34–36, 41–42, 52, 55 assertoric form 26, 29–30, 35–36, 41, 45, 55, 64, 127, 201; vs. asserting 30, 34, 69n1, 114; primacy of 14, 29–31, 36–39, 46, 50–52, 54, 62, 66, 68, 69n1, 74n54, 112, 114, 121, 140, 142n27, 232 Augustine 31–32, 79, 255; Augustinian picture 31–32, 70n18, 102, 107, 140, 268 Austin, J. L. 10–11, 24n11 authority 20, 22, 49, 73n43, 219, 238, 279, 280, 303, 305 Ayer, A.J. 10

background 3, 18, 21–23, 39, 45, 51, 65, 67–68, 71n46, 75n79, 79–81, 96, 100, 102–3, 105–6, 108, 117, 129, 137, 145, 149, 157, 185n31, 191, 199, 209– 11, 227–29, 235, 238, 241–42, 250, 252, 257–60, 263n16, 263n23, 264n32, 292, 295–300, 306–7, 310n9, 310n10, 313; blindness to the; 21, 100, 314; certainty 3, 20–21, 102–3, 191, 215, 228–30, 254–55, 258, 266n49, 296, 298, 303, 313; competency 22, 105–6, 237, 240, 272; and mastery of technique 3, 20–21, 228, 274, 313; obedience to the 23, 252; and stage-setting 3, 20–21, 228, 234, 269, 271, 274, 313; technique viii, 100–103, 226–28, 240, 244–52, 283, 302, 307 Baker, G.P. 172, 177–80, 182–83, 196, 204–5, 208 bedrock 163, 180, 190, 314; judgments 18, 88, 174, 176, 180, 192, 194, 210, 217–19, 220n9, 237–38, 256; and the obvious 217, 238, 250–51; practice 23, 24n10, 43, 68, 86–87, 95, 181, 190–95, 198, 219, 226, 234, 237, 239, 241, 249–51, 257, 266n46, 298–300 beetle-in-the-box argument 13, 15, 100, 227n75, 284–90, 311n14; see also paradox arguments [the paradox of sensation] behaviorism 80, 84–86, 97, 239–40, 295 belief 73, 83–87, 96–97, 126, 131–32, 137, 164, 166, 168, 215, 228–35, 240; epistemic model of 194, 297–98; web of 45, 83–85, 94, 96, 229–36, 240, 252, 256, 262n11, 262n14, 315

325

INDEX

Blackburn, Simon 184n14, 187n53, 209, 224n53, 265n36 blind obedience ix, 21–23, 67, 95, 190–92, 238, 241, 252–53, 299, 307, 314; of everyday life 22; of the novice 22, 105–6, 238, 250, 256; and rule-following 190, 192, 299, 307 blindness (deficits) 21; form-blind perception 22–23; linguistic 22; meaning-blind language use 22; soul-blind relations to others 22 Block, Ned 222n29 Bloor, David 196–97, 221n14–15, 221n19, 221n64 Brandom, Robert ix, 3, 43–52, 62, 68, 71n28, 72n34, 72n37, 72n39–40, 73n43, 73n46, 75n79, 110n28, 167–70, 185n21, 186n38–39, 186n41–43, 200, 212, 215, 220n6, 222n25, 224n56, 224n60–62, 224n68, 236, 262n5, 262n12, 266n49, 311n23, 311n29; inferential theory of meaning, 3, 47–48, 62, 71n28, 168, 220n6, 222n25, 226n49, 312n29; and regularism 168; and regulism 167–68 Budd, Malcolm 187n58, 221n13 calibration 104, 183, 217–19, 220n9, 225n73, 237, 241, 255, 289, 301 Carroll, Lewis 201, 222n26 Cartesian picture (theory) of mind 2–3, 22, 71n23, 84, 148, 231, 269–70, 286, 289–90, 293, 303, 308, 314 causal-normative divide 51 Cavell, Stanley 11, 25n11, 225n76, 263n16 certainty (certainties) 3, 20–22, 67, 95, 97, 102–3, 108, 191, 208, 226, 227–31, 234, 254–55, 257–61, 272–75, 296–98, 300, 303–4, 306–9, 313–14 Chalmars, D. 311n16–18 Chandland, D.K. 262n13 charity, principle of 131–32, 143n44, 160, 163, 166–67, 169, 185n23, 211 Chihara, C.S. 184n9 Chomsky, Noam 134, 142n26 circularity, problem of 38–39, 131, 166, 169–70, 172, 195, 198, 200, 250 cognitive division of labor 80, 105, 192, 199, 209–10, 219, 237, 239, 301 Collins, Arthur 187n58

color chart 12, 14–15, 25n14, 103, 110n33, 268, 270, 272–73 community view of rule following viii, 145, 167, 171–72, 175–78, 187n54–55, 187n73, 191, 210–11, 216, 218, 240; constitutive view 176–78, 210–12; majoritarian view 175, 177–78, 208, 210, 212, 238 compositionality 72n33, 125, 127–29, 131, 135, 137–38, 144, 147, 162 Conant, James 23n1, 140n1, 141n22 conflation arguments 3, 31, 268, 270, 284; domain of the master and domain of the novice 79, 125, 211; ‘It is asserted that p’ and ‘It is asserted: p’ 16, 42, 72n30, 112, 114; the means of representation with the object of representation 3, 14–15, 100, 103, 114, 157–59; naming and describing 273, 276; normative with non-normative features 15, 159, 267, 284; ostensive definition with ostensive teaching (training) 15, 81–82, 90, 98, 156, 167, 310n3; relation to paradox arguments 13–15, 18–19, 21, 268; propositional function with assertoric shape 16; relation to regress arguments 14; semantic and causal properties 81, 150 conformity 154, 167, 171, 173–79, 195, 211–12, 214, 226, 238–39 consciousness viii, 13, 24n8, 25n22, 267–70, 273–74, 278, 283, 286–90, 294, 296, 314 constructive interpretation 1–2, 4, 18 convention viii, 54, 57, 81, 97, 102, 133, 137, 143n44, 164, 179, 192–93, 211, 214, 217, 219, 226, 234, 238–39, 247–48, 261 correlation 85, 93, 110n25, 153, 182, 213, 271, 301 Crimmins, Mark 144n51, 144n54–55 criterion (criteria) viii, 102–3, 110n33, 127, 147, 151–54, 159, 176, 178, 181–83, 184n11, 192, 203, 223n47, 230, 242, 267, 276, 279, 283, 286–88, 293, 295, 298–305 Curtiss, Susan 262n13 custom 80–81, 168, 190, 195, 199, 221n19, 253–54, 282, 291 Davidson, Donald vii, ix, 3, 52, 72n33, 112, 125–40, 142n30–31, 142n33,

326

INDEX

143n42, 143n44, 144n49, 144n52, 147, 160–71, 183n2, 185n23, 185n31–32, 186n38, 186n49, 187n66, 187n70, 211–16, 224n62–63, 228, 232–33, 239, 252–53, 262n2 deception (pretense) viii, 267, 285, 299, 303, 305–6, 308 decision viii, 97, 190, 208, 226, 234, 238–39, 249, 256, 261, 263n17 Deigh, John 264n31 Dennett, D. 183n3, 298, 312n26 Descartes, René 2, 17, 148, 261, 269, 289, 297–98, 309n1, 310n7, 311n25 description, method of vii, 1, 3–4, 8–12, 17, 19 deVries, Willem 262n12 diagnosis vii, 6, 8–9, 14–15, 18, 21, 33, 41, 53, 86, 99–100, 102, 177, 259, 268, 272, 309, 313; theoretical 1–2, 4–5, 12, 14, 18 Diamond, Cora 23n1, 140n1, 141n22 discursive vs. non-discursive 48, 51 Dretske, F.I. 111n41, 140n5, 220n7 Dreyfus, Hubert 263n23 Dreyfus, Stuart 263n23 Dummett, Michael vii, 26–27, 32, 43, 52–68, 71n21, 72n33, 74n54–55, 74n67, 75n68, 75n80, 77, 94, 126, 232

foundationalism 230, 234 foundations of psychology 228, 298 Frascolla, Pasquale ix, 263n17 Frege, Gottlob vii, 5, 7, 14, 16, 26–55, 59, 62, 64, 68, 69n1, 69n6, 70n17–20, 70n28–29, 70n30, 77, 112, 115, 117, 119–21, 125, 127, 129, 140, 141n9, 147, 183n7, 206, 209, 247, 265n37, 265n42, 283, 286 Fregean picture of language vii, 26–27, 53, 68, 69n6, 70n17, 71n23, 206, 209; context principle 27–28, 32, 112, 114, 229; and the discovery of the proposition 31, 34- 5, 39, 72n30, 114; Frege”s idea vii, 16, 25n19, 26–27, 30–33, 39–41, 43–44, 47–48, 52–55, 59, 64–65, 69n1, 69n5–6, 70n18, 70n20, 74n54, 111n38, 112, 117, 127, 140, 141n9 Fregean systematicity 31, 52, 77, 117, 121, 125, 140

empiricism 81, 222n27, 231 encapsulation 274 epistemic privilege 233, 270–71, 273–74, 276–78, 280, 282, 287, 297, 299, 314 epistemology viii, 39, 52, 63–64, 84, 98, 267–69, 271, 277–78 Euclid 243, 252, 264n27, 264n29 experience 10, 12–13, 20, 22, 84, 94, 117–18, 155, 202, 230–33, 235, 240, 269–71, 278, 281–83, 286, 288–96, 298, 306 expressivism 72n31, 265n36, 297, 299

Gibbard, Alan 111n42, 263n20 Glock, H.J. 109n15, 262n8 Goldfarb, Warren 43–45, 49, 53, 71n28, 73n46, 200 grammar 4–5, 9–10, 13, 39, 63, 104, 140, 150, 172, 177, 179–83, 194, 201, 205, 219, 241, 247, 286, 289, 298, 302, 307; autonomy of 172, 177–78, 180–82, 189, 195, 209, 226 grammatical investigation 5, 11, 16, 19; and confusion 5, 31, 121, 130, 139, 268; vs. logical investigation 5–6, 23n5, 223 grammatical mistake 3, 7, 14, 16, 19, 23, 68, 77, 121, 139, 157, 159 grammatical propositions 97, 182–83, 230–31, 242, 248, 251, 301–2; vs. empirical propositions 169, 182, 226 Griffiths, Paul 311n24

facts: positive and negative 123–24; totality of 114, 122–23, 192 family resemblance 40, 242, 252 Fodor, J.A. 86, 88, 95, 96, 109n20, 110n25, 140n5, 142n31 Fogelin, Robert 110n31, 184n12, 185n19, 311n11 force, theory of 27, 35, 54–55, 57, 311n22 form(s) of life 8, 39, 218, 234, 238, 260, 289 Forster, Michael 188n81

Hacker, P.M.S. 23n3, 172, 177–83, 187n66, 187n70, 187n73, 196, 204–5, 208, 221n13, 222n35 Hacking, Ian 144n49, 185n31 Harman, Gilbert 71n25, 262n6 Henze, Donald 310n8 Hintikka, Jaakko 265n35 Hintikka, Merrill 265n35 holism viii, 83, 94, 96–97, 130, 164, 226–30, 233–34, 262n2, 262n8; heterogeneous 96, 227–30, 234;

327

INDEX

homogenous 83, 96, 229, 231, 233; molecular 230, 236, 261n1; radical 83–84, 96, 109n14, 168, 229–31, 261n1, 262n2 Hookway, Christopher 109n15, 262n11 Horgan, Terence 184n10 Horwich, Paul 75n76, 139, 144n58, 265n36 Hume, David 74m66, 152, 184n12, 187n56, 191, 223n45, 231, 294 identity 93, 148, 176, 180, 209, 235, 244, 267, 269, 278, 288, 299; claims 119–20, 177; conditions 14, 100, 267, 287; criterion of 192, 293, 295; principle of 116, 244; see also sameness idle ceremony 278 illusion(s) 4, 6, 8, 14, 18, 39, 63–64, 86, 98, 102, 156, 175, 282, 291, 298; of explanation, 14, 139; grammatical 7; philosophical 2, 7, 13 indeterminacy 78, 83, 87–88, 91–92, 95–96, 143n42, 154, 160, 163, 165, 196–97, 211, 229, 232, 237, 250; argument 83, 88, 91–92, 95–96; and underdetermination 163, 165 infallibility 22, 38, 278, 299, 314 inference 20, 45, 47, 82, 94, 183, 232, 243–44, 262n6, 305; inductive 179–80, 182, 197, 239, 248, 257, 303; logical 93, 96, 201–3, 230, 233, 242, 246; material 46–47, 51, 93, 96, 108, 110n28, 201–3, 222n25, 230, 233, 236, 242, 262n5, 312n29; practical 51 initiate learning (initiate learner) vii, 1, 3, 19–22, 68, 79, 81, 95–97, 103, 105–6, 108, 125, 157, 167, 172, 194, 199–200, 215–16, 219, 237, 239, 242, 245–47, 249–51, 253–57, 259, 261, 270, 272, 314; see also novice, domain of inscrutability of reference 83, 87–88, 91, 109n21, 197, 229 intellectualism 3, 20, 24n10, 157, 160, 189, 234–35 intentionality 84, 160, 170, 186n43, 219, 224n60, 235, 269, 309n1 intermediaries 6, 24n7, 70n14, 72n30, 93, 114, 122–25 interpretation viii, 3, 23, 46, 131, 133, 136–40, 145, 150, 155–56, 159–60, 162–65, 167–8, 170–71, 190, 192, 207, 209–14, 219, 226, 245–46, 250, 253,

292; methodology of 126, 130, 132, 134, 140, 143n44, 162–63, 165, 167, 186n38, 211; principle of charity 131–32, 143n44, 160, 166–67, 169, 211; radical 131–32, 134, 164, 166, 169–70, 214–15; see also paradox arguments [the paradox of interpretation] interpretationalist theory of meaning 3, 160, 241 interpretationalist theory of rule application 13, 17, 145–46, 156, 168, 216, 290 Ishiguru, H. 131, 140n2 Itard, J.M.G. 262n13 Jackson, F. 311n15 Kant, Immanuel 2, 61, 68, 108, 117–18, 192, 231, 241, 249, 262n6 knowledge by acquaintance 12, 290 Kripke, Saul 150, 154–57, 166, 172–78, 184n8, 186n49, 187n56–57, 191, 244–45, 294 KulKarni, S. 262n6 Kusch, Martin 186n45 language acquisition (learning) 3, 78–82, 86, 89, 95, 97, 104, 107, 128, 130, 136, 147, 200, 219, 291 language entry and language exist transitions 47, 50, 82, 88, 92, 105, 200–202, 206, 236, 238, 240 language-game(s) 11–12, 15–18, 20, 22–23, 25n13–14, 31, 38, 43, 45, 58, 62, 67, 79–80, 82, 88–89, 93–108, 110n33, 150, 161–62, 174, 181–83, 191–92, 197, 200–203, 206, 208, 214, 227–42, 247, 249, 252–60, 268–74, 278, 280, 282–307, 313; beetle-in-the-box 12, 14, 269, 285–86, 290; builders vii, 11–12, 15–16, 26, 31–33, 35, 37–38, 40–50, 53, 64, 68, 77, 83, 145, 153, 200, 206, 290, 300; private diary 268, 270–71, 273–74; pupil learning the natural number sequence 12, 149–50, 153–54, 223n46, 237; simple color chart 12, 14–15, 25n14, 103, 268; standard meter stick 12, 14, 99, 101, 103–4, 110n33, 217–18, 223n46, 268 learnability 72n33, 127–30, 135 learning: circle 249–51, 309n2; situation 3, 20–22, 64, 66, 106, 151, 153, 157,

328

INDEX

170, 198–200, 209, 212–16, 219, 237–40, 242, 244–45, 250–52, 261, 291, 305, 313; see also initiate learning, ostensive teaching or training Lewis, David 109n15, linguistic competence 20–22, 47, 105, 126–35, 141n10, 142m31, 147, 151, 161, 163, 196, 210, 253, 265, 272 Loar, Brian 140n5 Locke, John 2 logic vii, 8, 20, 39, 94, 96, 126, 135, 140, 145, 170, 196, 210, 230, 232, 243, 315 logical form 7, 23, 72n33, 77, 112, 119, 126, 129, 131–35, 232 Lycan, W. 143n36 machine as symbol 156, 158–59 MacLean, C. 262n13 malapropism 137, 164, 166, 215 master, domain of 20–21, 48, 79, 87, 106, 125, 149–50, 156, 177, 181, 190–91, 211, 234, 239, 301, 308, 310n3 mastery: of language, vii, 1, 19, 32–33, 44, 52–53, 59, 62, 67–68, 79–81, 84, 86, 96–97, 106, 130, 145, 157, 162, 195, 241, 283, 305–6, 310n9–10, 314; of technique 3, 20–1, 104, 219, 228, 234, 241–45, 250–51, 270, 274–75, 301–2, 307–8, 310n10, 313 mathematics 20, 23, 68, 117–18, 156, 176, 227–28, 231–32, 242–55, 258–60, 262n8, 264n26, 264n31, 266n46, 295, 298–99, 306–8, 309n1 McDowell, John 52, 71n21, 74n61, 155–57, 185n22, 185n29, 191, 240, 262n14 McGinn, Colin 184n8, 221n13, 222n34 McGinn, Marie 23n3, 266n44, 266n51 meaning: theory of 7, 53–55, 60, 63, 66, 108, 126, 131, 133, 138, 147, 162–64, 168, 173, 195; inferential theory of 3, 47–48, 62, 71n28, 168, 220n6, 222n25, 226n49, 312n29; as use 52, 54, 60–61, 75n79, 196 meaning finitism 197, 221n14 meaningfulness 7, 13, 35, 37–40, 58, 68, 77, 117, 131, 138, 204, 245–46, 312n29 meanings 84, 134, 196, 226, 228 Medina, Jose 265n37 memory 103, 278–82, 285, 288 mental illness 4, 8, 24n10, 238

mental objects 103, 149, 270, 279, 282, 289 mental process 151, 235, 282 mental states 269, 281, 288, 293–95, 302 mentalism 32, 52, 54–55, 68, 157, 184n8, 190, 193–94, 239, 295–97 metaphilosophy vii, ix, 1–19, 24n9–10, 177, 313 metaphysics viii, 6–7, 13–16, 19, 33, 39, 41–42, 62–63, 72n30, 77, 84, 95–103, 114, 117–18, 123–26, 132–36, 179–82, 203, 226, 228, 233, 240, 242–43, 247–48, 259–60, 268–77, 282–88, 293–94, 298–99 method vii, 2, 5–6, 17–22, 31, 84, 99, 153–54, 173, 192, 206, 213, 229, 268, 273–74, 290, 298; of analysis 5–6, 13, 16; of description vii, 1, 4, 8–12, 17; diagnostic 3, 8; of interpretation 126, 130–36, 140, 160–63, 167–70, 211; Socratic 2; therapeutic 2 method of projection 17, 36, 38, 147, 160, 196–97, 264n26 Millikan, R.G. 111n41 mistake vii, 1, 5–7, 14, 28, 42, 53, 68, 81, 88, 151, 154, 157, 159, 177, 209, 220, 233–4, 239, 252, 255, 261, 268, 272–73, 280, 284, 288, 293, 302, 304, 313 misunderstanding 5–8, 11, 19, 55, 68, 102, 118–21, 125, 139, 146, 250, 295, 308 Moore, G.E. 266n45 Morawetz, Thomas 263n22 Moyal-Sharrock, Danniele 266n44 Myth of the Given 185n22, 230–31, 233–34, 290 naming 12, 78–82, 91, 104–6, 112, 140, 150, 208, 217, 227, 235, 237, 250, 255, 270–8, 282, 292–93, 301 natural number sequence 2, 12, 149–50, 156–57, 162, 223n46, 237, 301–2 natural teleology 107, 111n40, 111n43 naturalism 23, 115, 140n5, 169, 263n20; and normativity 23, 314–15; scientific 84–85, 91–95, 97, 197 necessity viii, 18, 21–22, 67, 83–84, 97, 149, 180, 194–95, 226–28, 231–34, 240–42, 247–49, 254, 261, 302; causal 106, 244, 249; conceptual 97, 226–27, 232, 248; grammatical 97, 233, 248; logical 108, 226, 232, 248, 261; normative 250

329

INDEX

new problem of other minds viii, 267, 299, 306, 309 non-discursive normative practice 51 nonsense 5, 23n1, 156, 161–62, 181, 185n23, 288, 294 normative naturalism 23, 84, 314–15 normative similarity 2, 180, 213, 238–39, 300; judgments of 17–18, 218, 250–51, 254–55, 314 normative similarity, problems of vii–viii, 12, 18, 51, 77, 79, 83, 87–88, 92–94, 99, 103, 140, 145–50, 153–54, 157, 167, 170–73, 180, 191–92, 195, 210–14, 217, 226, 247, 267–70, 285, 287, 300 normativity viii, 3, 14, 18–23, 43–44, 51, 66, 97, 106, 108, 149, 167–83, 184n8, 189–95, 200, 204, 206, 210–19, 226, 231, 238, 241, 247, 254, 261, 263n20, 274, 277, 284, 300, 314 norms 14, 21, 48–51, 100–108, 167–72, 175, 178, 183, 195, 200, 218, 226, 236–39, 249, 251, 255, 257; epistemic 13, 17; ontological 13, 17; practice 13, 17; semantic 13, 17, 267 novice, domain of 21, 79, 86–87, 104, 125, 150, 177, 190–91, 210, 239, 254; see also initiate learning ontology viii, 12–13, 17, 22, 41, 87, 89, 92, 98–99, 113–16, 122, 149, 154, 231, 267–69, 274, 277–78, 282–95, 307, 310n6 order of explanation 19, 43, 120; inversion of 113, 233 ordinary language 7, 9–11, 17, 20, 30, 69n6, 119, 121, 127, 131, 134, 136 O”Shea, James 262n12 ostensive definition vii, 12, 26, 77–81, 88–98, 102–5, 112, 125, 197, 211, 227–28, 267, 292, 300 ostensive teaching or training vii, 15, 67, 77, 80–81, 90, 92, 96, 98, 104–5, 107, 108n2, 128, 149–50, 156, 199–200, 235–41, 255, 268–71, 274, 291, 280, 283, 292, 296, 300 pain 3, 10, 85, 106, 182–83, 270–71, 286–308, 309n1, 314 paradox argument(s) 3, 6, 13–18, 21, 123–24, 159, 162–67, 174–75, 241, 268, 283; relation to conflation arguments 13–15, 18–19, 21, 268; and

gerrymandering arguments 155–56, 159–60, 163–66, 168; the paradoxes of consciousness viii, 100, 103, 267–69, 290; the paradox of interpretation viii, 13, 15, 17, 100n10, 134, 145–46, 153–59, 162, 164–71, 174, 178, 196–97, 208, 211, 239, 241, 246, 250, 253; the paradox of selfknowledge viii, 15, 17, 100, 267–70, 275, 278; the paradox of sensation 100, 275, 283; the paradox of thought vii, 13, 16, 33, 43, 112, 115, 117, 121–22, 125, 268; as a reductio ad absurdum 15, 159–60, 163, 187n56, 241; see also the beetle-in-the-box argument, the private language argument Pappineau, David 11n41 pattern-governed behavior 193–95, 203–4, 208–9, 219, 220n9, 227, 233, 236 Pears, David 25n23, 140n2, 185n20, 221n12, 223n47, 225n73, 264n30, 309n2 perspicuous representation 7–9, 11 phenomenology 7, 24n8, 168; of philosophical puzzlement 5, 7–8, 24n8 physicalism 91 Plato 13–15, 73n46, 246–47, 281 Platonism 84, 156, 195, 210, 239 point, theory of 55–56 pragmatics 30 Price, Huw 265n36 private diary argument 13, 15, 38, 175, 271, 276, 290, 310n8, 310n10; see also paradox arguments [the paradox of selfknowledge] private language argument 100, 174, 267–68, 290, 293, 295, 300, 309n2, 310n8, 311n11; see also paradox arguments [the paradox of selfknowledge] privileged access 25n22, 270–71, 273–78, 287, 314 productivity of language 125, 127–29, 131, 134–38 proof of infinity of primes 185n26, 243–44, 248–49, 252 proposition, the 6, 8, 12, 16, 18, 27–28, 31–45, 52–55, 62, 77, 96–99, 112–26, 138–39, 146; discovery of 16, 31, 35, 37

330

INDEX

propositions: axial 258, 304; empirical 96, 162, 169, 182–83, 226, 249, 251, 254–55; grammatical 97, 182–83, 230–31, 242, 248, 251, 301–2; mathematical 96, 176, 180, 243, 249, 259, 295; normative 96, 249 propositions that hold fast 103, 248, 257, 259–300; see also certainty psychologism viii, 33, 74n61, 247, 251 qualia 290, 293, 311n16, 311n18 quietism 1–2, 4, 155–56, 181–82, 265n36, 313 Quine, W.V.O. vii, ix, 77, 83–99, 109n11, 109n21, 109n23, 130–31, 143n42, 186n51, 196–97, 214, 222n27, 228–36, 250 rationality 132, 138, 163, 166–71, 211–12, 233, 249 reactions 293, 296–97, 302–4; natural 15, 46, 90, 95, 98, 110n24, 150, 199, 216, 218, 241, 261, 272–73, 277, 286, 289, 300–305, 314; shared 100, 218–19, 253, 282, 288; trained 171, 190, 192, 197, 250, 300 reductionism viii, 51, 58, 64, 84, 145, 168, 171–72, 175, 189, 195–96, 210, 212, 217 reference, theory of 95, 97–98 regress argument 14, 145, 159, 241 regularities viii, 25, 54, 60, 67, 75n79, 97, 106–7, 133, 136, 143n44, 168–72, 180–82, 189–209, 220n7, 223n41, 225n73, 231, 244, 250 reminders 4–5, 9–11, 19, 32, 120, 145, 267, 272, 280, 295 representationalism 2–3, 13–14, 16, 19, 26–27, 30, 47–48, 75n79, 98, 126, 206, 210, 235–36, 260, 267–71, 274–78, 303, 309n1 resolute reading 1, 9, 17, 23n1, 141n22 Ricketts, Thomas 24n6 Robinson Crusoe 205–9 Rorty, Richard 222n27, 230–31, 262n7, 262n14 Rosenberg, Jay 50–51, 72n40, 110n34, 141n17 rule-following 3–4, 12–13, 21, 88, 97, 108, 138–40, 145–61, 167, 171–209, 217, 219, 226, 228, 238–39, 270,

290–91, 299; justificatory dimension (standard-setting dimension) of 149, 172, 190; practical dimension of 149, 151, 172, 190 Russell, Bertrand 5, 7, 18, 119, 121, 140, 141n11 Ryle, Gilbert 184n9, 241, 263n23, 312n32 Rymer, R. 262n13 sameness 2–3, 17–18, 67, 101, 154–55, 157, 167, 169–73, 176, 180–81, 192, 194–95, 197–200, 212–14, 217–18, 242, 244–45, 274, 278, 281, 288, 300–301; see also identity sanction 40, 46, 48–52, 68, 97, 105, 170, 199, 205–6, 250; external 48–49, 73n43, 177, 240; internal 48–51, 73n43, 206 Saunders, John 310n8 scientism 4, 19, 84, 92, 97 Searle, John 109n15, 111n40, 186n51–52, 221n19, 263n23, 311n14, 311n16 second nature 159–60, 190, 194–95, 213, 218–19, 255, 314 Sellars, Wilfrid 44, 81–82, 96, 193–94, 200–203, 220n7, 220n9, 220n11, 222n25, 222n27, 222n29, 230–34, 238, 262n5 semantics 3, 27, 36, 55, 107, 111n43, 134, 222n29, 228, 284, 312n29; truth conditional 55, 62–66, 77, 132, 162 sensation viii, 10–13, 17, 100, 103, 175, 228, 267–78, 283–314 sense of the obvious 3, 198, 237, 241–42, 261, 272 sense, theory of 43, 54, 56–57 sense-data 12, 293; see also qualia Shanker, S.G. 265n38 showing 234, 238, 244, 248–55, 265n35, 301 Skinner, B. F. 72, 110n25, 184n9, 163n18; Skinner box 46, 49, 72 sociality 163–64, 167–68, 209–10, 212–13, 216, 293; I-thou sociality 170–71, 175, 216–19; I-we sociality 214, 216–19 soul 22, 212, 216, 219, 294, 296, 297 space of reasons 44–47, 50–51, 62, 68, 93–94, 125, 168, 170–71, 215, 233, 237, 314 stage-setting viii, 3, 20–21, 79–81, 103–4, 226–29, 234–41, 254, 267, 269–71,

331

INDEX

274–76, 283, 292, 300–301, 313–14; stage-setting arguments 240 standard(s) 13–17, 67, 78, 91, 93, 101–7, 113, 149, 157, 166, 171, 183, 190, 194–95, 199–200, 205, 208, 216–19, 237–38, 250–51, 255, 270–75, 286–87, 280–82, 284, 287–9, 293, 303 standard meter stick 12, 14–15, 99, 101, 103–4, 110n33, 111n37, 161, 217–18, 237, 251, 253, 268, 284, 287–88 Stern, David 25n15, 264n24 Stich, Stephen 184n10 Stroll, Avrum 266n47, 266n51 stimulus (stimulation) 49–50, 81, 85, 88–96, 177, 202, 213–14, 216, 218, 230, 233–34, 239, 250, 261, 301; meaning 85, 87, 92–93, 96, 214, 233 structure: cognitive 77,107–8, 119, 125, 127, 134–35; inferential 50, 53, 96, 130, 201–2, 206, 233, 236, 240, 306–7, 309; formal 12, 18, 39, 46, 52, 127–29, 133, 137–38, 161; logical 6–7, 33, 44, 115, 129, 206; normative 3, 15, 20, 49, 80, 90, 94–95, 108, 192, 206, 233, 239, 241–42, 255, 261, 300; social 106, 181, 195; subsentential 29, 32, 40, 44, 131; syntactic 26, 36, 42–43, 117, 123, 125, 237 subliming of logic vii, 8, 20, 112–13, 117–22, 126, 134–36, 140 superstition 7, 192 superstructure 202–3, 235–36 surroundings 52, 178, 202, 206, 227, 229–30, 234–35, 240–41, 270, 304 systematicity vii, 44, 55, 81, 112, 125–26, 132, 134–35, 137, 145, 160, 240, 315 Tait, W.W. 221n13 Tarski, A. 126–27, 134–35 therapy 8 thought experiment viii, 22, 55–56, 83, 206, 215, 251, 267, 290, 295–96, 298; arithmetic pill 251; Cartesian thought experiments 267, 289–90, 293–94, 298; Mary 292, 311n19; the zombie 294, 311n16 Tienson, John 184n10 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5–7, 12, 19–20, 32, 55, 69n6, 76n80, 98–99,

113–18, 122, 126, 140, 140n5, 192, 245, 284, 287, 294 training 15, 39, 66–67, 79–82, 88–107, 108n2, 112, 125, 146, 156, 162, 171–72, 181–82, 190, 192, 199–200, 203, 209, 217–19, 237–56, 260–61, 267, 269, 272, 274, 277, 282, 291, 300–301, 307, 310n3 transcendental argument 102, 132, 147, 155–56, 241, 249; and antitranscendental argument 148 translation 36, 40, 92, 121; indeterminacy of 83, 87, 109n12, 186n51, 214; radical 55, 83–88, 130 Travis, Charles 138, 141n15, 144n56 triangulation 110n28, 163, 167, 169–70, 213–16, 239, 300–301 truth 27–30, 39, 55–68, 83, 95, 126–47, 303, 313; assertibility interpretation of 59; conditions 59, 67, 127–29, 166, 173; conditional semantics 55, 62, 64, 66, 71n21, 71n28, 77, 126, 132, 162; deflationary conception of, 126, 139, 145; redundancy conception of 64, 144n57; verificationist conception of 64 Ullian, J.S. 262n11 understanding 32, 52–55, 58–59, 62–63, 65, 119, 126, 133–34, 147–48, 150–53, 160, 178, 195, 203, 238, 302 verificationism 67–68, 71n21, 147, 175, 196, 294; verificationist theory of meaning 13, 63, 173; verificationist theory of truth 62–64 voluntarism 238, 263n17 Waismann, F. 73n32 Weiner, Joan 69n6 Williams, Meredith 185n20, 310n8 Williams, Michael ix, 75n76, 75n78, 134, 140, 140n3, 144n50, 144n58–59, 183n1, 185n20, 266n44, 266n45 Wilson, George 185n20, 187n56 Woodward, James 184n10 Wright, Crispin 151, 183n2, 187n54, 187n73, 210, 224n61, 265n39

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