Notes / Wittgenstein
Following a rule
Working note — a draft kept in the open. Tell me where it’s wrong.
Wittgenstein asks a question that looks too simple to be dangerous. I have been taught to add. I have done sums up to, say, large numbers but never beyond. Now I am asked for “68 + 57” and I answer “125.” What makes that the correct continuation of the rule I learned — rather than some other rule I might equally have been following all along, one that agrees with addition on every case I have met but diverges here? The training was finite; the rule reaches into infinitely many new cases; what bridges the gap?
Kripke sharpens this into a sceptical paradox. Imagine a sceptic who insists I have always meant not plus but quus — a function identical to addition for all the arguments I have actually computed, but yielding 5 for any pair as large as this one. Nothing in my past behaviour rules it out, because my past behaviour is consistent with both. Nothing in my mental history rules it out either: whatever image, formula, or feeling I summon, it too must be interpreted, and the sceptic can re-describe it as a quus-rule. There seems to be no fact — behavioural or inner — that constitutes my having meant addition. And if there is no such fact about me, there is no such fact about anyone, and meaning evaporates.
The regress of interpretations
The engine of the paradox is a single, seductive assumption: that to follow a rule is to interpret it — to have a further mental item that tells me how to apply it. Wittgenstein’s reply is to refuse the assumption. “Any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.” If grasping a rule were having an interpretation, the interpretation would itself need interpreting, and we would be off on a regress with the meaning always one step further back. So grasping a rule cannot be that.
There is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going against it” in actual cases. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §201
The dissolution, then: at some point interpretations give out and I simply act. “When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly.” This is not irrationalism; it is the recognition that the practice of following a rule is bedrock, not founded on a deeper layer of facts that justify each step. “If 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.”
Community, and how much of it we need
Kripke reads the upshot as a “sceptical solution”: there is no fact constituting meaning, but there are conditions under which we are entitled to say someone means addition — namely, agreement with the community. McDowell and others resist the slide to communitarianism: the point is not that the majority defines correctness, but that correctness lives in a custom, a practice, a shared form of life within which the very contrast between “seems right” and “is right” first gets a grip. I lean with McDowell. The community is not a tribunal that votes on sums; it is the medium in which there is such a thing as a sum to get right or wrong.
What survives either way is the lesson I keep using: normativity does not need a foundation underneath the practice. The correctness of a move is not certified by a fact behind it; it is constituted by the practice it belongs to. This is the same shape as the inferentialist’s scorekeeping and the pragmatist’s reading of the sorites — meaning and rule-correctness are matters of standing in a practice, not of correspondence to an antecedent fact.
Why a lawyer should care
Transpose the paradox into law and it stops being exotic. A statute is a rule; the legislature’s past enactments and intentions are finite; the cases that will arise are not. The sceptic’s “quaddition” is the bad-faith advocate’s gambit: nothing in the text or the legislative history strictly compels the orthodox reading rather than my creative one. Hart’s open texture is the rule-following problem seen from the bench. And the Wittgensteinian response tells the judge something true and freeing: the demand for an interpretation that, all by itself, settles every future case is incoherent — not merely hard, but the wrong thing to want. At some point the court does not interpret further; it acts, answerably, within a practice that makes the act correct or incorrect. The judge’s spade, too, is eventually turned. The honest question is never “what does the rule, interpreted deeply enough, already decide?” but “how do we go on, and what can we say for going on this way rather than that?”
Touching: Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations (1953, esp. §§138–242), Kripke (1982), McDowell (1984). See the canon §E. Compare The skateboard at the gate.