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In some of the best-known and most written-about parts of Investigations §§185-242, Wittgenstein appears to be concerned to emphasize that following a rule is a usage, a custom, an institution, or a practice (he seems to use these terms interchangeably):
198. “So is whatever I do compatible with the rule?” -- Let me ask this: what has the expression of a rule -- say a signpost -- got to do with my actions? What sort of connection obtains here? -- Well, this one, for example: I have been trained to react in a particular way to this sign, and now I do so react to it. But with this you have pointed out only a causal connection; only explained how it has come about that we now go by the signpost; not explained what this following-the-sign really consists in. Not so; I have further indicated that a person goes by a signpost only in so far as there is an established usage, a custom. [1]
199. Is what we call “following a rule” something that it would be possible for only one person, only once in a lifetime, to do? -- And this is, of course, a gloss on the grammar of the expression “to follow a rule”.
It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which only one person followed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood, and so on. -- To follow a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (usages, institutions).
202. … ‘following a rule’ is a practice.
Hilary Putnam has suggested, helpfully, that in §199, Wittgenstein’s point is fairly simple. According to Putnam, he means only to note that it does not even make sense to speak of someone’s following a rule, making a report, giving or understanding an order, or doing all sorts of other things in certain circumstances, namely those in which they cannot be said to be taking part in some established practice. [2] That is why Wittgenstein says in §199 that following a rule is not “something that it would be possible for only one person, only once in a lifetime, to do.” If, for example, mankind had never done any mathematics, and if someone were to write out the series 1, 2, 4, 8, 16..., it would make no sense to say he or she was applying the rule we write as xn = 2x(n-1) (cf. §204). As things are, where people have done mathematics for thousands of years and it is as ubiquitous as anything could be, that would be a fine way to describe someone who had been taught basic mathematics and did the same thing, but it would be a mistake to describe the actions of the person in my example this way.
Though Putnam does not say so, the same thought also seems to explain why in §200 he indicates that it would be inappropriate to say of the people he describes there that they are playing a game: since there is in the relevant tribe supposed to be no practice or custom in which they might thereby be said to be taking part--that is, no game they might be playing--it makes no sense to say that they are playing one. And he makes a similar point with his rhetorical question at §204: “would the following be possible…: mankind has never played any games; once though, someone invented a game--which, however, was never played?” Wittgenstein makes clear that this is supposed to be a grammatical or conceptual point about the concepts of following a rule, giving an order, playing a game, etc., precisely the sort of mundane and uncontroversial reminder in the provision of which Wittgenstein tells us in §127 the philosopher’s work consists.
Putnam’s reading certainly helps to make clearer the sense of these remarks, but it does not solve all of the relevant interpretive problems. For, we may still ask, why does Wittgenstein consider this grammatical point an important one to make? In particular, how is this point related to the one he seems to be making in §198, where he first indicates that rule-following is a practice?
Before we can answer those questions, we need to understand §198. That passage opens with a re-articulation of the question at the heart of this whole discussion: “But how,” he has an interlocutor ask, “can a rule teach me what I have to do at this point? After all, whatever I do can, on some interpretation, be made compatible with the rule.” Unsatisfied with this way of putting the problem, Wittgenstein suggests an alternative formulation: “No, that’s not what one should say. Rather, this: every interpretation hangs in the air together with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning.” Wittgenstein’s point would seem to be that--at least given the way that his interlocutor understands the problem--it will not do for the interlocutor to answer his own question--“how can a rule teach me what I have to do at this point?”--by saying simply that the rule will do so as soon as it is interpreted. For interpretations themselves admit of various interpretations, as do the interpretations of those interpretations, and so on. The interlocutor of course realizes this, and that is why he is distressed: interpretation seemed like the best candidate for solving his problem, and now that he sees it cannot help him, the problem seems to him insoluble. He recognizes that rules give clear instructions in ordinary life, but he cannot understand how this is possible.
It is here, in remarks clearly intended to help Wittgenstein’s interlocutor see his way out of these difficulties, that Wittgenstein first emphasizes that following a rule is a “usage, a custom.” (In fact in §198 he is speaking about following a signpost, but the idea is that a signpost is the expression of a rule of some sort.) Perhaps, then, we can make some headway by asking how the claim that following a rule is a practice might be thought to constitute or point the way to a solution of the “paradox” Wittgenstein articulates at §198.
It will help us to do that if we consider Wittgenstein’s more explicit statement of his favored solution (or dissolution, if you like) in §201:
That there is a misunderstanding here [i.e., in the interlocutor’s thought that a regress of interpretations is unavoidable] is shown by the mere fact that in this chain of reasoning we place one interpretation behind another, as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another lying behind it. For what we thereby show is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and “going against it”.
As many commentators have said, the point here would seem to be that the interlocutor’s mistake was to think that, as Wittgenstein puts it, “every interpretation hangs in the air together with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support,” or in other words, that every rule not only admits of but requires interpretation in order for it to have any clear meaning. [3] This assumption, Wittgenstein means to indicate, is confused: in a large portion of real life cases, rules neither need nor even so much as admit of interpretation. They simply leave no question as to how they are to be followed, and when they do, it is just false that their interpretations always leave room for further interpretation. Now let us ask: how might Wittgenstein’s remark in §198 that “a person goes by a signpost only in so far as there is an established usage, a custom” be meant to help us see this?
I want to suggest that these remarks are supposed to help us to appreciate that the interlocutor’s assumption is mistaken by prompting us to reflect on what it is really like to participate in the relevant practices, customs, etc. In §194, Wittgenstein writes that “when we do philosophy, we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the way in which civilized people talk, put a false interpretation on it, and then draw the oddest conclusions from this.” By emphasizing that following a rule is a practice, he means to get us to see how we have done this in the present case. Once we remember what it is really like to take part in the relevant practice, we will recognize the mistaken assumption he points out in §201 and see how it makes us think we need to solve the rule-following “paradox.” We will see how it can be the case, as Wittgenstein says it is, that “there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation.” [4]
What, then, of §§199-200? Why is the grammatical point Wittgenstein makes there worth making?
Here is an idea. Wittgenstein’s interlocutor is distressed because he has found himself unable to identify some method an individual might use to determine what a rule requires in a given case. He had hoped that interpretation might do the job, but now he sees it cannot. At other places in Wittgenstein’s text, we see the interlocutor get his hopes up at the prospect that intuition might do the same thing (e.g., §213). I want to suggest that the point of §§199-200 is to show Wittgenstein’s interlocutors that this whole approach is mistaken. The interlocutors think that questions about what a rule requires are to be decided by considering psychological facts about individuals, facts about their intuitions or the way they interpret the rule. But--Wittgenstein explains in §199--this just cannot work. For if it could, it would be possible for there to be “only one occasion on which only one person followed a rule.” They would only need to interpret it rightly or intuit its sense. But, he here reminds us, that is not possible! Rule-following and all the other activities he mentions are practices, and so they cannot occur in the absence of the whole “whirl of organism” that sustains them as practices. [5]
These passages are thus intended to help to disabuse Wittgenstein’s interlocutors of the thought that they must answer the question at issue in these hopeless ways. Wittgenstein’s hope would then have been that, having seen that their approach to these questions cannot but fail, these interlocutors would be more open to and so more able to understand the solution to which Wittgenstein points the way in §198 and articulates more explicitly at §201.
Notes
[1] Throughout I use the translations in the 4th edition of the Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
[2] See Putnam’s “Was Wittgenstein Really an Anti-realist about Mathematics?” in Wittgenstein in America, ed. McCarthy and Stidd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 143-149.
[3] See, for instance, David H. Finkelstein, “Wittgenstein on Rules and Platonism” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read, (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 53-73.
[4] John McDowell makes basically this point at “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 238.
[5] I take this by-now famous phrase from Stanley Cavell. See Must We Mean What We Say?, (Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1969), p. 52.
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