Abstract
Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule-following in Philosophical Investigations is compelling but enigmatic. It gives people a strong sense of the direction in which it is moving and yet there is no general agreement either about its starting-point or about its destination. The theory on which he turns his back is agreed by all to be Cartesianism, but there are many versions of that picture of the mind, and anyway, much depends on the question which it is taken to be answering. Is the problem the threat of scepticism about constancy of meaning? Or, is it the difficulty of understanding what gives meaning a stability which is not in doubt? Or perhaps, what needs to be explained is the credence generally put in a person’s own account of what he means. The divergence between the different views of Wittgenstein’s destination is equally striking. Some take his conclusion to be that meaning is fixed solely by agreement in judgements. Others think that he neither sought nor claimed to have found any single criterion of the correct use of language, but treated it as a system with many different ways of maintaining its stability, none of which would serve in sufficiently adverse circumstances.
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Notes
Philosophical Investigations, I, §187.
Philosophical Investigations, I, §682.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.0141–4.015.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.12. Cf. letter to Russell 19 August 1919, para. 5, (Notebooks 1914–1916, p. 130).;
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 3.262–63.
Philosophical Investigations, I, §201.
Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1930–32, pp. 35-36.
Philosophical Investigations, I, §237.
The Blue and Brown Books, pp. 11–12.
Philosophical Investigations, I, §§139–41.
Russell: 1956, ‘On Propositions’, in Essays in Logic & Knowledge, ed. R. C. Marsh, London: the article was written in 1919.
The Blue and Brown Books, p. 36.
The Blue and Brown Books, p. 34.
The Blue and Brown Books, pp. 35–36.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.023.
Russell: 1912, The Problems of Philosophy, Williams and Worgate, London, Ch. V.
Philosophical Investigations, I, §§195–97.
Wittgenstein: Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, pp. 182–84.
Philosophical Investigations, I, §242.
See D. F. Pears, The False Prison, Vol. II, Ch. 14.
See the discussion of ownership of sensations in Philosophical Remarks, §§57–66.
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Pears, D. (1991). Wittgenstein’s Account of Rule-Following. In: Hintikka, J. (eds) Wittgenstein in Florida. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3552-8_10
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