Abstract
In this essay, I defend an individualistic reading of Wittgenstein on learning . Many scholars (Williams, Stickney, Simpson) read Wittgenstein as endorsing a broadly social initiation model of learning (see also, Derry and Bakhurst for a Vygotskian spin on this). The social initiation model looks inevitable if you endorse the orthodox assumptions about Wittgenstein’s treatment of linguistic regularity. The key assumptions are as follows: (i) linguistic regularity involves a normative practice with words; (ii) normativity is socially constituted; and (iii) learning involves acquiring these normative practices. Developing arguments started in my Wittgenstein : Opening Investigations (2015), I deny all three assumptions. Wittgenstein’s treatment of linguistic regularity is naturalistic, not normative; it involves users engaging with words in ways that are patterned, patterns in which words fit, but the concept of ‘fit’ requires no more than ‘primitive normativity ’ (Ginsborg 2011). What this amounts to is the following: learners ’ first encounters with things from which they acquire concepts are encounters shaped by the syntactic patterns that render things salient, patterns of rhythm, rhyme and repetition. These patterns are not the patterns of conceptual order, let alone a normative pattern; they are the patterns characteristic of aesthetic experience; they are the patterns of play and of games. In short, individuals learn by playing with the forms of aesthetic experience—playing with sounds and symbols is the basis for these things coming to bear content. This is not to deny that there is a transition from such patterns to conceptual patterns, but challenging the orthodoxy of assumption (i) leaves conceptual patterns inheriting much of the contingency of the shape of aesthetic patterns. In the Big Typescript , Wittgenstein compares a rule to a garden path. We walk paths with a sense of allegiance to the way to go, but without any prescriptive sense that we have to go this way rather than that. We are, in part, authors of the paths we take. Understanding Wittgenstein on learning involves coming to learn how to share his sense of being comfortable with the contingencies of word use and to stop looking for any sense that there are prescriptive norms governing what we learn to do with words.
A shorter version appears in the Wittgenstein section of the Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Springer, 2016), co-edited by Nicholas Burbules & Jeff Stickney (Michael A. Peters, Chief Editor).
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- 1.
Wittgenstein also clearly endorses the common sense view that very often what we say is precisely what we mean and in striking fashion. He endorses what I call the ‘disclosure thesis’, see PI §§69, 71, 208 for instances for the idea that what we say as teachers is what we know; it does not fall short of that, it discloses it. It is also there in Augustine’s words in §1, although in a slightly different form when Augustine speaks of how we can express (reveal) how things are with us in the natural language of gestures. Being clear that Wittgenstein endorses such disclosure is grist to the mill for the thought that what Wittgenstein is doing is investigating how this is possible, rather than offering sceptical arguments that call it into question.
- 2.
And having an account of how it can be right is not to deny that it can be informative, once one has that account, to say that such know-how can be represented by saying something of the form: we know that the meaning of w is __. But when that is the case, it is only because we have an account of what it means to say that such propositional knowing-that is, in Wiggins’ felicitous phrase, the ‘stepchild’ of knowing-how, see Wiggins (2012).
- 3.
See the marginal remark between §§70 and 71 of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
- 4.
Of course, Fodor (1975) and in many places since has endorsed this nativism ; that is, Fodor denies that learning is transformative. I think Fodor is wrong, but the challenge to give a coherent model of how learning is transformative is, I think, a key challenge.
- 5.
- 6.
It is often assumed that Wittgenstein’s celebrated argument against ostensive definition as a fundamental method of assigning meaning to words makes a point something like this, but see Luntley (2015) for an alternative reading of what Wittgenstein says about ostension, including ostensive teaching , that is in line with what I argue here.
- 7.
Some descriptivists leave scope for explanation when they appeal to Vygotsky , e.g., Bakhurst , but that either hits a version of the problem that afflicts Williams’ social explanation, or it collapses back to descriptivism. In addition, this approach arguably misinterprets Vygotsky , for although he endorsed the key claim re the social constitution of the mind—interpsychological states are prior to intrapsychological states and he says that the latter come about by ‘internalisation’ of the former, he also states that we have no idea how this process works! And on that point, I have to insist, Vygotsky got it absolutely right! See Luntley (2016a).
- 8.
The ‘very little’ in this formulation qualifies our comprehension at the time relative to the specific learning at issue, and it does not qualify a period in ontogeny. In adult life, there are still learning encounters formed by game-like patterns that lack the generality of concept mastery. In other words, the role of aesthetic patterns in learning that I am promoting is not restricted to early development, for it never goes away. It is implicated in the craftiness of our use of words, in making sense of the art and craft of word use that is always available in our open-ended extensions of the conceptual. See Luntley (2016b) for more on this and the idea of the ‘craft of inquiry ’ as a way of capturing Dewey’s place for aesthetic experience within inquiry.
- 9.
I am indebted to Carey (2009) for the insight that numerals can figure in patterns with a sense of correctness weaker and distinct to the notion of correctness at play with words whose use is subject to semantic correctness. The former concept of pattern is central for her idea of placeholder structures that provide the learner with a first use of numerals prior to acquiring a conceptual understanding of numbers. The idea that such placeholder structures are akin to aesthetic patterns answerable to a primitive ‘ought’ of fit that is not rule-governed, is suggested by Ginsborg’s work on rule-following and aesthetics , Ginsborg op cit.
- 10.
I ignore the issue whether standards of correctness introduce norms or ‘oughts’. I suspect they do not, but even if they did, they are different norms to the primitive normativity to aesthetic patterns.
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Luntley, M. (2017). Wittgenstein and the Path of Learning. In: Peters, M., Stickney, J. (eds) A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3136-6_29
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