Wittgenstein and the Rule Following Paradox

Vicken Stein's rule following Paradox is one of the most complex and challenging philosophical ideas you're going to find anywhere in Vicken Stein's writing it concerns his thoughts on meaning and language and how we act as a community and it seems to set up a really deep philosophical puzzle which says that there can't be any such thing as language having meaning but it just seems obvious to us that when we talk when we write when we use language we mean something by it there is something there for us to understand so what's going on there let's jump right into it vien Stein's rule following Paradox crops up in his philosophical investigations his second great work of philosophy published in 1953 postumus a few years after his death perhaps the main topic of Vicken Stein's philosophical investigations is his thoughts on language and meaning how we use language how we understand language how language comes to have a meaning and how it's possible for language to mean anything at all and right in the center of this discussion of language and meaning between paragraphs 138 and 242 we find Vicken Stein's discussion of rule following and the rule following Paradox so first let's just say a little bit about why rule following and the Paradox is so important to Vicken Stein's understanding of language and meaning one of the big ideas in the Philosophical Investigation is that language by and large gets its meaning through the way that we use that language in paragraph 43 he writes for a large class of cases though not for all in which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus the meaning of a word is its use in the language so language is a rule governed activity if we want to set up a meaningful language a meaningful public language within a community basically what we need to do is give a system of rules for that Community to follow in using the words of that language so we've got this deep connection according to vicen Stein between rules governing how language is used and the meaning of that language so then the question that arises for Vicken Stein is what's the connection between the rule itself and its application that is the way that we act the way that we behave according to that rule or to put it a slightly different way what does it mean to act in accordance with a rule what does it mean to act against a given rule these are the kind of questions that Vicken Stein is going to focus in on so having given us this connection between meaning and rules and following a rule Vicken Stein thinks there is a real deep problem here or at least some kind of issue that we can get into if we don't think about things the right way this is often called the rule following Paradox and he expresses the idea like this paragraph 2011 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 what on Earth does he mean there let me try and illustrate what he means there by giving you an example one thing I want to point out first this is going to get pretty weird and I think it's kind of meant to be a bit weird VI gign is trying to alert us to stuff that we kind of take for granted in an everyday sense but when we look at things philosophically we kind of go oh yeah that actually is much more difficult to explain so there's going to be some weird ideas coming up you just have to roll with it okay suppose we got these two characters Anna and Beck and they're driving along trying to get to their destination and they're following various road signs okay and the road signs typically say okay your destination that way and there's a big Arrow or you know your destination that way and there's a big Arrow what does it mean for them to follow that rule well that's obvious right it just means turn your car in the direction of the arrow but suppose what actually happens is this Anna's driving and she turns following the arrow and she turns following the arrow and she turns following the arrow but on the 10th time she turns the opposite way to the way the arrows pointing and Beck turns to her and says well what did you do that for why did you do something different and Anna says I'm not doing anything different I'm just doing the same thing I've always done and Beck says no you didn't you you you followed the arrow you followed the arrow but this time you went against the arrow so you did something different and Anna said no no that wasn't what I was doing I was following the following rule on the first the second the third Etc time Drive the way the arrows pointing but on the 10th and the 20th and the 30th time go the opposite way to the way the arrow is pointing that's the rule that I was following and that's what I did Beck feels really perplexed by this and I guess we do too to us Anna's Behavior seems kind of weird but you know if she was following that bizarre rule on the 10th and the 20th and the 30th time go the opposite way to the way the arrow says then she did nothing wrong she was doing the same thing she'd always done and in fact if she had turned on the tenth time the way the arrows pointing she would have been breaking her rule so the kind of question that Vicken Stein's thinking about here this is not his example I think it's just one that gets the idea across a bit more simply is well we've got this system of having arrows pointing in directions okay and we have these rules which rule gives the meaning of the arrow we've got one rule that basically just says each time you see an arrow pointing in the way you want to go follow that arrow and we've got another rule that says do that on all the times except for the 10th the 20th the 30th in which case go the opposite way which rule gives the meaning of the arrow before we go any further I'd just like to jump in here and say I hope you're enjoying this content if you'd like to help me out to make more educational academic content like this go and take a look at my Kofi page and see how you can help me out okay okay so like I said there is weird stuff going on here in Vicken Stein's writings cuz it just seems obvious to us that there's a right thing for Anna to do you know the thing that we would all do follow the arrows and a wrong thing for her to do but the question really is what is it about her or about anyone that shows that we're following a particular rule rather than some other weird rule well you might say to yourself every time I go out driving and I see an arrow pointing to where I want to go I I Follow the arrow so it's pretty clear that I'm following the the usual rule you know follow the direction of the arrow rather than the weird rule that says on the 10th and the 20th time going the opposite way but let's just suppose that each time you've been out driving you've never made more than let's say 60 turns or 90 turns or whatever okay so consider the following rule you're going to follow the direction of the arrows apart from on Arrow 100 an arrow 200 and arrow 300 or whatever and on those cases you're going to go opposite it then really no fact about your past experience exp erience shows which rule you are following the kind of common sense one or the weird one because by hypothesis you've never got to Arrow number 100 before now there's lots of different questions different philosophical issues about rule following that we could talk about here that Vicken Stein isn't really trying to get at so we've got rules being vague okay some rules are just vague and it's hard to know what counts as following that rule or not that's not what Vick canin's talking about we've also got rules that clash with other rules so maybe we're trying to follow two rules like moral rules or legal rules and they seem to clash in certain cases okay that can definitely happen and it's a it's a philosophical issue but that's not what Vicken Stein's talking about here so Vicken Stein usually picks mathematical examples when he's talking about rule following basically because we think of mathematical rules as being unambiguous you know they're precise they're not me to conflict with one another and the idea is if if we have these rule following problems even in the case of mathematics they're going to crop up everywhere so it's not just a problem for following mathematical rules they're going to be a problem for following any kind of rule now if you read those Central bits of the philosophical investigations where Vicken Stein's talking about rule following and the rule following Paradox it's pretty difficult to follow it's difficult to see what the problem is what he thinks the solution is whether he even thinks there's a solution there or not one of the most most influential commentaries on Vicken Stein on meaning and rules and Rule following is soul kryp 1982 book Vicken Stein on rules and private language kpk is trying to do two main things in this book the first is to give a clear interpretation of the problem as he sees it in Vicken Stein and the second thing kryp is trying to do is give his solution to the problem key just like Vicken Stein sets up a simple mathematical example he's thinking about adding numbers together okay simple answer 125 but crypy points out there is this other function out there it's just something that he's made up out of the air he calls it quad and it's defined like this if you've got numbers lower than 54 you just do the normal thing and add them together but if either of the numbers are bigger than 54 or 54 then you just give the answer five okay that's a DFT function no one really does that but cryp his question is suppose that you've just never added together numbers 54 bigger before what is it about you and your past actions your intentions your education or any of that stuff that shows that you are adding rather than quadding in other words what did you mean by the plus sign what did you mean by that bit of language did you mean the addition function or the quad function well obviously we want to say you know we meant addition I'd never heard of this quadding business before clearly I meant addition but what fact about you shows that that's what you meant as crypy points out it can't be your past actions because by hypothesis all the numbers you've added together before they're smaller than 54 so adding and quading would have given the same answers so it can't be your past actions that shows which one you meant and you might say well I'm just going on as I did before right I've always added numbers together fine and I'm just doing the same thing here but it's fairly easy to see that that answer work do because if you were always adding in the past then you should go on and give the answer 125 and if you were always quadding in the past then you should give the answer five now okay so you say look let's let's just try and break this down and understand what adding means adding two numbers together basically just means I add one to this number this number number of times okay so if I'm adding three and three then I add one I add one I add one I do it three times and I get the answer so really adding is just about repeating add one and add one is really simp simple so problem solved right well not really because we've got add one but we've also got this other thing quad one so we add one we add one we add one apart from in certain cases where we just forget all that stuff and give the answer five so we can underpin addition with the add one function but we can also underpin quad condition with the quad one function so we're just back to the original problem now basically what fact about us our past action shows us that we were basically adding one as opposed to quadding one in the past nothing can because by hypothesis those functions agree on all the numbers we've ever encountered in the past it's only when we get to the bigger numbers the numbers 54 and up and you know by hypothesis we haven't encountered those numbers before a lot of people have pointed out maybe the interpretation isn't kind of very Vick andian I don't really want to get into the issue of is it a really accurate interpretation or not I just think it's useful to look at kryp ky's explanation because trying to understand exactly what Vicken Stein was talking about by reading the philosophical investigations isn't easy at all so that in a nutshell is basically Vicken Stein's rule following Paradox so I want to say a little bit now about what Vicken Stein went on to say about it and whether he thought of it as a genuine problem or not and then I'll also say a little bit about what kpy thought the solution should be so on my reading Vicken Stein doesn't at the end of the day think that the rule following Paradox is a gen genuine problem he thinks it basically reveals a misunderstanding in our theorizing about how language works so he says paragraph 2011 it can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we gave one interpretation after another that is we try to work out what I mean what I intend by this plus symbol and we we think about okay is it this rule or that rule okay so we need a rule to interpret a rule or maybe another rule to interpret that rule and we just get in this kind of big mess and all of a sudden we don't know what we mean Vick canstein thinks that this just shows that we've made a an error there right at the first step where we basically try to give a rule to interpret a rule instead Vicken Stein says when I obey a rule I do not choose I obey it blindly okay what does that mean what does it mean to obey a rule blindly well I don't think it's completely clear what Vick means but around this part of the philosophical investigations he talks a lot about practice and he kind of links following a rule to the kind of training we have so we are trained to follow a rule in such a way that when we when we come to act on that rule we don't think okay what does it mean we just act I think that's what he means by following it blindly so Vicken Stein Compares following a rule to following an order When someone tells you you know go and do that thing and you just do it okay you're not really thinking about what they mean or should I do it or whatever you're just you just do what they tell you to do and Vicken Stein thinks that following a rule that is acting in accordance with the meaning of the word is basically something like that he says in 198 I have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way and now I do so react a person goes by a signpost only in so far as there exists a regular use of signposts a custom okay so this is a really interesting point I think it's maybe one of the central points in all of Vicken Stein's philosophy of language in the philosophical investigations this idea of there being a custom that underpins meaning for Vicken Stein a custom isn't just another rule but rather it is our being embedded in a social situation a community so without that community of language users there would be no such thing as meaning so this way of thinking about things ties in quite closely with kpk's way of trying to solve Vicken Stein's rule following Paradox so kryp key sets out how he understands the skeptical problem the rule following problem and then he says well in a way it's right what the problem establishes is that there can be no facts about meaning there can't be any facts about me my education my my past history my use that dictates that I mean this thing rather than this thing this this function rather than that function or whatever by a mathematical symbol or by any word so that's the kind of skep iCal bit of kryp Key's analysis of Vicken Stein what kryp key then offers is what he calls a skeptical solution he's not trying to rebuff or reject the the skeptical line but rather he's trying to say granting that granting that there are no facts about meaning we can still have meaning words still have meaning it's just not how we thought of it before we met the rule following Paradox so on kpk's view a community of speakers of language users is a essential for any bit of language to have any meaning it just wouldn't make sense for an individual in isolation to be the only one who ever used that language and for it to be meaningful it wouldn't even be a language a tool according to cryp key so on this view meaning isn't an objective phenomenon that's basically what he means by saying there are no facts about meaning but that doesn't mean that meaning is subjective according to cryp key it's not like you or I or anyone gets to use language any way we want so we're not Humpty Dumpty who can just use you know a word to mean absolutely anything there are kind of constraints on what words mean so meaning isn't objective it's not subjective but it's inter subjective meaning exists in the interrelation of all of us in this community of language users lots of Vicken Stein Scholars don't really like kpk's take on Vicken Stein and the the main source of contention seems to be that cryp key tries to give a solution or be a skeptical solution to the problem whereas Vicken Stein seems to be saying there's kind of no problem here in the first place the the the problem is only there because we have misunderstood how language works and Vicken Stein is pretty clear in the philosophical investigations when he's talking about the purpose of philosophy and the method of philosophy that really we're not out there to form Grand theories about meaning or about anything else rather we're just trying to uncover mistakes that we as philosophers go in for in particular about the way that language is used so the problems aren't there to be solved it's rather we just uncover the mistakes that we've made and I think all of that's true in the sense of that is what Vicken Stein genuinely thought about philosophy so in that sense cryp his skeptical solution can't be a genuinely Vick andian one in the sense that you know Vicken Stein would have agreed aged with it it's still Vicken Stein inspired and the way I see it is that KP key read Vicken Stein he saw a genuine problem there but also thought it's a problem to be solved and here's the solution what kpy says he's quite upfront about this he's not trying to get to grips with exactly what Vicken Stein meant or exactly what Vicken Stein would have said he's basically said well I read Vicken Stein and here are the ideas as they struck me key and here's my solution in a kind of Vicken denian spirit so some people call this krippenstein it's kind of you know a mashup of Vicken Stein and kryp key kryp key calls it um Vicken Stein as it struck kryp key what do I think well I think the rule following Paradox is a really really deep philosophical issue and I guess I agree with more on the crypy side than on the traditional Vicken Stein side in that if there is a philosophical problem there then it's kind of of your job as a philosopher to try to understand what's going on there and to try to come up with a solution or at least with some theorizing that helps us think around the problem for Vicken Stein that was a mistake for Vicken Stein the job of the philosopher is not to theorize but just to describe just to look at how things are and how we do things and Vicken Stein thinks that if we do that with enough attention if we do it carefully enough the problems turn out to be non problems I think that's a fundamental mistake switch the topic forget meaning for the time being let's think about moral issues let's say it seems pretty obvious to me that we could describe the way that people behave you know morally immorally with all the detail and attention you like and that wouldn't really help us with moral questions like how should I act in this case if you want to know what's morally right and wrong you need to do some philosophical moral theorizing you have to understand what it means means what it is to act in a morally right or a morally wrong way and then think about how to apply that general theory to the specific case to tell you what you should do or shouldn't do or try to do in this particular case and I think that's a model for philosophy in general so not all of philosophy is practical philosophy a lot of it is theoretical philosophy if we're thinking about meaning how meaning is possible then we're in a very theoretical area of philosophy but I still think it's part of the job of philosophers to identify problems articul them clearly and then to come up with theories or at least ways of thinking about the issue that ideally solve the problem or at least give us some kind of understanding of what's going on there but with that said I think that Vicken Stein's discussion of meaning and language and Rule following is some of the most challenging and difficult but profound philosophy definitely in the 20th century and pretty much of all time so I definitely suggest you go and have a look at that look at some of the secondary literature look at kpk's book if you want to hear more about Vicken Stein's life and his ideas go and take a look at this video here thank you so much to all my co-i supporters for making this content possible thank you to you for watching this far I really appreciate it and I hope to see you back here on attic philosophy soon

Channel: Attic Philosophy

Views: 4,307

Keywords: philosophy, university, Mark Jago, education, logic, reason

Id: qF2XjCOmnsI

Length: 21min 18sec (1278 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 04 2023