the boundaries of language

Shawn and I were talking the other day about anomalies in philosophy books and papers we'd read, and I was reminded of one that I discovered a few years ago which REALLY bugged me at the time. With several years distance, however.......well, it still bugs me.

Let me set the scene. Here is the first part of #201 of the Philosophical Investigations:

'This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made to accord with the rule. The answer was: if any can be made to accord with the rule, then it can be made to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.'

Kripke famously took this as stating a sceptical paradox which the rest of the book- in particular the passages developing the argument against the possibility of a private language - offered a sceptical solution to (sceptical in the sense that it, like Hume's 'solution' to the problem of induction, fully concedes the cogency of the sceptical argument). But it's equally well known that Kripke doesn't once in his book quote the second part of #201:

'It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of another standing behind it. What this shews is 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.'

As Crispin Wright puts the familiar point, Wittgenstein is not here endorsing the paradoxical conclusion, but rather 'discharg[ing] what he views as a faulty premise on which it depends: the idea that determinacy of meaning somehow depends on interpretation'.

Now, finally, I come to my real point (you were starting to wonder, weren't you). It's been observed that there's a further slight piece of evidence against reading #201 as stating a paradox which the rest of the book still takes to be a active concern; the statement of the paradox is in the past tense. (I've seen this observation in a few places, though it's usually credited originally to Stanley Cavell). By itself, of course, this wouldn't be weighty enough to support one reading of the passage over another, but it's a neat point in conjunction with the other evidence which suggests Wittgenstein has dispensed with the paradox by the end of #201.

With this (mild) controversy over the tense in mind, try to read this 'quotation' of #201 in Robert Fogelin's widely celebrated introductory text on Wittgenstein without feeling that he's not playing fair. It hardly needs saying that Fogelin reads the Investigations in more or less the same manner as Kripke. Punctuation is exactly as it is on page 160 of Fogelin's book:

'This [is] our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made to accord with the rule. The answer [is]: if any can be made to accord with the rule, then it can be made to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.

I found this pretty astounding when I saw it years ago, and that feeling hasn't much diminished since then.

Afterword: I should say that there is some great stuff in Fogelin's book, on the early Wittgenstein in particular. It's mainly his treatment of the Investigations I object to.

Labels: Wittgenstein