RULE-FOLLOWING WITHOUT REASONS: WITTGENSTEIN’S QUIETISM AND THE CONSTITUTIVE QUESTION

This is a short, and therefore necessarily very incomplete discus-sion of one of the great questions of modern philosophy. I return to a station at which an interpretative train of thought of mine came to a halt in a paper written almost 20 years ago, about Wittgenstein and Chomsky,1 hoping to advance a little bit further down the track. The rule-following passages in the Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics in fact raise a number of distinct (though connected) issues about rules, meaning, objec-tivity, and reasons, whose conflation is encouraged by the standard caption, ‘the Rule-following Considerations’.2 Let me begin by explaining my focus here. I. The rule-following dilemma It is natural to think that in any area of human activity where there is a difference between correct and incorrect practice, which we achieve is (partly) determined by rules which fix what correct practice consists in, and which in some manner guide our aim. It also seems the merest platitude that wherever there are rules, there have to be facts about what their requirements are – and facts, moreover, which we are capable of knowing if the rules are ones whose guidance we are capable of receiving and acting on. Yet, as the rush of Wittgenstein-interpretative literature from the early 1980s onwards amply illustrates, the very idea of facts about what rules require seems on examination to raise a clutter of deeply perplexing questions of constitution and epistemic access. It is in the nature of rules, in a wide class of cases, to enjoin determinate mandates, permissions and prohibitions in previously unconsidered types of situation. So much seems to be 1 Wright [1989]; reprinted in Wright [2001]. 2 – the caption was first introduced in my [1980], so I take some responsibility for such conflations as it may have encouraged