Rules and philosophical problems

Philosophical descriptions of language use and the work of clarifying philosophical problems are, according to the methodological interpretation, intimately related: ―grammatical reminders are instruments employed to dissolve actual philosophical problems that particular people have‖ (Kuusela 2008, 250). Wittgenstein‘s rules of grammar are purpose-relative statements. They serve as (constructed) organising schemas of our erratic language use, whilst their ―correctness is decided on the basis of how the instances of language use fit [statements of rules]‖ (Kuusela 2008, 254). The claim,

33_{A similar argument is put forward by Hilmy: ―The shift to a heuristic use of exact language games as} ‗objects of comparison‘ involved an abandonment of his attempts earlier in his career to offer a refined and complete system of rules for the use of words (an ‗ideal‘ order to which our language must approximate), but this should not be taken to imply that he was no longer concerned with ‗rules of use‘ in his later philosophy. Rather there was a change in his concern with such rules‖ (Hilmy 1987, 77). Note that some authors discussed below under the ―anthropological‖ view emphasise the status of rules as objects of comparison too.

34 _{―Rules are to be comprehended as articulating models with the help of which language use is described by} means of comparison‖ (Kuusela 2008, 140)

33 however, is not that there are no rules whatsoever that govern our actual use of language and function as norms (establishing that would be a matter for linguists or anthropologists), but rather that the later Wittgenstein‘s notion of rules of grammar does not correspond to the notion of rules as norms which govern our linguistic practices, functioning as independent standards of correctness that could be called upon in a critique of other philosophical theories. For, that assumption involves a relapse into metaphysical claims about language use. In short, the crucial point is to understand the status of rules as objects of comparison, whereas the philosopher is not at liberty to assert whether the rule she states in fact governs actual use, without committing herself to an empirical or metaphysical thesis. There is a crucial difference between the rules that are constitutive of meaning (those one actually follows on particular occasions) and the rules as objects of comparison formulated by the philosopher (see Kuusela 2008, 217ff.).

The rules stated by the philosopher in the course of clarification of philosophical problems have, as Kuusela stresses, their own grammar.35 The methodological interpretation thus distinguishes between the ―grammar of our language‖ (i.e. regularities pertaining to actual language use on particular occasions) and the grammar of philosopher‘s statements (or the rule-governed grammar). The philosopher‘s grammar is only a (constructed, artificial) means of description (or model) of the actual grammar of our language. Whilst the actual grammar of our language is typically unbounded, fluctuating, flexible and occasion-variant, the philosopher‘s grammar is fixed, precise and sharply determined (Cf. AWL 48). For instance, our actual use of the word ―meaning‖, or our actual concept of meaning, has various facets, so that sometimes we use the word ―meaning‖ to designate the object some word stands for, sometimes to designate our use of the word, sometimes what we ―mean‖ by the word (i.e. a mental picture) and sometimes the feeling it invokes. Our use of the word ―meaning‖ thus fluctuates from occasion to occasion, and is not regulated by some fixed, uniform rule; its grammar is not clearly regulated. This fluctuation in use, as Kuusela suggests, is the main cause of philosophical confusion. To remove confusion connected with focusing on, say, the aspect which represents meaning as the mental picture, we might bring to view a different use of the problematic word, or different facet of the concept, by stating a rule such as ―The meaning of a word is its rule-governed use‖. As the statement of a rule, such a statement will amount to a statement of essence or ―exceptionless necessity‖

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34 (Kuusela 2008, 148), although (as an object of comparison) it will not attribute this necessary feature (i.e. rule-governedness) to our concept of meaning.

The grammar of our language is embedded in ―the form of life language is part of‖ and only in that sense is ―the logical... fundamentally intertwined with the factual‖ (Kuusela 2008, 147). To this extent, the grammar of our language, Kuusela argues, can be considered non-arbitrary. Hence, to say that grammar is arbitrary is merely ―to clarify the status of statements about essences and necessities by characterising them as grammatical statements‖ (2008, 190). If one fails to keep these two notions of grammar separate, one is in danger of projecting the properties of the ―ideal‖ onto our actual language use, thus claiming that it is, or it must be, governed by rules.36

And this is precisely what Hacker‘s interpretation does. Accordingly, it falls short of understanding the proper role of rules and the appeal to them in Wittgenstein‘s later work.

Kuusela‘s critique of Hacker‘s realist interpretation of rules thus brings out two important features pertaining to Wittgenstein‘s conception of rules and grammar: (i) rules are not understood as something ―real‖ and given prior to grammatical investigations, but rather as something constructed for particular philosophical purposes; (ii) the use of rule-based models of grammar (such as language games and calculi) does not entail that what those models model must be also governed by the rules. The methodological interpretation thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of Wittgenstein‘s later philosophy as a whole, inasmuch as his conception of rules is consistent with his general anti-dogmatic methodology.

However, although this interpretation acknowledges that the actual standards for application of our concepts (or the use of our words) might fluctuate across different occasions, and builds this insight into the notion of the status of rules (as objects of comparison), still the relevant method of clarification is stating definitions (such as ―Language is a rule-governed activity‖ or ―The meaning of a word is its use in a language‖) whereby ―a definition in terms of necessary conditions... articulates a particular way of drawing limits to the concept‖ (Kuusela 2008, 182). Because it still conceives of the rules as general schemas that are simply stated in the process of clarification of actual use, rather than seeing rules as the instructions that govern the correctness of particular moves in

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35 particular language games, the methodological interpretation does not see the philosopher‘s grammar as the ―occasion-sensitive‖ grammar of language games, but rather takes the insight about the occasion-sensitivity of our actual standards of correctness as a general constraint on understanding Wittgenstein‘s conception of rules. The anthropological interpretation, as we shall see below, understands ―rules‖ as the (occasion-specific) rules of constructed language-games, which set the standard of correctness for use of an expression within a particular game (or a constructed ―use of language‖).37

Pace Kuusela, what is to be compared with our actual fluctuating, occasion-sensitive uses of language are not simply rules (definitions), but rather the constructed uses of language (i.e. language-games) governed by such rules.