《Wittgenstein on Rule-Following and Rational Action 维特根斯坦论跟随规则与理性行动.pdf》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《Wittgenstein on Rule-Following and Rational Action 维特根斯坦论跟随规则与理性行动.pdf（56页珍藏版）》请在三一文库上搜索。
1、 DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY: WITTGENSTEIN ON RULE-FOLLOWING AND RATIONAL ACTION Jason Bridges University of Chicago A “quietist” reading of Wittgenstein is one that attempts to do justice to his conviction that it cannot be the job of philosophy “to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anythin
2、g”more pithily, that philosophy “leaves everything as it is.”1 A central difficulty facing such a reading of Wittgensteins remarks on rule-following is his tendency to characterize putative instances of rule-following in ways that seem pointedly to omit something central to our ordinary, pre-philoso
3、phical understanding of the phenomenon. Rule- followers are variously described by Wittgenstein as just reacting as they were trained (198), as proceeding in whatever way comes naturally to them (185), as obeying a rule blindly (219), and as acting without reasons (211). What these characterizations
4、 fail to register, what they might even seem outright to deny, is the commonsense view that rule-following is an activity that engages the agents understanding. On that view, to follow a rule is to put ones understanding, ones comprehension, of the rule into practice: a rule-follower, as we say, act
5、s on or in light of her understanding of the rule. Rule-following thus manifests what philosophers of mind sometimes call sapience.2 And so the question arises: if philosophy must leave our ordinary ways of conceptualizing the phenomena of human life as they are, why does Wittgenstein opt for charac
6、terizations of rule-following that do not acknowledge a central component of our ordinary conception? 1 First quotation from Wittgenstein 1960: 18 (cf. Wittgenstein 1958: 126). Second quotation from Wittgenstein 1958: 124. Subsequent references to Wittgenstein 1958 will just cite the section number.
7、 2 I believe the modern philosophical use of this term originates with Feigl. See for example Feigl and Meehl 1974. Jason Bridges, 10/1/2004 Doing What Comes Naturally Of course, in the context of a philosophical work driven by constructive or revisionary ambitions, we can readily imagine a point to
8、 Wittgensteins “thin” (as I will call them) characterizations of rule-following behavior. For a skeptical account of rule-following, one which denies that genuine rule-following ever does or could take place, the thin characterizations could serve as a deflationary assessment of whats really going o
9、n in those cases we mistakenly view as involving a persons following a rule. And for a reductive account of rule-following, which would aim to explain that phenomenon in “naturalistic” (i.e., non-intentional, non-mentalistic) terms, the characterizations might be taken to provide materials for such
10、an explanation, perhaps by gesturing toward a form of behaviorism or dispositionalism. Skeptical and reductive accounts of rule-following have occasionally been credited to Wittgenstein. But the whole point of a quietest reading of Wittgenstein is to make sense of the text without ascribing to him s
11、uch conspicuously substantive philosophical theses. This is to cast our question as a puzzle about motivation: what leads Wittgenstein to describe rule-following in ways that do not explicitly portray it as a form of sapient activity? If the role of understanding is a central element in our ordinary
12、 conception of what goes on in rule-following, and if it is not philosophys place either to cast doubt on or to naturalistically reconstruct our ordinary conceptions, then why take pains to avoid acknowledging this element? But the problem for a quietest interpretation can be made more serious. For
13、it can easily seem that the thin characterizations of rule-following behavior do not merely leave unexpressed, but in fact are incompatible with the thought that rule-following manifests understanding. Surely, one might suppose, to act with understanding is not just to do whatever comes naturally or
14、 to react however one was trained, still less to act blindly or 2 Jason Bridges, 10/1/2004 Doing What Comes Naturally without reason. These are characterizations we reserve for behavior whose determinants are the brute forces of habituation and innate disposition, and actions performed in the light
15、of understanding are precisely not that. This apparent conflict between Wittgensteins characterizations and our ordinary conception has been recently been pressed by Thomas Nagel in his thought-provoking book, The Last Word. Nagel grants that it would be preferable to find a reading of Wittgenstein
16、showing him to live up to his official repudiation of a view of philosophy as tasked with producing reductive accounts of the phenomena of human life, or failing that, skeptical denials of their reality. What stands in the way of this interpretive goal, for Nagel, is just those characterizations we
17、have been discussing, which Nagel calls Wittgensteins “facial descriptions of our practices”. These descriptions “suggest that the final and correct conception of what I am doing when I add, for example, is that I am simply producing responses which are natural to me, which I cannot help giving in t
18、he circumstances (including the circumstances of my having been taught in a certain way)” (Nagel 1996: 48). So viewed, says Nagel, the practices “lose their meaning”; they appear as mere “impotent rituals” (Nagel 1996: 51, 53). The problem is that we cannot square this conception of our behavior wit
19、h how our performances look to us from the “inside”, a vantage point from which they are seen as flowing from the thoughts and beliefs that constitute our understanding of, our insight into, what the relevant rules dictate. To suppose, for example, that when I do arithmetic I am “simply producing re
20、sponses that are natural to mewould be to get outside my arithmetical thoughts in a way that would be inconsistent with them” (Nagel 1996: 48-49). Adopting the picture of rule-following behavior that Wittgenstein seems to encourage upon usin which the source of our behavior is our natural inclinatio
21、ns to go on in certain wayswe are unable 3 Jason Bridges, 10/1/2004 Doing What Comes Naturally to conceive rule-following as the sapient activity that, when are actually engaged in doing it, we cannot help but take it to be. There is no doubt that Nagels worry has a prima facie force. (In calling it
22、 “Nagels worry”, I dont mean to suggest that it is idiosyncratic to him. I think the discomfort with Wittgensteins characterizations that Nagel articulates is a common reaction to the text.) At the same time, whatever the tension may be between saying, e.g., “In doing X, S just did what came natural
23、ly,” and saying “In doing X, S acted on her understanding of a rule,” it obviously doesnt attain the status of a logical or analytic contradiction.3 If we want to pinpoint the precise nature of the incompatibility, then, we need to do some work unpacking the relevant concepts. This at least opens th
24、e possibility that Wittgensteins characterizations are in the end incompatible, not with the very idea that we follow rules, but only with a misconception of what that involves, one that may tempt us but which ought to be ferreted out from our thinking. And indeed, that is what I will try to show is
25、 the case. In so doing, I follow a familiar template for quietest readings of Wittgenstein. Typically, such readings acknowledge that Wittgenstein is denying something with respect to the phenomenon at issue. But they hold that what is being denied is not the reality of the phenomenon per se. What i
26、s being denied is rather an imposition on our ordinary conception of that phenomenon, a confused theory or picture that distorts our understandingin other words, a piece of philosophy, in Wittgensteins pejorative sense of that term. But although the strategy is familiar, the applications of it in th
27、e recent work on the rule- following remarks do not provide a successful response to the worry we have been discussing. Indeed, they bypass this worry completely. This state of affairs is owed, I believe, to the 3 A contradiction is analytic, let us say, if it is immediately evident from our compete
28、nce in the meanings of the relevant expressions. 4 Jason Bridges, 10/1/2004 Doing What Comes Naturally enormous influence of Kripkes Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. What Kripke cast as the main issue raised by Wittgensteins rule-following remarks is rather different from the one we have
29、been discussing, and Kripkes reading set the terms for the subsequent secondary literature. The result is that the issue that we have identified here has largely gone missing. In fact, the situation is more complicated than this: Kripkes exposition of his “skeptical paradox” intertwines two distinct
30、 trains of thought, one of which concludes in the, as it were, “official” skeptical thesis, and the other of which engages an issue close to the one that will be our concern. A subsidiary aim of this paper is thus to elucidate an aspect of Kripkes discussion that, perhaps owing to Kripkes own lack o
31、f clarity on the matter, previous commentaries have been unable to get into focus. Although I will begin in the next section by saying something about why those quietest readings that were developed in reaction to Kripkes official story fail to address the worry that is our current topic, my primary
32、 aim is simply to address the worry, and that is what the bulk of the paper will be given over to doing. Let me register a few caveats in this regard before proceeding. First, I shall follow Nagel in taking talk of “doing what comes naturally” as the principal representative of the various “thin” ch
33、aracterizations of rule-following behavior cited above. We need to make some such choice in order to give focus to the discussion, and for various reasons that will emerge, this is a good one. Second, quietest readings that adhere to the template just described inevitably face the question of where,
34、 and how, to draw the line between our ordinary conception of the target phenomenon and the allegedly confused philosophical design that is put upon it. There is one point on this score whose plausibility we have already noted and that I will henceforth assume without argument: 5 Jason Bridges, 10/1
35、/2004 Doing What Comes Naturally anything recognizable as an activity of rule-following must involve the agents acting upon her understanding of a rule. An interpretation that buys quietism at the cost of taking Wittgenstein to deny that rule-following is a manifestation of sapience just blurs the w
36、orthwhile distinction between a quietest and skeptical interpretation. 1. Kripke and McDowell On Kripkes official story, the primary question raised by Wittgensteins rule-following remarks is not “What is it to act upon ones understanding of a rule?” but “What is it to so much as have an understandi
37、ng of a rule?” According to Kripke, Wittgensteins answer to this question is the dark claim that there is nothing that it is to have an understanding of a rule that there is simply is no such mental state as understanding a rule (or, correlatively, grasping the meaning of a word). Any candidate for
38、such a state would have to stand in a “normative” relation to our behavior, in the sense that it would have to embody a view about which courses of action count as being in accord with the rule or meaning and which courses of action count as being in conflict with it. But, says Kripke, the tendency
39、of Wittgensteins remarks is that no mental state could possibly have these “normative” implications. This skeptical view is said to be most explicitly stated in 201, where Wittgenstein speaks of “our paradox” that “every course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action
40、could be made out to accord with the rule”, and adds that if this were so, “there would be neither accord nor conflict here.” Kripke reads this passage as summarizing a complex set of arguments contained in sections 138-242, the upshot of these arguments being that nothing that might enter our minds
41、 in the course of an attempt to understand (“make out”) a rule could have any determinate implications for what counts as being in accord or in conflict 6 Jason Bridges, 10/1/2004 Doing What Comes Naturally with the rule. Hence nothing could add up to our understanding the rule in one way rather tha
42、n another (Kripke 1982: chapter two). Commentators concerned to present a quietist alternative to Kripkes skeptical interpretation are thus led to offer a different reading of 201 and comparable passages. Assuming they follow the template described above, the thrust of their readings will be that Wi
43、ttgenstein in these passages is exposing the “paradoxical” character, not of the very idea of an understanding of a rule, but rather of a confused conception of what that idea requires. The most well-known interpretation of this sort is due to John McDowell.4 According to McDowell, Wittgensteins tar
44、get, in its most general form, is a conception of the mind as a realm of items that do not intrinsically stand in relations of accord or conflict with anything else. The contents of a mind are in this respect conceived like physical objects. A physical objectsay, a piece of steel affixed to a post a
45、nd bearing the inscription “KEEP RIGHT” does not inherently, in its very nature as the physical object it is, have a normative bearing on our behavior. We may take it to have that bearing on our behavior, but what then gives it that bearing for us will be precisely our so taking it. By the same toke
46、n, if items in the mind intrinsically lack normative significance, they can acquire such a significance only by our interpreting them as having that significance. And it is just here that McDowells Wittgenstein finds trouble. For interpretation is a mental activity. Given the governing conception of
47、 the mind, any item that might enter our minds in the course of our interpreting something will itself, pending interpretation, lack normative significance. And what could our interpreting our interpretation amount to, on this conception, but the occurring to us of some further item that now stands
48、in need of interpretation? We are locked into an infinite regress. 4 My discussion of McDowell draws primarily on McDowell 1998. For a detailed reading along similar lines, see Finkelstein 2000. 7 Jason Bridges, 10/1/2004 Doing What Comes Naturally On McDowells reading it is this threat of regress t
49、o which Wittgenstein is drawing attention in his discussion of “our paradox” in 201. However, the cure Wittgenstein recommends is not to give up the very idea that we understand things but to abandon the sign-post conception of the minds contents, according to which mental items are intrinsically normatively inert. Whatever the attractions of that conception may beand McDowell faults Wittgenstein for not saying enough on this scoreit is a mistake we ought to exorcise from our thinking. Having done so, the question to which Krip