There is an anecdote about Wittgenstein that seems to encapsulate his presence in the minds of 20th and 21st century theorists; Keynes was waiting for Wittgenstein to arrive and spoke to his companion, ‘God has arrived and on the afternoon train.’ It is hardly presumptive to say that theories of language, logic, and philosophy writ large have been forever changed by wittgenstein. However, the particularities of these changes are often confused and misrepresented. The irony then is how such confusion and misrepresentation demonstrate the work Wittgenstein was trying to accomplish in the first place: to assess how language constructs reality, and thereby how linguistic creatures come to mistake grammatical problems for problems of reality. In this paper I will assess one of the most distinct problems in the later work of Wittgenstein, the relationship between rule following and privacy. To accomplish this, I will select two distinct passages, passage 162 and passage 249. I will then assess them independently, and assess their relevance to one another. In so doing I hope to demonstrate how rule-following relates to problems of privacy.
Rule Following
The change in the history of philosophy between discussing meaning and discussing rules cannot be taken lightly. Many cultures and societies tend to believe that meaning exists independent of the mind, that it really exists somewhere out there in the world. Thereby, if one discovers the right methods of empirical analysis one can discover the fundamental meanings of the universe; this is to say, meaning is not contingent on socio-cultural practice. In direct contrast, the later Wittgenstein poses what could be the logical opposite. Wittgenstein poses that meaning, far from being settled, is contingently constructed by social practices. Wittgenstein refers to these practices and constructions as “forms of life” ( Wittgenstein 117).
Consider the following section, passage 162:
Now suppose we have, for example, taught someone the Cyrillic alphabet, and told him how to pronounce each letter. In this case we shall very likely say that he derives the sound of a word from the written pattern by the rule that we have given him. And this is also a clear case of reading. (We might say that we had taught him the 'rule of the alphabet'.) (Wittgenstein 65)
In this section, Wittgenstein attempts to pose how we tacitly think about making meaning from language is actually a problem. He poses that when we acquire a language we learn a set of rules. We learn a set of rules to create meaning in order to read a variety of combinations of distinct letters. These rules allow us to create meaning, understand meaning from others, and tell what is nonsense and what is meaningful at all. What Wittgenstein attempts to make explicit is that the rules for generating meaning from sounds or written words are not simply given, they are made. They are contingent constructions a community has used to control for what counts as meaning and what does not, such work is precisely the effort of socialization.
However, such meta-considerations serve to add context to the additional point: how do we derive correct written translations from auditory sounds. As two senses, they unite two distinct set of rules in a common framework. As such, when people talk about deriving meaning, Wittgenstein is here posing that they are simplifying a far more complicated problem for the purpose of philosophical expedience. This serves to remind any reader of how there is nothing outside rules, people do not use a more fundamental set of meanings in order to enable relations among auditory and written rules. All that there are multiple set of rules a group acquires in order to control for meaning among one another.
Privacy
Perhaps the most famous discussion that came out of latter Wittgenstein was his discussion of privacy. What is it about one another that we can know with confidence, or about ourselves for that matter. The issue of privacy is often easily stated by asking, can a single person have their own language? The answer Wittgenstein might respond with would be unequivocally that whatever system of rules they create must only have a private reference and therefore is unaccountable to variations in the system of reference. As such, the system is either too fallible to be considered a real language, or the larger problem is entirely ignored anyways: that of how a person acquired the tools to be able to generate a reliable system of references in the first place and for what it would be used.
Consider the following section, passage 249:
Are we perhaps over-hasty in our assumption that the smile of an unweaned infant is not a pretence?—And on what experience is our assumption based?
(Lying is a language-game that needs to be learned like any other one.) (Wittgenstein 90)
Here Wittgenstein poses the central problem of what must a mind know in order to lie. A lie presumes private knowledge, that there is something which I know which you do not. At the very least, a lie presumes the capacity for private knowledge in the ability to speak in a way in which one believes will generate a meaning for another that will be distinct from the meaning one privately carries. It is therefore unreasonable to assume that a child, should it smile in your direction, is doing so out of their belief that it will trick you. Until it is able to learn to associate a smile with receiving some attention, and from that point a child can learn to smile even when it does not feel like smiling but only feels like drawing attention. But, even then, such an act might not be considered a lie, it is merely the child doing what it knows. The lie would come once the child realizes what a smile means in its community, and therefore knows when it is and is not appropriate.
Comparative
Since Descartes, laymen and philosophers have taken for granted that the only thing we cannot doubt is what we are thinking, and by thinking we must exist. However, such guarantees only extend to us, and doubt fills the meaning and world around us. The worst case of doubt leads philosophers to believe everyone is simply a brain in a vat, or that there is no guarantee we can give one another that the world is simply illusion.
However, the relationship between the two aforementioned passages makes problems for precisely this assumption. Firstly, the passage on rule following poses how meaning is acquired, not given. Meaning is contingent and therefore one cannot simply arrive at meaning in the world without a system in which references can be controlled for stable meaning. Secondly, since privacy is not given, it must too be learned. Privacy is a stage of the evolution of a creature's ability to generate meaning in a system of references, a form of life. Privacy can only exist in a world of rules, and a world of rules presumes that the minds of those that use the same rules are not, in fact, entirely private. Rather, such equivalence demands that any two minds that use the same rules are public to one another, and hence can ‘derive’ any meaning the other makes, if they use the same system of rules. Rules presume a level of privacy in so far as each mind produces and reproduces meaning independently, and privacy presupposes rules in the ability to generate and distinguish meaning at all. However, having a private system of rules supposes that a single mind can generate an independent and ontologically alternative method of deriving meaning. Lying therefore, like all meaning, is a contingent phenomena.
However, even lying, like all shared language-games, is derivable if one has the basic set of shared rules existing in a community. Given the passage on rules, lying should be distinguished from merely making a mistake in so far as one is intentional and the other is unintentional. Any member of a group can make a mistake when deriving meaning or producing/reproducing meaning. A group truly exists when another member can identify when a mistake is made, and call that person out. However, the alternative proposition is that such mistakes can be intentionally used for personal gain. The intentional problem, however, requires an entirely additional set of investigations undertaken elsewhere in the Philosophical Investigations.
Conclusion
In this paper I have attempted to show how rules and privacy require joint-investigation in order to make sense of either one. Rules suppose a consideration of privacy, and privacy presupposes a consideration of rules. If Wittgenstein is correct, and all meaning is contingent, then all privacy is contingent on the form of life in which meaning is generated. As such, lying and honesty are likewise not inherent properties of a system of meaning but acquire meaning like any other word, or set of rules, within a form of life.
Works Cited
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, G. E. M. Anscombe, G. E. M. Anscombe, G. E. M. Anscombe, Rush Rhees, Rush Rhees, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophische Untersuchungen = Philosophical Investigations. web
