Wittgenstein and the Rule Following Paradox

Wittgenstein's rule following paradox is one of the most complex and challenging philosophical ideas in Wittgenstein's writing. It threatens to show that language cannot be meaningful at all. What is the paradox, and what should we make of it?

00:00 - Intro
00:36 - The Philosophical Investigations
01:17 - Meaning as use
02:39 - The rule-following paradox
05:59 - What is the problem, exactly?
07:10 - What the problem ISN’T
08:12 - Kripke’s interpretation
12:05 - Wittgenstein’s response
14:52 - Kripke’s ‘Sceptical Solution’
16:50 - Assessing Kripke’s Interpretation
18:42 - What’s my view?

If there’s a topic you’d like to see covered, leave me a comment below.

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[saurabh]

Excellent! After reading so many papers and spending sleepless nights, it is your video which made the paradox clear to me. Thanks a lot!

[uchuuseijin]

I think one thing that is important to remember here is that Wittgenstein was talking specifically about language and this paradox is an extremely potent metaphor for rules-based teaching in L2 grammar acquisition. It's super common for someone to say "if you're continuously doing something, you add -ing to show you're doing that" only for the student to say "I'm having a dog" and the teacher to reveal, that, no, actually English follows the "use -ing for continuous actions unless it's the word 'have, then you don't use -ing and simply say you have a dog, unless it's not a dog and it's an emotional experience such as a 'bad time', in which case you do say you are having a bad time, unless your original intention in saying you were having a dog is that you are pregnant and a puppy is inside you, in which case it is perfectly correct to say you are having a dog..."

[matepenava]

I just got time to watch it, a great video indeed. I am glad you lean towards the communitarian side, as it is, at least to me, better grounded and argumented for.

[hss]

I agree with someone's suggestion, I think it was McDowell's, that perhaps it's best to understand the Rule Following Paradox as analogous with the problem of perception: whereas with perception we ask "How could merely causal interactions between our body and the world provide a justification for a belief?", with the RFP we ask "How could a belief or an intention be considered a cause for our action?".

[darrellee]

At heart the "rule paradox" is just a restatement of the problem of induction, or of computational irreducibility, or just a version of the Halting Problem You can't say for sure what the rule is until you reach the end, and you can't know when or if you will reach and end, until you do. In the meantime, use the simplest rule that accounts for the data so far, that most people would agree with, until it is contradicted, then revise it as needed.

[desfurria]

Happens in Minecraft, when I'm building I find I place things in a pattern and a rule applied without knowing what the rule itself is, but catching myself using it all the time. Small blocks of meaning.

So, the consequence is that to state which rule is being followed is an undecidable problem. Nice video, thanks!

[darrellee]

I think Qualia are a Private Language. The meaning of pain is evident. No community necessary.

[XY-ptgo]

In the U. S., turkeys and farmers have a rules-based problem that illustrates how each party may see their different interpretation of a rule as valid... Until it isn't. To the turkey, every day just after sunup, the Farmer feeds me. The Farmer follows the same pattern, until the morning that he harvests the turkey.

[darrellee]

If we define the addition by the use of the Succ() operator it follows that If Succ(X) = Succ(Y), then X must equal Y. since this does not hold for QSucc() we know we were were always doing addition, even if we never added any number in the Quadditiion domain.

[frankavocado]

The thing about customs is that they build or change through time. So 'subjective' here can be read as something like "evolving over time" rather than, say, "fixed in the stars". If this is related with the notion of rule following as computation, rule-following scepticism can then be understood as a symptom of computational irreducibility.

[paulodetarso]

I think something like that, after reading Wittgenstein: lets take the implication as an example. I could say if I go to London, i will talk to you. So, S=>P. But, it depends, as all speech, of the context of it. So I could be meaning S <=> P, it depends, I could have said IF I go to London, i will talk to you, after all, real people don't use the expression "only and only if" in their everyday language.. How could we decide which formula is the correct? Well, we can't. So symbolic logic, when it come to natural speech, is not a science, its an art of interpretation, a game. And sometimes, scientist interpret in this way a relation of implication: if the water boils then its temperature is >= 100 C. Well, the temperature is over 100, so the water boils, and if it boils, it is over 100. Recently, I read "if there were life in Mars, then the new Nasa probe will probe will find traces of it", well, in the end of the article, they wrote, we expect the new probe to find traces of life, microorganism, on Mars so we will be able validated our hypotheses.

[jrrr]

Great content! I am assuming probably not, given your more anlytical focus, but have your read any Heidegger? In particular Being and Time? I find so many interesting parallels between the phenomenological Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein's emphasis on practice/custom and meaning in use. Admittedly, I am much more familiar with the former than the latter, so it remains rather vague as of yet, but I could very well see the Heidegger of Being and Time saying "well, of course" to a lot of W's ponderings in PI. W has a more sophisticated understanding of the more technical side of language in my humble estimation, but still, H bypasses many of the problems with which W is dealing from the outset. Also, they both seem to share a mystical temperament of sorts.

[Just_an_onion]

Andrea Guardo is a contemporary defender of Kripkenstein and the skeptical, anti-semantical approach to solving the paradox. He has many interesting papers on the topic.

[AmorLucisPhotography]

Agree with your reading, more or less. But this all ties to the private language argument, right? Yes, a linguistic community is required for there to be meaning because there needs to be a criterion of correct vs. incorrect use - which entails that there can be no private language. The meaning of a word will be grounded in the customs and practices of a linguistic community with whom we share a form of life. All that said, we are still faced with the question of what, if anything, ground the customs and practices of the linguistic community. There must be some facts regarding that, surely. Now these facts cannot be constructed out of, or derived from, individual past behaviour or even collective past behaviour - fair enough - but there are alternatives. For example, using dispositions grounded in counterfactuals. I meant plus (and not quus) by "+" because if I had been faced with "68+57=?" I would have been disposed to respond "125". As with Hume's problem of induction, the fact that I cannot empirically derive or epistemically justify that there is a particular rule being followed (be it a natural law or a linguistic rule) based purely on past behaviour, we cannot immediately conclude that there is no fact grounding the rule. We should not blithely infer semantic skepticism from epistemic skepticism - at least not without eliminating all non-behaviourust possibilities. Just a thought.

[derendohoda]

The rule-following section is a place where I think Wittgenstein touches Heidegger. There are quite a few overlaps in PI with the popular phenomenologists and he offers yet a different way through by avoiding the theorizing urge. I am not the biggest fan of Kripke's very skeptical reading of Wittgenstein. The argument really reads to me to point out the limit of the rule-following mentality we are easily bewitched by in a "turtles all the way down" scenario. But it is never enough for LW to point out the flaw, he wants to show us the way to change our thought. And that change is the act "blindly", the bedrock comments, the forms of life. If the meaning of a word is its use in language, then the meaning of following a rule is the action in a form of life.

I feel like PI is an exceptionally long cautionary explanation why something like Cartesian skepticism or Husserl's bracketing doesn't work. And that began in the Tractatus "back to rough ground".

Please note I am just an LW fan, read him many times. Not a professional philosopher. So take my comments with a grain of salt :) Thank you for the video.

[artlessons]

Thanks. I understand Wittensteins words are self-explanatory, and you identify with Kripke inflates the waters, making it murky. Then again, that is a modern form of philosophy.

[Opposite]

It’s seems like that Quaddition is a rule with a exception.

The addition is correct if the process of adding them together is similar to past processes of adding. If they are not then they will produce incorrect outputs.

Now Quaddition is like addition just that at some point it introduces a anomaly process which doesn’t resemble past Quaddition processes on lower numbers.
It is in some sense a conjunction of two different rules bound into one.

So if one does not introduce the except beforehand, then yes the fact that one’s current behavior or thinking does not resemble one’s past behavior or thinking means that the rule has been broken.

So I would take a regularity resemblance as the basis of what makes usage correct or incorrect and any exception must be introduced beforehand.

[frankavocado]

I suspect much of the antipathy to Kripke's sceptical solution arises from the view that Wittgenstein's work represents a struggle against scepticism as a solution to anything. The Investigations might be seen as a reminder that philosophical objectivity has its limits, and those limits are the city limits of the city of language. This doesn't necessarily invalidate the role of philosophy in clearly describing problems through analysis, however. Wittgenstein was, of course, maddeningly opaque on this.

[BrianWilcox]

The “quaddition” argument reminds me of adding uranium atoms together. 1 + 1 = 2, etc. until you reach critical mass! (Big numbers added together = boom!)