McDowell on Following a Rule
May. 24th, 2005 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apollianaThis is a draft, and will be revised. Comments, attacks, questions, and especially suggestions about how to convince McDowell that my criticisms are appropriate are all welcome.
Blakely Phillips
Professor Baz
Independent Study
Spring 2005
In two of his essays, "Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy" and "Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,"(1) John McDowell addresses the controversy over skepticism about meaning and rule following. He takes a position opposite that of both Saul Kripke and Crispin Wright. Both Wright and Kripke, McDowell argues, get something fundamentally wrong about meaning. For both Kripke and Wright, whether someone is following a particular rule or means something by her words depends on further endorsement by the linguistic community. McDowell thinks this picture is inaccurate and, worse, makes it hard to see how we could ever mean anything at all. He argues that Wright and Kripke fail to fully understand key Wittgensteinian insights, e.g. that we at some point exhaust our justifications, and that "there is a way of following a rule that is not an interpretation" (PI §201). Their failure to grasp these insights, according to McDowell, gives Kripke and Wright an incorrect picture of meaning and understanding. Although I agree with McDowell's general accusations against Kripke and Wright, I believe the way McDowell formulates his replies also fails to take certain Wittgensteinian remarks seriously: specifically, those remarks regarding the difficulty of seeing clearly what is before us. This oversight concerns both the content of McDowell's work on meaning and understanding, as well as the form. Given that McDowell wishes his responses to be Wittgensteinian in nature, and to show why Wright and Kripke are misled in accepting questions about how meaning is possible as legitimate, this oversight prevents McDowell's responses from reaching their goal.
In the final paragraph of "Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy" McDowell writes:
"In Wright's view the texts [Wittgenstein's] contain at most a programme for the supposedly needed philosophy of meaning. Wright reads Wittgenstein in a way that respects his disavowal of constructive ambitions, but he makes that disavowal a point of criticism . . . . Contrast the style of reading I have outlined here. There is indeed room to complain that Wittgenstein reveals a need for something that he does not give, or does not give enough of. But what we might ask for more of is not a constructive account of how human interactions make meaning and understanding possible, but rather a diagnostic deconstruction of the peculiar way of thinking that makes such a thing seem necessary. It would be good to say something about how such a diagnosis should go in detail, but this paper is not the place for that" (278).
It sounds here as if McDowell is excusing himself from giving an account of "a diagnostic deconstruction of the peculiar way of thinking" that makes a constructive account of meaning and understanding seem needed. It also sounds, however, as if he thinks Wittgenstein does not give (or give "enough of") such a diagnosis. That McDowell finds Wittgenstein wanting in this regard is telling, I believe, of McDowell's understanding of the nature of Wittgenstein's work. Given that Philosophical Investigations is devoted to the diagnosis of the way of thinking that leads us to ask "How is meaning possible?" it sounds as if McDowell thinks Wittgenstein's diagnoses insufficient.
One reason he might find them lacking has to do with a peculiarity of Wittgensteinian diagnosis: through it, the 'philosophical' uses of terms like 'meaning' and 'understanding' are found to be the product of any of various kinds of grammatical mistakes. We may find that we have been thinking of every use of a word (such as 'know') along the lines of a single case, for example. A successful diagnosis no longer leaves us with our general, philosophical concepts of things like 'meaning' and 'understanding' at all. If McDowell wants an explanation of how we come to be misled about these concepts, a method like Wittgenstein's will not help him. In this paper I will examine three of McDowell's responses to Kripke and Wright, and attempt to show where and how he diverges from Wittgensteinian method. First, I will present some background to McDowell's concerns in these papers, since I will not go into the arguments he addresses in great detail. In the last section, I give some suggestions as to how a more Wittgensteinian approach to questions of 'meaning' and 'understanding' might go.
"This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action could be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.
It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the fact that we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases.
Hence there is an inclination to say: every action according to the rule is an interpretation. But we ought to restrict the term 'interpretation' to the substitution of one expression of the rule for another" (PI §201).
It will be necessary to briefly outline the views of Kripke and Wright, to which McDowell responds in the essays I am considering. Kripke takes the 'paradox' of the opening sentence of PI §201 to be a genuine threat. He is also impressed by PI §192 ("we have no model of this superlative fact" [the fact that would constitute what we can't describe about grasping the use of a word 'in a flash']). Kripke believes "there is no 'superlative fact' (§192) about my mind that constitutes my meaning addition by 'plus' and determines in advance what I should do to accord with this meaning" (Kripke 65). The dilemma, then, is that if there is no fact "about my mind" that makes it the case that I mean something, we must be skeptical that meaning is ever possible.
It is crucial to Kripke's view of the paradox that the sort of fact that could make it the case that I mean something by my words is a fact that is not itself open to interpretation. Otherwise, that fact could fit with any number of possibilities for what I mean. According to McDowell, Kripke and Wright with him, give solutions to this paradox in which they attempt to locate what makes it the case that someone means something in a fact-but in an 'external' fact: a fact consisting of my membership in a linguistic community wherein others can accept or reject my utterances. But, runs McDowell's argument, since any such fact is open to interpretation, Kripke and Wright both end up embracing skepticism about meaning (see especially §5 "MIWLP").
I will not go into the detail of McDowell's arguments here, but his general point is as follows: the thought that "people are talking about me in the next room" ("MIWLP" 270), if we are following Kripke, must be said to accord with any possible interpretation. If that is the case, there will be nothing that makes it the thought "that people are talking about me in the next room" ("MIWLP" 271). So, Kripke deduces, there must be some other fact that makes it the case that this is the thought I'm having. Such a fact might be my position in a "social framework" in which others check my utterances with their inclinations. Wright can be seen as endorsing a position similar to Kripke's in that he believes meaning is not "ratification-independent": that is, whether someone means something or not depends on the consensus of the community.
McDowell thinks both positions miss the point from the second paragraph of PI §201 that "there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation." In other words, we cannot make every instance of understanding something or grasping a rule dependent upon interpretation-or upon some process of verification by the community. His way of stating this, however, gives the impression that he thinks that because understanding need not always involve interpretation, it never does. This is a mistake by the standards of Wittgensteinian analysis because it assimilates all cases of understanding to one type, as I will show in the next section.
"We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand" (PI §89).
What I find objectionable in this response on McDowell's part is not its general direction. What disturbs me is that he thinks that in order to reject the thesis of Kripke and Wright that whether someone understands something requires interpretation, we must adopt a correct notion of 'understanding.' I wish to cast doubt on the idea that 'understanding' is what we need to have a correct notion of, if we are to dissolve the philosophical problems that lead us to ask about what 'understanding' requires.
McDowell characterizes his view of what Wittgensteinian diagnosis accomplishes in this way:
"A more Wittgensteinian lesson to learn from [Kripke's] manipulation of the regress of interpretations is that we need a diagnosis of why we are inclined to fall into the peculiar assumption, crystallized in the master thesis, that makes such questions look pressing. Given a satisfying diagnosis, the inclination should evaporate, and the questions should simply fall away . . . . The right response to 'How is meaning possible?' or 'How is intentionality possible?' is to uncover the way of thinking that makes it seem difficult to accommodate meaning and intentionality in our picture of how things are, and to lay bare how uncompulsory it is to think that way" ("MIWPL" 272).
What seems questionable about McDowell's view of "satisfying diagnosis" here is that he thinks 'meaning' and 'intentionality' need to be accommodated at all. What makes us think that, once the inclination to ask questions about the possibility of meaning and intentionality has evaporated, we will still need to accommodate them in our "picture of how things are"?
McDowell's words in the last section of "Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy" invite similar worries. There he sums up his objection to Kripke-that any notion of 'meaning' at all is undermined by Kripke's 'skeptical solution.' If we follow Kripke, we run the risk of "adopting a picture in which notions like that of accord cannot be in play" (272). There is something right about this criticism: insofar as we do use words like 'accord,' 'meaning,' and 'understanding' and think them meaningful, we should want a "picture" in which they can be 'in play.' On the other hand, it is doubtful that taking seriously the senses in which we ordinarily use these words will go any distance in securing a philosophical role for 'meaning' or 'understanding' or 'accord' in our "picture." A "picture of how things are" sounds rather like a philosophical theory; and Wittgenstein wants not to find the right place for such concepts in our theory, but to eliminate the need for a theory by placing such concepts in their natural habitats.
Similar concerns are raised by a passage that appears shortly after the last one, wherein McDowell says of Wittgenstein that "His point is to remind us that the natural phenomenon that is normal human life is itself already shaped by meaning and understanding. As he says: 'Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing' (§25)" ("MIWLP" 277). What it is for human life to be "shaped by meaning and understanding" just is for these activities ("commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting"-and presumably many others) to be part of our "natural history." Yet McDowell's phrasing makes it sound as if meaning and understanding are still things that can stand apart from these activities in which we may employ them or talk about them.
It is unclear from this passage in what sense McDowell means "meaning" or "understanding." He does not give enough context for us to be able to see that those words are not being used in their 'philosophical' sense. This is particularly dangerous given the nature of McDowell's criticism of Wright and Kripke-that they fail to accommodate the possibility of 'meaning' or 'understanding' at all by taking 'meaning' and 'understanding' to depend on interpretation. That is, McDowell tries to show that there are senses of these words in which they can be separated from the concept of interpretation. So, McDowell's claim is that, for instance, 'meaning' does not have to mean what Kripke takes it to mean. Yet McDowell does not iterate the various ways in which we use the verb 'to mean,' either. He simply says that its sense must be broader than that Kripke gives it. To say this without placing the word in the contexts in which we use it seems to merely replace one philosophical notion of meaning with another.
In a sense, what is 'philosophical' about using words like 'meaning' without reference to a context of use is just that we cannot tell exactly how to take the word.(2) It is not clear, for example, whether 'meaning' in its philosophical sense is an activity, something we do, or a property, something words have. Once we begin to place the word in its context in our use of language, we find that we need other concepts to describe the variations of its place in our patterns of language use. Wittgenstein's remarks on 'meaning,' for example, quickly branch into other concepts.
Consider the following remarks from Philosophical Investigations:
"Tell me what was going on in you when you uttered the words. . . . .? ---The answer to this is not: 'I was meaning. . . . .'!" (§675).
"Is it correct for someone to say: 'When I gave you this rule, I meant you to . . . . . in this case'? Even if he did not think of this case at all as he gave the rule? Of course it is correct. For 'to mean it' did not mean: to think of it. But now the problem is: how are we to judge whether someone meant such-and-such? ---The fact that he has, for example, mastered a particular technique in arithmetic and algebra, and that he taught someone else the expansion of a series in the usual way, is such a criterion" (§692).
"[T]he feeling that [a word] has taken up its meaning into itself. . . . how are these feelings manifested among us?---By the way we choose and value words" (II. xi. 218e).
These remarks give some indication as to the various ways attempts to place 'meaning' into the contexts in which we speak of it branch off into things like "the way we choose and value words," or mastering a technique in mathematics. Whether one knows what something means will be demonstrated by one's actions. Even the rather mysterious suggestion that a word "has taken up its meaning into itself" means that we treat words in a certain way. The criteria for our doing these things-understanding a technique in mathematics, treating words with care; and even for our meaning one thing rather than another-will be different. McDowell, by contrast, treats 'meaning' and 'understanding' as if they were not subject to such variation in their use.
This ties into the last criticism I wish to make of McDowell. In his essay, "Wittgenstein on Following a Rule," McDowell accuses Wright of demanding justifications where none can be given, of "looking for 'bedrock' lower than it is" ("WOFR" 72). The reference is to PI §217: "If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'this is simply what I do.'" I will not go into the detail of McDowell's criticism of Wright here. What is unsettling about the part of his response I have cited is that McDowell gives the impression that 'bedrock' is, as it were, homogenous. He says, in opposition to Wright, that "shared command of a language equips us to know another's meaning without needing to arrive at that knowledge by interpretation, because it equips us to hear someone else's meaning in his words" ("WOFR" 73, emphasis mine).
Like his remarks about how meaning and understanding "shape" human life, this passage makes it seem as if, whatever 'meaning' is, it is just given. Meaning is what we hear in another's words. These expressions might make sense, given the appropriate context; but as it stands, they are not integrated-and thereby whatever is meant by 'meaning' is not integrated-into the contexts and purposes in and for which we might say such things. We could imagine Wittgenstein saying, "I should like to say I 'hear his meaning in his words'": but that would not be the end of the matter. Why should one like to say that? When? What do these considerations do to our initial inclination to describe our experience that way?
What becomes evident when one takes seriously such considerations is that language, and with it 'bedrock'-the place where justifications are exhausted-is not homogenous. Justifications will not end at the same point for all human activities and for all purposes. So it seems that, although McDowell quotes the following remark--"The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground" (RFM VI-31, quoted in "WOFR" 63)--he does not fully realize its implications. For if he did, it would be clear that being able to "hear someone's meaning in his words" does not help. Sometimes we might say such things. But it is not clear what to do with such expressions unless the temptation to express ourselves that way is placed in a particular context. Put another way, McDowell thinks that our ability to "hear another's meaning in his words" is something we can always do, though it will not always be an appropriate characterization of how we relate to one another's words. Thus simply saying we hear someone's meaning in his words misses the fact that, whatever this means, it is not always the case. And an account of that ignores this fact seems more like an attempt to give an opposing theory of meaning than an attempt to begin a Wittgensteinian diagnosis of the temptation to give such a theory.
Finally, I wish to give some brief suggestions as to how a more Wittgensteinian treatment of 'meaning' and 'understanding' could go. I will not attempt to sum up Wittgenstein's own treatment of these concepts, but rather give some distinctions I hope will be relevant to McDowell's concerns about meaning skepticism in these essays. Understanding, I want to say, does not always involve the notion of interpretation. It can, because we often understand other people via words and actions that we find we are not sure how to interpret. We do not interpret ourselves, however. (Well, a context could be supplied: someone has a split brain, he cannot articulate what his left hand does, and when he makes a drawing of it that might count as 'interpreting himself.' But this is an abnormal context.)
What we understand is not always a meaning, nor is the way we demonstrate understanding always the demonstration of the grasp of a meaning. We understand ourselves, other people, mathematical formulae; I might understand your suffering, or aesthetic sense, or sense of humor. These are not 'meanings.' Nor is what we understand when we understand how to apply "2n + 1" best described as a meaning. It is best described as something we do: plug in values for n and compute the formula. There will be other concepts we must understand in order to do this, and perhaps we can be said to understand their meanings--; but these are other concepts, not the formula itself.
Whether I understand you or not will be demonstrated by how I react to you; and how I react may depend on what I take your words (or actions) to mean. That is, whether someone will say of me that I understand your sense of humor or 2n + 1 may involve my understanding the language in which you make jokes, or mathematical concepts-and in this sense, knowing the meanings of certain words, or concepts. What is understood, however, need not be a meaning.
You can doubt whether I understand your sense of humor without being skeptical that I grasp the meaning of the joke. When we talk of understanding or failing to understand concepts, we do say, e.g. of a child who fails to go on in the way we had expected with a certain word, that he doesn't know what it means. The skepticism here is not that the 'meaning' of any word or person's words or formula is indeterminate; it's that, where we can speak of understanding, we can also speak of being wrong, and of coming to find out that we were wrong. Understanding, in this way, involves treating whatever is understood as something apart from oneself, as something one about which one can in principle learn new things. (We can learn new things about ourselves, too, without doing any 'interpreting' or considering the meanings of our utterances.)
The kind of skepticism that begins with doubt as to whether you or I have truly understood something, then, has its origins in the grammar of 'understanding,' and is separable from 'meaning.' Perhaps there are situations in which we should content ourselves with our present verdict about someone's understanding, without allowing this anxiety about what we may learn in the future to set in. The fact that it can always set in, however, is a fact about understanding; the same fact that makes it possible for us to not see clearly what "is already in plain view" (PI §89); the same fact that makes investigations like these both necessary and difficult.
McDowell's attempts to dissolve questions like 'How is meaning possible?' and 'How is understanding possible?' does not constitute a Wittgensteinian attempt insofar as he leaves the various situations in which we do and do not speak of meaning and understanding (and "meaning something by one's words" and "meaning it" and so on) untouched. He makes it appear as if he is replacing one, implausible theory of meaning with another, simpler one, wherein meaning is readily available to us, is something we "hear in" one another's words. This approach, I have argued, is no diagnosis of our temptation to ask questions about the possibility of meaning. Such diagnosis will have its roots in our everyday use of words like 'meaning' and 'understanding,' and, to the extent that it is successful, will show how in our use of such words in philosophy we are inattentive to the details of our use of such words in everyday life. I have given one possible line the beginning of such a diagnosis might take, locating the possibility of skepticism about whether you or I have understood something in the fact where we talk of understanding something, we can also talk of getting it wrong.
Cavell, Stanley. "Knowing and Acknowledging." Must We Mean What We Say?
New York: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Kripke, Saul A. Wittgenstein On Rules and Private Language: An Elementary
Exposition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982.
McDowell, John. "Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein's Later
Philosophy." Mind, Value and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.
____. "Wittgenstein On Following a Rule." Rule-Following and Meaning. Ed.
Alexander Miller and Crispin Wright. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP,
2002.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.
1. Henceforth abbreviated as "MIWLP" and "WOFR."
2. See, for example, PI §525 and §532.
copyright 2005 by me.
Blakely Phillips
Professor Baz
Independent Study
Spring 2005
"Meaning" and "Understanding" in McDowell on Following a Rule
In two of his essays, "Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy" and "Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,"(1) John McDowell addresses the controversy over skepticism about meaning and rule following. He takes a position opposite that of both Saul Kripke and Crispin Wright. Both Wright and Kripke, McDowell argues, get something fundamentally wrong about meaning. For both Kripke and Wright, whether someone is following a particular rule or means something by her words depends on further endorsement by the linguistic community. McDowell thinks this picture is inaccurate and, worse, makes it hard to see how we could ever mean anything at all. He argues that Wright and Kripke fail to fully understand key Wittgensteinian insights, e.g. that we at some point exhaust our justifications, and that "there is a way of following a rule that is not an interpretation" (PI §201). Their failure to grasp these insights, according to McDowell, gives Kripke and Wright an incorrect picture of meaning and understanding. Although I agree with McDowell's general accusations against Kripke and Wright, I believe the way McDowell formulates his replies also fails to take certain Wittgensteinian remarks seriously: specifically, those remarks regarding the difficulty of seeing clearly what is before us. This oversight concerns both the content of McDowell's work on meaning and understanding, as well as the form. Given that McDowell wishes his responses to be Wittgensteinian in nature, and to show why Wright and Kripke are misled in accepting questions about how meaning is possible as legitimate, this oversight prevents McDowell's responses from reaching their goal.
In the final paragraph of "Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy" McDowell writes:
"In Wright's view the texts [Wittgenstein's] contain at most a programme for the supposedly needed philosophy of meaning. Wright reads Wittgenstein in a way that respects his disavowal of constructive ambitions, but he makes that disavowal a point of criticism . . . . Contrast the style of reading I have outlined here. There is indeed room to complain that Wittgenstein reveals a need for something that he does not give, or does not give enough of. But what we might ask for more of is not a constructive account of how human interactions make meaning and understanding possible, but rather a diagnostic deconstruction of the peculiar way of thinking that makes such a thing seem necessary. It would be good to say something about how such a diagnosis should go in detail, but this paper is not the place for that" (278).
It sounds here as if McDowell is excusing himself from giving an account of "a diagnostic deconstruction of the peculiar way of thinking" that makes a constructive account of meaning and understanding seem needed. It also sounds, however, as if he thinks Wittgenstein does not give (or give "enough of") such a diagnosis. That McDowell finds Wittgenstein wanting in this regard is telling, I believe, of McDowell's understanding of the nature of Wittgenstein's work. Given that Philosophical Investigations is devoted to the diagnosis of the way of thinking that leads us to ask "How is meaning possible?" it sounds as if McDowell thinks Wittgenstein's diagnoses insufficient.
One reason he might find them lacking has to do with a peculiarity of Wittgensteinian diagnosis: through it, the 'philosophical' uses of terms like 'meaning' and 'understanding' are found to be the product of any of various kinds of grammatical mistakes. We may find that we have been thinking of every use of a word (such as 'know') along the lines of a single case, for example. A successful diagnosis no longer leaves us with our general, philosophical concepts of things like 'meaning' and 'understanding' at all. If McDowell wants an explanation of how we come to be misled about these concepts, a method like Wittgenstein's will not help him. In this paper I will examine three of McDowell's responses to Kripke and Wright, and attempt to show where and how he diverges from Wittgensteinian method. First, I will present some background to McDowell's concerns in these papers, since I will not go into the arguments he addresses in great detail. In the last section, I give some suggestions as to how a more Wittgensteinian approach to questions of 'meaning' and 'understanding' might go.
Background: The Skeptical Paradox
"This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action could be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.
It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the fact that we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases.
Hence there is an inclination to say: every action according to the rule is an interpretation. But we ought to restrict the term 'interpretation' to the substitution of one expression of the rule for another" (PI §201).
It will be necessary to briefly outline the views of Kripke and Wright, to which McDowell responds in the essays I am considering. Kripke takes the 'paradox' of the opening sentence of PI §201 to be a genuine threat. He is also impressed by PI §192 ("we have no model of this superlative fact" [the fact that would constitute what we can't describe about grasping the use of a word 'in a flash']). Kripke believes "there is no 'superlative fact' (§192) about my mind that constitutes my meaning addition by 'plus' and determines in advance what I should do to accord with this meaning" (Kripke 65). The dilemma, then, is that if there is no fact "about my mind" that makes it the case that I mean something, we must be skeptical that meaning is ever possible.
It is crucial to Kripke's view of the paradox that the sort of fact that could make it the case that I mean something by my words is a fact that is not itself open to interpretation. Otherwise, that fact could fit with any number of possibilities for what I mean. According to McDowell, Kripke and Wright with him, give solutions to this paradox in which they attempt to locate what makes it the case that someone means something in a fact-but in an 'external' fact: a fact consisting of my membership in a linguistic community wherein others can accept or reject my utterances. But, runs McDowell's argument, since any such fact is open to interpretation, Kripke and Wright both end up embracing skepticism about meaning (see especially §5 "MIWLP").
I will not go into the detail of McDowell's arguments here, but his general point is as follows: the thought that "people are talking about me in the next room" ("MIWLP" 270), if we are following Kripke, must be said to accord with any possible interpretation. If that is the case, there will be nothing that makes it the thought "that people are talking about me in the next room" ("MIWLP" 271). So, Kripke deduces, there must be some other fact that makes it the case that this is the thought I'm having. Such a fact might be my position in a "social framework" in which others check my utterances with their inclinations. Wright can be seen as endorsing a position similar to Kripke's in that he believes meaning is not "ratification-independent": that is, whether someone means something or not depends on the consensus of the community.
McDowell thinks both positions miss the point from the second paragraph of PI §201 that "there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation." In other words, we cannot make every instance of understanding something or grasping a rule dependent upon interpretation-or upon some process of verification by the community. His way of stating this, however, gives the impression that he thinks that because understanding need not always involve interpretation, it never does. This is a mistake by the standards of Wittgensteinian analysis because it assimilates all cases of understanding to one type, as I will show in the next section.
The Adequacy of McDowell's Solutions as Wittgensteinian Diagnoses
"We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand" (PI §89).
What I find objectionable in this response on McDowell's part is not its general direction. What disturbs me is that he thinks that in order to reject the thesis of Kripke and Wright that whether someone understands something requires interpretation, we must adopt a correct notion of 'understanding.' I wish to cast doubt on the idea that 'understanding' is what we need to have a correct notion of, if we are to dissolve the philosophical problems that lead us to ask about what 'understanding' requires.
McDowell characterizes his view of what Wittgensteinian diagnosis accomplishes in this way:
"A more Wittgensteinian lesson to learn from [Kripke's] manipulation of the regress of interpretations is that we need a diagnosis of why we are inclined to fall into the peculiar assumption, crystallized in the master thesis, that makes such questions look pressing. Given a satisfying diagnosis, the inclination should evaporate, and the questions should simply fall away . . . . The right response to 'How is meaning possible?' or 'How is intentionality possible?' is to uncover the way of thinking that makes it seem difficult to accommodate meaning and intentionality in our picture of how things are, and to lay bare how uncompulsory it is to think that way" ("MIWPL" 272).
What seems questionable about McDowell's view of "satisfying diagnosis" here is that he thinks 'meaning' and 'intentionality' need to be accommodated at all. What makes us think that, once the inclination to ask questions about the possibility of meaning and intentionality has evaporated, we will still need to accommodate them in our "picture of how things are"?
McDowell's words in the last section of "Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy" invite similar worries. There he sums up his objection to Kripke-that any notion of 'meaning' at all is undermined by Kripke's 'skeptical solution.' If we follow Kripke, we run the risk of "adopting a picture in which notions like that of accord cannot be in play" (272). There is something right about this criticism: insofar as we do use words like 'accord,' 'meaning,' and 'understanding' and think them meaningful, we should want a "picture" in which they can be 'in play.' On the other hand, it is doubtful that taking seriously the senses in which we ordinarily use these words will go any distance in securing a philosophical role for 'meaning' or 'understanding' or 'accord' in our "picture." A "picture of how things are" sounds rather like a philosophical theory; and Wittgenstein wants not to find the right place for such concepts in our theory, but to eliminate the need for a theory by placing such concepts in their natural habitats.
Similar concerns are raised by a passage that appears shortly after the last one, wherein McDowell says of Wittgenstein that "His point is to remind us that the natural phenomenon that is normal human life is itself already shaped by meaning and understanding. As he says: 'Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing' (§25)" ("MIWLP" 277). What it is for human life to be "shaped by meaning and understanding" just is for these activities ("commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting"-and presumably many others) to be part of our "natural history." Yet McDowell's phrasing makes it sound as if meaning and understanding are still things that can stand apart from these activities in which we may employ them or talk about them.
It is unclear from this passage in what sense McDowell means "meaning" or "understanding." He does not give enough context for us to be able to see that those words are not being used in their 'philosophical' sense. This is particularly dangerous given the nature of McDowell's criticism of Wright and Kripke-that they fail to accommodate the possibility of 'meaning' or 'understanding' at all by taking 'meaning' and 'understanding' to depend on interpretation. That is, McDowell tries to show that there are senses of these words in which they can be separated from the concept of interpretation. So, McDowell's claim is that, for instance, 'meaning' does not have to mean what Kripke takes it to mean. Yet McDowell does not iterate the various ways in which we use the verb 'to mean,' either. He simply says that its sense must be broader than that Kripke gives it. To say this without placing the word in the contexts in which we use it seems to merely replace one philosophical notion of meaning with another.
In a sense, what is 'philosophical' about using words like 'meaning' without reference to a context of use is just that we cannot tell exactly how to take the word.(2) It is not clear, for example, whether 'meaning' in its philosophical sense is an activity, something we do, or a property, something words have. Once we begin to place the word in its context in our use of language, we find that we need other concepts to describe the variations of its place in our patterns of language use. Wittgenstein's remarks on 'meaning,' for example, quickly branch into other concepts.
Consider the following remarks from Philosophical Investigations:
"Tell me what was going on in you when you uttered the words. . . . .? ---The answer to this is not: 'I was meaning. . . . .'!" (§675).
"Is it correct for someone to say: 'When I gave you this rule, I meant you to . . . . . in this case'? Even if he did not think of this case at all as he gave the rule? Of course it is correct. For 'to mean it' did not mean: to think of it. But now the problem is: how are we to judge whether someone meant such-and-such? ---The fact that he has, for example, mastered a particular technique in arithmetic and algebra, and that he taught someone else the expansion of a series in the usual way, is such a criterion" (§692).
"[T]he feeling that [a word] has taken up its meaning into itself. . . . how are these feelings manifested among us?---By the way we choose and value words" (II. xi. 218e).
These remarks give some indication as to the various ways attempts to place 'meaning' into the contexts in which we speak of it branch off into things like "the way we choose and value words," or mastering a technique in mathematics. Whether one knows what something means will be demonstrated by one's actions. Even the rather mysterious suggestion that a word "has taken up its meaning into itself" means that we treat words in a certain way. The criteria for our doing these things-understanding a technique in mathematics, treating words with care; and even for our meaning one thing rather than another-will be different. McDowell, by contrast, treats 'meaning' and 'understanding' as if they were not subject to such variation in their use.
This ties into the last criticism I wish to make of McDowell. In his essay, "Wittgenstein on Following a Rule," McDowell accuses Wright of demanding justifications where none can be given, of "looking for 'bedrock' lower than it is" ("WOFR" 72). The reference is to PI §217: "If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'this is simply what I do.'" I will not go into the detail of McDowell's criticism of Wright here. What is unsettling about the part of his response I have cited is that McDowell gives the impression that 'bedrock' is, as it were, homogenous. He says, in opposition to Wright, that "shared command of a language equips us to know another's meaning without needing to arrive at that knowledge by interpretation, because it equips us to hear someone else's meaning in his words" ("WOFR" 73, emphasis mine).
Like his remarks about how meaning and understanding "shape" human life, this passage makes it seem as if, whatever 'meaning' is, it is just given. Meaning is what we hear in another's words. These expressions might make sense, given the appropriate context; but as it stands, they are not integrated-and thereby whatever is meant by 'meaning' is not integrated-into the contexts and purposes in and for which we might say such things. We could imagine Wittgenstein saying, "I should like to say I 'hear his meaning in his words'": but that would not be the end of the matter. Why should one like to say that? When? What do these considerations do to our initial inclination to describe our experience that way?
What becomes evident when one takes seriously such considerations is that language, and with it 'bedrock'-the place where justifications are exhausted-is not homogenous. Justifications will not end at the same point for all human activities and for all purposes. So it seems that, although McDowell quotes the following remark--"The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground" (RFM VI-31, quoted in "WOFR" 63)--he does not fully realize its implications. For if he did, it would be clear that being able to "hear someone's meaning in his words" does not help. Sometimes we might say such things. But it is not clear what to do with such expressions unless the temptation to express ourselves that way is placed in a particular context. Put another way, McDowell thinks that our ability to "hear another's meaning in his words" is something we can always do, though it will not always be an appropriate characterization of how we relate to one another's words. Thus simply saying we hear someone's meaning in his words misses the fact that, whatever this means, it is not always the case. And an account of that ignores this fact seems more like an attempt to give an opposing theory of meaning than an attempt to begin a Wittgensteinian diagnosis of the temptation to give such a theory.
Directions
Finally, I wish to give some brief suggestions as to how a more Wittgensteinian treatment of 'meaning' and 'understanding' could go. I will not attempt to sum up Wittgenstein's own treatment of these concepts, but rather give some distinctions I hope will be relevant to McDowell's concerns about meaning skepticism in these essays. Understanding, I want to say, does not always involve the notion of interpretation. It can, because we often understand other people via words and actions that we find we are not sure how to interpret. We do not interpret ourselves, however. (Well, a context could be supplied: someone has a split brain, he cannot articulate what his left hand does, and when he makes a drawing of it that might count as 'interpreting himself.' But this is an abnormal context.)
What we understand is not always a meaning, nor is the way we demonstrate understanding always the demonstration of the grasp of a meaning. We understand ourselves, other people, mathematical formulae; I might understand your suffering, or aesthetic sense, or sense of humor. These are not 'meanings.' Nor is what we understand when we understand how to apply "2n + 1" best described as a meaning. It is best described as something we do: plug in values for n and compute the formula. There will be other concepts we must understand in order to do this, and perhaps we can be said to understand their meanings--; but these are other concepts, not the formula itself.
Whether I understand you or not will be demonstrated by how I react to you; and how I react may depend on what I take your words (or actions) to mean. That is, whether someone will say of me that I understand your sense of humor or 2n + 1 may involve my understanding the language in which you make jokes, or mathematical concepts-and in this sense, knowing the meanings of certain words, or concepts. What is understood, however, need not be a meaning.
You can doubt whether I understand your sense of humor without being skeptical that I grasp the meaning of the joke. When we talk of understanding or failing to understand concepts, we do say, e.g. of a child who fails to go on in the way we had expected with a certain word, that he doesn't know what it means. The skepticism here is not that the 'meaning' of any word or person's words or formula is indeterminate; it's that, where we can speak of understanding, we can also speak of being wrong, and of coming to find out that we were wrong. Understanding, in this way, involves treating whatever is understood as something apart from oneself, as something one about which one can in principle learn new things. (We can learn new things about ourselves, too, without doing any 'interpreting' or considering the meanings of our utterances.)
The kind of skepticism that begins with doubt as to whether you or I have truly understood something, then, has its origins in the grammar of 'understanding,' and is separable from 'meaning.' Perhaps there are situations in which we should content ourselves with our present verdict about someone's understanding, without allowing this anxiety about what we may learn in the future to set in. The fact that it can always set in, however, is a fact about understanding; the same fact that makes it possible for us to not see clearly what "is already in plain view" (PI §89); the same fact that makes investigations like these both necessary and difficult.
Conclusion
McDowell's attempts to dissolve questions like 'How is meaning possible?' and 'How is understanding possible?' does not constitute a Wittgensteinian attempt insofar as he leaves the various situations in which we do and do not speak of meaning and understanding (and "meaning something by one's words" and "meaning it" and so on) untouched. He makes it appear as if he is replacing one, implausible theory of meaning with another, simpler one, wherein meaning is readily available to us, is something we "hear in" one another's words. This approach, I have argued, is no diagnosis of our temptation to ask questions about the possibility of meaning. Such diagnosis will have its roots in our everyday use of words like 'meaning' and 'understanding,' and, to the extent that it is successful, will show how in our use of such words in philosophy we are inattentive to the details of our use of such words in everyday life. I have given one possible line the beginning of such a diagnosis might take, locating the possibility of skepticism about whether you or I have understood something in the fact where we talk of understanding something, we can also talk of getting it wrong.
References
Cavell, Stanley. "Knowing and Acknowledging." Must We Mean What We Say?
New York: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Kripke, Saul A. Wittgenstein On Rules and Private Language: An Elementary
Exposition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982.
McDowell, John. "Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein's Later
Philosophy." Mind, Value and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.
____. "Wittgenstein On Following a Rule." Rule-Following and Meaning. Ed.
Alexander Miller and Crispin Wright. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP,
2002.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.
Endnotes
1. Henceforth abbreviated as "MIWLP" and "WOFR."
2. See, for example, PI §525 and §532.
copyright 2005 by me.
