Chapter 12 - Unruly Wittgensteinians

Summary

The idea that language is a rule-guided activity is as old as the study of language. And at least since Aristotle, it has been widely accepted that linguistic meaning is not simply a matter of natural ( physis), it depends at least partly on human convention (nomos). A sign does not have a meaning intrinsically, as a phonetic or typographic form, independently of humans using it according to certain rules. Linguistic rules also seem to play a central role in Wittgenstein's work (see Baker and Hacker 1985). Nevertheless, Cavell (1962) pioneered readings of Wittgenstein which I call ‘unruly’. Their common denominator is that that they disparage, downplay or substantially qualify Wittgenstein's talk of languages and meaning as constituted by logicosyntactical or ‘grammatical rules’. Some unruly Wittgensteinians stay closer to the texts than Cavell (e.g., Hanfling 1989; Rundle 1990, 5–8, 33–34, 64–69; Schroeder 2016). They acknowledge his abiding comparison of language to rule-guided activities such as games. At the same time they portray these comparisons and talk of grammatical rules as a dispensable, if not misleading, heuristic device, one which perhaps betokens a school-masterly attitude he imbibed while teaching in Lower Austria in the 1920s. There are also unruly Wittgensteinians who maintain specifically that his idea of meaning as use militates against rather than requires that meaning be intrinsically normative. The first to incorporate this view in a sustained use-theory was Horwich (1998, Ch. 8). Others toeing a similar line have been motivated by a desire to make Wittgenstein's work compatible with a Davidsonian anti-normativist approach, one that emphatically resists explaining language or meaning by reference to rules or conventions (e.g., Wikforss 2017).

The ideas challenged by unruly Wittgensteinians run through this collection (see esp. Part I). Whereas they regard them as mistaken both exegetically and philosophically, I have defended them in both respects. For the substantive issues, see Chapters 1, 3 and 9, as well as Glock 2019. This chapter is confined to matters of interpretation. Furthermore, it leaves aside exegetical arguments which are based on substantive criticisms of semantic normativism plus a ‘principle of charity’ that militates against the ascription of mistaken opinions.