Chapter Six - Meaning, Rules and Conversation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2021
Summary
1. Wittgenstein writes, ‘To understand a sentence means to understand a language.’ My question is: what is a language, and what is its importance to the idea of understanding what someone has said? I want to address this question while keeping firmly in mind Wittgenstein's insistence that ‘We are talking about the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language, not about some non-spatial, non-temporal phantasm’. I believe that it is astonishingly difficult to take that insistence seriously. Rush Rhees is addressing this difficulty when he writes, ‘If the language is not everything that is said by those who speak it, it may be natural to think of it as a set of rules.’ His suggestion that this is a temptation to resist is my topic in this essay.
2. There is substantial disagreement on how we are to read the ‘rule following considerations’ and, linked with that, substantial disagreement over what truth is to be found in them. Something that is, I believe, sufficiently widely shared to be labelled ‘the standard reading’ goes something like this:
The notion of a language is of crucial importance in that it is the language that embodies the conventions, or rules, that are essential to what a particular individual does being speech: it is only in so far as his ‘words’ are governed by some external standard that they are words. Now, while we may be tempted to think of ‘the language’ as being, in some sense, a set of timeless rules for the use of words, Wittgenstein shows us that the imagery we are tempted to employ here is empty. ‘The language’ is, in some sense, simply what those who speak it say: the use that its speakers make of its words. And what marks off Smith's words ‘It's pepper’ from Brown's sneeze is the fact that while the second is merely a causal response to what is under his nose, the first is a response that is governed by a standard embodied in the shared linguistic practices of the community.
Before turning to doubts about whether this is either true to Wittgenstein or a line of thought we should endorse two preliminary comments are in order.
There is an obvious and uncontroversial sense in which my understanding what another has said is dependent on a background of past use.
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- Information
- Wittgenstein, Human Beings and Conversation , pp. 87 - 104Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2021