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The Significance of Learning in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Meredith Williams
Meredith Williams*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL60208-1315, USA
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Extract

‘When a child learns this ....’ ‘What is “learning a rule”?— This.’ Anyone familiar with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy recognizes these phrases as wholly typical of that philosophy. The appeals to the way in which a child learns, to learning in general, and to the italicized use of the indexical – all are familiar themes. In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein develops his position on three crucial philosophical issues by beginning with the way in which a child learns. First, his critique of referential theories of meaning: ‘An important part of the training will consist in the teacher’s pointing to the objects, directing the child’s attention to them, and at the same time uttering a word’ (PI §6). Second, his attack on essentialist theories of understanding: ‘How does [the pupil] get to understand this notation? – First of all the series of numbers will be written down for him and he will be required to copy them .... And here there is a normal and an abnormal learner’s reaction’ (PI §143). And finally, his attack on the Cartesian model of consciousness: ‘A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences’ (PI §244). These three critiques are the cornerstones for his later philosophy, and at the beginning of each he appeals to how children learn. Moreover, Wittgen-stein’s subsequent writings show an increase in the explicit appeal to learning and to a child’s learning. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein’s final work, virtually every page involves appeal to learning. In spite of this, most commentators treat the appeal as incidental.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , June 1994 , pp. 173 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1987

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References

1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., Anscombe, G.E.M. trans. (New York: Macmillan 1958).Google Scholar All references to this work will be cited within the text, using the familiar abbreviation ‘PI.’

2 See, e.g., Malcolm, Norman ‘Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations’ in his Knowledge and Certainty (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1963)Google Scholar.

3 See, e.g., Hardwick, Charles Language Learning in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy (The Hague: Mouton 1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see Bloor, David Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a reading that is sympathetic to this interpretation.

4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, revised edition, Wright, G.H. von Rhees, R. and Anscombe, G.E.M. eds. (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press 1978).Google Scholar All references to this work will be cited in the text, using the abbreviation ‘RFM.’

5 The passages from Wittgenstein that I rely on most heavily are the rule-following discussion in the Investigations (PI $138-242) and Part VI of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. In the background of the argument are those passages from On Certainty, G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, eds. (New York: J. &J. Harper 1969) that are concerned with the idea of propositions that hold fast and the distinction between the normative and the empirical.

6 The discussion in this paper is restricted to the learning of the novice or initiate learner. Matters alter significantly when one considers the kind of learning in which the linguistically competent and cognitively sophisticated can engage. Indeed, matters have already changed considerably when one considers the differences between the preverbal child and the child who can ask for names.

7 See Watson, John Behaviorism (New York: Norton 1930)Google Scholar, Ch. 10, for an account of language acquisition in terms of chained reflexes; and Skinner, B.F. Verbal Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts 1957).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 See Fodor, J.A. The Language of Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell 1975).Google Scholar

9 This is precisely what Wittgenstein would take to be a paradigmatically vacuous argument. In PI $32, he dismisses just such an explanation:

Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one.

10 See Dretske, F.I. Explaining Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press 1988);Google Scholar Millikan, R.G. Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press 1984);Google Scholar and Pappineau, David Reality and Representation (Oxford: Blackwell 1987).Google Scholar

11 In distinguishing these three kinds of regularity or uniform behavior, I am drawing heavily on the work of Wilfrid Sellars, particularly his ‘Some Reflections on Language Games,’ in Science, Perception and Reality (New York: The Humanities Press 1963).

12 Sellars, ‘Some Reflections on Language Games,’ 326

13 This distinction between pattern-governed behavior and rule-obeying behavior is allied to the distinction drawn in the context of the cognitive sciences between following rules explicitly and implicitly. The reason that I prefer to follow Sellars’s way of drawing the distinction is that it does not commit one to the view that every structured practice can be described as a series of moves governed by a set of rules. It is an attempt to avoid the ubiquity of descriptions and explanations of behavior in terms of rules and representations. I think that it is doubtful, if not impossible, that all behavior can be so described or explained.

14 See p.178 above.

15 See Fodor, J.A. Psychosemantics (Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar where he defends a causal denotational theory of meaning. One of the central problems facing this theory is the problem of misrepresentation, which is a variant on what I am calling the problem of normativity. Fodor’s attempt to build normativity into his causal theory of denotation fails. See Cummins, Robert Meaning and Mental Representation (Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press 1989)Google Scholar, ch. 5; Dretske, F. ‘Misrepresentation’ in Bogdan, Radu J. ed., Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1986)Google Scholar; and Jones, Todd Edmond, Mulaire and Stephen, Stich ‘Staving Off Catastrophe,’ Mind & Language 6 (1991) 58-82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Kripke, Saul Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1982)Google Scholar

17 See Bilgrami, A. ‘An Extemalist Account of Psychological Content,’ Philosophical Topics 15 (1987) 191-226CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who argues for the public character of understanding but rejects the social.

18 See Wright, Crispin Introduction to Realism, Meaning, and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell 1986);Google Scholar and McGinn, Colin Wittgenstein on Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell 1984)Google Scholar.

19 Wittgenstein’s arguments are directed against the notion that conscious mental states can embody knowledge or rules without their ever being manifested publicly in the behavior of the subject. The matter is complicated if one attempts to apply this Wittgensteinian strategy against contemporary theories of mind that hypothesize unconsciously held and used knowledge and rules. The central problem that Wittgenstein raises is nonetheless a problem for these theories of mind as well. To restate the problem: no object, whether an acoustic sound, a string of letters, a patterned paper, pole, bird, or flower, has representational content, or more broadly, normative content, in its own right. An object has a normative role only in virtue of the way that it is used and the background against which it operates. This is the argument that Wittgenstein makes repeatedly against different candidates for being that which is inherently representational or normative: an ordinary object used as an exemplar for ostensive definition (an apple), a specially made object stipulated to play a particular normative role (the standard meter), a mental image, a formula, an interpretation. The problem of misrepresentation for Chomsky /Fodor- like theories is a variant on this key problem, as is the ‘thickness of slice’ problem for theories of natural teleology. The hope of current theories of mind and mental content is that the causal order will solve the problem, whereas for Wittgenstein, only the social order can solve the problem. For the debate on the problem of misrepresentation, see note 14, above. For the debate on the problem of thickness of slice, see Dretske, Explaining Behavior; Dennett, D.C. ‘When Frogs (and Others) Make Mistakes’ and ‘Evolution, Error, and Intentionality,’ The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press 1987)Google Scholar.

20 Also see PI $199 and RFM VI.21.

21 This is hardly a noncontroversial claim. There has been considerable debate over whether Wittgenstein’s account of rule-following is that it requires both public and social regularities of behavior or only publicly accessible regularities. See Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, for a defense of the social or community view of rule-following; Baker, G.P. and Hacker, P.M.S. Skepticism, Rules & Language (Oxford: Blackwell 1984)Google Scholar for a lively defense of the alternative; and Holtzman, Steven and Leich, Christopher eds., Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981)Google Scholar for arguments on both sides of the issue. My own view is that neither of these interpretations is fully adequate. For a full defense of my interpretation of the community view of rule-following, see ‘Blind Obedience: Rules, Community and the Individual’ in Puhl, Klaus ed., Meaning Skepticism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1991).Google Scholar

22 Wittgenstein makes the same point in several places in the Philosophical Investigations: ‘What sort of connection is there here [between my actions and a rule]? Well, perhaps this one: I have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react to it’ (PI $198); and ‘Following a rule is analogous to obeying an order. We are trained to do so’ (PI $206).

23 Also see Dreyfus, H. Why Computers Can’t Think, revised edition (New York: Harper & Row 1979)Google Scholar; and Searle, John The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially ch. 8. Both defend the indispensability of a background of skills and capacities, without which rules and representations cannot be used.

24 I think that there are two good reasons for taking his discussion of learning in Part VI as having general import. First, though most of the discussion of learning, technique, concept, and rule uses mathematical examples, Wittgenstein explicitly extends the discussion to language in general (RFM VI.31-49): ‘To what extent can the function of language be described? If someone is not master of a language, I may bring him to a mastery of it by training. Someone who is master of it, I may remind of the kind of training, or I may describe it; for a particular purpose; thus already using a technique of language’ (VI.31).

Second, his discussion of these matters here resonates with the discussion of rule-following in the Investigations and with much of the discussion of belief and certainty in On Certainty, even to the point of particular passages in the Remarks having their counterparts in the Investigations (e.g., compare VI.3 with PI $193, VI.21 with PI $199 and $240, VI.32 with PI $204, VI.38 with PI $201, VI.39 with PI $242).

25 This is, of course, Lewis Carroll’s problem of Achilles and the Tortoise all over again.