Philosophers

I cannot understand why Wittgenstein's considerations about rule-following had such a large impact in many areas of philosophy. May you explain it to me?

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This is a very good question. But there are several layers of answers, depending upon the question is asked from the point of view of the sociology of philosophy, the point of view of the history of it, or from the point of view of the intrinsic interest of a philosophical problem. If you question is about the latter, one can discern in it the following , fairly sceptical, one: why such a tiny, trivial sounding issue, dealing with such obvious facts as that people follow rules, can have become such an industry of ink spilling within the philosophical community for so many years?

With respect ot the sociological/ historical setting, it seems that W and although I am not an expert of the history of Wittgenstein scholarship and Wittgenstein reception, ittgenstein's "rule-following" considerations have started during the 1970, when a number of philosophers have ceased to concentrate , when reading Wittgenstein, upon the private language problem or family ressemblances, and started to investigate the role of the concept of rule in Wittgenstein's philosophy. To my knowledge, one of the first commentators to attract attention to these issues in the 1970 was Jacques Bouveresse, in his book Le mythe de l'interiorité (Minuit, Paris, 1976) ( although he was certainly anticipated by others. Later on in Crispin Wirght's book on Wittgenstein and the philosophy of mathematics (1980) the issue of rule-following was squarely identified and dealt with in the context of W's philosophy of mathematics. But it is mainly Kripke's book, Wittgenstein on rule and private language, which came out in 1981, which attracted the attention of the philosophical community to the ramifications of the problem. Kripke's book is a masterpiece of exposition, clear, crisp, stimulating, and it dramatises the issue in a way which has struck his readers. Kripke thinks that Wittgenstein is sceptical about whether we follow rules, and he compares this form of scepticism with more traditional ones, such as scepticism about induction and about meaning. He shows how the issue of whether we follow rules has an impact upon the nature of thought and concepts, upon the question of private language, and upon the question whether meaning can be analysed in terms of truth or assertion conditions. Ath the very same moment, these issues were hotly debated with philosophy of language and mind, in the works of Quine, Dummett , and Davidson. Kripke's book has immediately attracted a lot of commentary, from the part of Wittgenstein scholars on the one hand, and from many other circles on the other. So a first answer to you question is the following, it seems to me. The "rule-following" considerations, and the impact of the "sceptical view" that there might be no rules that we follow, has seemed, rightly in my view, to many philosophers absolutely essential to the issues in the philosophy of language and mind of the 1980's. Articles, collections, monographs appeared, which have dealt with the rule following problem.

Now, if you question is : why on earth did people find interesting such a dull and unintersting issue ? , it seems to me that one can answer in the following way.

The question whether we follow rules, and how we follow rules, is another way of asking how we can mean anything with our words, and how we can exercise our concepts. This is a central classical philosophical question. Wittgenstein's emphasis on rules is strongly related, as Kripke shows ( but not everyone agrees on that) to the social and communal nature of thought. So the issue has to do with whether the exercise of thought and the possibility of meaning through our use of words is social, or not. So the impact of this issue upon the questions whether we should be "internalists" or "externalists" about the nature of thought ( whether, in a nutshell, the content of our thought is essentially intenral to the individual, or whether it is dependent upon the environnement (especially social) is at stake. Wittgenstein also raised, throught the rule following consideration, the issue whether the nature of thought and language is of OUR making ( we are the ones who make the rules, which are conventions) or whether the rules, in some sense, are "there". This raises the issue of the difference between a anti-realist ( or "expressivist") conception of meaning and rules and a realist ( or "cognitivist") conception. We can apply these opposition to the realism/ anti-realism debate in general, or in more local areas, in moral philosophy ( are our judgements about ethics objective?) and in the philosophy of mathematics. Moreover, the issue of rules has been, especially within political and social philosophy , at the center of the analysis of social conventions, institutions, etc. A philosopher who has neatly brought these issues together is Philipp Pettit , in his book The Common Mind (Oxford 1993) .

So the main reason why the "rule - following" considerations have been so important and so crucial to many philosophers is that they seemed to connect up, a the deepest way, a number of philosophicial problems. This is why, in general, problems in philosophy come at center stage. The transcendental deduction in Kant's Analytic, the problem of the indetermincay of translation in Quine, or more recently, such thought experiments as Putnam's Twin Earth, have enjoyed such status because they seemed to be at the crossing of many paths in philosophy.

Now it that a good thing ? There is certainly a law of diminishing returns in philosophy as elsewhere, when a problem becomes too much the object of focus, and a risk of scholasticism. But although the zeal that philosophers have recently displayed in trying to deal with the "rule following" considerations may , in the end, diminish, it cannot be doubted that the issue is important, and that it points to some of the perennial philosophical problems.

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