Meaning is use. So what is it to carry out that “use” correctly, or wrongly? The late Investigations poses the question with a number series. You teach a pupil the rule “+2.” The pupil goes 2, 4, 6, …, 1000, and then writes 1004, 1008, 1012. You say “no, 1002,” and the pupil, genuinely baffled: “but I went on in the same way” (the scene of §185).
1. The paradox of rules
Unser Paradox war dies: eine Regel könnte keine Handlungsweise bestimmen, da jede Handlungsweise mit der Regel in Übereinstimmung zu bringen sei.
This was our paradox: no rule could determine a course of action, because every course of action can be brought into accord with the rule. (§201. German quotations throughout; Japanese and English are L/LAB working translations.)
Stare at the sign “+2” and it does not say that 1002 comes after 1000. Apply the odd rule “add 2 up to 1000, then add 4” and 1004 is “by the rule” too. And by the same manoeuvre any step can be made to conflict with the rule. Wittgenstein goes on: “then there would be neither accord nor conflict here” (§201).
2. Interpretations hang in the air
The naïve fix is to attach another rule — an interpretation — to the rule. But that interpretation is another string of signs, and admits interpretations in turn. As Wittgenstein puts it, “every interpretation hangs in the air together with what it interprets (hängt … in der Luft)” and “cannot give it any support” (§198).
Stack up interpretations and you never hit bottom. So Wittgenstein changes direction: “there is a grasp of a rule which is not an interpretation, and which shows itself, from case to case of application, in what we call ‘following the rule’ and ‘going against it’” (§201). What holds a rule up is not an inner interpretation but doing it.
3. Following a rule is a “practice”
Darum ist »der Regel folgen« eine Praxis. Und der Regel zu folgen glauben ist nicht: der Regel folgen. Und darum kann man nicht der Regel »privatim« folgen.
Hence “following a rule” is a practice. And to think one is following a rule is not to follow a rule. And hence it is not possible to follow a rule “privately.” (§202)
If “following privately” were allowed, “thinking one is following the rule” and “actually following it” could not be told apart (§202). “Following a rule, making a report, giving an order, playing a game of chess are customs (uses, institutions)” (§199). “It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion, once in a lifetime, on which someone followed a rule” (§199) — the standard of correctness is rooted in a repeated public practice.
4. Is a “private language” possible?
From here the private language argument begins. §243 imagines a language whose words refer “to what only the speaker can know — to his immediate, private sensations (seine unmittelbaren, privaten Empfindungen),” so that “another person cannot understand this language.”
Is such a language possible? Wittgenstein first looks at how we actually learn sensation-words (§244). A child falls and cries. Adults graft onto that natural cry first exclamations, then the word “pain.” “Pain” replaces crying; it does not describe it. Sensation-words are taught by tying them to public behaviour.
5. The beetle in the box
Angenommen, es hätte Jeder eine Schachtel, darin wäre etwas, das wir »Käfer« nennen. Niemand kann je in die Schachtel des Andern schauen … Das Ding in der Schachtel gehört überhaupt nicht zum Sprachspiel; auch nicht als ein Etwas: denn die Schachtel könnte auch leer sein.
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it that we call a “beetle.” No one can ever look into anyone else’s box … The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. (§293)
When the word “beetle” works in the shared exchange, what is actually in each person’s box plays no part. If “pain” named “the contents of a box only I can look into,” those contents would not be doing any work in fixing the meaning — they “drop out of consideration as irrelevant.”
The diary (§258) makes the same point. Each time a certain sensation recurs you write “S” in a notebook. But there is no standard against which “did I write S correctly?” can be checked. “One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we cannot talk about ‘right’” (§258).
6. Why this is decisive for semantics
Meaning is normative — a word’s use can be right or wrong. And normativity needs more than private conviction; it needs a public standard. This is the hinge of the “meaning is public” thesis. In the early Tractatus a name could in principle be correlated with an object by one person alone. The late work rejects that picture: a word has meaning because it is used within a shared practice, a form of life.
Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) sharpened the argument into “a sceptical paradox and its communal solution,” and put rule-following at the centre of modern philosophy of language. His reading is contested, but the core point — that meaning is not settled inside one head alone — is still live.
In sum
| section | point |
|---|---|
| §185, §201 | the sign of a rule does not fix the next step uniquely (the rule paradox) |
| §198 | interpretations hang in the air; interpretation alone does not fix meaning |
| §199, §202 | following a rule is a custom, institution, practice; not doable by one person once |
| §243–244 | sensation-words are taught by grafting onto natural behaviour |
| §258 | a private sign has no standard of “correctness” |
| §293 | the beetle in the box — private contents play no part in the language-game |
Connections
- Saussure’s point that “langue is social, not changeable by one speaker” and “a rule cannot be followed privately” arrive by different roads at the same conclusion: language is a communal institution.
- Sapir said “change begins in individual speech, but the system belongs to the group.” Wittgenstein’s rule argument grounds that “belonging to the group” at the level of correctness of meaning.
- “What is your aim in philosophy? — To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (§309). The rule paradox and the lure of a private language were, for Wittgenstein, “bottles” you can climb out of by looking at how the words are used.
The Wittgenstein feature: overview / the picture theory / the limits of language / language-games / family resemblance / this essay.
