RULES (INCLUDING THOSE GIVING MEANING) AS COMMUNAL PATTERNS OF USE

1. W. hopes to persuade us of two theses. The first is a general factual, testable, thesis (TH1): The word 'rule_OL', in ordinary language, refers to a loosely characterised collection of patterns of human communal behaviour. A meaning_OL is a particular instance of a rule_OL; the ordinary word 'meaning_OL', as used in such phrases as "That is what 'paid' means" or "'Red' means that colour there →□", refers to a kind of rule_OL, which is therefore purely a use which is communal, and hence a fortiori public. This is the content of the word 'meaning_OL'. We might say (roughly): Meaning_OL is entirely determined by communal use. How 'slab' is used communally - what communally happens when it is uttered - is what 'slab' means_OL. TH1 is a factual thesis about ordinary language, to be established by direct observation of ordinary language users.
2. Comment: TH1 will be false if OL users seem commonly to use 'rule_OL' and 'meaning_OL' in a way different from this. If it is false, W. cannot, according to his methods, subject this ordinary usage to criticism, because he insists that ordinary usage is fine; it does its job well. Only when philosophers take our ordinary words out of this FoL - take them on holiday - does the trouble start.
3. Comment: TH1 is not found stated explicitly in the PI. We suggest, however, that it is implicit throughout.
4. Suppose that TH1 is true. W.'s second thesis is TH2: There is no other possible_x EFoL or ELG in which people might use the word 'rule_ELG' in a different, but family-resembling, way, to the OL way, in order to refer the same area of behaviour that 'ruleOL' is used to refer to. There is consequently no possible_x EFoL or ELG in which people might use the word 'meaning_EL' in a different, but family-resembling, way to the OL way, in order to refer to the same area of association between words, ideas, human patterns of behaviour, and the world, that 'meaning_OL' refers to. In particular, there is no possibility_x of an alternative, extraordinary, approach, in which we (philosophers) propose that giving a word a meaning_x (in some other sense, presumably somehow associated with the OL sense) is setting up some kind of explicit metaphysical link - a silver thread - between a word and a thing (or an idea, or a perception). Nor can an implicit link be set up by providing a reference table. Both are examples of the proposed impossibility_x of creating a rule_x which is inhuman. Anything worthy of the name 'rule_x' is no more than a summary of a communal use.
5. TH2 is going to be very hard for W. to support. Indeed, we might wonder how supporting it could ever be possible (See the Short Essay on Criteria For An Acceptable Extraordinary Language). But we now argue that since TH1 turns out to be false, an assault on TH2 turns out to be unnecessary.
6. As a corollary of TH1, if agreement on this use began to break down, then the word would lose meaning_OL.
7. As a consequence of TH1, a single person cannot, under any circumstances, coherently say (OL)"I have just devised a new rule_OL". This is equally true whether the rule is supposed to govern private events ("Every time I think that →▒ I will silently count to ten") or public ones ("Every time the pebble hits the can I will give myself 5 points; if the can falls over, I'll give myself 10 points...")
8. As a consequence of TH1, a single person cannot, under any circumstances, coherently say "I have just christened a word with a new private meaning_OL, which I am not going to tell anyone". This is equally true whether the christening is of a publicly accessible object, or a private sensation.
9. Nothing Characteristic About The Private Language Argument: The PLA passage comes after an extensive discussion of 'rule'_OL, in which W.'s illustrations are all public: Looking up a word in a table; playing chess; seeing a footpath sign; watching a game of football. We get the clear impression that what is required before we can say (OL)"There is a rule_OL" is an actual pattern of community behaviour, not a pattern that is only potential, or in principle. The pattern's being publicly accessible is indeed, of course, a necessary precondition for there being such a pattern, but it is not sufficient.
10. Note: On this elucidation, there is nothing special about a supposed language which is necessarily private, as opposed to one which just happens to be private. Firstly, since tomorrow telepathy may be discovered, the privacy of our sensations could reasonably be considered to be merely contingent. Secondly, W.'s approach to rule-following appears to make no principled appeal to necessary_x privacy. All it appears to require is the actual (contingent) absence of the community of users, for whatever reason.

CRITICISM: TH1 Is False

Wittgenstein is at the mercy of linguistic anthropology. W. does not explicitly state that TH1 is a factual thesis concerning OL. But ultimately it must be, if it is to be consistent with his overall thesis that there are no sensible extraordinary philosophical uses/meanings for ordinary words - such as rule_x. His project therefore faces a severe factual test. Are his claims as to the ordinary uses of words, those which supposedly remain once silly philosophy has been banished, and everything returns to the way it ordinarily, unproblematically, is - are these claims ones with which everyone will immediately agree? Will ordinary people recognise that W. has captured the meanings that they use? Perhaps. But suppose, on the contrary, that the uses of ordinary words by philosophers, that he believes are characteristic misuses, turn out, as a matter of fact, to be uses that are quite ordinary. If so, his attempt to show that the philosophers' use is a misuse, and philosophers' problems pseudo-problems generated by this misuse, fails.

To put the point in another way, his attempt stands or falls on his assumption that once philosophical misuse of OL is expunged, everything will be unproblematic; raising philosophical problems in OL, ordinarily used, will be impossible. Within the conceptual schema of OFoL, the problems will be inexpressible. Everything will be in order. If someone seems to be asking a question that sounds 'philosophical', we will immediately see that he is misusing his language; something, perhaps, about the sentence's grammatical structure may have seduced him into incautious error. There will still be problems, of course, but they will be substantial; none of them will resemble the traditional pseudo-problems of philosophy. In particular, there will be no silly metaphysical presumptions being made.

 It is time, then, to put W.'s factual claim about OL to the test. Consider the following claim, in OL:

(OL)"It is meaningless for a person, on their own, to say (S): "I have devised, and written down, my own private set of rules for playing a game on the beach (or for what I will do privately when I begin to feel angry; or for what I will do when I have this curious sensation again)"".

 According to W., OL users should agree with this claim, because the OL meaning/use of 'rule' makes S meaningless.

1. In other words, given what 'rule_OL' means, an ordinary person, unsullied by philosophical training, should be unable to grasp what, in ordinary English, S means; it should be as though we say to the person (T): "Courage is twice an angry clematis". "I'm sorry", they say, giving us a puzzled look, "what was that you said? I must have misheard".
2. This is false; ordinary non-philosophical folk disagree with the claim. They can, as a matter of fact, grasp what S means, and do not find it bizarrely malformed. The community of non-philosophers ordinarily use the words in S in such a way that S is said, by them (OL)"to have meaning".
3. The common man does not play ball with W.. This is not automatically cause for rejoicing. W.'s Thesis 1 had, compared to the alternatives, considerable attraction. The common man is playing an OLG which involves, implicitly, claims which are, on reflection, surprising - even problematic - even, dare we say, metaphysical. The common man accepts, without mostly articulating it, that a single person can, by a curious ritual of privately paying attention to something, establish a kind of association between a word and either a sensation or a pattern of behaviour; this association then exists independent of himself. He seems to feel that this association can take on a kind of life of its own, independent of the person - independent of all people. It is as though he has created the association as an objective thing, like a physical chain. (Where does this association exist? The ordinary man does not tell us)
4. Like W., we may be strongly tempted to object. To avoid this metaphysical commitment, we may want to detach ourselves from the ordinary form of life, step out into an extraordinary form of life from whose vantage point we can look back and criticise the ordinary language game, and then refine it. By reflecting on the concepts used in the OFoL, W. could come to suggest that they are not the best overall system. He could propose, for some refined purposes, for use in some extraordinary circumstances, that OL should be revised. He, and we, could quite reasonably judge that ordinary people have gone off the rails. And we could set about devising an alternative, extra-ordinary, conceptual schema which is less odd. And perhaps in our new ELG the OL words 'rule_OL' and 'meaning_OL' may be adjusted in meaning/use such that (EL): "S is meaningless". We might devise a much more defensible conceptual schema, not requiring strange links between words and sensations, or patterns of behaviour, projected into some imagined Third World. The road ahead looks interesting.
5. But W. cannot take it. He has barred himself from it. It is the road leading out of the ordinary form of life into philosophy, and he is supposed to be with the common man against philosophy. All he has allowed himself to do is to follow his own non-philosophical road resolutely, examining everyday OL, summarising its uses, noting that it is unproblematic, and noting that philosophical writing is a nonsensical abuse of it.

1. Disingenuity, or Self-Deception: W. must not be allowed to extract himself from this trap by pretending to be the defender of the common man against philosophy - defending what he claims is ordinary, when he is actually offering us an extra-ordinary view, which is part of his own philosophy.  The facts of ordinary usage are against him. He cannot persist in pretending that he is the defender of salt-of-the-earth everyday ordinariness against extra-ordinary silliness. The extra-ordinary silliness, far from being an artefact of philosophers, is the actual ordinary view. If he wants to defend his claims, he will need to stop implausibly donning the mantle of ordinariness - which anyway does not suit him - and instead come out with it: "The ordinary man's implicit view of how rules, and meaning, work, is, on sophisticated philosophical reflection, unsound. Here is a preferable alternative." And now, instead just making assertions about "what can and cannot be said (in OL)", he will have to present some conventional philosophical arguments.

1. Conclusion: The ordinary use of the word 'rule_OL' does not require that a rule_OL is tied to the behaviour of a community. If W. wants to claim, as a result of extraordinary reflection, that this ordinary use is unsound, he is welcome to do so. But by so doing, he is proposing a revision of OL, like that proposed by physicists. His revision is philosophical, since it concerns a metaphysical claim that he has spotted implicit in the ordinary language game - a claim which is indeed, on extraordinary reflection, hard to justify. Unfortunately he does not offer any arguments in favour of his revision; he persists in the delusion that . There is therefore no reason to take his revisions of ordinary ideas on general rules, and in particular on rules for meanings, seriously.

How many people make a community?

1. There are familiar reports of just two people - such as twins - developing a language which they use to communicate, and which no-one else understands. The ability to check is here reduced to something so minimal that it is very similar to with one person. There is very little difference between what will seem to be correct, and what will be correct. If what is said to be "correct" is what the community does - if this is the touchstone for a meaning of 'correct', because there is no other option - then whatever these two people agree on in their use of 'gribble' is what is called the 'correct' use of gribble. If they have not used 'gribble' for a while, they may be unsure as to what was the way that they were using it previously. How can they now discuss "What they will now take 'gribble' to mean"? Since there is no community use, there is no meaning. So what are they discussing?

Public checking for correctness in principle_x?

1. Suppose that a single person is on a desert island, or indeed on a lonely beach. Is there, according to W., any difference between the person trying to generate a new rule concerning something that is private (a curious sensation), and the person trying to generate a new rule concerning something that is public - though there is no-one else around?
2. If a rule only exists to the extent that there actually is the appropriate community behaviour, then there is no difference between the two cases. But W. seems to be particularly interested in the attempt to create a so-called 'language' (with its so-called 'rules') which is private-in-principle, for example because it involves naming sensations. So although there is no-one else of the island or the beach, W.'s attitude might be that there could be. The person's invention is OK, the rule can be said meaningfully to have been created, because applications could in principle be imagined being checked against community behaviour - despite the fact that this is counter-factual, there being no such behaviour.
3. This is indefensible. If counterfactuals are to be invoked, then we might as well suppose that tomorrow a large group of people will become telepathic, so that the previous private sensation that a person had, which he had attempted to associate with writing the symbol 'S' in his diary, having taken part in some curious ritual of private naming, now becomes as public as naming a new flower. What are the principled constraints on counterfactuals we are to regard as acceptable?

Wittgenstein is not, however, open to the charge of meta-inconsistency.

1.  If S is nonsense, it might seem that we, as philosophers, should be unable to understand what it is that W. is saying, when he tries to explain to us what it is that he is objecting to - when he writes out what 'S' is supposed to be. (This would require some such get-out as that he famously introduces at the end of his Tractatus with the analogy of the ladder) But W. can reasonably respond that we don't actually understand it. What is happening is that we are reading a series of words, nodding our heads, and feeling puzzled - which doesn't imply that S actually means anything.