ABSTRACT
In a number of central and well-known passages in the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein describes situations in which a pupil is instructed in the meaning of words. The nature of the transaction between teacher and pupil in these cases is often thought to be problematic. On a familiar way of reading these passages, the teacher struggles to convey to the pupil what a word means and finds that their expression of what they know is subject to a radical skepticism that underdetermines the content of what they are trying to convey.1 On this reading, there is potential for an unbridgeable gap between what the teacher is able to say when explaining a word’s meaning and what the pupil needs to learn. The existence of this gap undermines our ordinary notion of word meaning. It presents a skeptical challenge to our ordinary understanding of meaning. The standard way of avoiding the skeptical challenge is to close the gap, to show that it can be bridged by reconstruing the teacher/pupil transaction. Kripke’s re-construal consists in deflating the account of knowledge that is transferred.2 A better strategy is to say that in place of a transaction in which the teacher transfers knowledge to the pupil, we are invited to construe the teacher/pupil relationship as one in which the teacher initiates the pupil into a practice.3 This is, perhaps, the favored response. If we construe the teacher/pupil relationship in this way, we avoid the slack that otherwise exists between the knowledge the teacher is able to express and the information that the pupil needs to acquire in learning the meaning of a word. Such, in outline, is a familiar way of reading the teacher/pupil relationship
as it figures in Wittgenstein’s discussion of the concept game from §66 onwards and in the discussion of teaching someone the meaning of “add 2” from §185 onwards. In this essay, I shall argue that this familiar interpretation of the teacher/pupil relationship is wrong. The familiar interpretation assumes an empiricist model of learning that, although clearly suggested in many passages in Wittgenstein’s later writings, is incompatible with a rationalist model of learning that makes much better sense of the key passages. To argue, as I shall, that Wittgenstein has a rationalist model of learning appears to fly
in the face of the numerous places where he emphasizes the role of training in language learning, where “training” is something that predates ratiocination. I need, therefore, to provide some account of how the frequent references to training are to work in a broadly rationalist model of learning. I shall argue that, properly understood, the accounts of training are not only compatible with my preferred rationalist reading, but provide the starting point for a serious detailed account of the pupil’s mental activity implied by the rationalist model. In short, despite initial appearances, the reading I provide does not take issue with what Wittgenstein actually says in his later writings. I take issue only with how he is often read. On my reading, Wittgenstein’s writings have a substantial contribution to make to contemporary debates about rationalism and nativism about concepts in the philosophy of mind. I start in the next section with an overview of the distinction between an
empiricist and rationalist model of learning. I offer this as an analytical tool for framing a reading of Wittgenstein that throws into relief a number of central passages and issues in his later work.
