ABSTRACT
Having discussed the incompleteness of rules and the indeterminacy of sense, Wittgenstein now considers how tables can be used to determine the meanings of words. He introduces a variant of the builders’ languagegame described in §2 in which builder A gives builder B a written sign and builder B uses a table to determine which sort of building-stones to fetch. In this language-game builder B determines what he is to do by consulting a table that correlates signs with pictures of building-stones in much the same way as the shopkeeper determines what colour apple to pick out by seeing which colour is correlated with red (see §1). We are to think of the table as ‘a rule which [builder B] follows in executing orders’ and to imagine his having been trained to read it by ‘learning to pass his finger horizontally from left to right’. (Whereas in §85 Wittgenstein focusses on the interpretation of rules, here he considers how someone uses a rule after ‘receiving a training’. Also notice that in §1 he simply assumed the shopkeeper read his chart the usual way.)
Clearly, other ways of reading the table might subsequently be introduced. Instead of reading it ‘horizontally from left to right’, the
builder might read it in such a way that ‘block’ is correlated with the picture of the pillar, ‘pillar’ with the picture of the slab, ‘slab’ with the picture of the beam, and ‘beam’ with the picture of the block. Moreover we can imagine the builder being supplied with a rule for reading the table, specifically a schema of lines showing how it is to be used. And we can imagine other rules being specified to explain this rule.
