ABSTRACT
When commentators have discussed Wittgenstein’s use of learning cases at all, they have been drawn to one of two closely related interpretations. The first interpretation construes the appeal to learning as an expository device (cf. Malcolm 1966). Appeal to a child’s learning is useful in elucidating the grammar of certain key notions, most especially, the distinction between criterion and symptom. What counts as part of the criterion for the application of a term is what one would appeal to in explaining or teaching
the word to a child. Appeal to these facts, however, is completely dispensable. Thus, such appeal can be seen primarily as a literary device in that it provides a more colorful, more concrete display of the conceptual contours of such notions as “meaning,” “understanding,” and “sensation.” It belongs, in short, to the style of the Investigations rather than the content. How in fact we learn these concepts is strictly irrelevant to grasping or elucidating their grammar.
