ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses basic and banal situations in order to dispel some of the mystery that tends to cloud understanding when the topic is morality, law, rationality, mathematics, and language. Sections 201 and 202 of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations are probably the most discussed and disputed passages of twentieth-century philosophy. The mythical pictures supposes that what is used in the teaching of practices, consulted in the course of them, or read off by an observer, are mere expressions of rules: the real rules are something at which these expressions only gesture. Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules should put this myth and its attendant metaphysical and epistemological problems to rest. When Wittgenstein invents his ‘primitive language games’, he is, in effect, describing his own rule-governed practices: ones in which he stipulates what moves count as correct, appropriate, permissible, and so on. Wittgenstein also discusses whether mental images are necessary in determining the meaning of a word.
