Rule Following

If language and thought are to be taken as objective, they must respond to how the world is. I propose to explain this responsiveness in terms of conditions of correction, more precisely, by taking thoughts and linguistic utterances to be assessible as true or false. Furthermore, the paper is committed to a form of qui- etism according to which the very same thing that can be (truly) thought or expressed is the case: 'soft facts' as opposed to hard, free-standing facts, independent of any possible rational activity of grasping them.

According to a standard criticism, Robert Brandom's “normative pragmatics”, i.e. his attempt to explain normative statuses in terms of practical attitudes, faces a dilemma. If practical attitudes and their interactions are specified in purely non-normative terms, then they underdetermine normative statuses; but if normative terms are allowed into the account, then the account becomes viciously circular. This paper argues that there is no dilemma, because the feared circularity is not vicious. While normative claims do exhibit their respective authors' practical attitudes and thereby contribute towards establishing the normative statuses they are about, this circularity is not a mark of Brandom's explanatory strategy but a feature of social practice of which we theorists partake.

Lon L. Fuller challenged the positivist distinction between the law “as it is” and the law “as it ought to be” by insisting on the need for interpretation even in easy cases of adjudication. Fuller argued that interpretation is always creative in the light of the purpose of the rule to be applied and thus always draws on the law “as it ought to be”. Andrei Marmor tried to defend positivism against this challenge by advancing the thesis that there is no need for interpretation in easy cases. He drew on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule following to suggest that in easy cases the law is just in need of understanding, not of interpretation. Although I also think that positivism can be saved from Fuller’s challenge, I do not think that it can be done with the help of Wittgenstein’s distinction between interpretation and understanding. Fuller’s challenge and Wittgenstein’s remarks on the relation between a rule and its application address different aspects of the process of adjudication in easy cases, which build upon, but which cannot be played out against each other. We have to distinguish between two different elements of our practice of adjudication in easy cases: On the one side the communicative interpretation of utterances – in the case of the law legal texts – in the sense Paul Grice was concerned with; on the other side the application of a rule thus identified as the content of a communicative intention that Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule following are concerned with. Fuller can be understood to have insisted rightly on the ubiquity of the former, which cannot be refuted by any account of the latter. The upshot, though, is not that Fuller’s challenge is successful. Its flaw, however, does not lie in the insistence on the ubiquity of communicative interpretation, but in its exploitation of an ambiguity of the creative element in two different kinds of interpretation. We have to distinguish between the epistemic creativity that can be involved in communicative interpretation and the creativity involved in amending the law via legal construction. Only the latter concerns the distinction between the law “as it is” and the law “as it ought to be”.

This dissertation examines people’s understanding of and action according to norms. Two models are distinguished: a cognitive and a non-cognitive model. The cognitive model is characterized by requiring for people to understand norms and each other, and to act accordingly, that they have higher-order mental states whose propositional contents refer to the mental states of others and from these infer beliefs about what is normative and intentions to act accordingly. On the other, non-cognitive model, understanding norms and others and to act accordingly is understood as an embodied, situated, ecological, and enacted know-how. Such knowledge does not imply that people entertain mental states with propositional contents that something is a norm or that someone is in a certain mental state, from which they infer what to do; instead it presupposes certain embodied activities in the context of particular situations in social environments that people together participate in enacting. In th...

espanolLas Investigaciones de Wittgenstein propusieron una vision igualitaria acerca de los juegos de lenguaje, haciendo enfasis en su pluralidad (“el lenguaje no tiene ningun centro de ciudad”). Los usos de las palabras dependen del juego que se este jugando y puede cambiar si se juega otro. No hay, tampoco, ningun juego privilegiado que dicte la reglas para los demas: hay tantos juegos como propositos. Esta vision es pluralista e igualitaria, pero dice poco acerca de la conexion entre significado y uso, y acerca de como un conjunto de reglas es responsable de ellos en la practica. Hacerlo explicito de Brandom intento dar una respuesta directa a estas preguntas mediante un desarrollo de las ideas Wittgensteinianas: la primacia de la practica social sobre significados; la idea de que significado es uso; la idea de seguir una regla para comprender la participacion en practicas sociales. Brandom, sin embargo, defendio una concepcion no-Wittgensteiniana de la practica discursiva: el le...

Este estudio analiza los niveles de asociación entre la capacidad de memoria operativa y el seguimiento de instrucciones, como elementos básicos para el desarrollo de competencias necesarias en ambientes educativos. Desde un enfoque cuantitativo, se usó un diseño de tipo correlacional, no experimental, transversal y prospectivo, en el cual participaron 33 universitarios de nuevo ingreso de la ciudad de Veracruz, México con 18.5 años de edad promedio, a los cuales se le aplicaron pruebas de alcance complejo para medir la capacidad de la memoria operativa. El seguimiento de instrucciones, se midió con cuatro pruebas que requerían de construir modelos con piezas Lego® a partir de la lectura de un procedimiento. Los resultados muestran una asociación positiva entre la habilidad para seguir instrucciones y la capacidad de la memoria operativa, de magnitud similar para sus dominios verbal y viso-espacial. Ambos tipos de prueba incorporados a una plataforma virtual de aprendizaje, puede pr...

1. Living and Painting Let us consider the fundamental distinction between having a rule and having a skill by drawing parallels between the practice or fine art of living and the fine art of painting. When someone has mastered the art of painting she does not come to possess a set of rules that she applies endlessly. She acquires a

Saul Kripke's influential ‘sceptical paradox’ of semantic rule-following alleges that speakers cannot have any justification for using a word one way rather than another. If it is correct, there can be no such thing as meaning anything by a word. I argue that the paradox fails to undermine meaning. Kripke never adequately motivates its excessively strict standard for the justified use of words. The paradox lacks the resources to show that its standard is truly mandatory or that speakers do not frequently satisfy the well-motivated competitor I offer. So the paradox fails.

Ideas on meaning, rules and mathematical proofs abound in Wittgenstein’s writings. The undeniable fact that they are present together, sometimes intertwined in the same passage of Philosophical Investigations or Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, does not show, however, that the connection between these ideas is necessary or inextricable. The possibility remains, and ought to be checked, that they can be plausibly and consistently separated. I am going to examine two views detectable in Wittgenstein’s works: one about proofs, the other about meaning and rules. The first is the denial of the objectivity of proof. The second is a conception of meaning stemming from the rule-following considerations. I shall argue that, though Wittgenstein seems to conjoin the two views, they can be, and should be, separated. In Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics, published in 1959, Michael Dummett wrote: «Wittgenstein’s main reason for denying the objectivity of mathematical truth is his...

Let us consider the fundamental distinction between having a rule and having a skill by drawing parallels between the practice or fine art of living and the fine art of painting. When someone has mastered the art of painting she does not come to possess a set of rules that she applies endlessly. She acquires a certain skill, a certain manner of approaching the canvas, which makes her capable of producing an indefinite number of distinct works. Every canvas is a new challenge which the appropriately skilled artist will know how to complete successfully. The person who has mastered the art of painting knows that, typically, prior to the act of painting itself there is no exhaustive plan which determines every detail of the completed successful work. Typically, the completed form of successful works of art, as opposed to some works produced by inexperienced novices, are determined not prior to their making, but in the making itself. To a great extent the act of painting is an act of balancing the different elements that make up a painting with the purpose of establishing a coherent whole that expresses certain very general standards of adequacy in a unique manner. But, typically, the whole is not fully determined prior to a painting’s completion.