RULE‐FOLLOWING WITHOUT REASONS: WITTGENSTEIN'S QUIETISM AND THE CONSTITUTIVE QUESTION
Crispin Wright · Ratio · 2007
Abstract This is a short, and therefore necessarily very incomplete discussion of one of the great questions of modern philosophy. I return to a station at which an interpretative train of thought of mine came to a halt in a paper written almost 20 years ago, about Wittgenstein and Chomsky, 1 hoping to advance a little bit further down the track. The rule‐following passages in the Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics in fact raise a number of distinct (though connected) issues about rules, meaning, objectivity, and reasons, whose conflation is encouraged by the standard caption, ‘the Rule‐following Considerations’. 2 Let me begin by explaining my focus here.