The General Argument

In paragraphs 185-99 of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein imagined a pupil who is being taught to follow a simple rule, namely, the rule of “add 2.” The pupil must try to follow the rule and generate the rule-bound sequence of 2, 4, 6, 8, etc., by adding 2 to the previous member of the sequence. The pupil is taught by a familiar mixture of examples and explanations and is then encouraged to go on to produce further numbers in the sequence. Witt­genstein then imagined the pupil deviating from the expectations of the teacher and the other competent rule followers in the surrounding culture. On reaching 2,000, the pupil does not say 2,002, but 2,004, 2,008, etc. Witt­genstein studied the likely reactions of the competent rule followers and the resources at their disposal as they tried to get the deviant pupil to understand what the rule means and what the rule requires. It rapidly emerges from the analysis that just as the original rule might be misunderstood, so too might any further explanation. Such explanations also depend on a small number of illustrative examples that the pupil must use as a pattern to generate the new instances that are required. Thus, the injunction to go on in the same way merely pushes the problem back to that of defining “same.” Any attempt to furnish an algorithm for producing the next member of the sequence merely provides rules for following rules and the original problem of furnishing an adequate analysis repeats itself.10

Ultimately any attempt to furnish reasons, or to ensure that the pupil’s behavior is guided by what the rule requires, depends on the pupil react­ing normally and automatically to the training provided by those already ac­knowledged as competent. There is nothing else available, and all appeals to “reason,” “logic,” “meaning,” “implication” (as well as the concepts of “must” and “have to”) come down, in the end, to this. The basis of the pro­cess is participation in a shared practice. This applies not just to the pupil now learning the rule but to all who have ever learned it and all who now teach others and identify and correct their errors. The meaning of the rule and the compulsion of the rule depend on shared dispositions to react and shared dispositions to interact with one another in ways that ensure that in­dividual responses stay accountable and aligned. In other words, rules are conventions. To obey a rule, said Wittgenstein, is to follow a “custom” and to participate in an “institution.”

Wittgenstein did not mean this statement as a criticism of rule follow­ing or the practice of citing rules. The claim is not that rules are unreal or that rule following is a sham. He was not saying that rule followers have no reasons for what they do or, in reality, are acting for other reasons. His point was that the institution of rule following is a social reality, and his aim was to expose that reality to view. The institution is vital for, and constitutive of, cognitive and social order. Citing the rule as an explanation of why pupils act as they do, or why they should act thus and so, is the currency with which one rational, social agent interacts with another rational, social agent. The rules and reasons are actor’s categories. Invoking rules is not an idiom for describ­ing the interaction in causal terms; it is a means of acting causally within the situation. What Wittgenstein’s argument shows, and was meant to show, was that the actor’s account will not suffice if it is taken out of context and treated as if it were self-sufficient, that is, as an analyst’s account. The analyst needs to understand an interaction in terms of causes. This is why Wittgenstein ad­opted the sociological perspective. In his example he focused attention on the process of socialization. More generally he adopted the explanatory stance by invoking the concepts of convention, custom, and institution.11

Wittgenstein’s genius lay in identifying a simple example that epitomizes all the central points concerning the relation of reasons and causes. Rule following is the perfect example of rational compulsion, and Wittgenstein’s analysis can be related directly to the questions posed by critics of the Strong Program. Here, if anywhere, the case could be made for the operation of ra­tional rather than social causes. Doesn’t the rule provide a sufficient reason for the behavior of a competent rule follower? Can’t the rule better explain the behavior of the rule follower than any social causes can? It seems to give the critics everything they want. But, as Wittgenstein’s analysis shows, the critic’s case collapses into a regress of rules for following rules. For the purposes of analysis and explanation, the regress must be stopped and so the phenom­enon must be seen as a combination of psychological and sociological causes. The stated reasons and the appeal to reasons prove insufficient to explain what happens, and, for the scientific analyst, the actor’s account needs to be reconfigured in terms that acknowledge an all-pervasive and self-sufficient sociopsychological causation.

Despite the central role played by Wittgenstein’s argument in setting up the Strong Program, its critics insist on misreading the sociological approach as the claim that reason giving is spurious. Such a misreading is question begging. It amounts to making the assumption from the outset that “real” reasons and “good” reasons are not to be analyzed in terms of social causes. The categories of the “rational” and the “social” are set in opposition to one another. The critics cannot believe that rationality can be a sociological phe­nomenon in anything other than a trivial sense. They therefore counterpose the rational and the social and read the symmetry requirement of the Strong Program as an a priori exclusion of the power and presence of real reasons. From the critic’s standpoint it then seems easy to refute the sociological ap­proach. All that is needed is an example of an action authentically based on good reasons, for example, a case of rule following or a well-founded sci­entific inference. This, critics assume, refutes the preposterous generaliza­tion put forward by sociologists of knowledge. That the sociologist, following Wittgenstein, is actually challenging the dualistic assumptions upon which the critic’s argument rests is never considered.12

Although Wittgenstein’s example deals with a particular case, the lesson that can be drawn is wholly general. The lesson is that the familiar distinc­tion between “cognitive factors” and “social factors” is wrong. The injunc­tion to “disentangle” these two things is incoherent. The social factor cannot be considered “external” to the cognitive process; it is constitutive, and you cannot “disentangle” that which is constitutive. The cognitive factor in Witt­genstein’s example is, of course, the rule itself and the orientation to the rule. But what, when properly analyzed, is “the rule”? Is it something that mys­teriously exists “in advance” of the acts of following, like a rail stretching to infinity? No, said Wittgenstein, that is just a mythical picture. We must think in a different way. A rule is something that exists solely in virtue of the social practice of following the rule (just as, in economics, a currency exists solely in virtue of the practice of using the currency). The meaning and implica­tions of the rule only exist through being invoked by the actors to correct, challenge, justify, and explain the rule to one another in the course of their interactions. This is what Wittgenstein meant by calling a rule an “institu­tion.” The implication (though these are not Wittgenstein’s words) is that the rule, that is, the cognitive factor, is actually itself a social factor. Those who appeal to a combination of cognitive factors and social factors, as if they are two, qualitatively different kinds of things, are not being prudent; they are being muddled or metaphysical.13

The processes that Wittgenstein brilliantly distilled into his example are the same ones that occurred on a larger scale in my case study. That which is recognizably social, for example, the disciplinary identities, the institutional locations, the cultural traditions, the schools of thought, are not “external” to the reasoning processes that I have studied but are integral to them. They are constitutive of the step-by-step judgments by which the different bodies of knowledge were built up. Experts gave reasons to explain and justify their views and found that sometimes they were accepted and sometimes rejected. Facts and reasons that inclined the members of one group to orient in one direction inclined the members of the other group to orient in a different direction. As one would expect from Wittgenstein’s example, these accep­tances, rejections, indications, and orientations fell into patterns. The pat­terns form the customs, conventions, institutions and subcultures described in my story.14