Language, Rules, and Rule:

Austin & Wittgenstein on Understanding and Authority*

(Prepared for the University of Chicago Political Theory Workshop, May 12, 2008)

Tanner J. McFadden
University of Chicago

(Draft. Please do not cite without the author’s permission.

Comments and critiques invited at tannerj@uchicago.edu)

“But as men (for the attaining of peace and conservation of themselves thereby) have made
an artificial man, which we call a commonwealth, so also have they made artificial chains,
called civil laws, which they themselves by mutual covenants have fastened at one end to the
lips of that man or assembly to whom they have given the sovereign power, and at the other
end to their own ears”

~Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, XXI.51

“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and
language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”

~Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §1152

Law, Hobbes’ brilliant image suggests, is power in the mode of language. The civil

laws pronounced by the sovereign guide and constrain his3 subjects as decisively as if they

were physical chains: for such a sovereign, clearly, “to say something is to do something,” in

J. L. Austin’s characteristic phrase;4 to speak is to make law.5 Just as for Austin “to marry is

to say a few words,” the medium of law makes it a matter of words to grant honor and

reward for some actions while requiring fine, imprisonment, or death for others, to declare

*
Thanks to Andrew Dilts, Doug Hanes, Patchen Markell, and Jacob Schiff for helpful conversations about
this paper, and to Dasha Polzik for provocation with regard to Wittgenstein.
1
Hereafter cited in the text as L, followed by the Chapter number in roman numeral notation, and the
paragraph number in Arabic notation.
2
Hereafter cited in the text as PI, followed by the section number: (PI, §115).
3
Throughout, I follow Hobbes’ consistent use of the masculine to characterize the ‘artificial man’ of the
sovereign. I do not claim that sovereigns must be men, nor do I argue, as Idit Dobbs-Weinstein has argued
to me in conversations about Hobbes’ metaphysics, that Hobbes’ project in Leviathan requires a masculine
sovereign.
4
Austin, How to do things with Words, 12. Hereafter cited in the text as Austin, followed by the page
number: (Austin, 12).
5
Austin repeatedly refers to the law as an example of performative speech in How to do Things with
Words; see Austin, 4, n. 2; 19; 32;
 2

war or peace, to grant certain persons entry into, and remove others from, a community.

The making of modern (written, public) law is perhaps the clearest example of a

performative situation in which, as Austin put it, “to utter the sentence (in, of course, the

appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering

to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it” (Austin, 6).

A closer look at Hobbes’ picture raises an important question, however: if laws are

chains, must they not bind the sovereign just as strongly as his subjects, so that subjects’

actions, transmitted back through the chains of law, guide and constrain the sovereign; that

is, what about all those chains pulling the sovereign around by the lips? Hobbes would of

course respond that this question misunderstands sovereignty itself, but it does so by using

Hobbes’ own imagery to draw attention to a problematic view of language that he shares

with Austin’s How to do Things with Words. Austin’s discussion of the performative presents

language as a matter of an individual speaker’s manipulation of an abstract system of

conventions, separating the concerns of interpersonal communication—and so of how we

use language among others—from the essence of language. This picture is not wrong so

much as it is incomplete: language is a system of conventions, and the settled, conventional

nature of meanings and usage is essential to nearly all communication; but these conventions

themselves consist in, and so depend on, tacit agreements shared among the users of a

language, and one’s ability to use them—to do things with words—is thus inseparable from

her ability to engage communicatively with others, to reach understanding with them.

Wittgenstein draws attention to the communicative foundations of conventions and

language with his claims that meaning is in use and that “it is not possible to obey a rule

‘privately’” (PI, §202). He offers a view of language markedly different from the one I’ve

linked to both Hobbes and Austin, one in which rules have a complex relationship to
 3

practices of communicative engagement with others. Articulating that relationship involves

reconsidering the forms of social power embedded in language, and it suggests a compelling

way to think about political rule in democratic contexts—or so I will argue in what follows.

I begin with a critical reading of Austin that brings the tension between conventions and

communication into focus; I then turn to the Philosophical Investigations to show how

Wittgenstein moves past that tension, and close by briefly reconsidering Hobbes’ vision of

rule in light of Wittgenstein’s critique.

I.

Austin’s explicit project in How to do Things with Words is to isolate and examine a

certain sense of ‘saying something as doing something’. 6 Through the first six lectures, he

elaborates the distinction between ‘constative’ speech—the making of statements which are

characteristically true or false—and ‘performative’ speech, the making of utterances that are

“the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as ‘just’, saying

something” (Austin, 5), and that Austin characterizes as ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ rather than true

or false. This analysis eventually leads him, in lectures VII-X, to suggest a distinction

between two senses in which making any utterance constitutes doing something: Every

utterance involves 1) a locutionary act, an act of saying something—making noises (or marks)

constituting certain words, within a language and with an intended sense and reference; 2)

an illocutionary act, an act performed in saying something—an intervention in the world made

through an utterance, by intending the utterance, as Austin puts it, with a certain ‘force,’ (as a

question, a description, a commitment, a criticism). He further claims that speech often,

6
Lecture XI largely undermines this project, arguing that the distinctions between constative and
performative or between locution and illocution obscure language and so hurt more than they help. I
consider below the relationship between this argument and my critique of Austin.
 4

though not always, involves 3) a perlocutionary act, an act performed by saying something—

producing effects in oneself or others through language (providing reassurance, casting into

doubt, insulting…).

All of this allows Austin to argue forcefully that any theory of meaning must take

account of the entire speech act, including the speaker’s intentions and the context of

speech; he thus offers a powerful critique of one kind of philosophical blindness about

language, one which takes constative speech and the practice of making truth-functional

statements as definitive for meaningful speech, and consigns other utterances to one or

another kind of nonsense. But Austin’s insistence on looking at language in context also

provides the ground for an internal critique, insofar as performative speech is possible only

in a context among others who understand. Because it is action taken specifically through

language, performative speech depends for its significance as action on an audience able to

grasp its meaning as such. Yet Austin distinguishes the performative in a way that largely

ignores this fundamental issue, insulating performative speech from the concerns of

intersubjective communication by defining it in terms of conventions.

Austin’s use of the idea of conventions to specify the boundaries of the performative

initially seems straightforward. Developing the idea that a performative utterance constitutes

action only when made under ‘appropriate circumstances,’ Austin links the success or

‘happiness’ of performatives to conventions: “There must exist an accepted conventional

procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of

certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances” (Austin 14). Again, if “simply to

say a few words” is to count as a distinct action like betting or promising or marrying, it

must be recognizably connected to some change in the world. Conventions provide this

connection, giving criteria for judging whether the action has come off successfully or not,
 5

whether the utterance counts as an action.7 Austin catalogs the ways that performative

utterances can go wrong in terms of different violations of convention (saying the wrong

thing, saying it at the wrong time or without the necessary accompanying actions, being the

wrong person to say it, & c.) in his ‘doctrine of infelicities’ (Austin, 14-18), and aligns

performative speech with action more broadly by noting that “infelicity is an ill to which all

acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts”

(Austin, 19). The concept of a convention plays two crucial roles for Austin here: first, it

identifies the type of world-relation characteristic of performative speech—a constitutive

relation sharply distinct from that of constative speech, and common to certain other kinds

of action.8 Second and relatedly, it provides a kind of criterion according to which

performatives are subject to robust evaluation, analogous to the evaluation of statements as

true or false.

With Austin’s shift from the performative/constative distinction and the locutionary,

illocutionary, and perlocutionary aspects of language, however, the role of conventions

becomes more complex. They remain definitive for illocution, the aspect Austin identifies as

relevant to the performative character of speech: “We must notice that the illocutionary act

is a conventional act: an act done as conforming to a convention” (Austin, 105). But this

now involves differentiating illocution from perlocution. Austin first identifies illocution

with the ‘force’ of an utterance, while presenting perlocution as a matter of its “effects upon

the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker or of other persons”

7
In some cases—Austin gives the examples “‘I do (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife)’—as
uttered in the course of the marriage ceremony. ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’—as uttered when
smashing the bottle against the stem” (Austin, 5)—the conventional procedure involved in making a
performative ‘happy’ are quite elaborate and specific, but this need not be so. See Austin, 32ff. and, more
generally, Lectures V & VI.
8
See Austin, 47: “…it is the fact that he is running which makes the statement that he is running true; or
again…the truth of the constative utterance ‘he is running’ depends on his being running. Whereas in our
case it is the happiness of the performative ‘I apologize’ which makes it the fact that I am apologizing: and
my success in apologizing depends on the happiness of the performative utterance ‘I apologize’.”
 6

(Austin, 101). But illocution too depends on certain kinds of effects, so Austin elaborates by

linking illocution’s effects to its conventional character:

the ‘consequential effects’ here mentioned [in relation to perlocution] do not include a particular kind of
consequential effects, those achieved, e.g., by way of committing the speaker as in promising, which come
into the illocutionary act. Perhaps restrictions need making, as there is clearly a difference between what we feel to
be the real production of real effects and what we regard as mere conventional consequences (Austin, 102-3, emphasis
added).

What Austin means by the ‘conventionality’ of illocution and its consequences here is that

they “could be made explicit by the performative formula, but [perlocutionary acts] could

not” (Austin, 103); illocutionary acts can be performed by sentences with the subject ‘I’ and

a verb in the first-person present indicative active. The conventions in question here, then,

are not matters of the utterance’s situation but rules of grammar and usage, the conventions

of language itself. And crucially, Austin’s recourse to such convention here suggests that

illocution is only or ‘merely’ a matter of manipulating language itself, while perlocution

depends on the ability of language to reach and influence others—in short, on

communication.

Austin seems to acknowledge this through his discussion of ‘uptake’; he notes that

illocutionary actions must necessarily have the effect of achieving understanding on the part

of the relevant audience:9

I cannot be said to have warned an audience unless it hears what I say and takes what I say in a certain
sense. An effect must be achieved on the audience if the illocutionary act is to be carried out. How shall
we put it here? And how can we limit it? Generally the effect amounts to bringing about the
understanding of the meaning and of the force of the locution. So the performance of an illocutionary act
involves the securing of uptake (Austin, 116-17).

If illocution depends on securing uptake, and this is a matter of getting the force of one’s

utterance across to others, of making oneself understood, then the sharp schism in language

between conventions and communication that I’ve just described appears to present a straw

man rather than Austin himself. But Austin then returns to conventions to show how the

9
Austin identifies ‘taking effect’ and ‘inviting response’ as further effects linked to illocution; he
characterizes each of these in clearly (though, in the case of ‘taking effect’, implicitly) conventional terms.
 7

relationship between utterance and effects in the case of illocution differs from that in

perlocution, and this reintroduces the problem. The key difference between illocutionary

effects and those involved in perlocution is, once again, the conventional character of

illocution.

Illocutionary acts are conventional acts: perlocutionary acts are not conventional. Acts of both kinds …can
be brought off non-verbally; but even then to deserve the name of an illocutionary act, for example, a
warning, it must be a conventional non-verbal act: but perlocutionary acts are not conventional, though
conventional means may be made use of in order to bring off the perlocutionary act. A judge should be able
to decide, by hearing what was said, what locutionary and illocutionary acts were performed, but not what perlocutionary acts
were achieved (Austin, 121-2, emphasis added).

As the last sentence suggests, illocutionary action’s conventionality secures its implications,

making them clear not only to the third-person ‘judge’, but to the speaker as well; provided I

understand grammar and usage, when I engage in illocution I can know what I am doing and

what not, what precisely I commit myself to (where my action stops), and so I can

unproblematically identify which social consequences are ascribable to me, and which not.

And this is because, in illocutionary action, I interact with language only as an abstract

system, a self-contained set of conventions linking my utterance to consequences, which I

can engage and manipulate objectively. Likewise, others interact not with me but with

language, reading my action off the utterance according to the conventions of the system.

Thus, having noted with great sensitivity the layer of linguistic conventions that

mediates people’s relations with the social world of others and expands the possibilities of

human action, Austin drives a wedge between that system and its human context. He

separates our engagement with language itself in illocution from our engagement with others

through language in perlocution, so that language insulates people from one another. But

uptake undermines this very distinction, naming the necessary communicative connection

with another that constitutes every illocutionary act. A judge, or any listener, can only decide

what locutionary and illocutionary actions I’ve performed if she can understand the meaning
 8

and force of what I said, that is, if I’ve managed, through the medium of language, to

communicate with her; and while conventions are extraordinarily helpful in reaching that

goal, they’re neither strictly necessary nor sufficient. I may move beyond conventional usage

and nonetheless manage a happy illocutionary act, ‘getting away with’10 something through

successful projection;11 or I may execute the an illocutionary act precisely ‘by the book’ and

nonetheless fail, my attempt scuttled by another’s failure to take me seriously, her refusal of

my utterance, her inability to give credit to what I say.

The crux of the matter here is whether linguistic conventions can guarantee

understanding among persons. Austin’s view of illocution relies on the assumption that they

can, though he does not make this assumption explicit and says things that make imputing it

to him problematic.12 The trouble with the assumption is that it falsely separates

conventions from the human practices and agreements that underlie, give rise to, and alter

them, accepting them unproblematically as arbiters of the language that I use in illocution

and so the consequences of my actions. And this means separating the question of what I

‘in fact’ do or attempt in speaking from that of how others understand and respond to what

I say. But making myself understood just is establishing certain relations to others, and what

I do in illocution ultimately depends on what, after my best efforts to make myself clear, they

take me to have done, not on the conventions of language that govern my speech. Put

another way, the problem is that Austin’s reliance on conventions, like, in a certain way, his

general project in How to do Things with Words, emphasizes the action-character of

illocutionary action at the expense of papering over its linguistic character: as a medium of

10
Discussing newly initiated procedures, Austin notes that “Getting away with things is essential, despite
the suspicious terminology.” (Austin, 30).
11
I take the term from Stanley Cavell. See, e.g. ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’, 52;
and The Claim of Reason, 180ff. and passim.
12
See his discussions of ‘getting away with it’ and indeterminate conventional procedures, Austin, 30ff.
 9

communication, language is inherently intersubjective, and the risks of intersubjectivity

inhere in it; speaking at all exposes the speaker to others, and so to ineliminable risks—

offense, appropriation, surprise, as well as misunderstanding; illocutionary action, then, as

action in language, cannot escape these risks. Austin insulates the speaker from these risks by

presenting locutionary meaning and illocutionary force as features of a hypostatized language

free from the risks of intersubjectivity, and consigning language’s risks and uncertainties to

perlocution.

Austin thus reinscribes Hobbes’ picture of law and the sovereign within an analysis

of language: As the chains of law both connect the sovereign to his subjects and insulate him

from them, allowing him to act without risks of misunderstanding or vulnerability to their

response, illocution both allows speakers to act in the social world and, as a matter only of

language’s conventions independent from its link to others’ understanding, insulates them

from the risks and uncertainties inherent in that action insofar as it consists in

communicating with others. And just as taking the chains in Hobbes’ image seriously as

chains suggests a different relationship between sovereign and subjects, taking seriously the

intersubjective understanding required for ‘uptake’ suggests the incompleteness of Austin’s

picture of language. In each case, what is elided is the fundamentally relational nature of

language—that it exists only as a medium among human users, and works not only toward

but through their understanding of one another; and in each case that elision secures one

agent’s ability to realize its will in the social world by giving that agent a privileged position in

relation to language—through illocution in Austin’s case, and through law in Hobbes’.

Hobbes’ picture of law is, of course, one part of a much larger story about

sovereignty, a conception of political rule that strictly separates ruler from ruled by dividing

agent and patient: The sovereign takes all of the action involved in exercising state power,
 10

while the consequences of that action belong entirely to the subjects, who encounter the

sovereign’s actions as already-completed external constraints.13 Given this, one might think

that, unlike chains, laws can and do form a one-way bond, constraining subjects but not

sovereign, and that Hobbes has simply botched his metaphor. But Hobbes is also portraying

the linguistic character of the sovereign’s power, and this makes the issue of the relationship

between conventions and communication raised (though misconceived) by Austin internal

to the structure of rule. If the fact that language too ‘pulls both ways’ makes chains a more

appropriate figure for language than Hobbes might like, this suggests a rethinking of political

rule as well as of language itself.

II.

If, as I’ve so far been arguing, Austin’s picture of language tends to misrecognize the

communicative relationship between a speaker and her audience as an interaction of the

speaker with objectively known conventions, perhaps Wittgenstein can help us re-imagine

language more clearly. Austin understands conventions as objective facts, and takes the

meaning and illocutionary force of an utterance to be settled by reference to those objective

facts; and this is a form of the “particular picture of the essence of human language” with

which Wittgenstein opens the Philosophical Investigations: “Every word has a meaning. This

meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands” (PI §1).

Austin rightly insists, against much philosophy of language that attends only to statements or

constative utterances (and so perhaps against the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, though that is

another paper entirely), that the facts to which utterances refer are often social facts,

conventions that link some utterance to such-and-such consequences; and that in these cases

13
Hobbes makes the distinction here through his concepts of representation and authorization; see
Leviathan XVI & passim.
 11

the ‘object for which the word stands’ will be a state of affairs in the social world rather than

a physical object. Austin maintains, however, the general notion that meaning depends on

reference, the ‘picture of the essence of language’ Wittgenstein raises. And if what Austin’s

use of conventions to define meaning and illocutionary force misses is that illocutionary

action depends on communicative success—that conventions can play a meaning-settling

role only to the extent that they help a speaker bring others to understand her act, and such

success is not a matter of convention, not settleable independent of the relationship between

speaker and auditor—then Wittgenstein, with his insistence that ‘meaning is in use,’ seems

precisely concerned with the intersubjective nature of conventions themselves.

Whether the word ‘number’ is necessary in an ostensive definition depends on whether without it the
other person takes the definition otherwise than I wish. And that will depend on the circumstances under
which it is given, and on the person I give it to.
And how he ‘takes’ the definition is seen in the use that he makes of the word defined. (PI §29)

The locus classicus for Wittgenstein’s critique of reference is the discussion of rules,

running roughly from §82 to §242.14 In these sections, Wittgenstein constantly objects to the

interlocutor’s insistence that some feature of one’s mind—an idea, an intention, a ‘picture’—

can function as a rule, determining the meaning of one’s words. Of the word ‘cube,’ he

notes that “The picture of the cube did indeed suggest a certain use to us, but it was possible

for me to use it differently” (PI §139); he refuses the idea that understanding consists in a

“superlative fact” beyond a word’s use (PI §192), and denies that a mental state must

underlie it:

...Imagine the case where nothing at all occurred in B’s mind except that he suddenly said ‘Now I know
how to go on.’…It would be quite misleading, in this…case, for instance, to call the words a ‘description
of a mental state’.—One might rather call them a ‘signal’; and we judge whether it was rightly employed by
what he goes on to do. (PI §180)

In his influential reading, Saul Kripke characterizes this as Wittgenstein’s ‘skeptical paradox”:

14
Kripke suggests a break between §§1-137 and §§139-242. We agree, however, that any separation of
Wittgenstein’s discussions must be rather arbitrary and porous; see Kripke, 78. .
 12

…nothing in my mental history of past behavior—not even what an omniscient God would know—could
establish that I meant [some determinate thing by a word]…. But then it appears to follow that there was
no fact about me that constituted my having meant [one thing rather than another]. How could there be, if
nothing in my internal mental history or external behavior will answer the sceptic?...
This, then, is the sceptical paradox. When I respond in one way rather than another to a problem
such as ’68 + 57’, I can have no justification for one response rather than another….Indeed, there is no
fact about me that distinguishes between my meaning a definite function by ‘plus’ (which determines my
response in new cases) and my meaning nothing at all. (Kripke, 21)

and this echoes Wittgenstein’s own generalization of the problem in §201: “This was our

paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can

be made out to accord with the rule.” As Kripke rightly notes, this critique undermines the

very concepts of ‘rule’ and ‘meaning’ as applied to individuals in isolation. If these concepts

are to have any significance, then, they must be explained in social terms; as Wittgenstein

continues, “And hence also, ‘obeying a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule

is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking

one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it” (PI §202).

What does it mean, though, to say that Wittgenstein offers a rearticulation of

meaning and rules on social terms; what role do others play in settling the meaning of a

speaker’s claims? Kripke argues that a community of others provides words with secure

meanings to which one’s utterances can refer; ‘use’ on his account is the use the community

makes of a word, the way it fits into their shared practices—and this is a matter of fact

independent of the individual that serves as a standard against which her speech can be

evaluated:

Any individual who claims to have mastered [a] concept…will be judged by the community to have done
so if his particular responses agree with those of the community in enough cases…an individual who
passes such tests in enough other cases is admitted as a normal speaker of the language and member of the
community. Those who deviate are corrected….One who is an incorrigible deviant in enough respects
simply cannot participate in the life of the community and in communication (Kripke, 91-2).

Wittgenstein does sometimes write as if this is his view. He asks “What has the expression

of a rule—say, a sign-post—got to do with my actions? What sort of connexion is there

here?”, and continues, “Well, perhaps this one: I have been trained to react to this sign in a
 13

particular way, and now I do so react to it…. [A] person goes by a sign-post only in so far as

there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom”15 (PI §198).

But Kripke’s solution only replaces one (realist, individual) kind of reference with another

(conventionalist, community-based) kind,16 while Wittgenstein has been worried about

reference in general, and here he’s opposing training, as a matter of responding to the sign-

post unreflectively and unproblematically, of ‘knowing how,’ to ways of responding to a rule

that require interpretation or ‘knowing that’ the rule is applied in one way rather than

another.17

Wittgenstein too thinks that others provide the criteria for the meaning of one’s

speech, but that they do so precisely by understanding (or misunderstanding, to a greater or

lesser degree) that speech; he takes meaning to be constituted in communication, so that

meaning anything requires bringing others to understand it. Thus, on one hand, the

meaning of what an individual says depends on, indeed is, what she can communicate to a

listener by saying it—and this means both that what she means in speaking is not solely,

safely up to her, and that the concept of meaning loses all sense in relation to her alone,

isolated from others. On the other hand, the speaker’s meaning is not secured by

conventions that function independently of her and dictate the significance of her speech.

Meaning remains suspended in the contingency of the present, dependent on her ability to

reach others through language and communicate with them. This will, of course, often be a

matter of whether, in addressing others, she uses words in ways they themselves would; but

15
See also the passages linking rules with ‘customs,’ (§199) ‘training,’ (§189-90, §198, §206), and
‘agreement’ (§224, §241)
16
This sentence is indebted to Linda Zerilli, who describes Kripke as arguing that “Wittgenstein shifts the
question of meaning from the realist requirement that it meet objective truth conditions…to the antirealist
requirement that it meet the justification conditions given by a particular community”; see Zerilli,
Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, 44.
17
Wittgenstein contrasts following a rule and interpreting a rule at §201; he discusses related issues at §§
219, 228, 230-1, 238.
 14

the crucial question is not whether I use a word or apply a rule in the same way other

members of a community would, but whether those others understand me when I use it.

The agreement between my usage and others’ is contingent on securing understanding:

It is only in normal cases that the use of a word is clearly prescribed; we know, are in no doubt, what to
say in this or that case. The more abnormal the case, the more doubtful it becomes what we are to say.
And if things were quite different from what they actually are—if there were for instance no characteristic
expression of pain, of fear, of joy; if rule became exception and exception rule and exception rule; or if
both became phenomena of roughly equal frequency—this would make our normal language-games lose
their point. (PI §142)

Where Kripke turns to communities to secure meaning, and leaves speakers’ grasp of

these—and, eventually, their membership in the human community—provisional,

Wittgenstein insists on the fact that speakers and meaning exist only within human

interaction, and concludes that the content of human rules must be provisional.18

This is most evident in Wittgenstein’s frequent discussions of teaching as a paradigm

for language. The teacher is an ambiguous figure: on one hand, teachers are authorities

specifically charged with imparting knowledge that they possess to pupils who do not yet

possess it, often as representatives of a community of which the pupil is not yet a full

member; on the other hand, teaching is profoundly interpersonal. To teach is to

communicate knowledge to pupils, and as such is deeply dependent on others. Introducing

the example of one person teaching another mathematical series’, Wittgenstein initially seems

to present the ‘teacher’ as the voice of an authoritative community; he imagines that the

‘pupil’ “makes ‘mistakes’ in the order…. Or he makes a systematic mistake; for example, he

copies every other number, or he copies the series 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,…. like this: 1, 0, 3, 2, 5,

4,….. Here we shall almost be tempted to say that he has understood wrong” (PI §143). And

later says “suppose that after some efforts on the teacher’s part he continues the series

correctly, that is, as we do it” (PI §145, emphasis added). Even here, however, Wittgenstein

18
Thanks to Patchen Markell for help in putting the problem this way.
 15

often aims at a quite different point. He notes that after initial instructions “…the possibility

of getting him to understand (Möglichkeit der Verständigung) will depend on his going

on…independently”;19 and suggests that, if the pupil never shows any understanding of the

numbers’ order, “then communication (Verständigung) stops at that point” (PI §143). The

use of ‘communication’ in each of these formulations suggests a view of the teacher and

student not as authority and subordinate but as equals, engaged together in an attempt to

come to a shared understanding. And this picture of the communicative situation in turn

suggests that what the teacher means, the meaning of the rule, is just as much up in the air as

is the pupil’s capacity to understand that rule.

The contingent, intersubjective character of Meaning comes out most explicitly in

§186.20 Responding to Wittgenstein’s insistence in §185 that a ‘pupil’ who learns the rule

“add two” from a teacher may understand that rule differently than the teacher in the face of

any explanation, the interlocutor takes him to be dramatizing the epistemic inequality

between the teacher who knows the rule’s meaning and the student, who must somehow

gain access to that meaning: “What you are saying, then, comes to this: a new insight—

intuition—is needed at every step to carry out the order ‘+n’ correctly.” But Wittgenstein

rejects this, and problematizes the rule itself instead: “—To carry it out correctly! How is it

decided what is the right step to take an ay particular stage?” At stake here are two views

about where in the process of communication meaning lies: The interlocutor takes meaning

as complete prior to interaction and within the ‘teacher,’ and communication is the one-way

process of transferring that already-complete meaning to the ‘pupil’; Wittgenstein’s riposte,

19
The translation of ‘Möglichkeit der Verständigung’ as ‘possibility of getting him to understand’ is
uncharacteristically inexact for Anscombe. Either ‘possibility of understanding’ or ‘possibility of
communication’ seems a more precise rendering, and the latter provides consistency with the translation of
‘dann hört da die Verständigung auf’ that follows—as well as providing support for my claim about
Wittgenstein’s emphasis, of course.
20
For indicating the importance of section §186, again thanks to Patchen Markell.
 16

however, takes meaning to exist only within the communicative exchange itself, and to

consist in the understanding teacher and student can come to share through that

communication. And Wittgenstein forces the content of the rule, the teacher’s meaning in

teaching, more into question as the section proceeds:

‘The right step is the one that accords with the order—as it was meant.…what I meant was, that he should
write the next but one number after every number that he wrote; and from this all those propositions follow
in turn.’—But that is just what is in question: what, at any stage, does follow from that sentence. Or,
again, what, at any stage we are to call ‘being in accord’ with that sentence (and with the mean-ing you then
put into the sentence—whatever that may have consisted in).

Having focused the ‘problem’ in the interaction between teacher/interlocutor and pupil on

the teacher’s own meaning by insisting that the only way to evaluate this is by reference to

what the pupil does with the rule, Wittgenstein concludes with an aphoristic, extremely

compressed form of the entire idea that meaning is constituted in communication, and is

contingent on relations with others. “It would almost be more correct to say, not that an

intuition was needed at every stage, but that a new decision was needed at every stage.”

Teacher and pupil must decide the meaning of the rule together, and it’s meaning remains

open to interpretation, contestation, and further specification for the same reason that it

exists only as shared with another: because it is constituted in their (contingent, limited)

ability to communicate with one another.

If Wittgenstein’s insistence on the contingency of meaning stems from his

confrontation with the pervasive fact that we are opaque to one another, this also explains

his emphasis on practice. All a speaker has to go on, in assessing whether another person

shares a concept, a word, or a rule with her, is that person’s response to her own words and

actions, his behavior—‘we judge whether the word was rightly used by what he goes on to

do’. But this is, on Wittgenstein’s view, the only level on which there can be meaning at all;

just as it is not possible to follow a rule privately, one cannot ‘mean alone’ or hold out ‘one’s
 17

own meaning.’ Thus he refuses speakers any privileged relation to the meaning of their

words separate from their ability to work it out among others: 21

‘But do you really explain to the other person what you yourself understand?...—Any explanation which I
can give myself I give to him too.—‘He guesses what I intend’ would mean: various interpretations of my
explanation come to his mind, and he lights on one of them. So in this case he could ask; and I could and
should answer him. (PI §210, compare §208)

Crucially, if Wittgenstein avoids understanding meaning in terms of reference, and

instead situates it within communication, among others, then he opens the space to

understand both language and political rule beyond the aporiae present in Hobbes and

Austin, respectively. Because Kripke takes reference to be essential in any theory of

meaning, he interprets Wittgenstein as concerned about the kind of facts to which language

refers, shifting from internal, mental facts to conventional social facts. But this simply

reinstates the dynamics that appeared so problematic in Austin: meaning remains a matter of

reference to conventions; conventions are thus still definitive for communication, settling

what and how much a speaker can communicate with another person prior to and

independent of her encounter with that other; and the speech of the community is secured

as meaningful, but also insulated from others and from the world, by the assignment of

interaction’s vulnerability and risk to the (only provisionally included) individual alone. On

the view of Wittgenstein I’ve tried to put forward, by contrast, meaning appears as a matter

of shared understanding reflected in practice; conventions arise from communication, while

the communicative possibilities of a human encounter depend on the participants’ ability to

bring features of themselves and of the world to shared attention—to engender response in

others, and cultivate responsiveness in themselves; and meaning, because it is always both

21
See also PI §232 & 237, defining ‘rule’ in relation to what one can teach another; here Wittgenstein
adopts first the position of the ‘teacher’ and then that of the ‘student,’ attempting to read another’s ‘rule’ off
of his actions.
 18

open-ended and constituted as shared, necessarily engages speakers and listeners in

relationships of responsiveness and mutual dependence.

Wittgenstein’s articulation of meaning in terms of communicative interdependence

has a chain of interesting consequences. First, of course, it undermines the picture of a

secure, unencumbered agent Austin presents by suggesting that illocutionary action is neatly

circumscribed by conventions. If Wittgenstein is right that our utterances have meaning at

all—including Austin’s ‘meaning’ and ‘illocutionary force’ both—only contingent on others’

responding to them, then neither the uptake of an illocution in particular nor its happiness in

general can be separated from the ‘effects on others’ Austin sought to isolate in perlocution.

To speak, then, is necessarily to expose oneself to the vulnerabilities—to misunderstanding

and failure, but also to surprise and unexpected success—that come with using a language

that is truly shared with others. Second, if speaking implies interdependence in this way and

political rule occurs in language—as Hobbes insists, and the whole tradition of modern

public law attests—then Wittgenstein pushes us toward a reconsideration of the structure of

rule. If rules are constituted in communication with others, then there cannot be a clean

division between an unconstrained, acting ruler and subjects who passively absorb the

consequences of her actions. Rather, ruling must consist in a relation of responsiveness

between speaker and audience, each contributing actively to the project of bringing practices

into agreement. ‘Ruling’ in the sense of occupying a position of political authority or

exercising control over political power, consists in inviting response and initiating

relationships of interdependence, exposing oneself to the agency of others rather than

wielding a transcendent power while remaining insulated from its objects. This is because,

on Wittgenstein’s view—and here a third consequence—the concept of a rule has two

unique features: a rule is always a relationship, a pattern of response shared, but contingently
 19

so, by the parties to the rule; and rules are always provisional, more or less indeterminate and

subject to challenge.

There is, of course, no need to turn to Wittgenstein for the claim that rules and the

law are never fully determinate; even the elaborate bureaucratic architecture of the modern

state can only produce a finite number of rules, and applying these to the political space they

are meant to govern inevitably involves ambiguity. Hobbes himself is profoundly aware of

the political importance of language and interpretation, and embeds a response to problems

of interpretation in his concept of sovereignty: the sovereign is, by definition, the final

arbiter of all disputes, and this includes questions of interpretation—in the Hobbesian state,

the law and, finally, language say what the sovereign wants them to say.22 But this only

solves the problem of rules’ indeterminacy by providing a further, meta-level rule for

interpreting rules. As long as meaning can finally be grounded in some secure, objective

source—as is still possible for Austin, by way of conventions—the response works; but

Wittgenstein’s challenge is rather to the idea that rules have such an objective ground at all,

and his suggestion would be that even the concept of sovereignty—as a rule about how to

allocate authority within a community—will come to have content only in terms of

agreements shared, because achieved communicatively, and so contingently. And the

sovereign’s ability to resort to force here doesn’t, for once, seem to help, just because the

disagreement or ambiguity in these cases concerns the limits of the rule’s meaning, that is,

the point at which it fails to function as a rule because it is not clear how to follow it,

regardless of the force a sovereign might marshal to compel others to follow it.

If I have succeeded in suggesting that deep-seated tendencies to imagine political rule

on hierarchical terms rest in part on even deeper misconceptions about how we function in

22
Hobbes, Leviathan, XVIII.9 asserts the sovereign’s power over opinions and doctrines; XXVI.20-22
describes the sovereign power to interpret law.
 20

language, what then? I’d like to close by suggesting that this need not simply be an

interesting note on language swept aside by power, the real stuff of political rule. Noting the

interdependence that language builds into political rule will not by itself bring oppressively-

enforced hierarchy to an end. It may, however, bring us to recognize the ways in which even

deeply hierarchic systems of power are parasitic on the kinds of human responsiveness in

which rules and social orders are grounded, and to see democracy as an attempt not to re-

assign the roles of ruler and subject within the hierarchy of the state, but rather to reimagine

rule itself as our practice, and our responsibility.

 21

Works Cited

Austin, J. L. How to do things with Words 2nd Edition. Edited by J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1962.
Cavell, Stanley. ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’ in Must we Mean What we Say? Pp. 44-72.
New York: Charles Scribners & Sons, 1969.
_____. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668. Edited by Edwin Curley.
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.
Kripke, Saul A. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Pitkin, Hanna. “Hobbes’ Concept of Representation—I.” American Political Science Review. 58, no. 2 (June,
1964): 328-340.
_____. “Hobbes’ Concept of Representation—II.” American Political Science Review. 58, no. 4 (December,
1964): 902-918.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations 3rd Edition. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Edited by
G.E.M. Anscombe & Rush Rhees. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Zerilli, Linda M. G. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.