Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language by Saul Kripke (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 481 " There in the Godhead itself, a concealed unity of Being and thought holds sway, which eye has not seen and ear heard" (p. 280). This togetherness of being and thinking has nothing in common with the Parmenidean one Heidegger tried to explicate phenomenologically. Caputo points beyond Heidegger to "a thinking which has been released from th conditions of finitude " and for which " there is only presence and only manifestedness " (p. 280). But to the ear of those as yet unbeatified such language can only be understood as that of the metaphysics of presence, which occludes the true phenomenality of being as a wresting from concealment. It is unclear how these religious representations can help us in the thinking of being, which is a rather sober, this-worldly task, since by "being" Heidegger never means anything transcending world. For its account of Heidegger and scholasticism and for its critique of previous studies on the topic this book is of great value. The positive suggestions of its last chapter remain, however, unconvincing, and leave unmet the daunting challenge of a deconstructive Heideggerian reading of Aquinas. Every student of philosophy or theology concerned with the task of "overcoming metaphysics " will nonetheless be gratefnl to Caputo for his original and thought-provoking contribution to the debate. JOSEPH STEPHEN O'LEARY Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. By SAUL KRIPKE. Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Pp. x +150. $12.50. Saul Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is an account of the argument in ## 137-243 of Philosophical Investigations. This central section of the book, as Kripke reads it, constructs a " sceptical paradox" concerning rule-following, and then presents a "sceptical solution " restoring the intelligibility of rule-following through appeal to actions performed in the context of public practices. The paradox is stated in PI 201: "No course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule." This problem amounts to a paradox that destroys the notion of acting in accord with a rule, since "there would be neither accord nor conflict " in such a situation. The solution is also stated in PI 201 : " There is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ' obeying the rule ' and ' going against it' in actual cases." Both paradox and solution involve rejection of the idea that our assurance that we are following a rule stems from private, " internal" awareness of the rule's guidance through our intell~ctual apprehension of its 482 BOOK REVIEWS import in the particular ease. But this idea seems especially difllcult to reject in two sorts of eases: our recognition of our own sensations, and our application of mathematical rules. In these eases the persistent intuition that private mental activities actually constitute rule-following seems very attractive. The chief apparent counter-examples, then, to Wittgenstein's approach to rule-following lie in two fields: philosophy of mind and philosophy of mathematics. Thus his otherwise disparate interests in these two areas are united by their supplying the cases in which as Kripke puts it, "Wittgenstein's basic approach is most likely to seem incredible" (p. 4). So the so-called "private language argument" following PI 243 is " a special ease of much more general considerations previously argued" in the book (p. 2). This way of fitting the " private language argument " into the thematic structure of the Investigations will be familiar to readers of Robert Fogelin 's Wittgenstein and of the collection of essays called Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, edited by Holtzmann and Leich. Kripke, however, noting in his preface the recent prevalence of this view, mentions his own dil'lcussions of it stretching over the past twenty years. Wherever its origins may be in published and unpublished discussions of Wittgenstein's work, Kripke's approach is more than a current fashion in the long and complicated process of interpreting Wittgenstein. It rests on an insight that allows Wittgenstein's later work to be organized, in large part, around a central theme whose defense and application unites much that seems otherwise only loosely related...