# Wittgenstein's rule following paradox and Reformed view of Human's freedom to choose.



## polanus (Jun 22, 2011)

Hello. It's my first posting on 'the puritan board.' I'm a korean and not so easy with writing in english. 

I've read Kripke's famous treatise on Wittgenstein's rule following paradox recently. (Wittgenstein on Rules and Private language) in there, I'm so stunned by Kripke's thesis. -'We follow rules blindly, without justification.'- I think that by following that lines of thinking, we can also justly criticise of modern concept of autonomous human freedom.

Do you think that I am right about the implication of Wittgenstein?


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## C. M. Sheffield (Jun 23, 2011)

I honestly don't pay much attention to what modern and post-modern philosophers think.


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## jwright82 (Jun 25, 2011)

polanus said:


> Hello. It's my first posting on 'the puritan board.' I'm a korean and not so easy with writing in english.
> 
> I've read Kripke's famous treatise on Wittgenstein's rule following paradox recently. (Wittgenstein on Rules and Private language) in there, I'm so stunned by Kripke's thesis. -'We follow rules blindly, without justification.'- I think that by following that lines of thinking, we can also justly criticise of modern concept of autonomous human freedom.
> 
> Do you think that I am right about the implication of Wittgenstein?



Welcome to the PB! I hope you stick around and enjoy it here! For the later Wittgenstein what he meant was that the meaning of a word is in how it used socially speaking. Slang is a good example of this, words get used to mean different things than they did before, like in America the word "cool" is meant to mean more than the tempature of something. What I think Kripke is getting at, although I have never read this work myself, is that we all use the social meaning of a word for the most part without thinking about why we use that word in that way. You may be right that the social connectivness is a problem for autonomous human freedom, I would recomend French Structialist and Post-Structialist thought, which was a precouser to Postmodernism. They made similer criticisms of "freedom" along these lines.


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## Philip (Jun 25, 2011)

> I'm so stunned by Kripke's thesis. -'We follow rules blindly, without justification.'- I think that by following that lines of thinking, we can also justly criticise of modern concept of autonomous human freedom.



What this means is that in language, a word's definition is a rule for its use, which we follow (blindly) because it's just the way the language works. If, for example, I was to say "two fives weirded and scienced tomorrow" you would say "what?" because the proposition I uttered is meaningless---the words are used apart from the rules which govern their use and therefore are meaningless.

In terms of "freedom" all that this means is that we are limited by human constructs, which are constantly evolving. To say anything more, we have to establish the Divine origin of language, or at least the Divine use of language.


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## athanatos (Jun 26, 2011)

So, really when we are presented with words we are given both semantics and syntax, showing what the word means and how it must be used. Words are not given meaning without syntax, and grammar means nothing without form or syntax?


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## Philip (Jun 26, 2011)

> Words are not given meaning without syntax, and grammar means nothing without form or syntax?



Exactly, grammar has no purpose apart from a vocabulary, and words have no meaning outside the context of a language.


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## jwright82 (Jun 28, 2011)

If you have children or observe them than you already understand what Wittgenstein is getting at here. We parents have to socially reinforce the proper use of a word in a given contexts all the time, "say please, or thank you". We don't realize that this is what we are doing but it is. If you think about language plays a very important role in scripture from the begining, Adam names things or God communicates to him. It seems that language plays a vitely important role in human affairs, I believe that we will talk to one another in heaven.


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