In her paper ‘On following a rule: Wright, McDowell and Travis’ Marie McGinn sets out a familiar account of the dilemma of the rule following considerations: neither no such thing as correctly following a rule/norm/intention nor platonism. She highlights the problems of communitarianism insofar as it falls to the former. And she claims that McDowell falls to the latter. The very idea of having something in mind at one time that determines what would be subsequent accord is, she claims as mysterious as the Platonism Wittgenstein targets. She then considers Travis.
Not having access to the pdf I’m only going to quote two key paragraphs. But we all know the basic story of Travis' Thought’s Footing in which Travis connects Wittgenstein on rule following to two things: a distinction between a descriptive-thought-like prior understanding and a singular-thought-like novel understanding and his own signature dish: occasion sensitivity. Whatever the prior understanding, there is always room for occasion sensitivity in the understandings to which it can give rise: such things as meat being on the rug or Pia’s shoes being underneath the bed.
I do not believe that Wittgenstein’s discussion of occasion sensitivity has anything, or at least very much, to do with this. But what does McGinn say? Her account of Travis is not obviously critical. Here is the key bit of her summary.
Thus, it seems that what Travis is committed to is, on the one hand, that there is some prior understanding of Sid’s words that rules certain state of affairs in, and others out, as far as his speaking truly is concerned. That, Travis holds, is just what it is for Sid’s utterance to have been an instance of expressing a thought which is answerable to how things are. On the other hand, he accepts that what that meaning is depends for its determination on our parochial capacities and sensibilities, and is manifest in what we go on to do, that is, in our all agreeing that this actual state of affairs is one that is ruled in, or out, by what Sid meant when he spoke as he did. If our later verdict is, as Travis insists it must be, a case of letting the world decide, then it seems to follow that our all getting the same verdict is indeed at least a result of the fact that we earlier agreed in the understanding of what had of what Sid’s words meant, even though this earlier understanding cannot be specified uniquely, insofar as any specification will itself be subject to different understandings or interpretations.
What does this idea of a prior determinate understanding amount to? One suggestion might be that it amounts to a certain kind of naturalism, though not the McDowellian platonic kind. The thought might be that, given our human sensibilities, our ways of being involved with the material world, our acquired interests and aims, and so on, and so on – that is, something both much wider and more primitive that is covered by the description grasp of a rule – it is the case that we just would take Sid’s words, spoken in the circumstances, on an understanding which means that this counts as his having spoken truly. It follows that anyone who thus spoke in these circumstances would have been taken to have said what Sid did and would, therefore, likewise count as having spoken truly. There are, in this sense, things for us to say. And this means that anyone of us, hearing certain words spoken in certain circumstances becomes prepared to count certain eventualities, and not others, as confirming what has been said. [McGinn 2018: 47]
But hang on. This idea that there’s merely some indeterminacy about a prior understanding just seems to fail to get the force of Wittgenstein’s sceptical side (though that is not offered as a final view but as a way to attack a misunderstanding). This isn’t supposed to be a mere Quinean indeterminacy brought about by scientism about linguistic evidence. If the prior understanding has any degree of shape such that that shape has some indeterminate normative consequences, then we’ve left the sceptical threat of the dialectic. Norms but gappy norms are not the issue. But if the shape isn’t the mere gappy normative determinism of the prior understanding but rather some sort of general collective naturalistic disposition that then gets further refined in how we typically ‘understand’ the prior understanding then we’ve got Quine for the first bit and Kripke for the second. That’s just rubbish!
This seems a terrible picture of Wittgenstein. I’m not sure if this is McGinn or Travis but I’m not buying it.
McGinn, M. (2018-07-12). On Rule-Following: Wright, McDowell, and Travis. In The Philosophy of Charles Travis: Language, Thought, and Perception. : Oxford University Press. Retrieved 5 Aug. 2020, from https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198783916.001.0001/oso-9780198783916-chapter-3.
