Normativity after Wittgenstein

“You must bear in mind that the language game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there—like our life.” —On Certainty §559

In the now longstanding debate over positivism, Wittgenstein has appeared to many social and political theorists as offering an alternative to the impossible choice between objectivism and subjectivism. Wittgenstein’s understanding of rules and rule-following, it is said, offers a third way of thinking about normativity that takes into account the (subjectivist) notion of the unique or meaningful nature of human thought and action, without relinquishing the (objectivist) idea that normativity necessarily transcends individuals, their actual practices of speaking and acting. Accordingly, Wittgenstein is seen as replacing the positivist’s law-governed (nomothetic) view of human speech and action with a rule-governed account that does not reduce meaning to individual subjective states. In this course we critically interrogate this view of normativity in Wittgenstein’s thought. We take up the “therapeutic reading” of his work pioneered by Stanley Cavell, according to which Wittgenstein does not put forward an alternative theory of linguistic meaning but seeks to expose misunderstandings about what kinds of structures must underwrite everything that humans can meaningfully do or say.

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