Knowledge of Rules

Wittgenstein's Slogan and the later Wittgenstein In Chapter 3, we outlined a strategy of opposition to Referential Realism. In pursuit of that strategy we committed ourselves in chapter 4 to a defence of what we there called Wittgenstein's Slogan: “Logic must take care of itself.” We took the Slogan to be equivalent to the proposal that all “logical” questions, taking “logical” in a sense broad enough to include all questions of the meaning and reference of terms, must be capable of being settled antecedently to the assignment of truth or falsity to any contingent proposition. And we began our defence by attempting to show, in Chapters 5–7, that the ability to refer by means of a proper name does not depend on a speaker's knowing any contingent truth concerning the entity to which he refers, but only on his knowing-how to participate in some selection of the array of socially instituted practices, maintained with the general object of keeping track of items by means of their names, which we called the Name-Tracking Network. We have assumed, in short, that what is required to implement Wittgenstein's Slogan, once it is removed from its original context in the phase of Wittgenstein's thought that culminated in the Tractatus , is some way of representing what is known in knowing a language as knowledge-how, not knowledge-that: knowledge of the workings of practices, not knowledge of the truth of propositions.