P. M. S. Hacker

The Second Edition of _Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity_ (the second volume of the landmark analytical commentary on Wittgenstein’s _Philosophical Investigations_) now includes extensively revised and supplemented coverage of the Wittgenstein's complex and controversial remarks on following rules. Includes thoroughly rewritten essays and the addition of one new essay on communitarian and individualist conceptions of rule-following Includes a greatly expanded essay on Wittgenstein’s conception of logical, mathematical and metaphysical necessity Features updates to the textual exegesis as the result of taking advantage of the search engine for the Bergen edition of the _Nachlass_ Reflects the results of scholarly debates on rule-following that have raged over the past 20 years.

This is the second volume of analytical commentary on Wittgenstein's masterpiece, the Philosophical Investigations. Like the first, it consists of philosophical essays and critical exegesis. The six essays deal comprehensively with various themes in Wittgenstein''s philosophy: the relationship between his mathematics and his philosophy of mind; his conception of grammar and rules of grammar; the relation between a rule and what accords with a rule; the characterization of rule-following as mastery of a technique manifest in practice; his notion of a form of life, and of agreement in definitions and judgements; a comprehensive investigation into his account of logical and mathematical necessity and other topics.

In ‘Wittgenstein on Language and Rules’, Professor N. Malcolm took us to task for misinterpreting Wittgenstein's arguments on the relationship between the concept of following a rule and the concept of community agreement on what counts as following a given rule. Not that we denied that there are any grammatical connections between these concepts. On the contrary, we emphasized that a rule and an act in accord with it make contact in language. Moreover we argued that agreement in judgments and in definitions is indeed necessary for a shared language. But we denied that the concept of a language is so tightly interwoven with the concept of a community of speakers as to preclude its applicabilty to someone whose use of signs is not shared by others. Malcolm holds that ‘This is an unwitting reduction of Wittgenstein's originality. That human agreement is necessary for “shared” language is not so striking a thought as that it is essential for language simpliciter.’ Though less striking, we believe that it has the merit of being a true thought. We shall once more try to show both that it is correct, and that it is a correct account of Wittgenstein's arguments.