Zhouwanyue Nata Yang

This essay examines the notion of rule-followingness in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in light of a particularist model of epistemological inquiry. I begin by contrasting two modes of conducting an epistemological inquiry: methodism, which prioritizes answering the How-Question (how to achieve understanding through a linguistic practice) over the What-Question (what counts as an understanding-achieving linguistic practice), and particularism, which answers these two questions in the reversed order. In the first part, I argue for the inadequacy of interpreting Wittgenstein’s concept of rule-followingness using a methodist model and for the possibility of establishing an adequate account using a particularist model within his anthropologically inflated later philosophy. In doing so, I articulate a relational structure between these two questions within the particularist model, namely that changes in answers to the How-Question should not affect the answers to the What-Question. In the second part, drawing on cases from Philosophical Investigations, I specify this relational structure as a heterogeneous evaluative structure defined by the functional dependence of the epistemic evaluation of concrete linguistic activities (whether the interlocutors performing these activities achieve mutual understanding through language) on their praxical evaluation (whether this performance manifests these interlocutors’ agreement in language use). Due to its embodiment of this structure, the performance of understanding-achieving linguistic activities must be praxically successful. Since this success can be characterized in normative terms as these activities’ rule-followingness, I show that an adequate theory of Wittgenstein’s notion of the rule-followingness presupposes his later philosophical investigations as being conducted in the particularist mode.