21.9.08

What I really want to speak about is learning. All these thoughts came about through correcting my girlfriend's English. The problem was that I couldn't explain why we say things a certain way, all I could tell her was that what she had said was wrong, and then I could demonstrate the right way, which she then imitated until it became natural for her.

This is important because before learning about Wittgenstein I somehow had thought, and this seems absurd in retrospect, that learning involved the attaining of knowledge. I thought that if I bought a book on bee keeping, or composting or tree pruning, and if I read all that knowledge, that I would then be able to do it. It was as if doing something was a 'yes/no' state to me, like 'you either can do this, or you can't' and the difference between the two states was simply communicatable knowledge.

Then I started reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The point which struck me, in relation to all this, was what he wrote about rule following, which he explained by showing how we learn and use language. I won't explain it here, because this is really about my interpretation, or what I got from it, and not what he actually meant.

Anyway, I started becoming aware of how we follow rules in language (like teaching English to my girlfriend) which lead me to realise that it is important how we followed rules and not why.

This, now, can be applied to rule following in every day life as well. And the point is that we following rules, all the time. Everything we do is following rules. When I garden, or cook, I am following rules, not someone else's (unless it is a new rule), but my own. Perhaps I want to say that my way-of-doing-something is identical to Wittgenstein's 'rules.' For example, I follow a certain rule, a way-of-doing-something, when I cook tomato sauce, first I fry the onions in a specific way, add garlic, then tomatos, then salt and olives and so on. I have a certain way-of-doing which I follow, which is probably different from anyone else's. But this way-of-doing is followed because it works in achieving my aims. It is not wrong to fry the tomatoes and add sugar instead of salt, it merely fails to achieve my aims as much as the other way. In the same way it is not wrong, in an absolutist sense, to use the word 'cat' when we mean dog, but it just fails to achieve our aims, which is to use a commonly agreed upon set of sounds to communicate.

You are probably jumping ahead. I am not trying to get to any subjective/objective theory about correctness, or rightness. I instead want to go back to the books on beekeeping and gardening. The book may say do A before B (i.e. fry onions before tomatoes), and this knowledge is then instantly attained, if you can remember it. However, doing A and B, and doing them correctly only comes about through doing them. This brings us back to my first post.

Theoretical knowledge, something which can be transmitted by language or demonstration, is not the same as doing knowledge. Think of the builder in the first post, the one who hated maths in school, but now can do certain maths, even though he probably doesn't call it that.