The Transition from Causes to Norms: Wittgenstein on Training

Abstract

Anti-reductionist philosophers have often argued that mental and linguistic phenomena contain an intrinsically normative element that cannot be captured by the natural sciences which focus on causal rather than rational relations. This line of reasoning raises the questions of how reasons could evolve in a world of causes and how children can be acculturated to participate in rule-governed social practices. In this paper I will sketch a Wittgensteinian answer to these questions. I will first point out that throughout his later philosophy Wittgenstein draws a sharp distinction between "teaching" and "training": newly-born children are (conditioned) to react to specific stimuli in specific ways, which then allows them to acquire concepts and follow rules. I will then show that this picture presupposes a strong analogy between concepts and capacities, which is also present in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. In the last section I will point out that Wittgenstein only discusses the ontogenetic question of how individual children can acquire speech, but not the phylogenetic question of how rule-governed behavior could evolve in the first place. I will argue that this strategy should not be seen as a shortcoming, but rather as an expression of Wittgenstein's approach that can be characterized as naturalistic in a wide sense.

Augustine, Wittgenstein, and “the Call” in Mollenhauer’s Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing

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“…Importantly, children must be trained to learn the proper normative uses of such terms. As Huemer (2006) has recently clarified, what Wittgenstein meant by training is not teaching or the like but something more like conditioning: when Wittgenstein emphasizes that teaching language is training rather than explanation, he insists that the first steps of language acquisition can be fully explained by a setting up of stimulus-response patterns: they take place at the level of pattern-governed behaviour rather than rule-conforming behaviour. We condition children to occupy their first positions in the language game which, from the adult speakers' , but not the children's point of view, contain an intrinsically normative element.…”

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“…Furthermore, the idea that word uselinguistic meaningis normative seems to be flatly false. To be interesting, the idea that word use is normative involves norms that are not reducible to mere causal regularities; that's the "space or reasons/space of causes" dichotomy that has become de rigeur for many scholars (McDowell 1994;Bakhurst 2011;Huemer 2006). But that requires categorical norms, and not merely conditional norms, for the latter are easily handled in a teleological reduction.…”