food for thought I love what I am studying. A few weeks ago I wrote a paper on how rule following is implicitely adhered to by scientists who think they are getting rid of all "bias" simply by using statistics in their research, and I have been reviewing it for my exam (coming up this Friday.... eeeeeek)
This is a part from my paper and a centre piece of a critique of Wittgenstein's account of rule following. Essentially, Wittgenstein says that the naturalistic sequence of events only has meaning because they are embedded into our social practice. I think this is a valid point of view, especially with his comment that "particular actions belong to particular practices, which are embedded within the wider practices which go to make up a culture. To understand a particular action or practice fully, we may need to grasp the wider context and see how broad collective ideas of what matters for the proper conduct of life contribute to the sense of how to go on particular occasions. But the story is, in the end, self-contained" (Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations). This makes a lot of sense to me, in so far that we tie everything we perceive into the framework that constitues our world, including its intricate web of rules which are often not explicite, but almost always have some coercive power. Only with this reference to a "background" can we say that anything has meaning.

However, in his book "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language", Saul Kripke identifies a logical problem with following a rule. This is the fact that we learn rules by example, or inductively from past experience. For a rough exposition, consider the fact that every human being who has had contact with mathematics has only ever computed, and seen, a finite number of addition problems. To simplify the argument, it is assumed that the largest number ever employed in these calculations was 57. Now let �+� denote ordinary addition, and let �?� (read �quus�) denote the function
x ? y = x + y, if x<57 and y<57, and otherwise 5
If the addition problem set is 68+57, we would intuitively give �125� as the answer, as �this is just what we do� when confronted with problems of additions according to the rules. However, what about someone who gives the answer �5�?
The problem is that in previous experience, + and ? have given the same answer, and hence there seems to be no reason to accept the answer 5 now in this new addition problem. Yet, Kripke asks �Who is to say that ? is not the function I previously meant by + ?� . How can we find a fact that shows that in previous addition problems we have really meant + and not ?? If we could really establish that we meant +, we could also justify the answer �125� to the addition problem 68+57. It does not help either to point to subsets of rules that establish how to compute addition algorithmically, since these rules were learned through previous finite experience and verbal expressions only.

I love this retort, and hate it at the same time. It is to clever, and so true, and contains so much I would want to agree with.  ¶ 10:30 AM