Wittgenstein on Rules - Justification, Grammar, and Agreement

James R. Shaw argues that the centerpiece of Wittgenstein''s Philosophical Investigations is made up of two completely different projects, with different guiding questions and methodologies. He claims that central, recurrent interpretive difficulties trace to conflating these two projects. Once we separate them out, we get our first clear understanding of the point of Wittgenstein''s work. He then shows the power of Wittgenstein''s resulting views by applying the resources of the reading to a well-known skeptical problem (that purports to demonstrate there are no facts about what we mean by any of our words), showing that it provides a new and illuminating way of rebutting that skepticism with extremely weak resources.