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II. HOW CAN WE FOLLOW RULES? The Intuitive Notion Let us assume, though, for the purposes of argument, that we have a satisfactory solution to this problem. Let us now turn to asking how it is possible for someone to follow a rule. For the purpose of posing this question it won’t much matter whether we construe rules in imperatival or propositional terms. Before proceeding we should clarify what we mean to be asking about. What intuitive phenomenon is at issue when we talk about someone following a rule? In answering this question, we should distinguish between a personal-level notion of rulefollowing and a sub-personal notion. We should not assume, at the outset, that our talk of a person’s following a rule comes to exactly the same thing as our talk of, say, his brain’s following a rule, or of his calculator’s computing a function. We should also recognize that, prima facie, anyway, it is the personal-level notion that is involved in the generalist, rule-following picture of rational belief with which we are concerned. I reason about what to believe, not a part of my brain. I propose, therefore, to start with attempting to understand the personal-level notion, returning to the sub-personal notion later. My view will be that there is a core concept that is common to both notions, but that the personal-level notion is richer in a particular respect that I shall describe below. Once we have a handle on the personal-level notion it will be easy to indicate the weakening that gets us the sub-personal notion. A propos of the personal-level notion, we certainly know this much: to say that S is following rule R is not the same as saying that S’s behavior happens to conform to R. Conforming to R is neither necessary nor sufficient for following R. It is not necessary because S may be following R even while he fails to conform to it. This can happen in one of two ways. Say that R is the instruction If C, do A!' S may fail to recognize that he is in circumstance C, and so fail to do A; yet it may still be true that S is following R. Or, he may correctly recognize that he is in conditions C, but, as a result of a performance error, fail to do A, even though he tries. Conformity to R is not sufficient for S's following R because for any behavior that S displays, there will be a rule-indeed, infinitely many rules-to which his behavior will conform. Yet it would be absurd to say that S is following all the rules to which his behavior conforms. There is another possible gloss on our notion that we need to warn against. There is a persistent tendency in the literature to suggest that the claim that S is following rule R means something roughly like: R may correctly be used to evaluate S's behavior. Crispin Wright, for example, often introduces the topic of rule following with something like the following remark: The principal philosophical issues to do with rule-following impinge on every normatively constrained area of human thought and activity: on every institution where there is right and wrong opinion, correct and incorrect practice.12 The suggestion seems to be that rule-following and normative constraint come to much the same thing. Or, if not quite that, that rule following on S's part is necessary for S's behavior to be subject to normative assessment. But this seems wrong. Intuitively, and without the help of controversial assumptions, it looks as though there are many thoughts that S can have, and many activities that he can engage in, that are subject to assessment in terms of rule R even if there is no intuitive sense in which they involve S's following rule R. Consider Nora playing roulette. She has a "hunch" that the next number will be36′ and she goes with it: she bets all her money on it. We need not suppose that, in going with her hunch, she was following any rule-perhaps this was just a one-time event. Still, it looks as though we can normatively criticize her belief as irrational since it was based on no good evidence. Or consider Peter who has just tossed the UNICEF envelope in the trash without opening it. Once more, we need not suppose that Peter has a standing policy of tossing out charity envelopes without opening them and considering their merits. However, even if no rule was involved it can still be true that Peter’s behavior was subject to normative assessment, that there are norms covering his behavior. In both of these cases, then, norms or rules apply to some thought or behavior even though there is no intuitive sense in which the agent in question was attempting to observe those norms or follow those rules himself. Of course, some philosophers-like Kripke’s Wittgenstein-think that wherever there is intentional content there must be rule-following, since meaning itself is a matter of following rules. But that is not a suitably pre-theoretic fact about rule-following; and what we are after at the moment is just some intuitive characterization of the phenomenon. We will come back to the question whether meaning is a matter of following rules. When we say that S is following a rule R in doing A, we mean neither that S conforms to R nor simply that R may be used to assess S’s behavior, ruling it correct if he conforms and incorrect if he doesn’t. What, then, do we mean? Let us take a clear case. Suppose I receive an email and that I answer it immediately. When would we say that this behavior was a case of following the: (Email Rule) Answer any email that calls for an answer immediately upon receipt! as opposed to just being something that I happened to do that was in conformity with that rule? Clearly, the answer is that it would be correct to say that I was following the Email Rule in replying to the email, rather than just coincidentally conforming to it, when it is because of some appropriate relation that I bear to the Email Rule that I reply immediately. I shall refer to this relation as S’s acceptance or internalization of the rule, though, clearly, it will be very important to understand this as neutrally as possible for now. 13 Equally clearly, the because here is not any old causal relation: if a malicious scientist (or an enterprising colleague) had programmed my brain to answer any email upon receipt (in some zombie-like way) because he accepted the rule that I should answer any email upon receipt, that would not count as my following the Email Rule. (It might count as my brain following the rule.) Rather, for me to be following the rule, the because' must be that of rational action explanation: I follow the Email Rule when my acceptance of that rule serves as my reason for replying immediately, when that rule rationalizes my behavior. However exactly the notion of acceptance or internalization is understood, what is important is that, in any given case of rule-following, we have something with the following structure: a state that can play the role of rule acceptance; and some non-deviant casual chain leading from that state to a piece of behavior that would allow us to say that the accepted rule explains and rationalizes the behavior. Occasionally, I will also describe the matter in terms of the language of commitment. In rulefollowing there is, on the one hand, a commitment, on the part of the thinker to uphold a certain pattern in his thought or behavior; and, on the other, some behavior that expresses that commitment, that is explained and rationalized by it. It will be up to the reader to discern whether I have loaded these notions in a way that is illicit. For the moment, let me just note that this characterization coincides well with the way Kripke seems to be thinking about the phenomenon of rule-following. As he says a propos of following the rule for addition: I learned-and internalized instructions for-a rule, which determines how addition is to be continued ... This set of directions, I may suppose, I explicitly gave myself at some earlier time ... It is this set of directions ... that justifies and determines my present response. 14 I think it was a mistake on Kripke's part to use the word "justify" in this passage rather than the word "rationalize." In talking about rule-following, it is important to bear in mind that we might be following bad rules. The problem of rule-following arises no less for Affirming the Consequent or Gambler's Fallacy than it does for Modus Ponens. If I am following Gambler's Fallacy, my betting the house on black after a long string of reds at the roulette wheel wouldn't be justified but it would be rationalized by the rule that I am following. Given that I am committed to the fallacious rule, it makes sense that I would bet the house on black. We may summarize our characterization of personal-level rule-following by the following four theses: (Acceptance) If S is following rule R ('If C, do A'), then S has somehow accepted R. (Correctness) If S is following rule R, then S acts correctly relative to his acceptance if it is the case that C and he does A; incorrectly otherwise. (Explanation) If S is following rule R by doing A, then S's acceptance of R explains S's doing A. (Rationalization) If S is following rule R by doing A, then S's acceptance of R rationalizes S's doing A. Against the backdrop of this characterization of the personal-level notion, we can see the subpersonal notion of following a rule as involving the first three elements but not the fourth. If I say of a calculator that it is adding, then I am saying that itsinternalization’ of the rule for addition explains why it gives the answers that it gives. But I am obviously not saying that the addition rule rationalizes the calculator’s answers. The calculator doesn’t act for reasons, much less general ones. Following Epistemic Rules If we apply this analysis to the rule following picture of rational belief with which we began, we arrive at the view that our internalization of general epistemic rules-like Modus Ponens and Induction-explain and rationalize why we form the beliefs that we form. And that seems intuitively correct. As in the case of our linguistic and conceptual abilities, our ability to form rational beliefs is productive: on the basis of finite learning, we are able to form rational beliefs under a potential infinity of novel circumstances. The only plausible explanation for this is that we have, somehow, internalized a rule that tells us, in some general way, what it would be rational to believe under varying epistemic circumstances. Furthermore, we form beliefs for reasons. As Kripke likes to say, when we form the belief that 68 + 57 = 125, that does not feel like a stab in the dark, a result that is spat out by some sub-personal mechanism that we find ourselves giving and which, to our surprise, turns out be reliable. Rather, the processes by which we fix beliefs are personal-level processes, processes of which we are, in some appropriate sense, aware. In that appropriate sense, we know why, on any given occasion, we are inclined to believe what we believe, what our grounds are. Combining these two natural thoughts gives us the personal-level rule-following picture of rational belief. And a very natural picture it is. The picture is perhaps most obviously at work in the case of deductive reasoning; but it applies equally to inductive reasoning, arithmetical reasoning and moral reasoning. Let us take a somewhat closer look at the deductive case. Suppose someone asks me to accept that Mitochondria are mitochondria. Even if I knew very little about what mitochondria are, I would be very confident that I should accept this proposition. What could be the reason for my confidence if not that I have accepted the general principle: Accept any proposition of the form All F’s are F’s. Or consider the inference: If x is a Malament-Hogarth space-time, then it has no Cauchy surface. x is a Malament-Hogarth space-time. Therefore, x doesn’t have a Cauchy surface. Once again, I may know very little about the ingredient concepts. But I can be very confident that, if I were justified in believing the premises, I would be justified in believing the conclusion. Once more, the only plausible explanation is that I have internalized (or accepted) a general Modus Ponens rule. Acceptance and Intention Let us turn now to asking why there is supposed to be a problem about rulefollowing. Why, in particular, does Kripke’s Wittgenstein maintain that it is not possible for us to follow rules? Kripke’s problem is focused on Acceptance. He is struck by the fact that the patterns to which we are said to be able to commit ourselves are infinitary patterns. Thus, we claim to follow the rule of inference Modus Ponens: (Modus Ponens): If you are rationally permitted to believe both that p and that `If p, then q’, then, you are prima facie rationally permitted to believe that q. MP, however, is defined over an infinite number of possible propositions. How is it possible, Kripke asks, for a thinker to commit himself to uphold this potentially infinitary pattern? Kripke despairs of answering this challenge head-on. As we all know, Kripke’s argument proceeds by elimination. There look to be only two serious candidates for constituting the state of rule acceptance: either it consists in some intentional state of a thinker, or it consists in his dispositions, very broadly understood, to use that symbol in certain ways. And he finds fault with both options. Let’s go along for now with the rejection of the dispositional suggestion. Still, what could possibly be wrong with invoking some intentional notion, as Crispin Wright has done? As Wright puts it: … so far from finding any mystery in the matter, we habitually assign just these characteristics [the characteristics constitutive of the acceptance of a rule] to the ordinary notion of intention … intentions may be general, and so may possess, in the intuitively relevant sense, potentially infinite content.15 Let us call this the Intention View of rule acceptance.16 The Intention View is itself just a special version of a more general class of views according to which rule acceptance consists in some intentional state or other, even if it is not identified specifically with an intention. Call this more general view the Intentional View of rule acceptance. I will focus my discussion on the Intention View but most everything I say will apply equally to the less committal Intentional View.