Reading Group: Lear's 'Disappearing We'

Jonathan Lear takes a line on the later Wittgenstein (LW) inspired by the Williams' paper we read last week. The paper outlines Wittgenstein's investigation of the way inner episodes of understanding meaning are intrinsically connected to the potentially publicly available outer manifestation of the practical ability to follow a rule. It compares this to Kant's investigation of how intuitive representations are 'saturated' by concepts due to their being instances of the analytic unity of apperception. The quite general point of comparison is that a certain synthetic unity amongst representations is required to make possible inner episodes of understanding/apperception. For LW the synthetic unity in question is constituted by language-games, so that understanding has to be capable of manifesting itself in rule-following which is potentially recognisable as a shared linguistic practice. Lear glosses this in terms of every 'I understand' implying a 'We are so minded'. This is supposed to license the 'we' in the second locution disappearing, so that what makes sense to 'us' shortens to 'what makes sense'. I presume the thought here is that if any case of understanding a word will also be a case of some potentially publicly available linguistic ability manifested in a language-game, then the 'we' who take making sense to consist in such manifestation just is the 'we' of sense-makers simpliciter.

The disappearing 'we' is one leg of Lear's interpretation of LW. The other is that our reflective self-consciousness of the fact that making sense simpliciter is a matter of words being potentially manifested in shared linguistic practices is consciousness of a form of transcendental idealism. The idea here is that the metaphysical articulation of the world is utterly enmeshed with the linguistic articulation of language-games - to individuate an object is always to articulate a view of the world that is part of our linguistically articulated 'form of life'. The thought is that any such individuation will consist in introducing one more possible articulation of the world that the global 'we' finds makes sense as a language-game, and that this means there is no room for articulating how the world is in itself. Or, to put it another way, on this view, the limits of possibilia coincide with the limits of what is linguistically articulable.

There are two obvious questions here. Does the 'we' disappear simply because understanding a word requires potentially publicly available manifestations of rule-following? If so, does this really imply idealism? To the first question, I think the answer is yes. If the global 'we' is defined as those subjects who understand meanings in terms of publicly available rule-following or shared linguistic practices, then any such understanding will be encompassed by some shared linguistic practice. It is then an anayltic truth that understanding will be part of the global 'we'. As for the second question, I'm not sure. I think it will depend on what one understands by 'realism'. If this is understood as our linguistic articulation of the world not falsifying the properties and relations that the world contains , then I don't think anything idealistic follows (some subset of our form of life might be articulated by language-games that precisely 'map' what there is). But if realism is taken as having an epistemic element, so that it requires that what makes our thoughts/sentences true is their correspondence with a world as it is in itself, then I think the position is transcendentally ideal. For it says that no such correspondence is intelligible, for there is now no sense to the idea of the way the world is in itself.