SELECTED PAPERS FROM

THE XXIII WORLD CONGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY

Philosophical Method
Remarks For a Symposium on Philosophical Method at
the World Congress of Philosophy

JOHN MCDOWELL
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

Abstract: I do not believe that it is in general a good thing for philoso-

phers to concern themselves with philosophical method. But in these
remarks I discuss an exception, which arises in the interpretation of
Wittgenstein. What Wittgenstein does in his Philosophical Investigations
cannot be properly understood except in the context of appreciating his
explicitly methodological remarks, in which he in effect disclaims any
intention to say anything that might be open to dispute. I try to explain
how that can be consistent with helpfulness in dealing with philosophi-
cal puzzlements.

1. I ought to begin by saying that I am an unsuitable person to take part in a sympo-

sium on this topic. For the most part I think that rather than concerning themselves
with method, philosophers ought to engage directly with the questions that worry
them, in whatever way seems best suited for allaying their worries. Some people
may object that philosophical method is itself a topic for philosophical questions,
but I think such questions are usually at best marginal. I would not favour trying
to formulate a canonical specification of philosophical method, or perhaps an
inventory of acceptable methods, as something one could use to sort intellectual
activities into those that count as philosophical and those that do not. Like everyone
(I suppose), I find myself unable to work up much interest in what some people
do under the description “philosophy,” but I would not dream of denying that it is
philosophy, and certainly not on the ground that it does not proceed according to
some approved method or methods.

Special Supplement, Journal of Philosophical Research pp. 25–29

© 2015 Philosophy Documentation Center
doi: 10.5840/jpr201540Supplement6
26 JOHN MCDOWELL

2. What I have just said is that it is generally unprofitable for philosophers to

concern themselves about method. But I am going to devote this talk to a kind of
exception to that.
One activity that is undisputably philosophical is making sense of great philoso-
phy from the past. And there is at least one of the mighty dead whose work we can-
not properly understand without paying attention to his self-consciously practised
method: namely Ludwig Wittgenstein. I think this goes for both his early and his
late work, but it is more clearly true about the late work, and I shall focus on that.

3. In Philosophical Investigations1 Wittgenstein writes (§127):

The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a par-
ticular purpose.
A reminder is something one’s audience already knows, but has forgotten. If
the work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders, it does not include
making claims that might be news to one’s audience, claims that one’s audience
might need to be argued into accepting. Accordingly Wittgenstein goes on (§128):
If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to
debate them, because everyone would agree to them.
It can seem that doing philosophy in the way Wittgenstein describes here would
require turning a blind eye to all that is grand and interesting in philosophy. He
anticipates this reaction (§118):
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only
to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important?
(As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.)
And he responds:
What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing
up the ground of language on which they stand.
Taking a house of cards for an imposing structure is an image for a kind of
pathology of the intellect. So, continuing with the metaphor of pathology, we can
take it that the particular purpose for which the philosopher assembles reminders
is therapy for intellectual delusions of grandeur. Wittgenstein sounds the note of
therapy in the vicinity of the passages I have been quoting (see §133). And in the
course of his discussion of the idea (or supposed idea) that one could have a lan-
guage that would be intrinsically unintelligible to anyone else, because it would
be used to express one’s “inner experiences” (§243), he says (§255):
The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.

4. The series of passages that form the context of that last remark is often
described as Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument. That label belongs with
looking in the text for a bit of, so to speak, ordinary philosophy: a proof that there
could not be a private language, which, like any impossibility proof, would need
to have premises and inferential transitions that are open to discussion.
PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 27

People do try to find such a thing in Wittgenstein’s text. Perhaps the best can-
didate is an argument whose premises are, first, that it would have to be possible
to verify that the norms of the private language were being followed in a use of
it; and, second, that nothing could count as verifying that, since on any occasion
of a supposed use it would seem, to the only person who could do the verifying,
that the answer to the question whether the norms were being followed was “Yes.”
As an argument for a philosophical thesis, this would be vulnerable to chal-
lenges to the credentials of the verificationism it turns on, and of the assumption
that the meaningfulness of elements in a language should be understood in terms
of norms for their use.
But one can read Wittgenstein on these lines only by ignoring or discounting
his remarks about the kind of thing he aims to do in philosophy.
What Wittgenstein is doing in this region of his text can be read so as to be
consistent with those remarks. In the so-called Private Language Argument, he
is harking back to—reminding us of—something he displayed as uncontentious
earlier in the Investigations, before the philosophically fraught topic of talk
about the inner was in play: that though words can of course be introduced into
a linguistic repertoire by pointing to elements in reality that they are to be words
for, that requires a place in the repertoire to be already prepared for them. One
can think one understands the idea of a linguistic repertoire that is private in the
supposed sense, but only by forgetting that uncontentious point. The material that
can look like an argument exploiting a disputable verificationism is just one of
several attempts to make the reminder gripping.

5. For another example, let me say a bit about Wittgenstein’s reflections about
rule-following.
A signpost of a certain kind is an example Wittgenstein sometimes uses of an
expression of a rule: a rule for getting to a destination. (For instance in §85.) We
can be puzzled over how signposts can be expressions of rules if we assume that
one could learn from a signpost which way to go only by putting an interpretation
on it. To make this concrete, imagine that someone provides herself with another
expression of the rule we want to conceive a signpost as expressing, perhaps in
words: “to get to Larissa from here one must go to the right.” That can seem in-
nocuous. But to suppose one cannot know which way a signpost points except by
putting an interpretation on it is to suppose that what one responds to when one
follows a signpost is something that, considered apart from any interpretation,
does not tell one which way to go: perhaps a board with marks on it. And on the
principles that make that seem right, it ought to seem no less right to say a corre-
sponding thing about the words that we were conceiving as an interpretation of the
signpost. If the signpost, considered in itself, is just a board with marks on it, the
words, considered in themselves, are just sounds that the signpost-follower perhaps
utters, or perhaps imagines being uttered. As such they would be just as much in
need of interpretation as we began by supposing the signpost was. On these lines,
it becomes clear that what we were conceiving as an interpretation of the signpost
does not, after all, bridge the supposed gap that seemed to require it, between the
28 JOHN MCDOWELL

signpost considered in itself and a determination of what the rule expressed by the
signpost requires one to do. And it would obviously be hopeless to propose putting
an interpretation on the interpretation; the same considerations will apply, and the
supposed gap will stay unbridged.
This poses a seeming problem about the idea that one can learn from a signpost
which way to go. Trying to respond to this, while holding on to what makes it seem
necessary to appeal to interpretation, we can be tempted into a fantastic concep-
tion of the act we are envisaging, the act of putting an interpretation on something
that by itself does not determine what one is to do. An ordinary act of interpreting
cannot bridge the gap, so we fall, perhaps, into picturing understanding a signpost
as a magical performance, a hocus-pocus performed by the soul (compare § 454),
which breathes life into what would otherwise be a mere dead thing, a board with
marks on it.
Wittgenstein’s treatment of this is crystallized in his remark that “there is a
way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation” (§ 201). When one follows a
signpost, what one responds to is not something separated from a determination of
what one is to do by that gap, a gap that “for a moment” we think an interpretation
could bridge. What one responds to is not just a board with marks on it, but a sign-
post pointing, say, to the right, which one recognizes for what it is. Understanding
a signpost is not performing a peculiar mental act in which one breathes life into
what would otherwise be a mere dead thing. Signposts are things that point the
way. And to say that is to say something we all know, at any rate until we forget it
in philosophical reflection.
I suggested it is wrong to take the so-called Private Language Argument as a
purported proof of a thesis. An analogous misreading here is taking Wittgenstein
to have uncovered a genuine problem about normativity, whose solution requires
a substantive social constructivism. Certainly signposts are what they are only as
figuring in a familiar human practice. But that too is something everyone knows.
Acknowledging it is not a first move towards a substantive philosophical theory
of norm-governed practices. We do not need to frame a philosophical theory of
normativity before we can be entitled to acknowledge that understanding a well-
designed signpost is not putting an interpretation on it, in the sense of equipping
oneself with another expression of the rule it expresses. Wittgenstein’s treatment of
rule-following is not a move in the direction of a theory of normativity. It unmasks
a seeming difficulty as a mere illusion of a philosophical problem.

6. Taking note of Wittgenstein’s practice can be worthwhile not just for under-
standing Wittgenstein, but also because aspects of his way of doing philosophy
can sometimes serve as a kind of model for us. Here I come back to the official
topic of this symposium.
I do not mean to recommend that Wittgenstein’s manner should be imitated.
But it is good to keep in mind that questions are not shown to be good questions
by the fact that philosophers have spent time and trouble trying to answer them.
Sometimes the most helpful thing to do when faced with a philosophical question,
say “How is normativity possible?”, is not to embark straight away on looking for
PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD 29

an answer to the question, but to cultivate suspicion of what makes the question
seem pressing. What is supposed to be mysterious or problematic about norma-
tivity, or whatever such a question is asked about? People who take ground-level
philosophical questions seriously sometimes seem to see no need to explain why
their topics need philosophical treatment; or their explanations may be lame and
unconvincing. It need not be that they have forgotten something obvious, as with
Wittgenstein’s targets. But whether or not by way of reminders, it can be a useful
philosophical activity to try to unmask seeming problems as illusory.

NOTE
1. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1951).