Abstract
This paper is an attempt at a continuous, though certainly incomplete, commentary on Wittgenstein’s remarks on rules and rule-following in PI, §§ 80 - 86. On the one hand, these remarks are seen as fitting in with their immediate context (proper names, exactness and its opposite), on the other, as anticipating in some ways, but at the same time differing in other ways from, the famous and much-discussed observations on rule-following in §§ 185 ff. The notion of a rule which emerges from this discussion is not easy to reconcile with widespread ideas about ‘rule-governed activities’, where at least some of the rules involved are not supposed to be public (at any rate not as public as Wittgenstein’s arrows and signposts) nor stateable and deliberately obeyed or flouted (as in the examples mentioned by Wittgenstein).
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