The role of rules

The question of rules is not an issue that separates the 'analytical' and ' Continental' traditions from one another; rather it is an issue that is a s ource of division within each tradition. Within Continental philosophy the problem of the rule-governed character of cognition goes back to Kant's dua lism of sense and understanding. Many philosophers in the Continental tradi tion (notably, Nietzsche, Gadamer and Adorno) have retained a quasi-Kantian conception of judgement while rejecting the idea of it as rule-governed. B ut there have been exception to this within Continental philosophy, most pr ominently, Jurgen Habermas. The rules thesis was implicit in much of analyt ical philosophy as it was practised in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. The doctrine gave support to a conception of philosophy (so-called 'ordina ry-language philosophy') as essentially an exercise in the articulation of certain kinds of tacit knowledge. It was advocated explicitly in such works as Searle's Speech Acts and Winch's The Idea of a Social Science. The equa tion of meaning and rules enjoyed further prestige, for it was taken by man y philosophers to be the central doctrine to be extracted from Wittgenstein 's Philosophical Investigations. A most striking feature of the receding of the rules thesis has been the transformation of previously accepted interp retations of Wittgenstein's later philosophy (for example, by Stanley Cavel l and John McDowell). Both adherents and opponents of the rules thesis have shared a common concern. In emphasizing the discontinuity between language and the subject-matter of the natural sciences both sides offer reassuring ly positive answers to one of the besetting problems of twentieth-century p hilosophy: does philosophy have a distinctive subject-matter of its own?