Learning by doing

Nobody learned to ride a bike from a manual. You were shown, you wobbled, someone held the saddle and let go. Wittgenstein thought that this is not a special case but the normal way rules are learned, including the rules for using words. Explanations matter, but they run out, and what carries us past that point is practice: examples, imitation, correction, and doing it again. That idea has very practical consequences for how you learn a skill, raise a child or welcome a new colleague.

What Wittgenstein says about learning rules

In the Philosophical Investigations he asks how you would teach someone the meaning of words like “regular”, “uniform” or “same”. To someone who speaks only French, you can give the French words. But to someone who does not yet have the concepts at all, translation is no use.

Wer aber diese Begriffe noch nicht besitzt, den werde ich die Worte durch Beispiele und durch Übung gebrauchen lehren. Und dabei teile ich ihm nicht weniger mit, als ich selber weiß.

But someone who does not yet have these concepts, I will teach to use the words through examples and through practice. And in doing so I do not pass on less to him than I know myself.

Philosophical Investigations §208

The last sentence is the striking one. Examples are not a poor substitute for the real explanation hidden behind them. There is nothing behind them. The same remark describes the method plainly:

Ich mach’s ihm vor, er macht es mir nach.

I do it for him, he copies me.

Philosophical Investigations §208

Add to that encouragement, approval, disapproval, letting go and holding back, and you have Wittgenstein’s picture of teaching. Elsewhere he says that following a rule is a practice (§202), and that at the start, teaching language is not explaining but training (§5).

Where the spade turns

Suppose the learner keeps asking why. Why this step and not another? Why does “add 2” mean 1002 comes after 1000 and not 1004? You can give reasons for a while. Then:

Habe ich die Begründungen erschöpft, so bin ich nun auf dem harten Felsen angelangt, und mein Spaten biegt sich zurück. Ich bin dann geneigt zu sagen: „So handle ich eben.“

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”

Philosophical Investigations §217

This is not laziness or authoritarianism. It is the recognition that no rule contains its own application, so a chain of interpretations has to end somewhere, and it ends in what we do. How deep this goes is disputed. Saul Kripke read these passages as a sceptical paradox with a social solution; others, such as Baker and Hacker, think Wittgenstein is dissolving the problem rather than solving it. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on rule-following sets out the debate, and the concept page on rule-following explains the background.

At work: onboarding without the thick manual

A new colleague gets a forty-page wiki and still writes the wrong kind of report in week two. That is not a reading failure. The wiki tells them what the rules say; it cannot show them what following them looks like. Try instead:

• Give three real examples of good work and one that missed the mark, and talk through the difference.
• Do the first task together, then let them do the second while you watch, then let go.
• When they ask “why do we do it like this?”, give the reasons you have. When you run out, say so honestly. Then check whether you hit bedrock or just an old habit nobody questioned.

With children: showing, not lecturing

Children learn “fair”, “sorry” or “careful” the way §208 describes: by seeing them used, trying them out, and being corrected. A long explanation of fairness at bedtime does less than ten small moments of sharing a cake. Wittgenstein knew classrooms from the inside. From 1920 to 1926 he taught at village schools in Lower Austria and compiled a spelling dictionary for his pupils. Honesty requires adding that he was a notoriously strict and sometimes harsh teacher. His philosophy of learning is wiser than his practice was.

When studying: practice beats rereading

Rereading your notes feels like learning because the words become familiar. But understanding a rule shows in being able to go on with it in new cases. Do the exercises, explain a worked example aloud, try a case your textbook did not cover. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle later sharpened this into the distinction between knowing that and knowing how.

Three exercises

1. The example test. Explain a rule from your work or home using only three examples and one counterexample, without stating the rule. See what the other person does with a new case.
2. Find your bedrock. Take one routine and ask “why?” five times. Mark the point where reasons stop and “this is what we do” begins. Decide whether that is real bedrock or something worth changing.
3. Notice the click. Learn something small with your hands this week, a knot, a chord, a recipe. Pay attention to when you “got it”. You will probably not find a moment when you grasped a formula.

The limits

Wittgenstein was not writing a theory of education, and his remarks are conceptual, not findings from learning science. The German word Abrichtung is also used for training animals; it describes how language starts, not a recommendation to drill people. And “this is simply what I do” is something you may say only after you have given the reasons you have, not instead of giving them.