On following rules blindly

KARCZMARCZYK, PEDRO

Turku, Finlandia.

Conferencia; Research Seminar in Philosophy; 2005

Departamento de Filosofía, Universidad de Turku, Finlandia.

My interest in the topic of blind rule following arouse because of a conceptual problem that I find some theories of social institutions have in order to explain the reification phenomena. The problem, roughly stated, is: if social institutions are constructed or created in accordance to rules, how is the reification possible? I mean, given the basic idea that institutions are constructed in accordance to rules, reification would imply that some people is following rules, the constitutive rules of the institutions, without knowing that they are following them. But now, is it possible for someone to follow a rule without knowing that s/he is following it?             We have a strong reason to refuse this possibility because we are interested in distinguishing following a rule and accidentally acting in accordance with a rule. So we think of someone following a rule as someone who is performing an intentional action. And performing the action of following a rule implies thinking you are following and consequently knowledge of the rule. So, there is a sort of relation between thinking of institutions as constructed in accordance with rules and thinking of people participating of institutions as having knowledge of  the rules of institutions. But it is a fact that a good amount of what we call (and want to call) “institutions” doesn´t have a self conscious state. For instance, money seems to us a clear cut case of institution; because the objects referred to as money only have the property of “being a mean of exchange” as far as they are collectively believed to be money. However, it is an empirical fact that the "institution of money" is compatible with some wrong beliefs about money. People can think, for instance, that gold is money because it is valuable by itself and not because of the collective acceptance of the constitutive rule “gold counts as money in the context Z”. They can refuse that what they are doing is to follow a rule of the kind “gold count as money” or they can find surprising this sort of explanation of their behavior regarding money. This problem concerning the reification of institutions can be formulated as a set of individually plausible claims but that, however, cannot be stated simultaneously: -          Institutions are constructed according to rules (of the kind "X counts as Y in the context Z") -          To follow a rule is an intentional action. -          To perform the action of following a rule implies the knowledge of the rule. -          Knowledge of the constitutive rule of an institution implies that one cannot consider it as independent of the human action. Consequently, reification of institutions is impossible. I think that in order to face the problem we should first clarify somewhat the notion of rule following. In this paper we would be concerned mainly with getting a clearer idea of the different possibilities in which acting in accordance with a rule and knowing that one is doing it can appear. We will be concerned with it as a general problem about rule following and not as a specific problem about constitutive rules of institutions. However we will considerer our conclusions prima facie applicable to rules of institutions. In part I of this paper I will be dealing with some wittgensteinian texts in order to develop the notion of virtual intentionality as a key notion in order to capture most of the ways in which we are inclined to speak of rule-following. In Part II I will focus in a category introduced first in Part I, the notion of without explicit rules games. As I recognise the category is polemical I will try to characterise it in a more accurate way. If this characterization is accepted, I think we have a way of thinking of the basic normativity of the social that gives us some tools to solve the puzzle mentioned above.