1. Rhees writes, ‘Philosophy is concerned with the intelligibility of language, or the possibility of understanding. And in that way it is concerned with the possibility of discourse.’ It is important to be clear what Rhees does not mean by this. His suggestion is not that philosophy is concerned with ‘the conditions of the possibility of discourse’. We are tempted to think that one of the aims of philosophy is to investigate something – the nature of language perhaps – on which our speaking with each other depends. Many philosophers have seen their central task in that way, and many have taken this to be one of Wittgenstein's concerns. Rhees's opposition to the view is seen in remarks such as the following: ‘The language – what you understand when you understand the language – is not something apart from understanding people and speaking with them. Something which makes that possible’ (277). Sharing a language with another is not what makes discussion between us possible. Sharing a language is nothing other than being able to speak with them.

‘You cannot say that it is because they have a common life that they are able to engage in conversation.’ You cannot say this, I take it, because their ‘common life’ is not something independent of the fact that they are able to engage in conversation. And we face the same problem if it is suggested that an agreement in our use of individual words is a condition of our being able to speak to each other with understanding. For if we take seriously the idea that in speaking of an individual's use of a word we are speaking of particular utterances, in particular contexts, into which it enters, we will not suppose that we can characterise my use of a word independently of the ways in which the word enters into my linguistic exchanges with others. I respond to your ‘Can we move him now?’ with ‘He's still in dreadful pain’; to your ‘Where is he going to sit?’ with ‘There are more chairs next door’, and so on. A characterisation of me as using a certain word in a particular way will make reference to my interactions with others into which the word enters.