Understanding Stopping and Forcing Modals

When does a child count as understanding the meaning of ‘plus’? Roughly speaking, when she has sufficiently mastered the skill of addition; in other words, when she often enough uses ‘plus’ (‘+’) in the right way, where that especially means: doing correct calculations employing the symbol. ‘Often enough’ is of course vague. We encounter the same vagueness when faced with the question, ‘When can a child play the piano?’ Answer: when she sufficiently often gets things sufficiently right on the piano (playing scales, pieces, etc.).

There is a general point here about language-mastery. As Wittgenstein famously wrote: ‘For a large class of cases […] in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language’ (PI43). Using a word is a form of activity. To charaterize the use of a word one will often need to locate that use within a certain language-game, i.e. a rule-governed practice in which various words or expressions are used in interlocking ways. The term ‘rule-governed’ here points to the difference between correct and incorrect uses of words. Understanding a word means having the ability to use it correctly, often enough.

Although all word-use may be called ‘activity’, involving various kinds of action (assertion, questioning, exclamation, apology …), there are certain uses of words which are bound up with action in a very direct way. I have in mind two kinds of languagegames: that involving imperatives, and that involving what Anscombe calls stopping and forcing modals. When does a child count as understanding the meaning of such imperative forms as ‘Come here’, ‘Pass the butter’ or ‘Don't do that’? The natural answer is: ‘When she responds appropriately often enough.’ And ‘responding appropriately’ presumably means obeying or complying with the command or request. (Perhaps we should additionally require that she develop the ability to use imperatives herself.)

Stopping and forcing modals are linguistic cousins of imperatives. Anscombe introduces them in the course of explicating, and then jumping free of, a certain circularity that we are liable to encounter when we try to say what a promise is (see e.g. Anscombe 1981a,d). To say what a promise is, we need at least to say this: that if you promise to ϕ, you bring it about that you have to ϕ.