[FOM] following rules

[Alice ter Meulen]

Some post-Wittgenstein thought about rule following proposes to consider a commonly recognised and consequently corrected violation of a rule to be evidence of its existence. E.g. a young child learning English often ‘tries out’ the extent of the -ed past tense morphology on verbs by over generating and getting corrected by others. For a short time he will correctly say “I walked to school” or “I biked to school”, but also “I leaved school” or “I readed a book”, until he can be properly regarded to know the rule of past tense formation for (weak) verbs.