On Instruction

We don't learn to talk by having it explained to us. If we can't talk, we can't take instruction either.

Being able to talk to one another, being able to give and take instructions, appears to depend on what we might vaguely call 'shared understanding' or 'shared appreciation of meanings'. This doesn't really add anything to 'shared ability to talk to one another,' but its specific components (things like 'shared experience', 'shared grammatical/logical capacities', our understanding of foundational concepts like 'same' and 'similar', the apparent persistence of common memory etc.) all have the character of Wittgensteinian 'hinges' - not just of specific enquiries but of any possible intelligible enquiry, including any enquiry into their own nature.

When a philosopher tells you that there is a 'right' way to do something - to translate a linguistic expression, to understand an experience, to perform an experiment or a calculation - they are already depending on your having a shared concept of  'rightness' and a shared appreciation of at least one (very disjunctive and distributed) example of it, which is 'the right way to talk'.

If we don't know the right way to talk, we have, of course, no way of discussing this with one another - never mind being able to attribute it to any failure to 'follow instructions' ...