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Paul A. Boghossian


The Rule-following Considerations

Introduction

  1. Wittgeinstein’s Philosophical Investigations §§138-242 and Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language caused great interest. Why?
  2. Kripke’s passages on rule-following are concerned with some of the weightiest questions in the theory of meaning – that occupy centre-stage in contemporary philosophy. Kripke represented Wittgenstein as defending a set of unified and extremely provocative claims concerning these questions.
    There is a room for an improved understanding of the precise nature of Kripke’s arguments, of their ultimate cogency, and of their relation to the wider discussion of meaning in contemporary philosophy of mind and language.
  3. In parts I and II, Boghossian lays out the essentials of Kripke’s argument. In subsequent parts, he offers an extended critique of the dialectic it presents, considered on its own terms and independently of exergetical concerns. A discussion of the critical literature will be woven in as in as appropriate. The moral will not be recognizably Wittgensteinian: Boghossian shall argue that, pace Kripke’s intent, the conception of meaning that emerges is a realist, non-reductionist, and judgement-independent conception, one which, moreover, sustains no obvious animus against private language.

I Kripke on Meaning and the Skeptical Problem
The Skeptical Problem

    • Kripke: the burden of the rule-following considerations is that it cannot literally be true of any symbol that it expresses some particular concept or meaning. This is the now-famous „skeptical conslusation“ he attributes  to Wittgenstein: There is no fact about me that distinguishes between my meaning a definite function by „+“ … and my meaning nothing at all.
    • Kripke argues, in effect, by elimination: all the available facts potentially relevant to fixing the meaning of a symbol in a given speaker’s repertoire… Adequate reflection on what it is for an expression to possess a meaning would betray, so Kripke invites us to believe, that that fact could not be constituted by any of those.
    • The claim is, of course, indisputable in connection with facts about actual use and qualitative phenomena. Neither of those species of fact could, either in isolation or in combination, capture what it is for a symbol to possess a meaning. Much more important and controversal is Kripke’s rejection of a dispositional account of meaning facts. Why are facts about how a speaker is disposed to use an expression held to be insufficient to determine its meaning?
    • Kripke’s objection 1: the idea of meaning something vy a word is an idea with an infinitary character – if I mean plus by „+“, then there are literally no end of truths about how I ought to apply the term, namely to just the members of this set of triples and not to others, if I am to use it in accord with its meaning. This is not merely an artefact of the arithmetical example; it holds for any concept. The totality of my dispositions is finite, being the dispositions of a finite being that exists for a finite time. And so, facts about dispositions cannot capture what it is for me to mean addition by „+“.
    • Kripke’s objection 2: stems from the so-called ‚normativity‘ of meaning. If I mean something by an  expression, then the potential infinity of truths that are generated as a result are normative truths: they are truths about how I ought to apply the expression, if I am to apply it in accord with its meaning, not truths about how I will apply it. My meaning something by an expression, it appears, does not guarantee that I will apply it correctly; it guarantees only that there will be a fact of the matter about whether my use of it is correct. Now, this observation may be converted into a condition of adequacy on theories of meaning: any proposed candidate for being the property in virtue of which an expression has meaning must be such as to ground the normativity of meaning – it ought to be possible to read off from any alleged meaning-constituting property of a word what is the correct use of that word. And this is a requirement, Kripke maintains, that a dispositional theory cannot pass: one cannot read off a use of that expression, for to be disposed to use an expression in a certain way implies at most that one will, not that one should.

     

     

 

  
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