Предлагается виттгенштайновское решение скептического парадокса Крипке, который возникает в результате пренебрежения прагматикой и нормативным измерением производимых операций. Парадокс Крипке указывает на то, что натурализация смысла и проблемы следования правилу в рамках классического (ненормативного) натурализма невозможна. Анализируется и критикуется недавно предложенная Гинзборг интерпретация парадокса. Хотя её натуралистический «срединный путь» между диспозиционализмом и ментализмом и близок к нормативному виттгенштайновскому натурализму, вводимое ею понятие примитивной нормативности неудовлетворительно. Правильнее говорить не о натурализме с минимальным добавлением нормативности, как это делает Гинзборг, а о нормативном натурализме.

Saul Kripke is struck by a skeptical argument which he says is neither Wittgenstein’s nor his own. I call this new skeptic “Saul Wittgenstein”. SW’s conclusion is that there is no such thing as following a rule. My first aim is to show that Kripke misunderstands the Investigations when he says it offers a “skeptical solution” to SW’s paradox. Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy commits him to a dissolution of the paradox. I show next that LW’s writing (...) contains an implicit dissolution of it. Finally, I point out the main lesson to be derived from Kripke’s discussion--namely, that there is nothing which is common and peculiar to what we call following a rule. (shrink)

Saul Kripke is struck by a skeptical argument which he says is neither Wittgenstein’s nor his own. I call this new skeptic “Saul Wittgenstein”. SW’s conclusion is that there is no such thing as following a rule. My first aim is to show that Kripke misunderstands the Investigations when he says it offers a “skeptical solution” to SW’s paradox. Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy commits him to a dissolution of the paradox. I show next that LW’s writing (...) contains an implicit dissolution of it. Finally, I point out the main lesson to be derived from Kripke’s discussion--namely, that there is nothing which is common and peculiar to what we call following a rule. (shrink)

Saul Kripke is struck by a skeptical argument which he says is neither Wittgenstein’s nor his own. I call this new skeptic “Saul Wittgenstein”. SW’s conclusion is that there is no such thing as following a rule. My first aim is to show that Kripke misunderstands the Investigations when he says it offers a “skeptical solution” to SW’s paradox. Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy commits him to a dissolution of the paradox. I show next that LW’s writing (...) contains an implicit dissolution of it. Finally, I point out the main lesson to be derived from Kripke’s discussion--namely, that there is nothing which is common and peculiar to what we call following a rule. (shrink)

Kripke's skeptical interpretation of Wittgenstein's project in the Philosophical Investigations attributes to Wittgenstein a radical skepticism about the objectivity of rules and thus the meanings of words and the existence of language as well as a skepticism about the truth conditions underlying our alleged facts about the world. Kripke then contends that Wittgenstein solves this skeptical paradox by committing himself to what I shall call a Communitarian View of language. There are a number of difficulties with (...) Kripke's interpretation of the project of the Philosophical Investigations. These include his evaluation of the notion of the rule, his interpretation of the private language arguments, his uses of the term intention, and his truncated reading of 201. In this paper I shall address and attack this interpretation of Wittgenstein as a questionable reading of the Philosophical Investigations, and I shall suggest some alternative interpretations of Wittgenstein's views which avoid both radical skepticism and a Communitarian View of language. (shrink)

A formal theory of truth, alternative to tarski's 'orthodox' theory, based on truth-value gaps, is presented. the theory is proposed as a fairly plausible model for natural language and as one which allows rigorous definitions to be given for various intuitive concepts, such as those of 'grounded' and 'paradoxical' sentences.

RESUMEN Se cuestionan las dos conclusiones imputadas a la aplicación de la "paradoja escéptica de Wittgenstein" al derecho, tal como es desarrollada por S. Kripke. A saber, o bien la paradoja se aplica a la práctica del derecho y esta es indeterminada e imposible, o bien aquella es completamente irrelevante para la práctica del derecho y la reflexión filosófica sobre este. Se sugiere que la filosofía del derecho puede aceptar la relevancia de esta paradoja y obtener nuevos elementos a partir (...) de ella. ABSTRACT The article questions the two conclusions attributed to the application of "Wittgenstein's skeptical paradox" to law, as developed by S. Kripke: that is, either the paradox is applied to the practice of law and it is indeterminate or impossible, or the paradox is completely irrelevant for the practice of law and for philosophical reflection in that respect. The paper suggests that philosophy of right can accept the relevance of the paradox and draw new elements from it. (shrink)

This important new book is the first of a series of volumes collecting essential work by an influential philosopher. It presents a mixture of published and unpublished works from various stages of Kripke's storied career. Included here are seminal and much discussed pieces such as “Identity and Necessity,” “Outline of a Theory of Truth,” and “A Puzzle About Belief.” More recent published work include “Russell's Notion of Scope” and “Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference” among others. Several of the (...) works included here are published for the first time, including both older works “Two Paradoxes of Knowledge,” “Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities,” “Nozick on Knowledge” as well as newer “The First Person” and “Unrestricted Exportation.” “A Puzzle on Time and Thought” was written for this volume. The publication of this volume—which ranges over epistemology, linguistics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, history of analytic philosophy, theory of truth, and metaphysics—represents a major event in contemporary analytic philosophy. This collection aims to be a testament to one of philosophy's greatest living figures. (shrink)

Saul Kripke, in his celebrated book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), offers a novel reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s main remarks in his later works, especially in Philosophical Investigations (1953) and, to some extent, in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956). Kripke presents Wittgenstein as proposing a skeptical argument against a certain conception of meaning and linguistic understanding, as well as a skeptical solution to such a problem. Many philosophers have called this interpretation of Wittgenstein Kripke’s (...) Wittgenstein or Kripkenstein because, as Kripke himself emphasizes, it is “Wittgenstein’s argument as it struck Kripke, as it presented a problem for him” (Kripke 1982, 5) and “probably many of my formulations and re-castings of the argument are done in a way Wittgenstein would not himself approve” (Kripke 1982, 5). Such an interpretation has been the subject of tremendous discussions since its publication, and this has formed a huge literature on the topic of meaning skepticism in general and Wittgenstein’s later view in particular. -/- According to the skeptical argument that Kripke extracts from Wittgenstein’s later remarks on meaning and rule-following, there is no fact about a speaker’s behavioral, mental or social life that can metaphysically determine, or constitute, what she means by her words and also fix a determinate connection between those meanings and the correctness of her use of these words. Such a skeptical conclusion has a disastrous consequence for the classical realist view of meaning: if we insist on the idea that meaning is essentially a factual matter, we face the bizarre conclusion that there is thereby “no such thing as meaning anything by any word” (Kripke 1982, 55). -/- According to the skeptical solution that Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein, such a radical conclusion is intolerable because we certainly do very often mean certain things by our words. The skeptical solution begins by rejecting the view that results in such a paradoxical conclusion, that is, the classical realist conception of meaning. The skeptical solution offers then a new picture of the practice of meaning-attribution, according to which we can legitimately assert that a speaker means something specific by her words if we, as members of a speech-community, can observe, in enough cases, that her use agrees with ours. We can judge, for instance, that she means by “green” what we mean by this word, namely, green, if we observe that her use of “green” agrees with our way of using it. Attributing meanings to others’ words, therefore, brings in the notion of a speech-community, whose members are uniform in their responses. As a result, there can be no private language. -/- This article begins by introducing Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s skeptical problem presented in Chapter 2 of Kripke’s book. It then explicates Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s skeptical solution to the skeptical problem, which is offered in Chapter 3 of the book. The article ends by reviewing some of the most important responses to the skeptical problem and the skeptical solution. (shrink)

Several writers have assumed that when in “Outline of a Theory of Truth” I wrote that “the orthodox approach” – that is, Tarski’s account of the truth definition – admits descending chains, I was relying on a simple compactness theorem argument, and that non-standard models must result. However, I was actually relying on a paper on ‘pseudo-well-orderings’ by Harrison. The descending hierarchy of languages I define is a standard model. Yablo’s Paradox later emerged as a key to interpreting the (...) result. (shrink)

This important new book is the first of a series of volumes collecting the essential articles by the eminent and highly influential philosopher Saul A. Kripke. It presents a mixture of published and unpublished articles from various stages of Kripke's storied career.

This paper deals with Wright’s criticism of Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgeinstein and his understanding of the problem of following the rules, and particularly the understanding of a so called skeptical paradox. In the first part of the text, the author gives the basic points of Kripke’s position, whereas the second part examines Wright’s answer to the skeptical solution, that is, Wright’s defense of the objectivity of both the meaning and the connections of rules and their use. The (...) third part discusses the range and certain weak points of Wright’s position which have to do with the issue of the constitutive question of rules and the nature of their normativity. (shrink)

In?201 of Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein puts forward his famous? rule - following paradox.? The paradox is how can one follow in accord with a rule? the applications of which are potentially infinite? when the instances from which one learns the rule and the instances in which one displays that one has learned the rule are only finite? How can one be certain of rule - following at all? In Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke concedes (...) the skeptical position that there are no facts that we follow a rule but that there are still conditions under which we are warranted in asserting of others that they are following a rule. In this paper, I explain why Kripke?s solution to the rule - following paradox fails. I then offer an alternative. (shrink)

The main question of metasemantics, or foundational semantics, is why an expression token has the meaning (semantic value) that it in fact has. In his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, Saul Kripke presented a skeptical challenge that threatened to make the foundational question unanswerable. My first contention in this paper is that the skeptical challenge indeed poses an insoluble paradox, but only for a certain kind of metasemantic theory, against which the challenge effectively works as a (...) reductio ad absurdum argument. My second contention is that as a result of rejecting the theory which entails a paradoxical outcome, we will see that the foundational question essentially involves a temporal dimension. After arguing that the skeptical challenge gives us a strong reason to adopt a historical view of meaning, I shall further argue against certain authors who claim that meanings not only have histories but futures as well, or that the meaning of a word may change retroactively in time as a consequence of counterfactual change in its future use. The major aim of the paper is thus to bring together the arguably interrelated debates about the skeptical challenge and temporal externalism in philosophy of language. (shrink)

John Henry Newman starts the second half of the Grammar of Assent by laying out a “paradox,” and he announces that the purpose of the following chapters of the book is to resolve it. Surprisingly, recent scholarship has tended not to question the nature of this paradox. In this paper, I argue that we should understand Newman’s paradox to be a kind of skeptical paradox that arises when we accept “Lockean rationalism.” I then show how (...) Newman deals with the paradox. One of the upshots of this reading is that “naturalism” plays a smaller role in Newman’s anti-skepticism than previous commentators have suggested. Another is that we should understand Newman to be a kind of infallibilist. (shrink)

To preserve freedom leibniz maintains that at any point in the development of the infinite series of a monad's states there will be an unlimited range of possible developments alternative to the actual. but if so a paradox analogous to kripke's arises. at any point in the development of an individual's states, no matter how far the series had developed, there would always be an unlimited number of rules, or concepts, the series could instantiate. but in such circumstances, (...) it would seem, god could not mean to create any particular individual. (shrink)

Davidson’s later philosophy of language has been inspired by Wittgenstein’s Investigations, but Davidson by no means sympathizes with the sceptical problem and solution Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein. Davidson criticizes the sceptical argument for relying on the rule-following conception of meaning, which is, for him, a highly problematic view. He also casts doubt on the plausibility of the sceptical solution as unjustifiably bringing in shared practices of a speech community. According to Davidson, it is rather success in mutual interpretation that explains (...) success in the practice of meaning something by an utterance. I will argue that Davidson’s objections to the sceptical problem and solution are misplaced as they rely on a misconstrual of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s view. I will also argue that Davidson’s alternative solution to the sceptical problem is implausible, since it fails to block the route to the sceptical problem. I will then offer a problematic trilemma for Davidson. (shrink)

Kripke (1982, Wittgenstein on rules and private language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) presents a rule-following paradox in terms of what we meant by our past use of “plus”, but the same paradox can be applied to any other term in natural language. Many responses to the paradox concentrate on fixing determinate meaning for “plus”, or for a small class of other natural language terms. This raises a problem: how can these particular responses be generalised to the whole (...) of natural language? In this paper, I propose a solution. I argue that if natural language is computable in a sense defined below, and the Church–Turing thesis is accepted, then this auxiliary problem can be solved. (shrink)

This paper argues that deflationism about truth enables us to resolve the notorious problem of intentionality—the problem (forcibly articulated by Kripke) of explaining how intrinsically dead signs, whether material or mental, are able to reach into the world and pick out specific collections of things.

This paper argues that deflationism about truth enables us to resolve the notorious problem of intentionality—the problem (forcibly articulated by Kripke) of explaining how intrinsically dead signs, whether material or mental, are able to reach into the world and pick out specific collections of things.

Most readers of the Investigations take skepticism as a target of Wittgenstein’s remarks, something to be refuted by means of a clear grasp of our criteria. Stanley Cavell was the first to challenge that consensual view by reminding us that our criteria are constantly open to skeptical repudiation, hence that privacy is a standing human possibility. In an apparently similar vein, Saul Kripke has argued that a skeptical paradox concerning rules and meaning is the central problem of (...) the Investigations – and one that receives a skeptical solution. Following the orthodoxy, however, Kripke does not take privacy as a real threat but instead reads Wittgenstein as offering an argument against its very possibility. This paper offers a critical assessment of Kripke’s and Cavell’s readings, and concludes by delineating an understanding of our linguistic practices that acknowledges the seriousness of skepticism while avoiding the kind of evasion shared by Kripke and the orthodoxy, enabling us to see agreement and meaning as continual tasks whose failure is imbued with high existential costs. (shrink)

Historically, the sub-Saharan Africans’ being-in-the-world with other peoples and nations has been characterized by a ‘Black-Out,’ or the exclusion of black Africans from full humanity and the violation of their human rights through slavery, colonization, apartheid, etc. So far globalization looks like another ‘Black-Out’ or recolonization, Westernization, homogenization, the universalization of the particular, and a jungle rather than an opportunity for all. This conception of globalization has resulted in skepticisms about, and fear of the phenomenon. Antiglobalization movements – e.g., the (...) World Social Forum - are the expression of many people’s feelings about globalization. The 21st-century globalization cannot be really global except by being a dynamic synthesis of all peoples’ culturaland economic values. So in this paper I argue that despite the potential benefits of globalization, African peoples – more than anybody else - have good reasons to fear and/ or be skeptical about it. This is due to the negativities and the paradoxical nature of globalization on the one hand; and the African colonial andneocolonial experience, on the other. I propose an alternative to “the savage globalization” or ‘junglobalization.’ I will call it ‘Pan-Bantuist Globalization.’ It is intended to move globalization from Eurocentrism and/or any other negative ethnocentrism to ‘pan-anthropocentrism’ or ‘pan-Bantucentrism,’ thereby creatingconditions for inclusion, equality, brotherhood/sisterhood, and respect for human rights. In other words, Pan-Bantuist Globalization is concerned with democratizing and civilizing the savage globalization through an ethic of globalization, i.e., a global ethics that is based on the golden rule, human rights, ‘Ubuntu’, ‘Maat’, and ‘Yin-Yang’. If acted upon this ethics, noboby – including Africans – will be left behind and things will not fall apart again. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of PhilosophyPaul S. MiklowitzSusan Neiman. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 358. Cloth, $29.95.Contemporary philosophy in America tends to regard epistemological questions as the most fundamental of the discipline, but Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought sets itself against this assumption in an attempt to sketch "an alternative history of (...) philosophy." "It's possible to begin to worry about the difference between appearance and reality because... a dream is so vivid that you want to grasp one of its objects for a moment or two of sleepy half-consciousness," Neiman writes, but then "you wake up in your bed, slap your face if you have to... " (5). The problem of evil, in stark contrast to such skeptical speculations, is far more urgent and trenchant; it is "the place where philosophy begins, and threatens to stop" (ibid.). Moreover, the problem of evil, far from being merely a theological quandary, actually forms a link between metaphysics and epistemology by starkly posing questions about the intelligibility of the world: Why are things like that? wants the answer Because it's best that way. For the early modern period, these questions centered on the "theodicy" debates focused by the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake of 1755, while for us the holocaust threatens to explode all our hopes and expectations for the possibility of a world that is as it should be. Thus, Lisbon and Auschwitz frame for Neiman the historical topoi that ground discussion of the relation between natural and moral evils, the evolving philosophical understanding of which defines "who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment" (10).The problem of theodicy is introduced through the figure of Alfonso X, king of Castille in 1252, and "the first Enlightenment hero" (14), according to Neiman. Having studied astronomy under the guidance of learned Jews from Toledo, Alfonso scandalously remarked "If I had been of God's counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better" (15). Serving as a paradigm of blasphemy for half a millennium, Alfonso's boast also expresses the inevitable dismay that must accompany the delighted wonder at natural order exploited by the argument from design: while Creation is surely miraculous in its manifestation of seemingly intelligent structure, it is just as surely astonishing that so much of that structure seems so wantonly destructive. Can this really be the best of all possible worlds if innocent lives are cut short by cruel diseases or natural disasters while vicious villains prosper into comfortable old age?! Alfonso's remark serves Neiman as a leitmotif around which she orders central figures in the canon of western philosophy into two camps: those who struggled to reconcile natural evil with God's goodness or with reason (Leibniz, Pope, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx), and those who skeptically condemned reason by appealing to "brute appearances" (Bayle, Voltaire, Hume, Sade and Schopenhauer). Because the very categories of natural and moral evil tend to break down as a result of the development of psychology as a "science of nature" (to the extent that human motives are regarded as natural processes subject to empirical explanation, they cease to manifest a unique ontology), Nietzsche and Freud fall outside the philosophical canon thus construed—although Neiman's discussion of these two thinkers is perhaps the most compelling of the book.No new interpretive ground is broken in the resulting exegesis of western philosophical history, but Neiman's treatment of each of these figures is intelligent and skillful. In discussing Kant, for example, a deep paradox at the center of his moral thought is brilliantly harnessed to the book's argument. Whereas theodicies from Leibniz onward had focused on attempts to show that Providence ultimately guaranteed a connection between virtue and happiness despite obvious evidence to the contrary, Kant took exactly the opposite tack. As Neiman puts it, "Solving the problem of evil is not only impossible but immoral. For knowing the connections between moral and natural evils would undermine the possibility of morality" (69). If we could be sure that good deeds... (shrink)

The paper puts forward a new skeptical solution to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox, a solution which revolves around the idea that human communication does not require meaning facts - at least as defined by Kripke. After a brief discussion of the paradox, I explain why I think that Kripkenstein’s solution needs revision and argue that the main goal of a skeptical solution to the rule-following paradox should be that of showing that communication does not require (...) meaning. After that, I offer two arguments for the thesis that communication does not require meaning. The first argument instantiates a rather direct strategy and focuses on the description of a concrete case of communication without meaning. The second one is more indirect in that I start by describing a world in which, although there are meaning facts, communication does not depend on them. The paper’s last section deals with the issue of meaning talk. (shrink)

Fallibilism is ubiquitous in contemporary epistemology. I argue that a paradox about knowledge, generated by considerations of truth, shows that fallibilism can only deliver knowledge in lucky circumstances. Specifically, since it is possible that we are brains‐in‐vats (BIVs), it is possible that all our beliefs are wrong. Thus, the fallibilist can know neither whether or not we have much knowledge about the world nor whether or not we know any specific proposition, and so the warrant of our knowledge‐claims is (...) much reduced and second‐order skepticism is generated. Since this is the case in both skeptical and everyday contexts, contextualism cannot resolve the paradox. (shrink)

A lot has been written on solutions to the semantic paradoxes, but very little on the topic of general theories of paradoxicality. The reason for this, we believe, is that it is not easy to disentangle a solution to the paradoxes from a specific conception of what those paradoxes consist in. This paper goes some way towards remedying this situation. We first address the question of what one should expect from an account of paradoxicality. We then present one conception of (...) paradoxicality that has been offered in the literature: the fixed-point conception. According to this conception, a statement is paradoxical if it cannot obtain a classical truth-value at any fixed-point model. In order to assess this proposal rigorously we provide a non-metalinguistic characterization of paradoxicality and we evaluate whether the resulting account satisfies a number of reasonable desiderata. (shrink)

Kripke-Wittgenstein meaning skepticism appears as a serious threat to the idea that there could be meaning-constituting facts. Some people argue that the only viable response is to adopt semantic primitivism (SP). SP is the doctrine that meaning-facts are _sui generis and irreducibly semantic. The idea is that by allowing such primitive semantic facts into our ontology Kripke's skeptical paradox cannot arise. I argue that SP is untenable in spite of its apparent resourcefulness. (edited).

We investigate axiomatizations of Kripke's theory of truth based on the Strong Kleene evaluation scheme for treating sentences lacking a truth value. Feferman's axiomatization KF formulated in classical logic is an indirect approach, because it is not sound with respect to Kripke's semantics in the straightforward sense: only the sentences that can be proved to be true in KF are valid in Kripke's partial models. Reinhardt proposed to focus just on the sentences that can be proved to (...) be true in KF and conjectured that the detour through classical logic in KF is dispensable. We refute Reinhardt's Conjecture, and provide a direct axiomatization PKF of Kripke's theory in partial logic. We argue that any natural axiomatization of Kripke's theory in Strong Kleene logic has the same proof-theoretic strength as PKF, namely the strength of the system RA< ωω ramified analysis or a system of Tarskian ramified truth up to ωω. Thus any such axiomatization is much weaker than Feferman's axiomatization KF in classical logic, which is equivalent to the system RA<ε₀ of ramified analysis up to ε₀. (shrink)

This paper argues that most of the alleged straight solutions to the sceptical paradox which Kripke ascribed to Wittgenstein can be regarded as the first horn of a dilemma whose second horn is the paradox itself. The dilemma is proved to be a by‐product of a foundationalist assumption on the notion of justification, as applied to linguistic behaviour. It is maintained that the assumption is unnecessary and that the dilemma is therefore spurious. To this end, an alternative conception (...) of the justification of linguistic behaviour is outlined, a conception that vindicates some of the insights behind Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical solution of the paradox. This alternative conception is defended against two objections (both familiar from McDowell's works): (1) that it would imply that for the linguistic community there is no authority, no standard to meet and, therefore, no possibility of error and (2) that it would lead to a kind of idealism. (shrink)

I consider Lewis’ appeal to naturalness to solve Kripke ’s rule - following paradox. I then present a different interpretation of this paradox and offer reasons for thinking that this is what Kripke had in mind. I argue that Lewis’ proposal cannot provide a solution to this version of paradox.

Skeptics try to persuade us of our ignorance with arguments like the following: 1. I don’t know that I am not a handless brain-in-a-vat [BIV]. 2. If I don’t know that I am not a handless BIV, then I don’t know that I have hands. Therefore, 3. I don’t know that I have hands. The BIV argument is valid, its premises are intuitively compelling, and yet, its conclusion strikes us as absurd. Something has to go, but what? Contextualists contend that (...) an adequate solution to the skeptical problem must: (i) retain epistemic closure, (ii) explain the intuitive force of skeptical arguments by explaining why their premises initially seem so compelling, and (iii) account for the truth of our commonsense judgment that we do possess lots of ordinary knowledge. Contextualists maintain that the key to such a solution is recognizing that the semantic standards for ‘knows’ vary from context to context such that in skeptical contexts the skeptic’s premises are true and so is her conclusion; but in ordinary contexts, her conclusion is false and so is her first premise. Despite its initial attractiveness, the contextualist solution comes at a significant cost, for contextualism has many counterintuitive results. After presenting the contextualist solution, I identify a number of these costs. I then offer a noncontextualist solution that meets the adequacy constraint identified above, while avoiding the costs associated with contextualism. Hence, one of the principal reasons offered for adopting a contextualist theory of knowledge–its supposedly unique ability to adequately resolve the skeptical problem – is undermined. (shrink)

In his 1982 book Wittgenstein On Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke maintains that Wittgenstein´s rule following considerations land us with a skeptical argument about meaning. This essay contains a short exposition of Kripke´s argument. In addition, I hold, both on textual grounds and by an appeal to some select secondary literature, that Wittgenstein offered no such skeptical argument in the Philosophical Investigations . Although Wittgenstein certainly repudiates a view of meaning based on temporally located mental states, it (...) does not follow that there can be no meaning-grounding facts of other sorts. Although it is true that mental states, viewed atomistically, offer no sure foundation for meaning, I argue that it need not follow, pace Kripke, that no facts about an individual´s past mental life can ever make it clear that he meant ‘plus’ rather than ‘quus’ while performing any addition. For the individual´s past mental life is indeed relevant to meaning when considered in its unfolding in time. The essay further contains explorations on the very nature of the practice of following a rule and ends with a discussion of the solitary rule follower. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to consider whether or not Kripke’s ‘Wittgensteinian’ invocation of “assertibility conditions” and “the community” is a skeptical solution. In other words, this paper relates Kripke’s famous and major book, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, to the key background text for his work—the corpus that forms the backdrop even to his most unusual reading of Wittgenstein: Hume’s works. Through questions of influence and of Kripke’s use of particular terms, the analysis is largely directed (...) toward answering the following question: In what sense could Kripkenstein’s skeptical solution be a solution to rule- or meaning-skeptical doubts? (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to consider whether or not Kripke’s ‘Wittgensteinian’ invocation of “assertibility conditions” and “the community” is a skeptical solution. In other words, this paper relates Kripke’s famous and major book, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, to the key background text for his work—the corpus that forms the backdrop even to his most unusual reading of Wittgenstein: Hume’s works. Through questions of influence and of Kripke’s use of particular terms, the analysis is largely directed (...) toward answering the following question: In what sense could Kripkenstein’s skeptical solution be a solution to rule- or meaning-skeptical doubts? (shrink)

am going to discuss some issues inspired by a well-known paper ofKeith Donnellan, "Reference and Definite Descriptions,”2 but the interest—to me—of the contrast mentioned in my title goes beyond Donnellan's paper: I think it is of considerable constructive as well as critical importance to the philosophy oflanguage. These applications, however, and even everything I might want to say relative to Donnellan’s paper, cannot be discussed in full here because of problems of length. Moreover, although I have a considerable interest in (...) the substantive issues raised by Donnellan’s paper, and by related literature, my own conclusions will be methodological, not substantive. I can put the matter this way: Donnellan’s paper claims to give decisive objections both to Russell’s theory of definite descriptions (taken as a theory about English) and to Strawson’s. My concem is not primarily with the question; is Donnellan right, or is Russell (or Strawson)? Rather, it is with the question: do the considerations in Donneilarfs paper refute Russell’s theory (or Strawson’s)? For definiteness, I will concentrate on Donnellan versus Russell, leaving Strawson aside. And about this issue I will draw a definite conclusion, one which I think will illuminate a few methodological maxims about language. Namely, I will conclude that the considerations in Donnellan’s paper, by themselves, do not refute Russell’s theory. Any conclusions about Russell’s views per se, or Donnellan’s, must be tentative, IfI were to be asked for a tentative stab about Russell, I would say that although his theory does a far better job of handling ordinary discourse than many have thought, and although many popular arguments against it are inconclusive, probably it ultimately fails. The considerations I have in mind have to do with the existence of “improper” definite descriptions, such as “the table," where uniquely specifying conditions are not contained in the description itself.. (shrink)

In his 1982 book Wittgenstein On Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke maintains that Wittgenstein´s rule following considerations land us with a skeptical argument about meaning. This essay contains a short exposition of Kripke´s argument. In addition, I hold, both on textual grounds and by an appeal to some select secondary literature, that Wittgenstein offered no such skeptical argument in the Philosophical Investigations . Although Wittgenstein certainly repudiates a view of meaning based on temporally located mental states, it (...) does not follow that there can be no meaning-grounding facts of other sorts. Although it is true that mental states, viewed atomistically, offer no sure foundation for meaning, I argue that it need not follow, pace Kripke, that no facts about an individual´s past mental life can ever make it clear that he meant ‘plus’ rather than ‘quus’ while performing any addition. For the individual´s past mental life is indeed relevant to meaning when considered in its unfolding in time. The essay further contains explorations on the very nature of the practice of following a rule and ends with a discussion of the solitary rule follower. (shrink)

There is an epistemological skepticism that I might be dreaming now, or I might be a brain in a vat (BIV). There is also a demonstration that derives the skeptical conclusion about knowledge of the external world from the premise C1, i.e., I do not know “I am not dreaming (not a BIV) now.” Pessimistic critics (e.g., F. Strawson, B. Stroud) consider that the refutation of C1 is impossible, whereas others have attempted the direct refutation of C1 (e.g., G. (...) E. Moore, H. Putnam, C. Wright), and some (e.g., F. Dretske, R. Nozick) have attempted to refute the closure principle of knowledge used in the demonstration while permitting the validity of C1. Another scholar, M. Williams, maintains that the skeptical demonstration is true only if we presuppose the epistemological premise that we choose to accept or reject at will. It seems that most critics tend to adopt a strategy that allows them to effectively avoid the skeptical consequence, thereby conceding the validity of C1. However, it is difficult to say whether their attempts succeeded, and in my opinion, they are indeed unsuccessful. This is because their concession to Descartes’ argument is insufficient. Their lack of success could also stem from the incompletion of Descartes’ own methodological doubt. The somewhat paradoxical‐sounding aim of this thesis is to show that the skeptical paradox about knowledge can be dissolved only if the Cartesian skepticism is extended far beyond the endpoint of his attempt. The argument of this thesis is based on the important arguments of Wittgenstein's On Certainty （OC）. (shrink)

Kripke’s Wittgenstein is standardly understood as a non-factualist about meaning ascription. Non-factualism about meaning ascription is the idea that sentences like “Joe means addition by ‘plus’” are not used to state facts about the world. Byrne and Kusch have argued that Kripke’s Wittgenstein is not a non-factualist about meaning ascription. They are aware that their interpretation is non-standard, but cite arguments from Boghossian and Wright to support their view. Boghossian argues that non-factualism about meaning ascription is incompatible with a deflationary (...) theory of truth. Wright argues that non-factualism about meaning ascription is incoherent. To support the standard interpretation, I’ll respond to each argument in turn. To the degree that my responses are successful, Byrne and Kusch have an unmotivated interpretation of Kripke’s Wittgenstein. Wilson provides a factualist interpretation that is not based on Boghossian and Wright’s arguments. Miller argues for a non-factualist interpretation against Wilson, but I’ll show that Miller’s interpretation faces a dilemma. Miller’s argument cannot be maintained if a coherent interpretation of the skeptical solution is to be provided. I’ll show how this dilemma can be avoided and provide an independent argument against Wilson so that a non-factualist interpretation of the skeptical solution can be maintained. (shrink)