Jaegwon Kim has recently[1] argued that a solution to the exclusion argument against the intelligibility of mental causation is to found if mental properties can be shown to be reducible to physical properties.

This book provides a defence of epistemological relativism against its most powerful opponents.

Experiments may contribute to understanding the basic processes of cultural evolution. We drew features from previous laboratory research with small groups in which traditions arose during several generations. Groups of four participants chose by consensus between solving anagrams printed on red cards and on blue cards. Payoffs for the choices differed. After 12 min, the participant who had been in the experiment the longest was removed and replaced with a naı¨ve person. These replacements, each of which marked the end of (...) a generation, continued for 10 – 15 generations, at which time the day’s session ended. Time-out duration, which determined whether the group earned more by choosing red or blue, and which was fixed for a day’s session, was varied across three conditions to equal 1, 2, or 3 min. The groups developed choice traditions that tended toward maximizing earnings. The stronger the dependence between choice and earnings, the stronger was the tradition. Once a choice tradition evolved, groups passed it on by instructing newcomers, using some combination of accurate information, mythology, and coercion. Among verbal traditions, frequency of mythology varied directly with strength of the choice tradition. These methods may be applied to a variety of research questions. D 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This article offers a critique of Karsten Stueber’s account of rule following as presented in his article "How to Think about Rules and Rule Following." The task Stueber sets himself is of defending the idea that human practices are bound and guided by rules (both causally and normatively) while avoiding the discredited "cognitive model of rule following." This article argues that Stueber’s proposal is unconvincing because it falls foul of the very problems it sets out to avoid. Stueber’s defense of (...) rules as normative guides is shown to be either circular or burdened with an infinite regress, while his account of rules as causal determinants of our actions is shown to lapse back into the "cognitive model" that he explicitly rejects. Key Words: rules • rule following • norms • causes • social science. (shrink)

This paper discusses the prospects of a dispositional solution to the Kripke-Wittgenstein rule-following puzzle. Recent attempts to repair dispositional approaches to this puzzle have appealed to the ideas of finks and antidotes - interfering dispositions and conditions - to explain why the rule-following disposition is not always manifested. We argue that this approach fails: agents cannot be supposed to have straightforward dispositions to follow a rule which are in some fashion masked by other, contrary dispositions of the agent, because in (...) all cases, at least some of the interfering dispositions are both relatively permanent and intrinsic to the agent. The presence of these instrinsic and relatively permanent states renders the ascription of a rule-following disposition to the agent false. (shrink)

David Bloor's challenging new evaluation of Wittgenstein's account of rules and rule-following brings together the rare combination of philosophical and sociological viewpoints. Wittgenstein enigmatically claimed that the way we follow rules is an "institution" without ever explaining what he meant by this term. Wittgenstein's contribution to the debate has since been subject to sharply opposed interpretations by "collectivist" and "individualist" readings by philosophers; in the light of this controversy, Bloor argues convincingly for a collectivist, sociological understanding of Wittgenstein's later work. (...) Accessible and simply written, this book provides the first consistent sociological reading of Wittgenstein's work for many years. (shrink)

Content and Justification presents a series of essays by Paul Boghossian on the theory of content and on its relation to the phenomenon of a priori knowledge. -/- Part one comprises essays on the nature of rule-following and its relation to the problem of mental content; on the intelligibility of eliminativist views of the mental; on the prospects for a naturalistic reduction of mental content; and on the currently influential view that meaning is a normative notion. -/- Part two includes (...) three widely discussed papers on the phenomenon of self-knowledge and its compatibility with externalist conceptions of mental content. -/- Part three concerns the classical but ill-understood phenomenon of knowledge that is based upon knowledge of meaning or conceptual competence. -/- Finally, part four turns its attention from general issues about mental content to an account of a specific class of mental contents. It contains two widely discussed papers on the nature of colour concepts, and colour properties. (shrink)

I. Recent years have witnessed a great resurgence of interest in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, especially with those passages roughly, Philosophical Investigations p)I 38 — 242 and Remarks on the Foundations of mathematics, section VI that are concerned with the topic of rules. Much of the credit for all this excitement, unparalleled since the heyday of Wittgenstein scholarship in the early IIJ6os, must go to Saul Kripke's I4rittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It is easy to explain why. (...) To begin with, the dialectic Kripke uncovered from Wittgenstein's.. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the most prominent and familiar features of Wittgenstein’s rule following considerations generate a powerful argument for the thesis that most of our concepts are innate, an argument that echoes a Chomskyan poverty of the stimulus argument. This argument has a significance over and above what it tells us about Wittgenstein’s implicit commitments. For, it puts considerable pressure on widely held contemporary views of concept learning, such as the view that we learn concepts by constructing (...) prototypes. This should lead us to abandon our general default hostility to concept nativism and be much more sceptical of claims made on behalf of learning theories. (shrink)

The case for anti-realism in the theory of meaning, as presented by Dummen and Wright, 1 is only partly convincing. There is, I shall suggest, a crucial lacuna in the argument, that can only be filled by the later Wittgenstein's following-a-rule considerations. So it is the latter that provides the strongest argument for the rejection of semantic realism.
By 'realism', throughout, I should be taken as referring to any conception of meaning that leaves open the possibility that a sentence may have (...) a determinate truth-value although we are incapable - either in practice or in principle - of discovering what truth-value it has ('the possibility of veritication-transcendence' for short). 2 I shall say nothing further about what an anti-realist semantics might look like, nor about the possible consequences for logic, epistemology and metaphysics, beyond the fact that it must involve the rejection of any such conception of meaning. (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 look at the problem of rule-following—notably discussed by Kripke (Wittgenstein on rules and private language, 1982 ) and Wittgenstein (Philosophical investigations, 1953 )—from the perspective of the study of generics. Generics are sentences that express generalizations that tolerate exceptions. I first suggest that meaning ascriptions be viewed as habitual sentences, which are a sub-set of generics. I then seek a proper semantic analysis for habitually construed meaning sentences. The quantificational approach is rejected, due (...) to its persistent difficulties. Instead, a cognitive approach is adopted, where psychological considerations of meaning attributors play a crucial role. This account is then compared with the picture of meaning offered by Kripke and Wittgenstein, respectively. I show how this fresh way of conceiving of meaning sentences respects some of their insights while avoiding some of the drawbacks, and serves to improve the framework in which the current debate and inquiry about rule-following are conducted. (shrink)

Ideas on meaning, rules and mathematical proofs abound in Wittgenstein’s writings. The undeniable fact that they are present together, sometimes intertwined in the same passage of Philosophical Investigations or Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, does not show, however, that the connection between these ideas is necessary or inextricable. The possibility remains, and ought to be checked, that they can be plausibly and consistently separated. I am going to examine two views detectable in Wittgenstein’s works: one about proofs, the other (...) about meaning and rules. The first is the denial of the objectivity of proof. The second is a conception of meaning stemming from the rule-following considerations. I shall argue that, though Wittgenstein seems to conjoin the two views, they can be, and should be, separated1. (shrink)

The New Wittgenstein offers a major reevaluation of Wittgenstein's thinking. This stellar collection of original essays by the "third wave" of Wittgenstein critics presents a significantly different portrait of the philosopher, not as a proponent of metaphysical theories but as an advocate of philosophy as therapy--a means of helping us grasp the essence of thought and language by attending to our everyday forms of expression. Boldly criticizing standard interpretations and offering unorthodox perspectives, these controversial essays will change the way we (...) look at Wittgenstein's entire body of work. Contributors: Stanley Cavell, David Cerbone, James Conant, Alice Crary, Cora Diamond, David Finkelstein, Juliette Floyd, P.M.S. Hacker, John McDowell, Hilary Putnam, Rupert Read, Martin Stone, Edward Witherspoon. (shrink)

Non-cognitivists claim that thick concepts can be disentangled into distinct descriptive and evaluative components and that since thick concepts have descriptive shape they can be mastered independently of evaluation. In Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following, John McDowell uses Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations to show that such a non-cognitivist view is untenable. In this paper I do several things. I describe the non-cognitivist position in its various forms and explain its driving motivations. I then explain McDowell’s argument against non-cognitivism and the Wittgensteinian considerations upon (...) which it relies, because this has been sufficiently misunderstood by critics and rarely articulated by commentators. After clarifying McDowell’s argument against non-cognitivism, I extend the analysis to show that commentators of McDowell have failed to appreciate his argument and that critical responses have been weak. I argue against three challenges posed to McDowell, and show that the case of thick concepts should lead us to reject non-cognitivism. (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)

I criticize Yamada's account of rule-following. Yamada's conditions are not necessary. And he misses the deepest level of the rule-following considerations: how meaning rules come about.

Through detailed and trenchant criticism of standard interpretations of some of the key arguments in analytical philosophy over the last sixty years, this book ...

Rule-following has become a focus of philosophical interest since Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. The case which Kripke makes is an argument against reducing the description of the beliefs of a person to a description in naturalistic terms. However, it has also implications for the metaphysics of mind. I claim that, contrary to what one might except, Kripke’s case contains an argument in favour of materialism in ontology.

Pierre Bourdieu has developed a philosophy of social science, grounded in the phenomenological tradition, which treats knowledge as a practical ability embodied in skilful behaviour, rather than an intellectual capacity for the representation and manipulation of propositional knowledge. He invokes Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following as one way of explicating the idea that knowledge is a skill. Bourdieu’s conception of tacit knowledge is a dispositional one, adopted to avoid a perceived dilemma for methodological individualism. That dilemma requires either the explanation of (...) regularities in social behaviour as the result of the tacit representation of procedural rules (‘legalism’) or the self-conscious representation of behavioural goals (‘voluntarism’) by individuals. After explaining the apparent dilemma, I then argue that Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule following actually undermine, rather than support, a dispositional solution. Nonetheless, the philosophy of social science can survive without a dispositional account of knowledge. Such a social science needs, firstly, to embrace one horn of the dilemma, voluntarism, provided that the relevant regularities can be explained as unintended consequences of agents’ self-represented intentions. Secondly, such a social science should treat theorists’ interpretations as unifying generalizations, not hypotheses about the acquisition of tacit knowledge. Finally, where appeal to cognitive psychology can distinguish otherwise equivalent theories in social science, social science should incorporate the data of cognitive psychology concerning tacit mental processes. (shrink)

Anandi Hattiangadi packs a lot of argument into this lucid, well-informed and lively examination of the meaning scepticism which Kripke ascribes to Wittgenstein. Her verdict on the success of the sceptical considerations is mixed. She concludes that they are sufficient to rule out all accounts of meaning and mental content proposed so far. But she believes that they fail to constitute, as Kripke supposed they did, a fully general argument against the possibility of meaning or content. Even though we are (...) not now in a position to specify facts in which meaning consists, the view that there are such facts, and more specifically that they satisfy the intuitive conception of meaning which she labels ‘semantic realism’, remains a live option. Moreover, given.. (shrink)

This paper employs some outcomes (for the most part due to David Lewis) of the contemporary debate on the metaphysics of dispositions to evaluate those dispositional analyses of meaning that make use of the concept of a disposition in ideal conditions. The first section of the paper explains why one may find appealing the notion of an ideal-condition dispositional analysis of meaning and argues that Saul Kripke’s well-known argument against such analyses is wanting. The second section focuses on Lewis’ work (...) in the metaphysics of dispositions in order to call attention to some intuitions about the nature of dispositions that we all seem to share. In particular, I stress the role of what I call ‘Actuality Constraint’. The third section of the paper maintains that the Actuality Constraint can be used to show that the dispositions with which ideal-condition dispositional analyses identify my meaning addition by ‘+’ do not exist (in so doing, I develop a suggestion put forward by Paul Boghossian). This immediately implies that ideal-condition dispositional analyses of meaning cannot work. The last section discusses a possible objection to my argument. The point of the objection is that the argument depends on an illicit assumption. I show (1) that, in fact, the assumption in question is far from illicit and (2) that even without this assumption it is possible to argue that the dispositions with which ideal-condition dispositional analyses identify my meaning addition by ‘+’ do not exist. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper argues that most of the alleged straight solutions to the sceptical paradox which Kripke (1982) 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)

This is a volume of specially commissioned essays of analytical philosophy, on topics of current interest in ethics and the philosophy of logic and language. Among the topics discussed are the making of wicked promises, G. E. Moore's early ethical views, as well as indexicals, tense, indeterminism, conventionalism in mathematics, and identity and necessity. The essays are all by former students of Casimir Lewy, until recently Reader in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and an exponent of a particularly thoroughgoing (...) form of philosophical analysis. Together, they represent some of the best work in these areas at present, and express what may be described as a characteristic 'Cambridge' voice. (shrink)

Written by an international assembly of leading philosophers, this volume provides a survey of contemporary philosophy of language.

In Oughts and Thoughts, Anandi Hattiangadi provides an innovative response to the argument for meaning skepticism set out by Saul Kripke in Wittgenstein on ...

In Making it Explicit, Brandom aims to articulate an account of conceptual content that accommodates its normativity--a requirement on theories of content that Brandom traces to Wittgenstein's rule following considerations. It is widely held that the normativity requirement cannot be met, or at least not with ease, because theories of content face an intractable dilemma. Brandom proposes to evade the dilemma by adopting a middle road--one that uses normative vocabulary, but treats norms as implicit in practices. I argue that this (...) proposal fails to evade the dilemma, as Brandom himself understands it. Despite his use of normative vocabulary, Brandom's theory fares no better than the reductionist theories he criticises. I consider some responses that Brandom might make to my charges, and finally conclude that his proposal founders on his own criteria. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to Frank Hindriks.

The aim of this paper is to discover whether or not a solitary individual, a human being isolated from birth, could become a rule-follower. The argumentation against this possibility rests on the claim that such an isolate could not become aware of a normative standard, with which her actions could agree or disagree. As a consequence, theorists impressed by this argumentation adopt a view on which the normativity of rules arises from corrective practices in which agents engage in a community. (...) However, it has been suggested that an isolated individual could engage in such a practice by herself. Three prospective examples of such cases are considered, and the possibility of solitary rule-following is vindicated. Furthermore, the nature of the goals at which rule-following practices generally aim is clarified. (shrink)

. In his work on language John Searle favors an Austinian approach that emphasizes the speech act as the basic unit of meaning and communication, and which sees speaking a language as engaging in a rule-governed form of behavior. He couples this with a strident opposition to cognitivist approaches that posit unconscious rule following as the causal basis of linguistic competence. In place of unconscious rule following Searle posits what he calls the Background, comprised of nonintentional (nonrepresentational) mental phenomena. I (...) argue that these two aspects of his philosophy of language cannot be reconciled. In order to preserve his view of language as a rule-governed activity, he must embrace the cognitivist idea of unconscious rule following. Finally, I try to show how such an accommodation would be far less traumatic to Searle’s philosophical system than it might otherwise seem. (shrink)

A modest solution to the problem(s) of rule-following is defended against Kripkensteinian scepticism about meaning. Even though parts of it generalise to other concepts, the theory as a whole applies to response-dependent concepts only. It is argued that the finiteness problem is not nearly as pressing for such concepts as it may be for some other kinds of concepts. Furthermore, the modest theory uses a notion of justification as sensitivity to countervailing conditions in order to solve the justification problem. Finally, (...) in order to solve the normativity problem, it relies on substantial specifications of normal conditions such as those that have been proposed by Crispin Wright and Mark Johnston, rather than on Philip Pettit's functionalist specification. This theory is modest in that it does not meet the demands of Kripke's sceptic in full. Arguments are provided as to why this is not needed. (shrink)

In 'General Propositions and Causality' Ramsey rejects his earlier view that universal generalizations are infinite conjunctions, arguing that they are not genuine propositions at all. We argue that his new position is unstable. The issues about infinity that lead Ramsey to the new view are essentially those underlying Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations. If they show that generalizations are not genuine propositions, they show that there are no genuine propositions. The connection raises interesting historical questions about the direction of influence between Ramsey (...) and Wittgenstein, the origin of the rule-following argument, and the influence of writers such as Brouwer. (shrink)

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY: COMMUNAL AGREEMENT AND OBJECTIVITY Christopher M. Leich and Steven H. Holtzman In this essay we shall take up certain questions raised ...

Semantic holists view what one's terms mean as function of all of one's usage. Holists will thus be coherentists about semantic justification: showing that one's usage of a term is semantically justified involves showing how it coheres with the rest of one's usage. Semantic atomists, by contrast, understand semantic justification in a foundationalist fashion. Saul Kripke has, on Wittgenstein's behalf, famously argued for a type of skepticism about meaning and semantic justification. However, Kripke's argument has bite only if one understands (...) semantic justification in foundationalist terms. Consequently, Kripke's arguments lead not to a type of skepticism about meaning, but rather to the conclusion that one should be a coherentist about semantic justification, and thus a holist about semantic facts. (shrink)

According to a standard criticism, Robert Brandom's “normative pragmatics”, i.e. his attempt to explain normative statuses in terms of practical attitudes, faces a dilemma. If practical attitudes and their interactions are specified in purely non-normative terms, then they underdetermine normative statuses; but if normative terms are allowed into the account, then the account becomes viciously circular. This paper argues that there is no dilemma, because the feared circularity is not vicious. While normative claims do exhibit their respective authors' practical attitudes (...) and thereby contribute towards establishing the normative statuses they are about, this circularity is not a mark of Brandom's explanatory strategy but a feature of social practice of which we theorists partake. (shrink)

I here discuss Hegel's rule-following considerations as they are found in the first four chapters of his Phenomenology of Spirit. I begin by outlining a number of key premises in Hegel's argument that he adopts fairly straightforwardly from Kant's Transcendental Deduction. The most important of these is that the correctness or incorrectness of one's application of a rule must be recognizable as such to the rule-follower. Supplementing Hegel's text as needed, I then argue that it is possible for an experiencing (...) subject to follow a rule only where there is a community of individuals whose agreement can provide a standard for the correctness and incorrectness of his use. I further argue that a community must consist of members that are compresent, and thus that a collection of time-slices of an individual will not serve this purpose. I conclude by raising a potential problem for Hegel's account of rule-following concerning the correctness and incorrectness of the judgments of a community, and pointing to a possible line of response to this problem. (shrink)

JEL Classification: B41, B53, B31, B2, P48, A12 Abstract: Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox has important implications for two aspects of Austrian theory. First, it makes it possible to reconcile the Misesian, Rothbardian, and hermeneutical approaches to methodology; second, it provides a way of defending a stateless legal order against the charge that such an order lacks, yet needs, a final arbiter.

Moral particularists have seen Wittgenstein as a close ally. One of the main reasons for this is that particularists such as Jonathan Dancy and John McDowell have argued that Wittgenstein's so-called "rule-following considerations" (RFCs) provide support for their skepticism about the existence and/or role of rules and principles in ethics. In this paper, I show that while Wittgenstein's RFCs challenge the notion that competence with language, i.e., the ability to apply concepts properly, is like mechanically following a rule, he does (...) not reject the idea that there are rules that govern proper use of language. I then argue that while the RFCs may, at best, support a weak form of particularism that denies that moral competence is dependent on an explicit grasp of rules, they do not support a stronger version of particularism that denies that there are any true rules or principles in ethics. (shrink)

This remarkable collection explores the legacy of Wittgenstein's work in contemporary American philosophy. The contributors (including several celebrated philosophers) take a variety of approaches to Wittgenstein; they discuss such topics as rule-following, realism about mathematics, the method of the Tractatus, the relation between style and content in Wittgenstein, and his distinction between sense and nonsense. Wittgenstein also is discussed in relation to subsequent philosophers such as Quine and Kripke.

John McDowell has suggested recently that there is a route from his favoured solution to Kripke's Wittgenstein's "sceptical paradox" about rule-following to a particular form of cognitive externalism. In this paper, I argue that this is not the case: even granting McDowell his solution to the rule-following paradox, his preferred version of cognitive externalism does not follow.