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Wittgenstein famously remarks that ‘the meaning of a word is its use’ (PI §43). Whether or not one views this as gesturing at a ‘theory’ of meaning, or instead as aiming primarily at dissuading us from certain misconceptions of language that are a source of puzzlement, it is clear that Wittgenstein held that for certain purposes the meaning of an expression could profitably be characterised as its use. Throughout his later writings, however, Wittgenstein’s appeal to the notion of use pulls in two directions. In several places, Wittgenstein seems to connect the notion of an expression’s meaning with that of use in the sense of usage or practice. More specifically, he suggests that for an expression to possess meaning is for there to be a practice of employing it according to certain rules. ‘That’, he tells us, ‘is why there exists a correspondence between the concepts “rule” and “meaning”’ (OC §62; cf. PG 68; PO 51; RFM VI §28; VW 103). Indeed, Wittgenstein goes so far as to say, ‘The rule-governed nature of our languages permeates our life’ (RC §303). Call the view that the meaning of an expression is determined by a general principle governing its use, rulism.

Oddity One : Kripke claims that Wittgenstein has invented "a new form of scepticism", one which inclines Kripke "to regard it as the most radical and original sceptical problem that philosophy has seen to date, one that only a highly unusual cast of mind could have produced" (K, p. 60). However, Kripke also claims that there are analogies (and sometimes the analogies look very much like identities) between Wittgenstein's sceptical argument and the work of at least three and maybe four other philosophers, viz., Quine, Goodman, Hume and Berkeley. Strange stuff indeed. The originality of Wittgenstein's work is especially difficult to see after Kripke claims that Wittgenstein presents a problem concerning the nexus between past . . . 'meanings' and present practice" (K, p. 62), and says that Hume is said to have questioned "the causal nexus whereby a past event necessitates a future one, and the inductive inferential nexus from the past to the future." (K, p. 62). Whither the originality? And the connection with Goodman's work with 'grue' is even closer than that between Kripke's Wittgenstein and Hume. Given that Kripke had read Goodman before "discovering" the rule-following paradox in Wittgenstein, one ought to be sceptical of Kripke's claim that Wittgenstein has invented a new form of scepticism. It would be much more accurate to say that Kripke has strapped Wittgenstein with a hybrid scepticism drawn from Hume and Goodman.

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.

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..

Wittgenstein's relationship to skepticism has always been complex. It has even been argued in recent years that Wittgenstein can be best understood as an inheritor of scepticism. Wittgenstein and Scepticism is the first collection to explore this relationship and review our understanding of scepticism. Boasting a stellar collection of contributors, the essays in this volume address the nature of skepticism and Wittgenstein's approach in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language and epistemology. Wittgenstein and Scepticism is a fascinating exploration of one of the most important philosophers.

David Bloor has claimed that Wittgenstein is best read as offering the beginnings of a sociological theory of knowledge, despite Wittgenstein's reluctance to view his work this way. This leads him to dismiss Wittgenstein's many self?characterizations as mere ?prejudice?. In doing so, however, Bloor misses the import of Wittgenstein's work as a ?grammatical investigation?. The problems inherent in Bloor's interpretative approach can be discerned in his attitude toward Wittgenstein's use of imaginary scenarios: he demands that they be replaced by real natural history and real ethnography. This demand is misplaced. The very self?characterizations Bloor dismisses show how imaginary scenarios have a place in his philosophical project simply by being imagined. Three examples are examined and presented in such a way as to make Bloor's demand for replacement increasingly more difficult to comprehend: while in the first case, the demand seems simply beside the point, in the second and third cases, it becomes difficult to say just what would count as replacements. Wittgenstein's imaginary scenarios are thus best read not as suggestions for further empirical research, but as devices to aid in recovering the naturalness and familiarity of our concepts, which is precisely what one would expect from them as part of a grammatical investigation.

The paper explicates a version of dispositionalism and defends it against Kripke's objections (in his "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language") that 1) it leaves out the normative aspect of a rule, 2) it cannot account for the directness of the knowledge one has of what one meant, and 3) regarding rules for computable functions of numbers, a) there are numbers beyond one's capacity to consider and b) there are people who are disposed to make systematic mistakes in computing values of functions they understand perfectly well.