Online research in philosophy

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.

Paul Hoffman (in “Kripke on Private Language”, Philosophical Studies 47, 1985, 23-28) argues that Kripke’s Wittgenstein fails in his solution to his own sceptical paradox. I argue that Hoffman fails to see the importance for Kripke’s Wittgenstein of the distinction between agreement in fact and judged agreement. Hoffman is right that no solution to the sceptical paradox can be based on agreement in fact, but the solution of Kripke’s Wittgenstein depends upon judged agreement. An interpretation is given: by ‘judged agreement’ Kripke’s Wittgenstein does not mean understanding oneself to judge agreement but having a feeling of agreement. On this interpretation Hoffman’s argument fails.

_Private Language_ is that it almost universally sees KW as offering, in his sceptical solution, an account of meaning attributions (i.e., statements of the form, "X means such-and-so by 's'"; hereafter, MAs) which takes their legitimate attribution to be a function of something other than facts or truth conditions. KW is almost universally read as having rejected any account of meaning attributions which takes them to be stating facts or corresponding to facts. In a word, KW is understood as offering a nonfactualist account of MAs. And given that KW's sceptical challenge to the possibility of meaning rests on his negative assertions that there are no meaning facts, and that KW offers a sceptical solution to the sceptic's claim that meaning is impossible, i.e., a solution that by definition "begins . . . by conceding that the sceptic's negative assertions are unanswerable" (K, p. 66), it seems impossible that there would be any doubts about the accuracy of the "almost universal" reading of KW as a nonfactualist.

Saul Kripke has raised a powerful skeptical objection to an account of meaning based on dispositions. He argues that attempts to explain meaning on the basis of dispositions, no matter how sophisticated, are bound to fail because meaning is normative, whereas dispositions are descriptive. I provide a clear account of the normativity objection, which has often been seen as obscure or been conflated with other objections Kripke raises. I offer a straight solution to the skeptical paradox based on a dispositional approach to meaning that survives the normativity objection. A key aspect of my approach is the assimilation of meaning to secondary properties such as color. I compare meaning attributions with reductive explanations of high-level phenomena in other areas, and argue that there are no differences in kind between the two. Consequently, skepticism about meaning is not better warranted than a similar skepticism about reductive explanations of other high-level phenomena.

This article argues, first, that the fundamental structure of the skeptical argument in Kripke's book on Wittgenstein has been seriously misunderstood by recent commentators. Although it focuses particularly on recent commentary by John McDowell, it emphasizes that the basic misunderstandings are widely shared by other commentators. In particular, it argues that, properly construed, Kripke offers a fully coherent reading of PI #201 and related passages. This is commonly denied, and given as a reason for rejecting Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein's text. Second, it is pretty universally accepted that Kripke's Wittgenstein is a `non-factualist' about ascriptions of meaning. The article argues that, when Kripke's discussion is rightly understood and the content of `non-factualism' is clarified, there is an important sense in which the skeptical solution is not committed to non-factualism.

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.

In his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke develops a skeptical argument against the possibility of meaning. [...] My aim in this paper is to propose a solution to the skeptical puzzle which offers a middle way between these two approaches. This solution attempts to do justice to the way in which meaning and rule-following resemble dispositional states, while still accommodating what Kripke calls the normativity of meaning. While my approach is partly reductionist, in that it aims to reduce facts about meaning to facts that are in a sense more primitive, it does not attempt a reduction of meaning to facts conceived purely naturalistically. “Bedrock” on this approach is located below the level of facts about meaning, but as we shall see it is still irreducibly normative, and hence it remains above the level of mere behavioural responses and their psychological concomitants. My solution centers on a notion which I call “primitive normativity” and which I take to be Kantian in origin.