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Intentions and Intentional states How should we proceed? I have been talking about the Intention View, but, of course, everything I’ve been saying will apply to any Intentional View. So let me restate our problem in full generality exposing as many of our assumptions as possible. The claim is that the following five propositions form an inconsistent set. 1. Rule-following is possible. 2. Following a rule consists in acting on one’s acceptance (or internalization) of a rule. 3. Accepting a rule consists in an intentional state with general (prescriptive) content. 4. Acting under particular circumstances on an intentional state with general content involves some sort of deductive inference to what the content calls for under the circumstances. 5. Inference involves following a rule. If my argument is correct, then one of these claims has to go.26 The question is which one. Giving up (1) would give us rule-following skepticism. (2) seems to be the minimal content of saying that someone is following a rule. (3) is the Intentional View. (4) seems virtually platitudinous. For how could, say, a general conditional content of the form Whenever C, do A' serve as your reason for doing A, unless you inferred that doing A was called for from the belief that the circumstances are C? (I shall come back to this.) (5) seems analytic of the very idea of deductive inference (more on this below). When we review our options, the only plausible non-skeptical option seems to be to give up 3, the Intentional View. To rescue the possibility of rulefollowing, it seems, we must find a way of accepting a rule that does not consist in our having some intentional state in which that rule's requirements are explicitly represented. Wittgenstein can be read as having arrived at the same conclusion. The full passage from Investigations 219 reads as follows: "All the steps are really already taken," means: I no longer have any choice. The rule once stamped with a particular meaning, traces the lines along which it is to be followed through the whole of space.-But if something of this sort really were the case, how would it help? No; my description only made if it was understood symbolically.-I should have said: This is how it strikes me. When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly. The drift of the considerations I have been presenting seems to capture the intended point behind this passage. Even without assuming Naturalism as an a priori constraint on the acceptability of a solution to the rule-following problem, and without assuming that mental content itself must be engendered by rule-following, it would seem that we have shown that, in its most fundamental incarnation, rule-acceptance cannot consist in the formation of a propositional attitude in which the requirements of the rule are explicitly encoded. Such a picture would be one according to which rule-following is always fully sighted, always fully informed by some recognition of the requirements of the rule being followed. And the point that Wittgenstein seems to be making is that, in its most fundamental incarnation, not all rulefollowing can be like that-some rule-following must simply be blind. The argument I have presented supports this conclusion. Rule-Following without Intentionality: Dispositions The question is how rule-following could be blind. How can someone commit himself to a certain pattern in his thought or behavior without this consisting in the formation of some appropriate kind of intentional state? The only option that seems to be available to us is the one that Kripke considers at length, that we should somehow succeed in understanding what it is for someone to accept a given rule just by invoking his or her dispositions to conform to the rule. If we were able to do that, we could explain how it is possible to act on a rule without inference because the relation between a disposition and its exercise is, of course, non-inferential. Now, Kripke, as we know, gives an extended critique of the dispositional view. However, that critique has not generally been thought to be very effective; many writers have rejected it.27 So perhaps there is hope for rule-following after all, in the form of a dispositional account. My own view, by contrast with received opinion, is that Kripke's critique is extremely effective, although even I underestimated the force of what I now take to be its most telling strand. And so I think that it can't offer us any refuge after all, if we abandon the Intentional View. The core idea of a dispositional account is that what it is for someone to accept the rule Modus Ponens is, roughly, for him to be disposed, for any p and q, upon believing both p andif p, then q,’ to conclude q. Kripke pointed out that any such dispositional view runs into two problems. First, a person’s dispositions to apply a rule are bound to contain performance errors; so one can’t simply read off his dispositions which rule is at work. Second, the rule Modus Ponens is defined over an infinite number of pairs of propositions. However, a person’s dispositions are finite: it is not true that I have a disposition to answer q when asked what follows from any two propositions of the form p and if p, then q', no matter how large. To get around these problems, the dispositionalist would have to specify ideal conditions under which (a) a thinker would not be capable of any performance errors and (b) he would in fact be disposed to infer q from any two propositions of the form p andif p, then q.’ But it is very hard to see that there are conditions under which I would be metaphysically incapable of performance errors. And whatever one thinks about that, it’s certainly very hard to see that there are ideal conditions under which I would in fact be disposed to infer q from any two propositions of the form p and if p, then q,' no matter how long or complex. As Kripke says, for most propositions, it would be more correct to say that my disposition is to die before I am even able to grasp which propositions are at issue. Along with many other commentators, I used to underestimate the force of this point. The following response to it seemed compelling. A glass can have infinitary dispositions; so how come a human can't? Thus, a glass can be disposed to break when struck here, or when struck there; when struck at this angle or at that one, when struck at this location, or at that one. And so on. If a mere glass can have infinitary dispositions, why couldn't a human being?28 There is a difference between the two cases. In the case of the glass, the existence of the infinite number of inputs-the different places, angles and locations-just follows from the nature of the glass qua physical object. No idealization is required. But a capacity to grasp infinitely long propositions-the inputs in the rulefollowing case-does not follow from our nature as thinking beings, and certainly not from our nature as physical beings. In fact, it seems pretty clear that we do not have that capacity and could not have it, no matter how liberally we apply the notion of idealization. These, then, are Kripke's central arguments against a dispositional account of rule-following, and although it would take much more elaboration to completely nail these arguments down, I believe that such an elaboration can be given.29 But both before and after he gives those arguments, Kripke several times suggests that the whole exercise is pointless, that it should simply be obvious that the dispositional account is no good. Thus, he says: To a good extent this [dispositionall reply ought to appear to be misdirected, off target. For the skeptic created an air of puzzlement as to my justification for responding125′ rather than 5' to the addition problem ... he thinks my response is no better than a stab in the dark. Does the suggested reply advance matters? How does it justify my choice of125′ ? What it says is ” 125' is the response you are disposed to give..." Well and good, I know that125′ is the response I am disposed to give (I am actually giving it!) … How does any of this indicate that… 125' was an answer justified in terms of instructions I gave myself, rather than a mere jack-in-the-box unjustified response? This passage can seem puzzling and unconvincing when it is read, as Kripke seems to have intended it, as directed against dispositional accounts of mental content. After all, one of the most influential views of mental content nowadays is that expressions of mentalese get their meaning by virtue of their having a certain causal role in reasoning. Could it really be that this view is so obviously false that it is not worth discussing, as Kripke suggests? And is it really plausible that the facts by virtue of which my mentalese symbol+’ means what it does have to justify me when I use it one way rather than another? But if we see the passage as directed not at dispositional accounts of mental content but rather at dispositional accounts of personal-level rule-following, and if we substitute “rationalize” for “justify,” then its points seem correct. It should be puzzling that anyone was inclined to take a dispositional account of rule-following seriously. We can see why in two stages. First, and as I have been emphasizing, if I am following the rule Modus Ponens, then my following that rule explains and rationalizes my concluding q from p and if p, then q', (just as it would be true that, if I were following the rule of Affirming the Consequent, then my following that rule would explain and rationalize my inferring q from p andif q, then p’). Second, if I am following the rule Modus Ponens, then not only is my actually inferring q explained and rationalized by my accepting that rule, but so, too, is my being disposed to infer q. Suppose I consider a particular MP inference, find myself disposed to draw the conclusion, but, for whatever reason, fail to do so. That disposition to draw the conclusion would itself be explained and rationalized by my acceptance of the MP rule. However, it is, I take it, independently plausible that something can neither be explained by itself, nor rationalized by itself. So, following rule R and being disposed to conform to it cannot be the same thing. Here we see, once again, how Kripke’s Meaning Assumption gets in the way of his argument: a good point about rule-following comes out looking false when it is extended to mental content. Is Going Sub-Personal the Solution? I emphasized from the very beginning that the notion of rule-following that appears to underwrite the rule-following picture of rational belief is a personallevel notion. I reason about what to believe, not a part of my brain. As a result, it is the personal-level notion with which I have been most concerned in this paper. Someone may therefore be tempted to think that perhaps the moral of the preceding discussion is precisely that it can’t be the personal-level notion that’s at work in the rule-following picture, that the solution to the difficulties we have been outlining is to go sub-personal. This suggestion resonates with what has been a robust tendency in the literature on rulefollowing. There are many discussions of the Intentional View that accuse it of being `overly intellectualized’ and which recommend substituting a sub-personal notion in its place.30 It isn’t very often made clear exactly what that is supposed to amount to. The preceding discussion should help us see that this is not a very useful suggestion. In the present context, going sub-personal presumably means identifying rule-acceptance or internalization not with some person-level state, such as an intention, but with some sub-personal state. Such a state will either be an intentional state or some non-intentional state. Let us say that it is some intentional state in which the rule’s requirements are explicitly represented. Then, once again, it would appear that some inference (now, sub-personal) will be required to figure out what the rule calls for under the circumstances. And at this point the regress problem will recur. (That is what I meant by saying earlier that the structure of the regress problem seems to be indifferent as to whether the states of rule-acceptance are personal or sub-personal.) On the other hand, we could try identifying rule-internalization with some non-intentional state. Indeed, even if the state of rule-internalization is initially identified with a sub-personal intentional state, it will ultimately, I take it, have to be identified with some sort of non-intentional state. But then what we would have on our hands would be some version or other of a dispositional view (with the dispositions now understood sub-personally). And although we would no longer face the rationalization problem-because, presumably, sub-personal mechanisms are not called upon to rationalize their outputs-we would still face the enormous problems posed by the error and finitude objections. In consequence, I don’t believe that going sub-personal offers a satisfying solution to the problems for the notion of rule-following that we have been describing.3′ III. CONCLUSION We think of our reasoning as governed by rules. We worry about whether our rules are the right ones, the ones that really deliver justified belief. We worry about how we might establish that they are the right ones; and about whether there can be a fact of the matter about that. This entire way of looking at matters, though, depends on our being able to vindicate its fundamental assumption, that our reasoning is governed by rules. If the preceding arguments are correct, there is a real problem about this. First, it is hard to give a satisfactory answer to the question: What is a rule such that following it is necessary for rational belief? Second, it is hard to explain how rule-following is so much as possible, and this difficulty arises even without our assuming either that rule-following or intentionality needs to be given a naturalistic reduction. What are we to do? Perhaps we should embrace rule-skepticism, denying that our reasoning is under the influence of general rules? The trouble is that this seems not only false about reasoning in general, but also unintelligible in connection with deductive inference. It is of the essence of deductive inference that the reasons I have for moving from certain premises to certain conclusions are general ones. So what we are contemplating, when we contemplate giving up on the rulefollowing picture of deductive inference, is not so much giving up on a rulefollowing construal of deductive inference as giving up on deductive inference itself. But that is surely not stable a resting point-didn’t we arrive at the present conclusion through the application of several instances of deductive inference? The only other option with respect to our second problem (I don’t at the moment know what to say about the first) is to try taking the notion of following-or applying-a rule as primitive, effectively a rejection of proposition 4 above. Notice that this goes well beyond the sort of antireductionist response to Kripke’s arguments that I was already inclined to favor-an antireductionism about mental content. It would involve a primitivism about rule-following or rule-application itself: we would have to take as primitive a general (often conditional) content serving as the reason for which one believes something, without this being mediated by inference of any kind. It is not obvious that we can make sense of this, but the matter clearly deserves greater consideration. 32