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The Constitutive Nature of the Sceptical Problem 7. Having a meaning is essentially a matter of possessing a correctness condition. And the sceptical challenge is to explain how anything could possess that. Notice, by the way, that I have stated the sceptical problem about meaning without once mentioning Kripke’s notorious sceptic. That character, as everyone knows, proceeds by inviting his interlocutor to defend a claim about what he previously meant by the expression +'. The interlocutor innocently assumes himself to have meant addition; but the sceptic challenges him to prove that the concept in question was not in fact quaddition, where quaddition is just like addition, except for a singularity at a point not previously encountered in the interlocutor's arithmetical practice. It may seem, then, that the sceptical problem I have described could not be Kripke's. For Kripke's problem appears to be essentially epistemological in character-it concerns a speaker's ability to defend a particular meaning ascription; whereas the problem I have outlined is constitutive, not epistemological-its topic is the possibility of meaning, not our knowledge of it. In fact, however, the two problems are the same; Kripke merely chooses to present the constitutive problem in an epistemological guise. Epistemological scepticism about a given class of judgements is the view that our actual cognitive capacities are incapable of delivering justified opinions concerning judgements in that class. Kripke's sceptic is not after a thesis of that sort. This is evident from the fact that his interlocutor, in being challenged to justify his claim that he meant addition by+’, is permitted complete and omniscient access to all the facts about his previous behavioural, mental, and physical history; he is not restricted to the sort of knowledge that an ordinary creature, equipped with ordinary cognitive powers, would be expected to possess.13 Kripke’s sceptical scenario is, thus, completely unsuited to promoting an epistemological scepticism. What it is suited for is the promotion of a constitutive scepticism. For if his sceptic is able to show that, even with the benefit of access to all the relevant facts, his interlocutor is still unable to justify any particular claim about what he meant, that would leave us no choice but to conclude that there are no facts about meaning.14 Pace many of Kripke’s readers, then, the problem is not-not even in part-epistemological scepticism about meaning. 15 But, of course, one may agree that the problem is constitutive in character, and yet believe it to have an epistemological dimension. According to Crispin Wright, for example, Kripke is not interested in the mere possibility of correctness conditions; he is interested in the possibility of correctness conditions that may be, at least in one’s own case, known non-inferentially. 16 The problem is essentially constitutive in character; but acceptable answers to it are to be subject to an epistemic constraint. I do not wish to argue about this at length. It does seem to me that, once we have corrected for the distortions induced by the dialogic setting, there ought not to be any residual temptation to think that epistemological considerations are playing a critical role in Kripke’s argument. In any case, whatever intention Kripke may have had, the considerations he adduces on behalf of the sceptical conclusion appear to owe nothing to epistemological constraints and can be stated without their help.17 That, anyway, is how I shall present them. The Rule-Following' Considerations? 8. It would not be inappropriate to wonder at this point what all this has to do with the topic of rule following? Where, precisely, is the connection between the concepts of meaning and content, on the one hand, and the concept of following a rule, on the other, forged? I shall argue that, in an important sense, the answer isnowhere’, and hence that the rule-following considerations' is, strictly speaking, a misnomer for the discussion on offer.l8 Many writers seem to assume that the connection is straightforward; they may be represented as reasoning as follows. Expressions come to have correctness conditions as a result of people following rules in respect of them; hence, exploring the possibility of correctness is tantamount to exploring the possibility of rule-following. But, at least on the ordinary understanding of the concept of following a rule, it cannot be true of all expressions-in particular, it cannot be true of mental expressions-that they come to have correctness conditions as a result of people following rules in respect of them. The point is that the ordinary concept of following a rule-as opposed to that of merely conforming to one-is the concept of an intentional act: it involves the intentional attempt to bring one's behaviour in line with the dictates of some grasped rule. Crispin Wright has decribed this intuitive conception very clearly: Correctly applying a rule to a new case will, it is natural to think, typically involve a double success: it is necessary both to apprehend relevant features of the presented situation and to know what, in the light of those apprehended features, will fit or fail to fit the rule. Correctly castling in the course of a game of chess, for instance, will depend both on apprehension of the configuration of chessmen at the time of the move, and on a knowledge of whether that configuration (and the previous course of the game) permits castling at that point.19 As such, however, the ordinary concept of following a rule is the concept of an act among whose causal antecendents lie contentful mental states; consequently, it is a concept that presupposes the idea of a correctness condition, not one that can, in full generality, help explain it. Since it makes essential play with the idea of a propositional attitude, which in turn makes essential play with the idea of content, rule-following in this sense presupposes that mental expressions have conditions of correct application. On pain of regress, then, it cannot be true that mental expressions themselves acquire meaning as a result of anyone following rules in respect of them. What Kripke's discussion is concerned with is the possibility of correctness; so long as we keep that clearly in mind, talk ofrule-following’ is harmless. Simon Blackburn has captured this perspective very well: I intend no particular theoretical implications by talking of rules here. The topic is that there is such a thing as the correct and incorrect application of a term, and to say that there is such a thing is no more than to say that there is truth and falsity. I shall talk indifferently of there being correctness and incorrectness, of words being rule-governed, and of their obeying principles of application. Whatever this is, it is the fact that distinguishes the production of a term from mere noise, and turns utterance into assertion-into the making of judgment.20 II. THE SCEPTICAL SOLUTION A Non-Factualist Conception of Meaning 9. Having established to his satisfaction that no word could have the property of expressing a certain meaning, Kripke turns to asking how this conclusion is to be accommodated. The question is urgent, in his view, because the conclusion threatens to be not merely shocking but paradoxical. The trouble is that we would ordinarily take a remark to the effect that there could not be any such thing as the fact that I mean something by the +' sign, to entail that there is nothing I could mean by the use of that sign. Applied quite generally, across all signs and all people, the claim becomes the seemingly paradoxical and self-refuting thesis that no one could mean anything by their use of linguistic expressions. A scepticism about meaning facts would appear to be, then, prima facie anyway, an unstable position. Sustaining it requires showing that what it asserts does not ultimately lapse into a form of pragmatic incoherence. What is called for, in other words, is a rehabilitation of our ordinary practice of attributing content to our thoughts and utterances, which nevertheless conserves the sceptical thesis that there are no facts for such attributions to answer to. That is what thesceptical solution’ is designed to do. It is alleged to have the following startling consequence: the idea of a language whose meanings are constituted solely out of an individual’s speaker’s properties, considered completely in isolation from any wider community to which he may belong', is incoherent.21 The sceptical solution has two parts that are usefully distinguished. The first consists in the suggestion that we replace the notion of truth conditions, in our intuitive picture of sentence meaning, by that of assertibility conditions. The second consists in a description of the assertibility conditions for meaningattributing sentences, in the course of which it is argued that it is essential to such sentences that their assertibility conditions advert to the actions or dispositions of a community. The adjustment recommended in the first part is supposed to help because if we suppose that facts or truth conditions are of the essence of meaningful assertion, it will follow from the skeptical conclusion that assertions that anyone ever means anything are meaningless. On the other hand, if we apply to these assertions the tests suggested ... no such conclusion follows. All that is needed to legitimize assertions that someone means something is that there be roughly specifiable circumstances under which they are legitimately assertible, and that the game of asserting them has a role in our lives. No supposition thatfacts correspond’ to those assertions is needed.22 The proposed account is, in effect, a global non-factualism: sentence significance is construed quite generally in assertion-theoretic terms and no invidious distinction is drawn between the sort of significance possessed by meaning-attributing sentences and that possessed by sentences of other types. The Argument Against Solitary Language 10. The argument against solitary language' emerges, according to Kripke, from the observation that, so long as a speaker is considered in isolation we can assign no assertibility conditions to judgements to the effect that he has misapplied a symbol in his repertoire: [I]f we confine ourselves to looking at one person alone, this is as far as we can go. ... There are no circumstances under which we can say that, even if he inclines to say125′, he should have said 5', or vice-versa. ... Under what circumstances can he be wrong? No one else by looking at his mind or behavior alone can say something like,He is wrong if he does not accord with his own intention’; the whole point of the skeptical argument was that there are no facts about him in virtue of which he accords with his intentions or not.23 The possibility of error, however, is essential to our ordinary concept of meaning, and can only be accommodated if we widen our gaze and take into consideration the interaction between our imagined rule-follower and a linguistic community. Were we to do so, Kripke continues, we could introduce assertibility conditions for judgements about error in terms of the agreement, or lack of it, between a given speaker’s propensities in the use of a term and the community’s. Since, however, this would appear to be the only way to give substance to the correlative notions of error and correctness, no one considered wholly in isolation from other speakers could be said to mean anything. And so a solitary language is impossible. Let us turn now to an assessment of the various central aspects of Kripke’s argument. III. ASSESSMENT OF THE ARGUMENT AGAINST SOLITARY LANGUAGE Constitutive Accounts and Solitary Language 11. Kripke is very clear about the limited, wholly descriptive nature of the sceptical solution, at least in his official' explications of the view: We have to see under what circumstances attributions of meaning are made and what role these attributions play in our lives. Following Wittgenstein's exhortation not to think but to look, we will not reason a priori about the role such statements ought to play; rather we will find out what circumstances actually license such assertions and what role this license actually plays. It is important to realize that we are not looking for necessary and sufficient conditions (truth conditions) for following a rule, or an analysis of what such rule-followingconsists in’. Indeed such conditions would constitute a straight' solution to the skeptical problem, and have been rejected.24 It is important to see that the counselled modesty-we will not reason a priori about the role such statements ought to play-is compulsory. The assertibility conditions may not be understood to provide the content (or truth conditions) of the meaning-attributing sentences, on pain of falling prey to the accepted sceptical considerations (That is why the solution on offer has to be sceptical: it has already been conceded that nothing could cogently amount to the fact that a meaning sentence reports). It would appear to follow from this, however, that the sceptical solution can do no more than record the conditions under which speakers in fact consider the attribution of a certain concept warranted and the endorsement of a particular response appropriate. The Wittgensteinian exhortationnot to think but to look’ is not merely (as it may be) good advice; the modesty it counsels is enforced by the fact that truth conditions for these sentences has been jettisoned. For how, in the absence of a conception of the truth conditions of meaning attributing sentences, could the project of providing an account of their assertion conditions aspire to anything more than descriptive adequacy? Were we equipped with an account of their truth conditions, of course, we might be able to reason a priori about what their assertion conditions ought to be and, hence, potentially, to revise the conditions for assertion actually accepted for them. But without the benefit of such an account there is no scope for a more ambitious project: a descriptively adequate account of the actual assertion conditions for such sentences is the most one may cogently aim for. If this is correct, however, we ought to be puzzled about how the sceptical solution is going to deliver a conclusion against solitary language of the requisite modal force: namely, that there could not be such a language. For even if it were true that our actual assertibility conditions for meaningattributing sentences advert to the dispositions of a community, the most that would license saying is that our language is not solitary. And this would be a lot less than the result we were promised: namely, that any possible language has to be communal. Communal Assertibility Conditions? 12. Putting this worry to one side, let us ask whether it is in fact true that, if we accept the sceptical conclusion, we cannot introduce substantive assertibility conditions for meaning-attributions that do not advert to the dispositions of a community of speakers? It appears, on the contrary, that not only can we introduce such conditions, but have actually done so.25 Consider the following: (A) It is warranted to assert of Jones that he means addition by +', provided he has responded with the sum in reply to most arithmetical queries posed thus far. As a description of our practice, (A) is, of course, quite rough: room has to be made for the importance of systematic deviations, the greater importance attaching to simple cases, and many other such factors. But all these refinements may be safely ignored for the purpose of raising the following critical question: what in the sceptical conclusion rules out attributions of form (A)? It had better rule them out, of course, if the argument against solitary language is to be sustained, for (A) adverts to no one other than the individual. But as Goldfarb points out, there appears to be nothing in the sceptical conclusion that will rule it out.26 It can hardly be objected that the interpretation ofsum’ is being presupposed in the statement of the condition, for the sceptical solution is not meant to be a straight solution to the problem about meaning; as Kripke himself says, in fending off a similar imagined objection to his own account of the assertibility conditions: What Wittgenstein is doing is describing the utility in our lives of a certain practise. Necessarily he must give this description in our own language. As in the case of any such use of our language, a participant in another form of life might apply various terms in the description (such as agreement') in a non-standardquus-like’ way. … This cannot be an objection to Wittgenstein’s solution unless he is to be prohibited from any use of language at all.27 Nor is there any problem in the assumption that it is a genuinely factual matter what any two numbers sum to; as Kripke himself repeatedly emphasizes, the sceptical argument does not threaten the existence of mathematical facts. But how, then, is (A) to be ruled out, and the argument against solitary language preserved? 13. Could it perhaps be argued that (A) is permissible though parasitic on the communal assertibility conditions Kripke outlines? As a matter of fact, just the opposite seems true.28 Kripke’s communitarian account of meaning-attributions runs as follows: Smith will judge Jones to mean addition by plus' only if he judges that Jones's answers to particular addition problems agree with those he is inclined to give. ... If Jones consistently fails to give responses in agreement ... with Smith's, Smith will judge that he does not mean addition byplus’. Even if Jones did mean it in the past, the present deviation will justify Smith in judging that he has lapsed.29 According to this account, then, I will judge that Jones means addition by plus' only if Jones usesplus’ enough times in the same way I am inclined to use it. As a rough description of our practice, and many important refinements aside, this seems acceptable enough. One of the refinements that is called for, however, exposes the fact that Kripke’s communitarian conditions are parasitic on the solitary conditions, and not the other way round. It would be absurd for me, under conditions where I had good reason to believe that I had become prone to making arithmetical mistakes-perhaps owing to intoxication or senility or whatever-to insist on agreement with me as a precondition for crediting Jones with mastery of the concept of addition. And this would appear to show that, at a minimum, Kripke’s communitarian account must be modified to read: (B) It is warranted to assert of Jones that he means addition by +', provided he agrees with my responses to arithmetical queries, under conditions where I have been a reliable computer of sums. But this modification would seem immediately to reveal that the reference tomy own responses’ is idle, and that the basic assertion condition I accept is just (A): It is warranted to assert of Jones that he means addition by `+’, provided he has responded with the sum in reply to most arithmetical queries posed thus far. It would appear, in other words, that the acceptability of the communitarian conditions is strongly parasitic on the acceptability of the solitary ones, and not the other way around. In sum: both because it is difficult (impossible?) to generate constitutive results out of nonconstitutive accounts, and because our actual assertibility conditions for meaning ascriptions appear not to be communitarian, I conclude that the sceptical solution does not yield a convincing argument against solitary language.