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Problems for the Intention View But what concerns me in this essay is whether it is true that we can solve Kripke’s problem as easily as all that? Can we really just appeal to intentions with infinitary contents to explain how the Acceptance condition on rule-following gets fulfilled? I can think of three reasons that may be found in the literature why someone might resist Wright’s Intention View. (p.35) The first reason would be provided by the assumption of Naturalism. A Naturalist would insist that intentions be shown to be naturalistically reducible before they could legitimately be appealed to in solving Kripke’s problem. However, it is none too clear how such a reduction is to be pulled off and Kripke’s book provides a battery of arguments against its feasibility (more on this below). Second, and even if we were to put the Naturalist Assumption to one side, there look to be straightforward counterexamples to the Intention View: not everything that we would intuitively count as rule-following is intentional action in the sense that it specifies. To be sure, and as I have already emphasized, there are many cases of rule-following that are captured very well by the Intention View, the email rule discussed above being one of them. But there also seem to be several significant cases of rule-following in which it would be implausible to say that there was a general intention to conform to a pattern involved. The trouble comes in part (and ironically) from a feature of intentions that Wright himself emphasizes —namely, that their contents are typically thought of as highly accessible to their owners. The problem is that we appear to follow many rules that we aren’t able to specify at all precisely. Take, for example, the rules by which we regulate our moral conduct. Are we Kantians or consequentialists? It is, of course, a highly controversial normative matter which rules are the morally correct ones. But even just as a matter of descriptive fact, it is controversial whether we employ deontological principles, consequentialist ones, or some confused mixture of the two. If these moral rules were the contents of intentions of ours, wouldn’t we expect to know what they are with a much higher degree of precision and clarity? A similar point could be made using principles of etiquette or the epistemic rules by which we update our beliefs. A third type of consideration against the Intention View is provided by an assumption that is crucial to Kripke’s thinking about rule-following. Kripke sets up the rule-following problem by asking what determines whether I am using the ‘+’ sign according to the rule of addition as opposed to the rule for quaddition, where quaddition is a function just like addition, except that it diverges from it for numbers larger than we are able to compute. He considers saying that what determines that rule-following fact is some general intention I formed to use the symbol according to the one rule rather than the other: What was the rule? Well, say, to take it in its most primitive form: suppose we wish to add x and y. Take a huge bunch of marbles. First count out x marbles in one heap. Then count out y marbles in another. Put the two heaps together and count out the number of marbles in the union thus formed. The result is x+y. This set of directions, I may suppose, I explicitly gave myself at some earlier time. It is engraved on my mind as on a slate. It is incompatible with the hypothesis that I meant quus. It is this set of directions, not the finite list of particular additions I performed in the past that justifies and determines my present response. Kripke continues: (p.36) Despite the initial plausibility of this objection, the sceptic’s response is all too obvious: True, if ‘count’ as I used the word in the past, referred to the act of counting (and my other words are correctly interpreted in the standard way) then ‘plus’ must have stood for addition. But I applied ‘count’ like ‘plus’ to only finitely many past cases. Thus the sceptic can question my present interpretation of my past usage of ‘count’ as he did with ‘plus’.15How should we understand this passage? On one way of reading it, Kripke would be assuming that the contents of mental states are derived from the contents of linguistic expressions. But if that’s the assumption, it is vulnerable: most philosophers think that the relation between mind and language is in fact the other way round, that linguistic meaning derives from mental content. On another way of reading it, Kripke would be assuming not some controversial view of the relation between mind and language, but rather just the familiar ‘language of thought’ picture of thought—that thoughts themselves involve the tokenings of expressions (of mentalese)—and claiming that those expressions, too, get their meaning by our following rules in respect of them. I think this latter assumption is clearly what Kripke had in mind. Let’s call it Kripke’s Meaning Assumption and let’s go along with it for now. Now, it should be obvious that combining the Meaning Assumption with the Intention View will lead rather quickly to the conclusion that rule-following, and with it mental content, are metaphysically impossible. For given the two assumptions, we would be able to reason as follows. In order to follow rules, we would antecedently have to have intentions. To have intentions, the expressions of our language of thought would have to have meaning. For those expressions to have meaning, we would have to use them according to rules. For us to use them according to rules, we would antecedently have to have intentions. And so neither content nor rule-following would be able to get off the ground. Since Kripke regards the Meaning Assumption as non-optional, he rejects the Intention View. The problem then becomes to find a way in which someone could be said to have committed himself to a certain pattern of use for a symbol without this being the result of his forming an intention (or other intentional state) to uphold that pattern. And that is why so much attention is focused on the dispositional view. 5. Are there Solutions to these Problems for the Intention View? Let us take stock. If the second of the three considerations we have outlined is correct, then there must be a species of rule-following that is non-intentional. And, if either the first or the third of our three considerations is correct, then not only must there be a species of rule-following that is non-intentional, all rule-following (p.37) must be at bottom nonintentional, because even intentional forms of rule-following will presuppose the non-intentional kind. Now, since we know that it is going to be extremely difficult to make sense of rule-following in purely non-intentional, dispositional terms, we should ask whether there is any way around these considerations. Can they be rebutted? To the first objection, one might respond by saying that Naturalism is not obviously correct and so can hardly be used to constrain the acceptability of an otherwise intuitively compelling theory of rulefollowing. After all, it continues to prove difficult to account for consciousness within a naturalistic setting. Kripke tried to argue that there would be something irredeemably queer about an intentional state that is simply taken unreduced, without hope of reconstruction in terms of materials that would be naturalistically acceptable. But I agree with Wright that his argument here is not successful and doesn’t rise above begging the question against the anti-reductionist suggestion. To the objection based on cases of alleged non-intentional rule-following, one could try responding by introducing the notion of a tacit intention, an intention to do something that is not explicitly articulated in someone’s consciousness but which the thinker could be said to have implicitly or tacitly. Specifying such a notion in a satisfactory way would obviously be a huge undertaking and has not yet been shown to be feasible. But it is not clearly hopeless.However, even if the foregoing responses were accepted, I hope it is clear that we would still be stuck with a huge problem for the Intention View, if Kripke’s Meaning Assumption is left in place. The problem, of course, is that even unreduced, tacit intentions are contentful states and so it would still not be possible to combine the Intention View with the Meaning Assumption. But can the Meaning Assumption be plausibly discarded? Let’s distinguish between the question whether public language expressions get their meaning through rule-following and the question whether the expressions of the language of thought do. Is the Meaning Assumption correct at least when it comes to the words of public language? Is it right to say that the words of English, for example, get their meaning as a result of our following rules in respect of them? Well, a word is just an inscription, a mark on paper. Something has got to be done to it by its user for it to get a meaning. That much is clear. It is also clear that meaningful words have conditions of correct application. Thus, the word ‘tiger’ is correctly applied only to tigers and the word ‘red’ only to red things. But it doesn’t follow from these obvious truths that the way the word ‘tiger’ comes to mean what it does for a given speaker S—the way it comes to have the correctness conditions that it has in S’s idiolect—is by S committing himself to using it according to the rule: Apply the word ‘tiger’ only to tigers!16 (p.38) For meaning to be a matter of rule-following in the sense presupposed by the Meaning Assumption, it must be true not only that words have satisfaction conditions but that they get their satisfaction conditions by their users committing themselves to using them according to certain patterns. Still, it does look as though one can make a strong case for the Meaning Assumption as applied to public language expressions.17 When I apply the word ‘tiger’ to a newly encountered animal, it is very natural to think that my application of the word is guided and rationalized by my understanding of its meaning, an understanding that is general and which determines what the word does and does not apply to. However one may feel about the relation between public language and rules, though, there looks to be very little prospect that the Meaning Assumption applies at the level of mental expressions. Since we are dealing with a personal-level notion of rule-following, it makes very little sense to say that we follow rules in respect of our mental expressions, expressions that we have no access to and which, for all that the ordinary person knows, may not even exist. (Whether we should regard their meaning as generated by subpersonal rule-following is a question that I shall come back to.) So, here, then, is the problem for Kripke’s Meaning Assumption that I alluded to at the beginning. Kripke is clearly working with a personal-level notion of rule-following. That is why he can confidently claim that when someone is following a rule that rule justifies (rationalizes) his behavior. But it can hardly be true that all meaning is a matter of rule-following in this sense. In particular, it can hardly be true that the expressions of mentalese get their meaning by our following rules in respect of them in this sense. So, it looks as though we are free to reject Kripke’s Meaning Assumption, at least as it applies to mental expressions. And with that we seem to have answered the third of the three objections we had posed for the Intention View. If we reject the Meaning Assumption, we give up on the claim that mental expressions get their meaning by our following rules in respect of them. How, then, do they get their meaning? Kripke’s discussion may be seen as containing a battery of effective arguments against reductive accounts of meaning facts. But as I have already mentioned above, and argued at length elsewhere, his arguments against anti-reductionist accounts are rebuttable.18 If we adopt such an anti-reductionist conception of mental content, doesn’t that mean that we are now free to adopt the Intention View of rule-following? (p.39) 6. Can the Intention View be Saved? Not quite. For what I now want to argue is that even if all of these responses were to pan out, that still wouldn’t suffice to salvage the Intention View. The Intention View suffers from a further and seemingly fatal flaw. It concerns not, as on Kripke’s view, Acceptance, but rather, Explanation or Rationalization. To see what it is, let us waive Naturalism; let us ignore the examples of putatively non-intentional forms of rule-following; and let us reject the Meaning Assumption. And let us simply help ourselves to an anti-reductionist view of mental content. Once such contentful thoughts are available, they can be used to frame intentions—and so, it would seem, to account for our acceptance of rules. If something like this picture could be sustained, would that imply that there is nothing left of the rule-following problem? In a passage whose import I believe many commentators have missed, Wittgenstein seems to indicate the answer is No—even if we could simply help ourselves to the full use of intentional resources, Wittgenstein appears to be saying, there would still be a problem about how rule-following is possible. The passage I have in mind is at Philosophical Investigations 219. In it Wittgenstein considers the temptation to say that when we commit ourselves to some rule, that rule determines how we are to act in indefinitely many future cases: “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. If we were reading this with Kripke’s eyes, what would we expect Wittgenstein to say in reply? Something along the following lines (with absolutely no aspiration to capturing Wittgenstein’s literary tone): And how did you get to stamp the rule with a particular meaning so that it traces the lines along which it is to be followed through the whole of space? To do that you would need to be able to think, to frame intentions. But that assumes that we have figured out how we manage to follow rules in respect of mental expressions. And that is something that we have not yet done. But what Wittgenstein says in reply is rather this: But if something of this sort really were the case, how would it help? Even if we were to grant that we could somehow imbue the rule with a meaning that would determine how it applies in indefinitely many cases in the future, Wittgenstein seems to be saying, it would still not help us understand the phenomenon of rule-following. How mystifying this must seem from a Kripkean point of view. How would it help? How could it not help? We wanted an answer to the question: By virtue of what is it true that I use the ‘+’ sign according to the rule for addition and not some other rule? (p.40) According to the picture currently under consideration, one of our options is to say that it is by virtue of the fact that I use the ‘+’ sign with the intention that its use conform to the rule for addition and where it is understood that the availability of such intentions is not itself a function of our following rules in respect of them. Under the terms of the picture in place, what would be left over? How should we understand what Wittgenstein is saying here? It is, of course, always hard to be confident of any particular interpretation of this philosopher’s cryptic remarks; but here is a suggestion that seems of independent philosophical interest. Let us revert to our email example. Suppose I have adopted the rule: Answer any email (that calls for an answer) immediately upon receipt. And let us construe my adoption of this rule as involving an explicit intention on my part to conform to the instruction: Intention: For all x, if x is an email and you have just received x, answer it immediately! Now, how should we imagine my following this rule? How should we imagine its guiding, or explaining, the conduct that constitutes my following it? To act on this intention, it would seem, I am going to have to think, even if very fleetingly and not very consciously, that its antecedent is satisfied. The rule itself, after all, has a conditional content. It doesn’t call on me to just do something, but to always perform some action, if I am in a particular kind of circumstance. And it is very hard to see how such a conditional intention could guide my action without my coming to have the belief that its antecedent is satisfied. So, let us imagine, then, that I think to myself: Premise: This is an email that I have just received. in order to draw the Conclusion: Answer it immediately! At least in this case, then, rule-following, on the Intention model, requires inference: it requires the rule-follower to infer what the rule calls for in the circumstances in which he finds himself. At least in this case, then, rule-following, on the Intention model, requires some sort of inference. In this regard, though, the email case is hardly special. Since any rule has general content, if our acceptance of a rule is pictured as involving its representation by a mental state of ours, an inference will always be required to determine what action the rule calls for in any particular circumstance. On the Intention View, then, applying a rule will always involve inference. Inference, however, is an example of rule-following par excellence. In the email case, in moving from the intention, via the premise about the antecedent, to the conclusion, I am relying on a general rule that says that from any such premises I am (p.41) entitled to draw such-and-so conclusion. Since, as I have set up the example, I have construed the email rule as an imperative, this isn’t quite Modus Ponens, of course, but it is something very similar: (MP) From ‘If C, do A’ and C, conclude ‘do A’! But now: If on the Intention View, rule-following always requires inference; and if inference is itself always a form of rule-following, then the Intention View would look to be hopeless: under its terms, following any rule requires embarking upon a vicious infinite regress in which we succeed in followingno rule. To see this explicitly, let us go back to the email case. On the Intention View, applying the Email Rule requires, as we have seen, having an intention with the rule as its content and inferring from it a certain course of action. However, inference, we have said, involves following a rule, in this case, MP. Now, if the Intention View is correct, then following the rule MP* itself requires having an intention with MP* as its content and inferring from it a certain course of action. And now we would be off on a vicious regress: inference rules whose operation cannot be captured by the intention-based model are presupposed by that model itself.19 This argument bears an obvious similarity to Lewis Carroll’s famous argument in “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.”20 The Carrollian argument, however, is meant to raise a problem for the justification of our rules of inference—how can we justify our belief, for example, that Modus Ponens is a good rule of inference?