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The Rule-Following Considerations 1 INTRODUCTION 1. Recent years have witnessed a great resurgence of interest in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, especially with those passages-roughly, Philosophical Investigations ##138-242 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 1960s, must go to Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.2 It is easy to explain why. To begin with, the dialectic Kripke uncovered from Wittgenstein’s discussion is enormously exciting on its own terms. On Kripke’s reading, the passages on rule-following are concerned with some of the weightiest questions in the theory of meaning, questions-involving the reality, reducibility, and privacy of meaning-that occupy centre-stage in contemporary philosophy. Furthermore, Kripke represented Wittgenstein as defending a set of unified and extremely provocative claims concerning these questions. And, finally, he argued for these claims with power and clarity. The ensuing flood of articles and books on the subject of rule-following was both predictable and warranted. The present paper is the result of an invitation to survey this literature. It could have been about exegetical matters, on what the recent discussions have had to teach us about the historical Wittgenstein’s philosophical views. In the event, however, it is almost entirely concerned with a retrospective assessment of the philosophical contributions. Limitations of space dictated that a choice be made; and the philosophical assessment seemed the more fruitful thing to do.3 Despite a lot of discussion, there is room for an improved understanding of the precise nature of Kripke’s arguments, of their ultimate cogency, and of their relation to the wider discussion of meaning in contemporary philosophy of mind and language. Pulling on the thread that is Kripke’s argument leads quite naturally to a discussion of many of the most significant issues occupying philosophers today; in that lies the main impetus behind the present essay. I proceed as follows. In Parts I and II, I lay out the essentials of Kripke’s argument. In subsequent parts, I offer an extended critique of the dialectic it presents, considered on its own terms and independently of exegetical concerns. A discussion of the critical literature will be woven in as appropriate. The moral will not be recognizably Wittgensteinian: I shall argue that, pace Kripke’s intent, the conception of meaning that emerges is a realist, non-reductionist, and judgementindependent conception, one which, moreover, sustains no obvious animus against private language. 1. KRIPKE ON MEANING AND THE SCEPTICAL PROBLEM The Sceptical Problem 2. As Kripke sees it, the burden of the rule-following considerations is that it cannot literally be true of any symbol that it expresses some particular concept or meaning. This is the now-famous sceptical conclusion' he attributes to Wittgenstein: [T]here is no fact about me that distinguishes between my meaning a definite function by+’ … and my meaning nothing at all.4 How is such a radical thesis to be supported? Kripke argues, in effect, by elimination: all the available facts potentially relevant to fixing the meaning of a symbol in a given speaker’s repertoirefacts about how the speaker has actually used the expression, facts about how he is disposed to use it, and facts about his qualitative mental history-are canvassed, and found wanting. Adequate reflection on what it is for an expression to possess a meaning would betray, so Kripke invites us to believe, that that fact could not be constituted by any of those. The claim is, of course, indisputable in connection with facts about actual use and qualitative phenomena; it is a familiar and well-assimilated lesson of, precisely, Wittgenstein’s Investigations, that neither of those species of fact could, either in isolation or in combination, capture what it is for a symbol to possess a meaning. Much more important and controversial, however, is Kripke’s rejection of a dispositional account of meaning facts. Why are facts about how a speaker is disposed to use an expression held to be insufficient to determine its meaning? Kripke develops two sorts of consideration. First, the idea of meaning something by a word is an idea with an infinitary character-if I mean plus by +', then there are literally no end of truths about how I ought to apply the term, namely to just the members of this set of triples and not to others, if I am to use it in accord with its meaning. This is not merely an artefact of the arithmetical example; it holds for any concept. If I mean horse byhorse’, then there are literally no end of truths about how it would be correct for me to apply the term-to horses on Alpha Centauri, to horses in Imperial Armenia, and so on, but not to cows or cats wherever they may be-if I am to use it in accord with its meaning. But, Kripke argues, the totality of my dispositions is finite, being the dispositions of a finite being that exists for a finite time. And so, facts about dispositions cannot capture what it is for me to mean addition by +'. The second objection to a dispositional theory stems from the so-callednormativity’ of meaning. This objection is somewhat harder to state, but a rough formulation will do for now. The point is that, if I mean something by an expression, then the potential infinity of truths that are generated as a result are normative truths: they are truths about how I ought to apply the expression, if I am to apply it in accord with its meaning, not truths about how I will apply it. My meaning something by an expression, it appears, does not guarantee that I will apply, it correctly; it guarantees only that there will be a fact of the matter about whether my use of it is correct. Now, this observation may be converted into a condition of adequacy on theories of meaning: any proposed candidate for being the property in virtue of which an expression has meaning must be such as to ground the normativity of meaning-it ought to be possible to read off from any alleged meaning-constituting property of a word, what is the correct use of that word. And this is a requirement, Kripke maintains, that a dispositional theory cannot pass: one cannot read off a speaker’s disposition to use an expression in a certain way what is the correct use of that expression, for to be disposed to use an expression in a certain way implies at most that one will, not that one should. The Contents of Thought 3. But what about thoughts, intentions, and other content-bearing mental states? How do they figure in the sceptical argument? More specifically: is the sceptical thesis directed against them as well, or is it confined solely to linguistic representation? It is hard to see how a convincing meaning scepticism could be confined purely to the linguistic domain, given the intimate relation between thought and language. Philosophers divide, of course, on the precise nature of this relation and, in particular, on the question of priority: Do the semantic properties of language derive from the representational properties of thought, or is it the other way round? Whatever the correct answer, however, there would appear to be no plausible way to promote a language-specific meaning scepticism. On the former (Gricean) picture, one cannot threaten linguistic meaning without threatening thought content, since it is from thought that linguistic meaning is held to derive; and on the latter (Sellarsian) picture, one cannot threaten linguistic meaning without thereby threatening thought content, since it is from linguistic meaning that thought content is held to derive. Either way, content and meaning must stand or fall together.5 If a sceptical thesis about linguistic meaning is to have any prospect of succeeding, then, it must also threaten the possibility of mental meaning (or content). Of course, on a Sellarsian view, that result is automatic, given a demonstration that nothing non-mental fixes linguistic meaning. But on a Gricean view matters are not so simple. Since the Gricean holds that linguistic items acquire their meaning from the antecedently fixed content of mental states, an argument to the effect that nothing non-mental fixes linguistic meaning would leave the Gricean unmoved; he needs to be given a separate argument against the possibility of mental content. Does Kripke see this need and does he show how it is to be met? Colin McGinn has argued that the answer to both questions is no': My third point ... points up a real lacuna in Kripke's presentation of his paradox. The point is that it is necessary for Kripke to apply his paradox at the level of concepts; that is, he has to argue that the notion of possessing a determinate concept is likewise devoid of factual foundation. ... It cannot be said, however, that Kripke explains how this need is to be met, how this extension of the paradox to the level of concepts is to be carried out; and brief reflection shows that the exercise is by no means trivial.6 I think McGinn is wrong on both counts; it will be worthwhile to see why. In fact, the suggestion that some appropriately general thought or intention constitutes the sought after meaning-determining fact comes up early in Kripke's presentation, before the dispositional account of meaning is considered and found wanting: 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 that I performed in the past, that justifies and determines my present response.7 And his response to it seems clear (p. 16 ff). The idea is that thoughts that someone may have had concerning how he is prepared to use a certain expression will help determine a meaning for that expression only if their correct interpretation is presupposed. But this is equivalent to assuming, Kripke suggests, that the sceptical challenge has been met with respect to the expressions that figure in those thoughts. But how was their meaning fixed? Not by facts about their actual or counterfactual history of use, (if the argument against a dispositional account of meaning is to be believed); and not by facts concerning associated experiential episodes. Hence-on the assumption that no other sort of fact is relevant to the fixation of meaning-by nothing. The strategy seems clear; but is it not problematic? The trouble is that it seems to depend on the assumption that thought contents are the properties of syntactically identifiable bearers-properties, that is, of expressions belonging to alanguage of thought’. And although there may be much to recommend this view, still, does Kripke really wish to rest the sceptical conclusion on so contestable a premisses? Fortunately for the sceptical strategy, we will see below that, although a contestable premiss about thought is involved, it is nothing so rich as a language of thought hypothesis. But we will be in a position to appreciate this properly only after we have examined McGinn’s claim that, even granted a linguistic model of thinking, it is still impossible to run a Kripke-style sceptical argument against thought. The Normativity of Meaning 4. McGinn writes: The issue of normativeness, the crucial issue for Kripke, has no clear content in application to the language of thought: what does it mean to ask whether my current employment of a word in my language of thought (i.e. the exercise of a particular concept) is correct in the light of my earlier employment of that word? What kind of linguistic mistake is envisaged here? … There is just no analogue here for the idea of linguistic incorrectness (as opposed to the falsity of a thought): linguistic incorrectness (of the kind we are concerned with) is using the same word with a different meaning from that originally intended (and doing so in ignorance of the change), but we cannot in this way make sense of employing a concept with a different content from that originally intendedit would just be a different concept.8 The idea of mental content cannot be threatened by Kripke, McGinn argues, because the principal requirement by which putative reconstructions of that notion are to be dispatched-the normativity requirement-has no cogent application to the language of thought. The claim calls for a somewhat more searching articulation of the normativity thesis than we have attempted so far. In what does the normativity of meaning consist? McGinn offers the following characterization: The notion of normativeness Kripke wants captured is a transtemporal notion. … We have an account of this normativeness when we have two things: (a) an account of what it is to mean something at a given time and (b) an account of what it is to mean the same thing at different timessince (Kripkean) normativeness is a matter of meaning now what one meant earlier.9 So, the later use of the expression is correct', according to McGinn, if it then expresses the same meaning as it did earlier;incorrect’ if, without intending to introduce a change of meaning by explicit stipulation, it expresses a different meaning. It is in such facts as this that the normativity of meaning is said to consist. Supposing this were the right understanding of normativity, how would it affect mental content scepticism? McGinn says that the problem is that we cannot make sense of employing a concept with a different content from that originally intended-it would just be a different concept. But although that is certainly true, it is also irrelevant: what we need to make sense of is not employing a concept with a different content from that originally intended, but employing an expression in the language of thought with a different content from that originally intended, which is a rather different matter. As it happens, however, it is an idea that is equally problematic. The difficulty is that we do not have the sort of access to the expressions of our language of thought that an attribution to us of semantic intentions in respect of them would appear to presuppose. You cannot intend that some expression have a certain meaning unless you are able to refer to that expression independently of its semantic properties. But we have no such independent access to the expressions of our language of thought; we do not, for instance, know what they look like. So we cannot have semantic intentions in respect of them and, hence, cannot make sense of using them correctly or incorrectly in the sense defined by McGinn. If McGinn’s understanding of normativity were the correct one, then, it would indeed be difficult to see how it could operate at the level of thought (though not quite for the reasons he gives). It ought to be clear, however, that the normativity' requirement defined by McGinn has nothing much to do with the concept of meaning per se and is not the requirement that Kripke is operating with. We may appreciate this point by observing that the requirement defined by McGinn could hardly act as a substantive constraint on theories of meaning, even where these are theories solely of linguistic meaning. Any theory of meaning that provided an account of what speakers mean by their expressions at arbitrary times-however crazy that theory may otherwise be-would satisfy McGinn's constraint. In particular, the main theory alleged by Kripke to founder on the normativity requirement, would easily pass it on McGinn's reading: since there are perfectly determinate facts about what dispositions are associated with a given expression at a given time-or, rather, since it is no part of Kripke's intent to deny that there are-it is always possible to ask whether an expression has the same or a different meaning on a dispositional theory, thus satisfying McGinn's requirement. How to explain, then, Kripke's claim that a dispositional theory founders precisely on the normativity requirement? 5. The answer is that the normativity requirement is not the thesis McGinn outlines. What is it then? Suppose the expressiongreen’ means green. It follows immediately that the expression green' applies correctly only to these things (the green ones) and not to those (the non-greens). The fact that the expression means something implies, that is, a whole set of normative truths about my behaviour with that expression: namely, that my use of it is correct in application to certain objects and not in application to others. This is not, as McGinn would have it, a relation between meaning something by an expression at one time and meaning something by it at some later time; it is rather, a relation between meaning something by it at some time and its use at that time. The normativity of meaning turns out to be, in other words, simply a new name for the familiar fact that, regardless of whether one thinks of meaning in truth-theoretic or assertion-theoretic terms, meaningful expressions possess conditions of correct use. (On the one construal, correctness consists in true use, on the other, in warranted use.) Kripke's insight was to realize that this observation may be converted into a condition of adequacy on theories of the determination of meaning: any proposed candidate for the property in virtue of which an expression has meaning, must be such as to ground thenormativity’ of meaning-it ought to be possible to read off from any alleged meaning constituting property of a word, what is the correct use of that word. It is easy to see how, on this understanding of the requirement in question, a dispositional theory might appear to fail it: for, it would seem, one cannot read off a disposition to use a word in a certain way what is the correct use of that word, for to be disposed to use a word in a certain way implies at most that one will, not that one should (one can have dispositions to use words incorrectly).I0 11 6. With this clarification of the normativity thesis in place we are finally in a position to settle the question: can Kripke develop the same sort of meaningsceptical argument against a language of thought as he develops against public language? And the answer is: clearly, yes. For: what fixes the meaning of expressions in the language of thought? Not other thoughts, on pain of vicious regress. Not facts about the actual tokening of such expressions or facts about associated qualitative episodes, for familiar reasons. And not dispositional facts about the tokening of such expressions, for, since meaningful expressions of mentalese possess conditions of correct use in precisely the same sense as public language expressions do, because correctness cannot be reconstructed dispositionally. So, nothing fixes their meaning. Indeed, we are also now in a position to see, as promised, that nothing so rich as a language of thought hypothesis is strictly needed. A language of thought model is composed out of two theses: (a) that thinking the thought that p involves tokening an item-a representation-that means that p; and (b) that the representation whose tokening is so involved possesses a combinatorial syntactic and semantic structure. In other words, according to a language of thought hypothesis, thought contents are the semantic properties of syntactically and semantically structured bearers. But it should be quite clear that nothing in the sceptical argument depends on the assumption of structure: even if the representation were to possess no internal syntax, we could still ask, in proper Kripkean fashion, what its correctness conditions are and in virtue of what they are determined. It would appear, however, that the sceptical argument’s strategy does presuppose that content properties have some sort of bearer (even if not necessarily a structured one). For, otherwise, there will be no natural way to formulate a dispositional theory of thought content, and no natural way to bring the normativity requirement to bear against it. There has to be something -a state, event, or particular, it need not matter which-whose disposition to get tokened under certain circumstances constitutes, on a dispositional theory, its possession of a certain content. And although this commitment is, I suppose, strictly speaking contestable, it is also very natural and plausible. After all, contents do not figure in a mental life except as subtended by a particular mode-belief, desire, judgement, wish-and, hence, are naturally understood as the properties of the states or events that instantiate those modes. And so we see that the sceptical argument must, can, and does (in intent, anyway) include mental content within the scope of the scepticism it aims to promote. 12