Rule-Following and Primitive Normativity

Abstract

In her ‘Primitive Normativity and Scepticism about Rules’, Hannah Ginsborg proposes a novel solution to Kripke's sceptical challenge to factualists about meaning (those who think that there is some fact about what you mean or meant by your utterances). According to Ginsborg, the fact in virtue of which you mean, say, addition by ‘plus’ is the fact that you are disposed to respond to, say, the query ‘68 plus 57’ by uttering ‘125’, and to take your doing so to be primitively appropriate given your previous uses of ‘plus’. Ginsborg's account is at its most compelling when considering what we might call unsophisticated cases of meaning, cases in which a subject means something by their words without their being in a position to identify the relevant rule or provide any sort of justification for their using the term as they do. In this paper, I raise doubts about whether Ginsborg's account is extendable to sophisticated cases of meaning. Reflection on those cases which generate the doubts brings it into question whether the dispositions that Ginsborg identifies are necessary and jointly sufficient for one's meaning that p, even in unsophisticated cases.

Rule‐Following II: Recent Work and New Puzzles

“…739‐745). Furthermore, it's not clear that non‐intentionally characterized dispositions can distinguish between different, but extensionally equivalent rules one might be following and thus fix a determinate rule at all (Sorgiovanni, 2018).…”

“…Second, some worry that the skeptical challenge can be reinstated at the level of the concept of CORRECTNESS. The skeptic may ask about what taking a response to be correct rather than quorrect consists in, where to do the latter is to take it to be correct until time t and to lack correctness thereafter (Haddock, 2012, p. 159, Sorgiovanni, 2018, pp. 143‐144).…”