Rule-Following Skepticism, Properly So Called

Abstract

Saul Kripke famously argued that there are no facts about what people mean by the words and sentences they utter. His 'skeptical paradox', as he called it, has generated an enormous secondary literature. Indeed, it's not an exaggeration to say that it gave birth to a new subfield of the philosophy of mind and language. Despite the degree of attention, however, I believe that the real source and character of Kripke's skeptical doubts have never come into clear view. Previous commentary on Kripke has failed to grasp that the doubts fundamentally concern the possibility of a person's following a rule. That might seem an absurd charge, given that everyone knows that Kripke conceives the skeptical paradox as a development of Wittgenstein's remarks on rule following. But the point of the charge is that previous interpretations of the paradox go astray because they miss that its central target is the idea that person's performance might be based upon a rule-that a rule might be her reason for proceeding as she does. The skeptical paradox belongs to the philosophy of rational explanation, of explanations that account for what people do or think by citing their reasons for doing or thinking so. That this feature of the paradox has been overlooked is partly Kripke's fault. His exposition of the skeptical argument intertwines two strands without adequately distinguishing them. The secondary literature has picked up on one of these strands. But the material constituting this strand cannot make sense of crucial steps in the discussion; thus commentators are led to find Rule-Following Skepticism Jason Bridges

Semantic Knowledge, Semantic Guidance, and Kripke's Wittgenstein

“…I am not the first to reject the guidance conception as a prerequisite for possession of semantic content. See also Bridges, ; Ginsborg, ; Haddock, (who comes closest to what I offer here, but pursues no positive proposal); Stroud, , (though he often appears to think something like the guidance conception as inexorable); Teghrarian, ; Wikforss, . None offer a critique that takes the particular shape described here.…”

“… This guidance‐centric view of ‘justification’ in the paradox represents the majority view of the more recent interpreters, but it is still controversial. Explicit defenses include: Bridges, ; Horwich, ; Kusch, , pp. 1–93; Van Cleve, ; Wikforss, , pp.…”

Anti-Normativism Evaluated

“…If we focus on assessability, we should reject the third ought-condition and, hence, (C.P1). Indeed, I hold that there are genuine norms, even prescriptive norms, that are not action-guiding (see Bridges, 2014;Ginsborg, 2012).…”

Meaning Scepticism and Primitive Normativity

“…2 2 See, among many others, Blackburn (1984), McDowell (1984), Wright (1986), Boghossian (1989), Glüer and Wikforss (2009), Miller (2010), Verheggen (2011), and Bridges (2014). …”

“…3 3 See, for example, Bridges (2014) and Sultanescu and Verheggen (2019) for conceptions of the paradox that bring the perspective of the speaker to the fore. As we shall see, Ginsborg's conception is of this sort.…”