Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s Sceptical Argument

Abstract

Abstract This chapter outlines and expands on the sceptical paradox developed in chapter 2 of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It does so in the context of the ACER model of rule-following introduced in Chapter 1 above. According to this argument, there are no facts about an agent’s psychological and/or social history capable of making it true that the agent accepts one rule rather than another (or means one thing rather than another by a linguistic expression or has a mental state with one content rather than another). Particular attention is paid to Kripke’s attack on reductive dispositionalist theories of meaning and to his objections to non-reductionist views which regard facts about meaning as primitive and sui generis. The chapter also considers “sceptical solutions”, according to which the integrity of meaning-ascribing practices can be preserved even in the absence of meaning-constituting facts. It is argued that such a position—whether construed as an error theory or as a form of non-factualism—is inherently unstable.