This is a work in the philosophy of language and metasemantics. Its purpose is to help answer the question about how words acquire their meanings. The work is divided into two parts. The purpose of Part One is to defend the claim that, despite numerous attempts, the so-called Kripkenstein’s sceptical challenge, and especially the problem of finitude, has not been offered a successful straight solution. The purpose of Part Two is to critically examine Robert Brandom’s philosophy, which can be treated (...) as an answer to the sceptical challenge in my interpretation. My main claim is that although Brandom’s so-called normativist approach does provide a principled solution to the sceptical challenge, the proposal faces a host of other problems in the light of which I reject it. -/- What is Kripkenstein’s sceptical challenge? The name 'Kripkenstein' is an abbreviation used in the literature for Saul Kripke’s reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later works, published in 1982. In the long essay, Kripke presents (that Wittgenstein presented) a sceptical challenge that demands an explanation of how any word can have a determinate meaning. The challenge is usually thought to consist of three interrelated problems: (1) the problem of finitude, (2) the problem of error, and (3) the problem of normativity. Following Martin Kusch, I view the problem of finitude as the most important one. According to the problem, briefly, since any actual subject is a finite being, i.e. capable of exhibiting only finite expressions of linguistic signs, it will always be possible to ask whether, in a given context, she is following a rule S1 or rule S2 that corresponds to the meaning of the sign. For example, supposing that the sign in question is '+', it can be asked whether the subject in a given context has followed the addition rule or an alternative quaddition rule, according to which any addition problem exceeding certain arbitrary cardinality results in five. According to the hypothesis, the actual use of '+' by any speaker is compatible with both rules. Since any speaker has only finite dispositions to the mathematical conduct, there will always be some limit after which there is no fact of the matter, according to the sceptic, which rule the subject will have turned out to have followed. Hence, it is indeterminate whether any actual subject has ever calculated according to the addition rule or the quaddition rule. -/- From my view, despite the work of Kripke and Kusch, the problem of finitude has not been taken as seriously as it ought to have been. This in turn has significant consequences for the metasemantic theory concerning the origin and nature of meaning. In particular, I claim that the way how the meaning of words is determined must be understood as temporal in nature. Moreover, I claim that Kripke’s causal-historical account of reference can work as a non-straight solution to the challenge that explains how at least the meanings of some words can be temporally determined. -/- One central aim of Brandom’s philosophy is to give a straight answer to the problem of finitude by providing an answer to the problem of normativity. However, I claim that Brandom’s version of the 'normativity of meaning' hypothesis cannot work as he intends. The key issues are difficult to summarise, but to put it succinctly, the crucial problem concerns Brandom’s ambition to give an answer to a version of Agrippa’s trilemma, or how a chain of justifications can end in anything else than (i) premises that have already been used, (ii) a primitive premise, or an (iii) infinitude of premises. My claim is that Brandom’s resolution to the trilemma is not sound. (shrink)

The skeptical solution is based on two assumptions — the rejection of semantic facts and the denial of semantic nihilism. On the basis of the non-factualist interpretation of this solution, these two assumptions are reconciled by stating that meaning ascriptions possess non-descriptive function. Nonetheless, Alexander Miller argues that this position is self-refuting since, as despite its non-descriptivism, by rejecting any kind of semantic facts, it inevitably leads to semantic nihilism. In this text, I demonstrate that Miller’s argument is not sound. (...) I argue that a coherent non-factualist way of formulating the conditions of correct use of meaning ascriptions may be performed by rejecting the closure principle of assertibility of meaning ascriptions. On this basis, I demonstrate that argument formulated against non-factualist interpretation by Miller may be refuted. What is more, I argue that rejection of the closure principle should be regarded as the central aspect of Kripke’s skeptical solution. (shrink)

The extensions of Goodman’s ‘grue’ predicate and Kripke’s ‘quus’ are constructed from the extensions of more familiar terms via a reinterpretation that permutes assignments of reference. Since this manoeuvre is at the heart of Putnam’s model-theoretic and permutation arguments against metaphysical realism (‘Putnam’s Paradox’), both Goodman’s New Riddle of Induction and the paradox about meaning that Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein are instances of Putnam’s. Evidence cannot selectively confirm the green-hypothesis and disconfirm the grue-hypothesis, because the theory of which the green-hypothesis (...) is a part has an unintended model in which the grue-hypothesis is equally confirmed; and there are no meaning-facts that determine reference, because the objects referred to by the referring terms of any language or set of intentional mental states are permutable in a way that is consistent with the truth-values of all other sentences in that language or beliefs in that set. The upshot is that the three paradoxes need to be solved in a unified way. (shrink)

Later Wittgenstein is famous for having related meaning and use. Nonetheless, thanks to Dummett and Kripke, and the debates they provoked, a conventional wisdom is nowadays available: Wittgenstein, so the story goes, adopted a theory of meaning in terms of assertability conditions. This paper claims that it is wrong to attribute such a theory to the Investigations. For such a thesis to go through, one of the following two scenarios should be confirmed. It should either be true that Wittgenstein reduces (...) all meaning-engendering uses and conditions of use to assertion and assertability conditions, or that he invokes assertability conditions to show that meaning is always use. But, I will be claiming, the first scenario is excluded by Wittgenstein’s thoughts about the role of assertion and his thoughts about the sense-force distinction, while the second scenario is excluded by Wittgenstein’s thoughts about truth. (shrink)

The paper discusses an objection, put forward by - among others - John McDowell, to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s non-factualist and relativist view of semantic discourse. The objection goes roughly as follows: while it is usually possible to be a relativist about a given domain of discourse without being a relativist about anything else, relativism about semantic discourse entails global relativism, which in turn entails subjective idealism, which we can reasonably assume to be false. The paper’s first section sketches Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s ideas (...) about semantic discourse and gives a fully explicit formulation of the objection. The second section describes and briefly discusses the formal apparatus needed to evaluate the objection - which is basically equivalent to John MacFarlane’s recent development of David Kaplan’s classic semantic framework. Finally, the third section explains in detail why the objection fails. I show that even though relativism about semantic discourse does entail a form of global relativism, the relativism in question does not entail anything like Berkeleyan or Fichtean idealism. This particular kind of relativism holds that which character (in Kaplan’s sense) is associated to a given utterance depends on what MacFarlane calls “the context of assessment”. (shrink)

In this essay, I seek to demonstrate the interplay of philosophical voices – particularly, that of a platonist voice and a community-agreement-view voice – that drives Wittgenstein’s rule-following dialectic forward; and I argue that each voice succumbs to a particular form of dialectical oscillation that renders its response to the problem of rule-following philosophically inadequate. Finally, I suggest that, by seeing and taking stock of the dilemma in which these responses to the skeptical problem are caught, we can come to (...) appreciate Wittgenstein’s own view of what might constitute a proper a response to the so-called problem of rule-following. This view can be preliminarily characterized by saying that Wittgenstein’s aim is to dissolve the temptation to philosophically rebut the skeptical challenge posed by the rule-following dialectic, an aim he achieves by revealing the semantic emptiness of the apparent sentences that raise the skeptical problem. (shrink)

In 1929 Wittgenstein began to work on the first philosophical manuscripts he had kept since completing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1918. The impetus for this was his conviction that the logic of the TLP was flawed: it was unable to account for the fact that a proposition that assigns a single value on a continuum to a simple object thereby excludes all assignments of different values to the object . Consequently Wittgenstein's "atomic propositions" could not be logically independent of one (...) another. ;Initially he thought he could replace the "logically perfect language" of the TLP with a "phenomenological language" in which experiential propositions about various "spaces" would form systems. The system described by a phenomenological language would be independent of the one described by ordinary "physicalistic" language; the physical "world" was known only by inference from the phenomenological. But he soon realized there was a fundamental error in this conception: phenomenology has to describe the same world as physics or it fails to provide a foundation for it. This suggests that there is only one world, and one language with two different modes of expression. Wittgenstein's now comes to his fundamental insight: ordinary language is biased towards the description of physical objects and their relations, but it is our only method of expressing phenomenological or abstract concepts. Failure to recognize this difficulty leads to the misapplication of physicalistic concepts, i.e., to grammatical errors. ;This insight had the following impact: the task of philosophy is not to invent logical or phenomenological languages, but to understand the grammar of ordinary language; the notion of a language of pure experience was itself connected with a false, physicalistic idea of the soul as an observer of a private world; the conception of analysis that had guided philosophy since Frege was based on a misused metaphor taken from the grammar of physics: the analysis of an object into its parts or chemical constituents. These ideas reach their ultimate expression in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Thus his "later" work actually begins with these 1929--30 manuscripts. (shrink)

Two readings of Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox dominate the literature: either his arguments lead to skepticism, and thus to the view that only a deflated account of meaning is available, or they lead to quietism, and thus to the view that no philosophical account of meaning is called for. I argue, against both these positions, that a proper diagnosis of the paradox points the way towards a constructive, non-sceptical account of meaning.

John McDowell has suggested recently that there is a route from his favoured solution to Kripke's Wittgenstein's "sceptical paradox" about rule-following to a particular form of cognitive externalism. In this paper, I argue that this is not the case: even granting McDowell his solution to the rule-following paradox, his preferred version of cognitive externalism does not follow.

Contra an expanding number of deflationary commentators onWittgenstein, I argue that philosophical questions about meaningare meaningful and that Wittgenstein gave us ample reason tobelieve so. Deflationists are right in claiming that Wittgensteinrejected the sceptical problem about meaning allegedly to befound in his later writings and also right in stressing Wittgenstein''s anti-reductionism. But they are wrong in taking these dismissals to entail the end of all constructive philosophizing about meaning. Rather, I argue, the rejection of the sceptical problem requires that we (...) abandon the questions that philosophers have traditionally addressed and that we replace them with more appropriate ones, to which constructive answers are forthcoming. However, though quietism is not the only alternative to reductionism, the rejection of reductionism does oblige us seriously to revise our sense of what constructive philosophy can achieve. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ : J’affirme que les normes sémantiques, y compris les normes mathématiques pour l’addition, sont réelles. Ces normes sont régies par des pratiques sociales d’attribuer aux autres et d’entreprendre soi-même la signification, et cet aspect sociale obscurci l’objectivité des normes. L’attribution par Kripke d’un paradoxe sceptique, quant à la possibilité de suivre une règle, relève d’une conception de la normativité selon laquelle les pratiques sociales sont insuffisantes pour autoriser les normes sémantiques. Or, une conception de la normativité qui prend comme (...) point de départ que les êtres humains font partie du monde, détrône cette idée fausse ainsi que le scepticisme sémantique qu’elle soutien. (shrink)

Moral particularists have seen Wittgenstein as a close ally. One of the main reasons for this is that particularists such as Jonathan Dancy and John McDowell have argued that Wittgenstein's so-called "rule-following considerations" (RFCs) provide support for their skepticism about the existence and/or role of rules and principles in ethics. In this paper, I show that while Wittgenstein's RFCs challenge the notion that competence with language, i.e., the ability to apply concepts properly, is like mechanically following a rule, he does (...) not reject the idea that there are rules that govern proper use of language. I then argue that while the RFCs may, at best, support a weak form of particularism that denies that moral competence is dependent on an explicit grasp of rules, they do not support a stronger version of particularism that denies that there are any true rules or principles in ethics. (shrink)