In this book Saul Kripke brings his powerful philosophical intelligence to bear on Wittgenstein's analysis of the notion of following a rule.

CONTRARY TO GOODMAN’S VIEW, A CLEAR DISTINCTION CAN BE MADE BETWEEN QUALITATIVE AND POSITIONAL PREDICATES. HENCE WE CAN EXPLAIN THAT WE OUGHT TO PROJECT ’GREEN’ RATHER THAN ’GRUE’ BECAUSE THE LATTER IS A POSITIONAL PREDICATE, RATHER THAN BECAUSE THE LATTER IS LESS WELL ENTRENCHED. A PREDICATE IS POSITIONAL IF, TO FIND OUT AS CERTAINLY AS WE CAN WHETHER IT APPLIES TO AN OBJECT, WE HAVE TO FIND OUT THE LATTER’S SPATIO-TEMPORAL LOCATION.

In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims.

Professor Goodman first presented his "new riddle of induction" in 1946 but it was mainly the more elaborated version published in his Fact, Fiction and Forecast in 1955 that has captured the attention of philosophers. Since then, numerous attempts to solve his "paradox of grue" appeared in press; none of them, however, proved to be wholly satisfactory. In this paper I want to present a solution to this 30-years old puzzle. In the first section I shall try to show that (...) my solution, which is based on a Gedankenexperiment, is immune to the objections leveled against previous attempts. In light of this solution I shall re-examine the status of the paradox and show that in order to preserve the meaningfulness of the paradox some type of Platonic framework for the theory of meaning should have to be assumed. In the last section I shall discuss a proposed solution to the paradox using counterfactual claims. I will show that despite the similarity between counterfactuals and thought-experiments, the counterfactual approach does not lead to a satisfactory solution. (shrink)