Saul Kripke, among others, reads Wittgenstein’s private-language argument as an inference from the idea of rule following: The concept of a private language is inconsistent, because using language entails following rules, and following rules entails being a member of a community. Kripke expresses the key exegetical claim underlying that reading as follows.

Saul Kripke, among others, reads Wittgenstein’s private-language argument as an inference from the idea of rule following: The concept of a private language is inconsistent, because using language entails following rules, and following rules entails being a member of a community. Kripke expresses the key exegetical claim underlying that reading as follows.

I. Recent years have witnessed a great resurgence of interest in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, especially with those passages roughly, Philosophical Investigations p)I 38 — 242 and Remarks on the Foundations of mathematics, section VI that are concerned with the topic of rules. Much of the credit for all this excitement, unparalleled since the heyday of Wittgenstein scholarship in the early IIJ6os, must go to Saul Kripke's I4rittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It is easy to explain why. (...) To begin with, the dialectic Kripke uncovered from Wittgenstein's.. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889 and died in Cambridge in 1951. He studied engineering, first in Berlin and then in Manchester, and he soon began to ask himself philosophical questions about the foundations of mathematics. What are numbers? What sort of truth does a mathematical equation possess? What is the force of proof in pure mathematics? In order to find the answers to such questions, he went to Cambridge in 1911 to work with Russell, who had just (...) produced in collaboration with Whitehead (1861-1947) Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), a monumental treatise which bases mathematics on logic. But on what is logic based? Wittgenstein's attempt to answer this question convinced Russell that he was a genius. During the 1914-8 war he served in the Austrian army and in spare moments continued the work on the foundations of logic which he had begun in 1912. His war-time journal, Notebook s 1914-16 (1961), reveals the development of his ideas more clearly that the final version, Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, which he published in the early 1920s. (shrink)

In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke rejects some of the most popular accounts of what meaning facts consist in on the grounds that they fail to accommodate the normative character of meaning. I argue that a widespread interpretation of Kripke's argument is incorrect. I contend that the argument does not rest on the contrast between descriptive and normative facts, but on the thought that speakers' uses of linguistic expressions have to be justified. I suggest that the line (...) of reasoning that I attribute to Kripke can be seen as putting pressure on the idea that predicate satisfaction is to be explained in terms of a relation between predicates and properties. (shrink)

It verges on the platitudinous to say that Wittgenstein's own treatment of the question of a private language has been almost lost to view under mountains of commentary in the last twenty years—so much so, that no one with a concern for his own health would try to arrive at a verdict on the question by first mastering the available discussion. But a general acquaintance with the commentaries indicates that opinion on the matter can be roughly divided into two categories: (...) that of the Old Orthodoxy , most recently represented by Robert Fogelin in his book Wittgenstein ; and that of what may be termed the New Guardians of the Wittgenstein Tradition, apparently based in Oxford and headed by Anthony Kenny, who in his book Wittgenstein has proposed a new account of the argument of Philosophical Investigations §§256–271. The important difference between the old and new orthodoxies will be considered later. (shrink)

The question of rules is not an issue that separates the 'analytical' and 'Continental' traditions from one another; rather it is an issue that is a source of division within each tradition. Within Continental philosophy the problem of the rule-governed character of cognition goes back to Kant's dualism of sense and understanding. Many philosophers in the Continental tradition (notably, Nietzsche, Gadamer and Adorno) have retained a quasi-Kantian conception of judgement while rejecting the idea of it as rule-governed. But there have (...) been exceptions to this within Continental philosophy, most prominently, Jürgen Habermas. The rules thesis was implicit in much of analytical philosophy as it was practised in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. The doctrine gave support to a conception of philosophy (so-called 'ordinary-language philosophy') as essentially an exercise in the articulation of certain kinds of tacit knowledge. It was advocated explicitly in such works as Searle's Speech Acts and Winch's The Idea of a Social Science . The equation of meaning and rules enjoyed further prestige, for it was taken by many philosophers to be the central doctrine to be extracted from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations . A most striking feature of the receding of the rules thesis has been the transformation of previously accepted interpretations of Wittgenstein's later philosophy (for example, by Stanley Cavell and John McDowell). Both adherents and opponents of the rules thesis have shared a common concern. In emphasizing the discontinuity between language and the subject-matter of the natural sciences both sides offer reassuringly positive answers to one of the besetting problems of twentieth-century philosophy: does philosophy have a distinctive subject-matter of its own? (shrink)

Introduction It is by no means obvious that someone interested in politics and society needs to concern himself with philosophy; nor that, in particular, ...

The rule-following debate, in its concern with the metaphysics and epistemology of linguistic meaning and mental content, goes to the heart of the most fundamental questions of contemporary philosophy of mind and language. This volume gathers together the most important contributions to the topic, including papers by Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Graeme Forbes, Warren Goldfarb, Paul Horwich, John McDowell, Colin McGinn, Ruth Millikan, Philip Pettit, George Wilson, and José Zalabardo. This debate has centred on Saul Kripke's reading of the rule-following (...) sections in Wittgenstein and his consequent posing of a "sceptical paradox" that threatens our every day notions of linguistic meaning and mental content. These essays are attempts to respond to this challenge and represent some of the most important work in contemporary theory of meaning. They examine the notion of meaning; whether it is possible to find a suitable meaning-constituting fact from our previous behaviour or mental histories; objections to, and defenses of, dispositional accounts of meaning; the plausibility of non-factualism about meaning; our attempts to develop non-reductionist accounts of meaning; and the sources of the normativity which attaches to meaning, such as the linguistic practice of the community or the dispositions of the individual. With an introductory essay and a comprehensive guide to further reading the book is an excellent resource for courses in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, Wittgenstein, and metaphysics, as well as for all philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists with interests in these areas. Contributors include Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Graeme Forbes, Warren Goldfarb, Paul Horwich, John McDowell, Colin McGinn, Alexander Miller, Ruth Garrett Millikan, Philip Pettit, George. M. Wilson, Crispin Wright, and José L. Zalabardo. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's `language-games' constitute a forceful post-Cartesian, anti-foundationalist account of linguistic activity with meaning sustained across a network of customary practices or forms of life. This is a fertile picture of language but it depends upon a rigid, synchronic notion of linguistic rules and fails to account for the developmental and transformative dimensions to language. I suggest that Wittgenstein is unable to connect past to present language-games. Despite an obvious proximity of Gadamer to Wittgenstein (on the pragmatics of language) I argue (...) that Gadamer's work on tradition, with its hermeneutical understanding of the indeterminacy of linguistic rules, exposes Wittgenstein's apparent blindness to the historical aspect of language. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes five key interpretations of the argument presented by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations I, §258. I also argue that on none of these five interpretations is the argument cogent. The paper is primarily concerned with the most popular interpretation of the argument: that which that makes it rest upon the principle that one can be said to follow a rule only if there exists a 'useable criterion of successful performance' (Pears) or 'operational standard of correctness' (Glock) for its (...) correct application. This principle, I suggest, is untrue. The private language argument upon which it rests therefore fails. (shrink)

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

Ebbs’s aim is to “come to terms with and move beyond currently entrenched ways of looking at central topics in the philosophy of language and mind”. The entrenched perspectives are Metaphysical Realism, the view that “we can make ‘objective’ assertions only if we can ‘grasp’ metaphysically independent ‘truth conditions”’, and Scientific Naturalism, “Quine’s view that ‘it is within science itself that reality is to be identified and described”’. Ebbs intends to replace these with what he calls the “Participant Perspective,” from (...) which alone, he says, a satisfactory understanding of our linguistic behavior can be had. His work constitutes, I think, a stimulating and highly original contribution to the field. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discover whether or not a solitary individual, a human being isolated from birth, could become a rule-follower. The argumentation against this possibility rests on the claim that such an isolate could not become aware of a normative standard, with which her actions could agree or disagree. As a consequence, theorists impressed by this argumentation adopt a view on which the normativity of rules arises from corrective practices in which agents engage in a community. (...) However, it has been suggested that an isolated individual could engage in such a practice by herself. Three prospective examples of such cases are considered, and the possibility of solitary rule-following is vindicated. Furthermore, the nature of the goals at which rule-following practices generally aim is clarified. (shrink)

This chapter concentrates on two discussions, both of which enlist Wittgenstein's rule‐following considerations in support of radical and highly revisionary conclusions about the objectivity of meaning ‐ conclusions which may appear to entail, and have been taken to entail, consequences for the objectivity of truth and judgment which are no less radical and revisionary. There is widespread agreement that Wittgenstein advances, in the rule‐following sections of Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, considerations that are quite destructive of (...) certain conceptions of meaning, understanding, and rule‐following into which one may easily slide when attempts a general philosophical account of them. Saul Kripke interprets central sections of Philosophical Investigations as developing a 'skeptical paradox' about meaning. Kripke himself describes the skeptical conclusion as 'insane and intolerable'. (shrink)

The solitary language user is again stalking the critical fields of Europe . This pre-social individual, abstracted from all social and historical context, has been seemingly revived after what many of us saw as a death-blow dealt by Wittgenstein in his analysis of the notion of following a rule , and his related discussions bringing out the impossibilities of a ‘private’ language—what has come to be known as Wittgenstein's ‘private language argument’. Just what a ‘private language’ is has become the (...) issue. Did Wittgenstein show that language-use and rule-following essentially and necessarily involved others, and were therefore necessarily social in character ? Or did his arguments bear only against the notion of a language which was essentially and necessarily private, one which could not in principle be taught to another? (shrink)

Could we imagine a language in which a person could express his inner sensations or experiences for his private use? the author explicates wittgenstein's views, Giving one, An expose of certain considerations which lend plausibility to the notion of a private language, And two, A reduction "ad absurdum" of the notion of a private language or private understanding. The utility of a sign and its intelligibility in the common language go hand in hand; a sign which is supposed to be (...) simply "associated" with a sensation cannot have a use. Hence, Any sign which has a use cannot be simply associated with a sensation. (staff). (shrink)

Through detailed and trenchant criticism of standard interpretations of some of the key arguments in analytical philosophy over the last sixty years, this book ...

v. 1, pt. 1. The essays -- v. 1, pt. 2. Exigesis, 1-184.

Los Principios del Conocimiento Humano de George Berkeley es un texto crucial en la historia del empirismo y en la historia de la filosofía en general. Su afirmación central y aparentemente sorprendente es que el mundo físico no puede existir independientemente de la mente que percibe. El significado de esta afirmación, los argumentos poderosos a su favor y el sistema en el que está incrustado, se explican de manera altamente lúcida y legible y se colocan en su contexto histórico. La (...) filosofía de Berkeley es, en parte, una respuesta a las profundas tensiones y problemas en la nueva filosofía del período moderno y al lector se le ofrece una descripción de este medio intelectual. Luego, el libro sigue el orden y la sustancia de los Principios mientras se basa en materiales de otros escritos de Berkeley. Este volumen es la introducción ideal a los Principios de Berkeley y será de gran interés para los historiadores de la filosofía en general. (shrink)

On a souvent considéré qu'une philosophie de l'esprit devait choisir parmi les traits distinctifs du mental celui qu'elle retiendrait pour le mettre en relief. Il ne serait pas possible de faire place dans une même philosophie aux trois faits majeurs : l'intentionnalité du mental (on discerne les pensées de quelqu'un en disant à quoi il pense), le holisme du mental (impossible de concevoir un état d'esprit isolé du tout d'une vie mentale), la part impersonnelle du mental (les acteurs ne manifestent (...) pas seulement des capacités mentales attachées à leurs personnes respectives, mais aussi des manières de penser communes, des institutions de sens formant ce qu'on appelle un esprit objectif). Ainsi, les théories intentionalistes de l'esprit ont généralement exalté le sujet aux dépens des totalités symboliques, tandis que les théories des structures de l'esprit ont paru faire de l'acteur un simple figurant sur la scène du signifiant. De tels partis pris signalent l'échec de bien des philosophes à concevoir clairement les conditions d'une analyse holiste des phénomènes de l'esprit. Ce livre utilise les ressources analytiques de la logique des relations de C.S. Peirce pour développer une conception holiste de l'intentionnalité de l'esprit (tant subjectif qu'objectif). Ce faisant, il introduit, par l'analyse d'exemples plutôt que par un simple survol historique des doctrines, aux problèmes discutés dans les grandes philosophies de l'esprit de ce temps : phénoménologie, individualisme, structuralisme, pragmatisme. (shrink)

This lucid and accessible dictionary presents technical terms that Wittgenstein introduced into philosophical debate or transformed substantially, and also topics to which he made a substantial contribution. Hans-Johann Glock places Wittgenstein's ideas in their relevance to current debates. The entries delineate Wittgenstein's lines of argument on particular issues, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and shed light on fundamental exegetical controversies. The dictionary entries are prefaced by a 'Sketch of a Intellectual Biography', which links the basic themes of the early and (...) later philosophy and describes the general development of Wittgenstein's thinking. Extensive textual references, a detailed index and an annotated bibliography will facilitate further study. Authoritative, comprehensive and clear, the volume will be welcomed by anyone with an interest in Wittgenstein - his life, work or influence. Each Blackwell Philosopher Dictionary presents the life and work of an individual philosopher in a scholarly but accessible manner. Entries cover key ideas and thoughts, as well as the main themes of the philosopher's works. A comprehensive biographical sketch is also included. (shrink)