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3 - Answering Kripke’s Skeptic

Dispositions without ‘Dispositionalism’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2024

Claudine Verheggen
Affiliation:
York University, Toronto
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Summary

Saul Kripke famously raised two sorts of problems for responses to the meaning skeptic that appealed to how we were disposed to use our words in the past. The first related to the fact that our “dispositions extend to only finitely many cases” while the second related to the fact that most of us have “dispositions to make mistakes.” The second of these problems has produced an enormous, and still growing, literature on the purported “normativity” of meaning, but the first has received (at least comparatively) little attention. It will be argued here, however, that (1) the fact that we can be disposed to make mistakes doesn’t present a serious problem for many disposition-based responses to the skeptic, and (2) considerations of the “finiteness” of our dispositions point, on their own, to an important way that the relation between meaning and use must be understood as “normative.”

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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