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Kripke's Normativity Argument

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

José L. Zalabardo
José L. Zalabardo*
Affiliation:
The University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, BirminghamB15 2TT, United Kingdom
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Extract

In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Kripke presented an argument to the effect that there can be no facts as to what someone means by a linguistic expression. In this argument, a central role is played by the contention that meaning is a normative notion. Some of the most popular accounts of what meaning facts consist in are rejected on the grounds that they fail to accommodate the normative character of meaning. This aspect of Kripke's dialectic plays a crucial role in his rejection of dispositional accounts of meaning, and it is rightly perceived as undermining, if successful, currently fashionable information theoretic accounts of semantic notions. Assessments of its success vary widely. Whereas for some writers the normative character of meaning constitutes an insurmountable obstacle for dispositional accounts, advocates of the information theoretic program have generally failed to acknowledge that their proposals are invalidated by this aspect of the notion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , December 1997 , pp. 467 - 488
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1997

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Footnotes

1

This paper was presented at a symposium on the philosophy of Saul Kripke organised by the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, UNAM, in Mexico City. Thanks are due to that audience, especially to Saul Kripke and Scott Soames. I have also benefited from comments by Harold Noonan, Greg McCulloch and an anonymous referee.

References

2 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1982

3 All these quotations are taken from Fodor, Jerry ‘A Theory of Content, II: The Theory,’ in A Theory of Content and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1990), 128–9.Google Scholar

4 Boghossian, Paul ‘The Rule-Following Considerations,’ Mind 98 (1989), 513Google Scholar

5 Cf. ibid.

6 Hume, David A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed. Selby-Bigge, L.A. and Nidditch, P.H. eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1978), 469Google Scholar

7 Paul Boghossian has given the clearest presentation of this reading of Kripke's normativity considerations (d. ‘The Rule-Following Considerations’). Boghossian attributes this reading to Simon Blackburn, Crispin Wright and John McDowell (cf. ibid., 532-3), and at least in the case of the first two, this attribution seems incontestable. Cf. Blackburn, Simon ‘The Individual Strikes Back,’ Synthese 58 (1984) 281–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wright, Crispin ‘Kripke's Account of the Argument against Private Language,’ Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984) 759–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Cf. e.g., J. Fodor, ‘A Theory of Content, II: The Theory,’ 94-5.

9 However, not all dispositional accounts are information theoretic. Cf. Ginet, Carl ‘The Dispositionalist Solution to Wittgenstein's Problem about Understanding a Rule: Answering Kripke's Objections,’ in French, P.A. Uehling, T.E. Jr., and Wettstein, H.K. eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume XII: The Wittgenstein Legacy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1992) 53–73Google Scholar.

10 Cf. J. Fodor, ‘A Theory of Content, 1: The Problem,’ in A Theory of Content and Other Essays, 60, where a number of influential information theoretic accounts are presented as following this model. Fodor claims that his most recent version of the information theoretic account doesn't follow this pattern (cf. ‘A Theory of Content, II,’ 90). See Boghossian, Paul ‘Naturalizing Content,’ in Rey, G. and Loewer, B. eds., Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell 1991 ), 71–3Google Scholar, where this claim is contested.

11 For other arguments against the feasibility of this task, see Paul Boghossian, ‘Naturalizing Content,’ and Zalabardo, J. ‘A Problem for Information Theoretic Semantics,’ Synthese 105 (1995) 1–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Crispin Wright, ‘Kripke's Account of the Argument against Private Language,’ 771-2

13 Boghossian, ‘The Rule-Following Considerations,’ 332. Cf. also Simon Blackburn, ‘The Individual Strikes Back,’ 291, where this claim is attributed to Kripke and endorsed.

14 ‘A Theory of Content, II,’ 135

15 Cf. Field, Hartry ‘Tarski's Theory of Truth,’ Journal of Philosophy 69 (1972) 347–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an explicit statement of this way of conceiving the task.

16 I have argued against this way of understanding the task of explaining predicate reference in Zalabardo, J. ‘Predicates, Properties, and the Goal of a Theory of Reference,’ Grazer Philosophische Studien 51 (1996) 121–61Google Scholar. Cf. also Putnam, Hilary Reason, Truth and History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an argument against the assimilation of the task of explaining reference to the scientific explication of pre-theoretic notions.

17 Warren Goldfarb has also seen that a principle along these lines is at play in Kripke' s discussion of dispositionalism. He writes: ‘Now Kripke, in saying the “fact must show how I am justified,” does seem to mean that the justifications must in some sense be transparent’ (Goldfarb, Warren ‘Kripke on Wittgenstein on Rules,’ Journal of Philosophy 82 [1985], 478)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Some predicates are associated with fairly elaborate application procedures, while others are applied on the basis of brute classificatory propensities. As I am using the notion, procedures for applying predicates are meant to include both kinds of case. They could be as minimal as, say, checking whether an object is red by looking at it. Notice also that I am not assuming that each predicate will be associated with a single procedure. We often have several methods for deciding whether to apply a predicate to an object.

19 There are some exceptions. In his review of Kripke's, book (Nous 19 [1985])Google Scholar, Brian Loar emphasized the importance of this line of reasoning for Kripke's dialectic (d. 275). Warren Goldfarb has also identified this strand of Kripke's argument. Cf. his ‘Kripke on Wittgenstein on Rules,’ 477-9. Ruth Millikan also registers, in a footnote, this aspect of Kripke's dialectic. Cf. Millikan, Ruth Garrett ‘Truth Rules, Hoverflies, and the Kripke-Wittgenstein Paradox,’ Philosophical Review 99 (1990), 327–8, n. 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 For externalist accounts of epistemic notions, see, e.g., Goldman, A. ‘Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge,’ Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976) 771–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Armstrong, D. Belief, Truth and Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973), chs. 12 and 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 For a promising line of attack on epistemological externalism, cf. Stroud, B. ‘Understanding Human Knowledge in General,’ in Clay, M. and Lehrer, K. eds., Knowledge and Skepticism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1989)Google Scholar.

22 Wilfrid Sellars identified this picture as central to the traditional empiricist account of sense perception. Cf. Sellars, Wilfrid ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,’ in Feigl, H. and Scriven, M. eds., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. I: The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1956), 286–8Google Scholar. The picture is also present in the Fregean conception of senses as objective, extra-mental, reference-determining entities which the mind is nevertheless capable of grasping. Kripke discusses briefly the bearing of the rule following considerations on this view (cf. 53-4).