Primitive Normativity and Skepticism about Rules

Abstract

In his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language 1 , Saul Kripke develops a skeptical argument against the possibility of meaning. Suppose that all your previous uses of the word 'plus' and of the '+' sign have involved numbers less than 57. You are now asked 'what is 68 plus 57? and you answer '125.' But a skeptic proposes the hypothesis that by the word 'plus,' or the '+' sign, you previously meant, not addition, but quaddition, where x quus y is the sum of x and y if x and y are less than 57, and otherwise 5. If you are to use the word 'plus' as you used it in the past, the skeptic says, then, on the hypothesis that you meant quaddition, you ought to answer '5.' Against your insistence that you know what you meant by 'plus,' the skeptic challenges you to cite some fact in virtue of which you meant addition. All your previous answers, he points out, were consistent with the hypothesis that you meant quaddition, so how can you justify your claim that you meant addition instead? The upshot of the skeptical considerations is not merely the epistemological conclusion that you do not know what you meant, but the metaphysical conclusion that there is no fact about what you meant. And this conclusion generalizes to all supposed cases of meaning or rule-following, present as well as past. There can be no fact as to whether anyone means anything by any word, or is following any one rule rather than any other. Kripke's argument proceeds mostly by elimination: he considers, and rules out, various proposals as to what the fact of meaning addition might consist in. Two in particular are worth highlighting. The one which Kripke discusses in more detail is that your meaning addition by the word 'plus' is a fact about your dispositions with respect to that word. You meant addition in the past because you were disposed to give the sum rather than the quum in answer to questions using the word 'plus.' Kripke raises three objections against this proposal, turning respectively on the supposed finiteness of our dispositions (26-27), on the fact that we are sometimes disposed to make arithmetical mistakes (28-32), and most importantly on the proposal's apparent failure to account for what he calls the 'normativity of meaning': that one is or was disposed to respond in a certain way on a given occasion cannot make it the case that one ought so to respond (23-24, 37). 2 The other, which Kripke

Determinate attitudes and indeterminate norms

“…Second, concerning the consequences of the paradox, we agree with Ginsborg's () popular interpretation that they are ontological (rather than epistemological: we cannot know which norm we are following). In her words, the paradox aims to establish the “metaphysical conclusion that there is no fact about what you meant” (2001, p.228) or, in more normative terms, that there is no fact about which norm one is following.…”

Rule-Following and Primitive Normativity

“…Ginsborg's account is not fully reductionist, however, for it appeals to a further disposition – the disposition to regard one's applications as primitively appropriate – which clearly is fully intentional. Ginsborg's account is nonreductionist “to the extent that it requires us to accept at least one sui generis intentional attitude, namely, the attitude through which we take each of our actual responses to be appropriate to the circumstances” (Ginsborg , 252).…”

“…Kripke's challenge is to produce the fact in virtue of which you mean or meant one thing rather than another, for example, the fact in virtue of which you mean, say, addition by ‘plus’ and not some similar yet distinct function quaddition . According to Ginsborg, the fact in virtue of which you mean, say, addition by ‘plus’ is the fact that “you are disposed to respond to a query about (say) ‘68 plus 57’ with ‘125’, where, in responding in that way, you take that response to be primitively appropriate in light of your previous uses of ‘plus’” (Ginsborg , 244). You take your response to be primitively appropriate insofar as your sense of its appropriateness does not depend on a belief that the response conforms to an antecedently recognized rule.…”

Rule‐Following and Rule‐Breaking: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein

“…Compare Hannah Ginsborg's Kant‐inspired attempt also to supply an account of primitive normativity that provides a middle way between an intentionalist conception of rule‐following and mere rule‐conforming (see Ginsborg : 248, n25). On Ginsborg's account, it is sufficient for one to follow a rule just for one to be reliably disposed to conform to the rule, ‘with the proviso that one's … behavior involves the consciousness of its primitive appropriateness to the context’ (Ginsborg : 248). Notably, the view I am associating with Kierkegaard does not require any positive idea of consciousness of the ‘primitive appropriateness’ of one's way of applying a rule.…”