12 - “Considered in Isolation”

Summary

Chapter 2 of Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language argues that there are no facts about what anyone means by their words, so meaning is a fiction. But some fictions are useful, and Chapter 3 explains why this one is. One side-effect of that explanation is supposed to be the “Private and solitary language argument,” which says that we cannot, or at least cannot usefully, ascribe meaning to an individual “considered in isolation”; it thereby reveals something essentially communitarian about meaning.

This chapter briefly defends that fictionalist reading of Kripke’s great work before arguing at more length that no communitarian conclusion follows. Even if semantic ascriptions are all false, they may still be useful, even when made by, or applied to, or addressed by, an individual “considered in isolation”– whatever exactly this turns out to mean.