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Gruesome Arithmetic: Kripke's Sceptic Replies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Barry Allen
Barry Allen
Affiliation:
McMaster University
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Extract

Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language has enlivened recent discussion of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Yet it is quite possible to disengage his interpretive thesis from its supporting argumentation. Doing so leaves one with an intriguing sceptical argument which Kripke first powerfully advances, then tries to halt. But contrary to the impression his argument may leave, Kripke's solution and the position it concedes to the Sceptic are deeply allied. Here I shall demonstrate their common assumption, and on that basis argue that Kripke's solution begs the Sceptic's question. Furthermore, I believe we can live with the Sceptic. The sceptical argument can be turned into a reasonable contribution to a kind of nominalism in the philosophy of meaning and truth.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , Spring 1989 , pp. 257 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1989

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References

1 Kripke, S. A., Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. References embedded. As an interpretation of Wittgenstein, Kripke's work has been criticized from several directions: Polemically, by Baker, J. and Hacker, P., Scepticisim, Rules, and Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984)Google Scholar; in deeper yet more measured tones by Goldfarb, W., “Kripke on Wittgenstein on Rules”, Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985), 471–488CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McDowell, J., “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule”, Synthese 58 (1984), 325–363CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Anscombe, G. E. M., “Critical Notice of Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 15 (1985), 103–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 The name “Sceptical Solution” is intended to recall the Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, where Hume follows up his sceptical assault on the reality of causation with a “Sceptical Solution of These Doubts”. While Kripke regards his own Sceptical Solution as Wittgenstein's position in the Philosophical Investigations, it is not one he would defend without qualification and it seems irreconcilable with ideas advanced in Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

3 While unquestionably an assumption of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, a truth-conditional semantic is not inevitably committed to an ontology of truth-makers. Donald Davidson (Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984]Google Scholar) maintains a strong link between linguistic meaning and truth-conditions, yet radically departs from the attempt to explain truth on the basis of facts, arguing that “no thing makes sentences and theories true” (194).

4 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations (3rd ed.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), section 65.Google Scholar

5 Davidson, Donald, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”, in LePore, E., ed., Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 445–446.Google Scholar

6 Goodman, Nelson, “The New Riddle of Induction”, in his Fact, Fiction and Forecast (3rd ed.; Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1979), 59–83.Google Scholar

7 See Quine, W. V., Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960)Google Scholar, chap. 2; and Davidson, , Inquiries into TruthGoogle Scholar, chaps. 9–16. Quine returns to this in his recent paper, “Indeterminacy of Translation Again”, Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987), 5–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Quine, W. V., “Reply to Chomsky”, in Davidson, D. and Hintikka, J., eds., Words and Objections (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), 304.Google Scholar

9 Calvin Normore argues that “medieval nominalism began in a series of worries about the relation of sentences and clauses to the world”; that “it has nothing to do with the problem of universals, and that seeing it as focused on the problem of universals simply distorts our picture of what went on”. He believes “it is less distorting but still inaccurate to see it as a position about the ontological status of abstract entities”. See “The Tradition of Medieval Nominalism”, in Wippel, J. F., ed., Studies in Medieval Philosophy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 201–217.Google Scholar