ABSTRACT
In this chapter we move on to look at another form of scepticism about sense, that developed by Kripke’s Wittgenstein in Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.1 Let Jones be a representative speaker of English, and consider sentences such as “Jones means addition by ‘+’ ”, “Jones understands the ‘+’ sign to mean addition”, “The sense that Jones associates with the ‘+’ sign is such that it stands for the addition function”. KW argues for a form of constitutive scepticism about such claims: there is no fact of the matter which constitutes Jones’s meaning one thing rather than another by the “+” sign, no fact of the matter which constitutes his attaching one sense rather than another to the “+” sign. Another way of putting the conclusion would be: ascriptions of meaning or sense do not themselves possess sense, they do not have truth-conditions, and are neither true nor false. Ascriptions of meaning thus appear to be meaningless. This is KW’s sceptic’s “sceptical paradox”. KW goes on to try to neutralise the impact of the sceptic’s conclusions: even though there are no facts in virtue of which ascriptions of sense and meaning are true or false, we can
still find a place for them by viewing them as possessing some non fact-stating role.2 This is KW’s “sceptical solution”. In this chapter we’ll outline KW’s sceptic’s arguments for the sceptical paradox, and KW’s sceptical solution to that paradox. We’ll see that the sceptical solution is problematic, so that some more direct response to the sceptical paradox is called for. In the next chapter, we’ll look at a number of such responses that have been developed by contemporary philosophers of language.
