ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Saul Kripke's case concerning the understanding and following rules. Kripke is guilty of committing the very mistake which Wittgenstein is at pains to correct, that is to say the assumption that there must be an interpretation which mediates between an order or rule on the one hand, and an action in conformity with it, on the other hand. Kripke represents Wittgenstein as stating the sceptical paradox that no course of action could be determined by a rule. Charles M. Yablon accepts Kripke's paradox, that is that language is impossible. The chapter concludes that that Yablon's distinction between "Kripkean indeterminacy" and "causal indeterminacy" must be rejected since he is conflating the two uses of rules in the way which Wittgenstein calls a "mistake". Yablon thinks that the rules of arithmetic take on a certain causal efficacy when incorporated in a person's mind, whereas this is not the case with legal rules.
