ABSTRACT
This chapter contains Rupert’s critical discussion of the epic exegetical struggle around PI 201f., and his own ‘resolute’ reading of this, the climactic moment in the so-called ‘rule-following considerations’. He advances a reading of these passages of PI which serves to throw into question what one can be stably wanting to mean if one wants to purvey a ‘constitutive’ scepticism a la Kripke’s Wittgenstein (‘Kripkenstein’). For, if one’s present meanings are thrown into doubt (as Kripke seems to claim), then the doubts that one raises (in the present) about the past are also thrown into doubt. But this deprives one of the resources needed even to (seem to) state the constitutive scepticism. One concludes that Kripke has not succeeded in assigning any stable meaning to his central ‘claims’ in his reading of Wittgenstein. Kripkean scepticism need not trouble us, because ‘it’ fails even to exist. Kripke’s Wittgenstein evinces merely a fantasy of ‘total’ freedom, rather than anything coherent. It is freedom as mere license; it is the ‘freedom’ of nonsense without due attention: the purveyor of nonsense is free to ‘say’ whatever they want, but, sadly, they don’t actually succeed in saying anything at all.
