Introduction

Many commentators on Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (hereafter WRPL) have found it flatly incredible that Kripke would suppose that Wittgenstein was some kind of skeptic about meaning. But often, it seems to me, these commentators have not paid adequate attention to the character of the putative meaning of skepticism that is chiefly at issue in Kripke’s reconstruction. The questions here are confusing, but it will be useful to begin with Kripke’s well-known comparison to Hume.

Kripke asserts, “It is important and illuminating to compare Wittgenstein’s new form of skepticism with the classical skepticism of Hume: there are important analogies between the two. Both develop a skeptical paradox, based on questioning a certain nexus from past to future. Wittgenstein questions the nexus between past ‘intention’ or ‘meanings’ and present practice: for example, between my past ‘intentions’ with regard to plus and my present computation ‘68 + 57 = 125’” (WRPL, p. 62). Hume, of course, is a skeptic about the idea that past causes necessitate their future effects. The nexus questioned by Kripke’s Wittgenstein, on the other hand, is this: what the speaker means nowby a term determines how the term, in its present meaning, is to be applied correctly in an indefinite range of yet to be examined cases. Let us say, for brevity, that what is claimed to be questioned in Wittgenstein is the idea that the meaning of a term semantically determines in advance whether or not the term, so meant, applies to various actual and possible candidate items. In Section I, I will spell out more carefully what I think the targeted notion of “prior semantic determination” amounts to, and I will sketch the outlines of the critique of that notion that Kripke’s Wittgenstein elaborates.