BLIND RULE-FOLLOWING AND THE ‘ANTINOMY OF PURE REASON

Abstract

Saul Kripke identifies the ‘rule-following problem’ as finding an answer to the question: What makes it the case that a speaker means one thing rather than another by a linguistic expression? In a series of important papers in the 1980s and 1990s, Crispin Wright and Paul Boghossian argued that this problem could be neutralized via the adoption of a form of non-reductionism about content. In recent work on ‘blind rule-following’, however, both now argue that even if a non-reductionist view can be defended in such a way as to neutralize the challenge posed by Kripke's Wittgenstein, a more fundamental problem about rule-following remains unsolved. Against this, I will argue that if, courtesy of a non-reductionist conception of content, we can successfully meet the challenge posed by Kripke's Wittgenstein, there are no further problems about rule-following along the lines of those recently suggested by Boghossian and Wright.