Kripke's Wittgenstein

This is a philosophical guide that investigates Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein presented in his celebrated book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language(1982). It explores various aspects of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s view and explicates the chief objections to it made by leading philosophers since the 80s.

Kripke’s novel and uniquereading of Wittgenstein offered in his eminent book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language(1982) has been subject to tremendous discussions for over forty years. The present book aims to offer a comprehensive explanation of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s view by explicating step by step the “Sceptical Argument” that Kripke offers on behalf of Wittgenstein in Chapter 2 of his book, the “Sceptical Solution” that he attributes to Wittgenstein in Chapter 3, the problem of other minds as treated by Kripke’s Wittgenstein in the Postscript to Kripke’s book, and finally the chief objections to Kripke’s view of Wittgenstein made by those leading philosophers who have deeply engaged in the topic since the 80s.

In Chapter 2 of his book, Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein a sceptical argument, which aims to establish the sceptical conclusion that there is no fact of the matter as to what someone means by her words. This is a direct attack on the classical realist view of meaning, which, according to Kripke, the early Wittgenstein himself has been in a sense an advocate of. The first three chapters of the present book have been dedicated to a detailed discussion of this argument. Kripke, in Chapter 3 of his book, reads Wittgenstein asproposing a sceptical solution to the sceptical problem, which basically attempts to bring our attention back to our ordinary linguistic practices, such as that of attributing meaning to ours and others’ utterances. On this alternative picture, we attribute meaning and rules to someone if we can observe, in enough cases, that she responds as we do or would do on similar occasions. This sceptical solution is explored in Chapter 4 of the present book. I have then concentrated on Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s remarks on the problem of other minds discussed in the Postscript to Kripke’s book. We will see how the same sceptical problem arises in the case of attributions of sensations and why Kripke’s Wittgenstein thinks that there is, in addition to the sceptical problem, an extra problem special to this case. We face this additional problem if we followthe traditional model of dealing with the problem of other minds, according to which we extend the concepts of the inner from our own case to the case of others. These topics are introduced in Chapter 5 of the book at hand.

Finally, the lastchapter of the book covers the key responses to Kripke’s view of Wittgenstein, which have beenput forward by those leading philosophers who have extensively discussed Kripke’s reading, such as John McDowell, Christopher Peacocke, Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker, Simon Blackburn, Colin McGinn, Crispin Wright, Paul Boghossian, Scott Soames, Noam Chomsky, Paul Horwich, Hannah Ginsborg, George Wilson, Philip Pettit and Barry Stroud. Each of these philosophers has carefully examined various facets of Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein, which the last chapter scrutinizes one by one.