Rule-Following Paradox and its Implications for Metaphysics

This monograph presents a new approach to the rule-following paradox, one that doesn't favor community standards over individual ones. This approach also doesn't replace truth conditions with assertability conditions. The author is concerned with how Kripke's influential version of Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox-and Wittgenstein's views more generally-have been perceived as undercutting the belief that individuals can, entirely independently of a community, engage in cogent mathematics and indeed have "private languages." The book first summarizes and develops Kripke's original version of Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox. It then goes on to describe a disposition-meaning language as well as shows how individuals (also known as Robinson Crusoes) can utilize such a language privately. Next, coverage explores why reference magnetism approaches to the rule-following paradox (and to Putnam's paradox as well) don't work, examines how positive success curves enable private rule following, and offers a skeptical solution that is completely compatible with truth conditions and truth-conditional semantics. The author shows that the rule-following paradox is deep in the sense that genuinely solving it has important corollaries for semantic theories of our language as well as for metaphysics, more generally. He also suggests that the relationship between the rule-following problem and Hume's problem of induction may be closer than anyone has realized.