Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

Two Reductions of ‘rule’
Dana Riesenfeld, Tel Aviv, Israel
1. First reduction: The reduction of rules to
conventions 1
Kripke (1982) sees Wittgenstein’s discussion on rule following
as presenting a paradox which brings about a skeptical
conclusion: “..there is no fact about me that distinguishes
my meaning a definite function by ‘+’ …and my
meaning nothing at all” (1982: 21). But as this “skeptical
[sic.] 2 conclusion is insane and intolerable” (1982: 60),
Kripke attempts to solve the it by offering a skeptical conclusion
that involves an appeal to community, and which
has later been entitled ‘the community view’. The outcome
of the paradox is that words do not have pre-existing
meanings, however, he argues, they do gain their meaning
by the rule’s tendency to match in their usage within the
linguistic community. Meanings are not derivative of their
conforming to rules but rather derive from their compliance
with a social consensus regarding their proper or correct
use: “the community must be able to judge whether an
individual is indeed following a given rule in particular applications,
i.e. whether his responses agree with our own”
(1982: 109).
The first chapter of Kripke’s book (“The
Wittgensteinian paradox” pp. 22-37) consists in the
attempts of the interlocutor to oppose the skeptic’s doubts
concerning the meaning of ‘+’, the addition sign. The
skeptic casts doubt on whether anything at all (not
exclusively a rule) can establish meaning. Having been
persuaded by the skeptic’s arguments that there is no fact
about me which ensures my meaning ‘plus’ rather than
‘quus’, Kripke examines a few plausible answers to the
skeptic, devoting most of his efforts to reject the
dispositional account as an inadequate account of rule
following.
Dispositionalism in this context is the idea that “To
mean addition by ‘+’ is to be disposed to, when asked for
any sum ‘x+y’, to give the sum of x and y as the answer …
to mean quus is to be disposed, when queried about any
arguments, to respond with their quum” (1982: 22-23). For
Kripke it is very important to distinguish between his
position and the dispositionalist account. Kripke raises a
few difficulties for the dispositionalist account, the most
important of which is the claim that it aims to shed light on
the normative practice of rule following in descriptive
terms.
Dispositions tell us how we will answer not how we
ought to answer. This point is stressed by Kripke
throughout his attempts to dismiss the dispositional
account as an adequate candidate to answer the skeptic:
Suppose I do mean addition by ‘+’. What is the relation
of this supposition to the question how I will respond
to the problem ’68 + 57’? The dispositionalist
gives a descriptive account of this relation: if ‘+’
meant addition, then I will answer ‘125’. But this is
1 Throughout, I refer to Kripke’s views, ignoring the question of whether the
view Kripke is assigning to Wittgenstein is really his, whether it is Kripke’s
position or whether it is a hybrid view sometimes assigned in the literature to
‘Kripkenstein’. Kripke himself is unclear about this issue, (1982: 5).
2 Throughout Kripke’s text ‘sceptic’ and ‘scepticism’ are spelled with a ‘C’.
When quoting, I left the spelling as it appears in the original text.
not the proper account of the relation which is normative,
not descriptive. The point is not that, if I
meant addition by ‘+’, I will answer ‘125’ but that, if I
intend to accord with my past meaning of ‘+’ I
should answer ‘125’… The relation of meaning and
intention to future action is normative, not descriptive
(1982: 37).
Kripke’s discussion of the dispositionalist account and his
critique of it make it clear that any adequate explanation of
‘rules’ must retain the normative aspect of rules. But does
Kripke’s own account give an explanation of rule following
in normative terms? In what follows, I claim it does not.
Kripke’s skeptical solution is achieved by a
‘widening of the gaze’, “…from consideration of the rule
follower alone and allow ourselves to consider him as
interacting with a wider community” (1982: 89). So in
answer to the question ‘what are rules?’ Kripke replies that
they are in themselves and by themselves nothing at all.
Only when thought about against a background of the
community of speakers within which they operate they
have meaning. The concept of rule means nothing when
abstracted from the use of rules by a community, and does
not have any objective meaning outside of how rules
operate in actual speech. Rules of meaning are thus rules
of use, and correct, justified and guided use of rules is
something that is in principle dependent upon the
pronouncement of the community of speakers.
This idea is presented by the emphasis Kripke puts
on the procedure he calls public checkability:
“Wittgenstein’s sceptical solution to his problem depends
on agreement, and on checkability – on one person’s
ability to test whether another uses a term as he does”
(1982: 99). Public checkability, or agreement, now sets the
standard of correctness and replaces the appeal to the
rule as providing such standard.
‘Agreement’ for Kripke is not an objective fact but it
is a brute fact. It is not objective in a Platonic sense, for
agreement can change and shift and what we agree on
today may not be what we will agree upon tomorrow. It is
in this sense that agreement lacks the necessitation of
e.g., a law of nature. However, agreement is a brute fact, a
descriptive notion, capturing the conventions the linguistic
community abides by at a certain point in time. In fact,
Kripke claims, we do agree (e.g., on the meaning of the
addition sign) generally. But what does it mean to
generally agree? Does it mean that most of us agree most
of the time? That most of us agree part of the time?
Perhaps that part of us agree all of the time? In other
words, how do the concepts of agreement and public
checkability differentiate between correct and incorrect rule
following, and between those and not following any rule at
all?
According to Kripke’s solution, when asked to justify
an action (e.g., giving the answer 125 to the addition
problem: 68+57) one should answer: “I gave this answer
because everyone else does”. Following a rule is found to
be no more (and no less) than acting in conformity to
others. The maxim “act like everyone else does” replaces
the appeal to rules when one searches for justification. An
important merit of this solution is that it maintains one of
the most basic intuitions about rules: their fallibility. Rules
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