This contribution’s point of departure is a reading of Wittgenstein defended elsewhere, on which Wittgenstein never engaged with semantic skepticism in his texts. While this reading distances Wittgenstein from Kripke, an intriguing indirect connection between their work remains. Certain concepts like regularity, constancy, and (qualitative) sameness play a significant role in addressing questions in the foundations of semantics for Wittgenstein. I discuss how, if Wittgenstein's appeal to these notions is legitimate, they may also be of use in diffusing (the distinctively metaphysical aspects of) semantic skepticism. Along the way, I contrast the resulting position with its nearest historical antecedent in the work of David Lewis, arguing that Lewis’s appeal to metaphysically distinguished properties in the foundations of semantics is not only superfluous, but counterproductive.

There is a form of naturalism which runs through Kripke’s account of rule-following. Given the overarching structure of his account, in which Wittgenstein’s naturalism is made to serve the ends of a skeptical solution to the paradox of the regress of interpretations, it inevitably has the effect of giving a reductive interpretation of it. The reductionist aspect was made clear by those, such as Crispin Wright, who made Kripke’s naturalistic element explicit, using non-normative notions in a constructive account of what going by a rule consists in. I look at Wittgenstein’s pivot toward naturalism in the early 1930s and trace its development to the discussion of rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations. I argue for a different understanding of Wittgenstein’s naturalism and its relation to the paradox of PI §201, one which allows it to escape the charges of both reductionism and an unsatisfactory form of quietism.

According to the “standard interpretation” of WRPL (favored by Wright, Boghossian, McGinn, and Goldfarb), the epistemological argumentation and metaphysical conclusion of the skeptic’s ruminations in Chapter 2 can be reconciled by viewing the overtly epistemological argumentation as merely a “dramatic device” for developing a fundamentally metaphysical argument. The epistemological challenge – to defend your claim that you know that you mean addition and your claim that you are justified in answering “5” – takes place under conditions in which you are granted ideal epistemological access to all of the sorts of facts capable of constituting your meaning addition by “+.” In this chapter, I will defend the standard interpretation against a recent attack launched by Hannah Ginsborg, and I’ll argue that the standard interpretation fits the text of Chapter 2 of WRPL more smoothly than Ginsborg’s alternative proposal. I’ll also make some comments on Ginsborg’s notion of “primitive normativity.”

Kripke finds in Wittgenstein an argument for the conclusion that there are no meaning facts and considers the consequences of this outcome for the meaning of meaning-ascribing sentences. One immediate consequence is that their meaning cannot be given by their truth conditions. Kripke proposes instead that meaning ascriptions obtain their meaning from (i) their assertibility conditions and (ii) the non-representational function that the practice of asserting these sentences in these conditions plays in our lives, accepting that these sentences can’t play the role of representing the world. I present a strategy for avoiding this outcome. Meaning ascriptions obtain their meanings from their assertibility conditions, but they successfully perform the function of representing the world. The states of affairs they represent can be singled out with definitions by abstraction, using the synonymy conditions generated by their assertibility conditions. When meaning facts are construed in this way, the argument that Kripke finds in Wittgenstein does not establish that they don’t exist.

Saul Kripke famously raised two sorts of problems for responses to the meaning skeptic that appealed to how we were disposed to use our words in the past. The first related to the fact that our “dispositions extend to only finitely many cases” while the second related to the fact that most of us have “dispositions to make mistakes.” The second of these problems has produced an enormous, and still growing, literature on the purported “normativity” of meaning, but the first has received (at least comparatively) little attention. It will be argued here, however, that (1) the fact that we can be disposed to make mistakes doesn’t present a serious problem for many disposition-based responses to the skeptic, and (2) considerations of the “finiteness” of our dispositions point, on their own, to an important way that the relation between meaning and use must be understood as “normative.”

Most readings of the meaning skepticism Kripke ascribes to Wittgenstein understand it as metaphysical. The threat to meaning is supposed to follow immediately from the impossibility of citing facts in which meaning consists. I offer an alternative, epistemological, reading that is closer to Wittgenstein. What threatens meaning is the worry that, when I use an expression on any given occasion, I cannot know that my use conforms to previous uses of the expression; instead, in Wittgenstein’s terms, I go on “blindly,” without the understanding which is necessary for meaningful use. This reading makes for a stronger skeptical argument, in that it blocks the non-reductionist response of taking meaning facts to be primitive. But the argument, on this reading, can still be answered: not by citing meaning facts but by showing that I can know how to go on with an expression without needing to appeal to what the expression means.

Chapter 2 of Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language argues that there are no facts about what anyone means by their words, so meaning is a fiction. But some fictions are useful, and Chapter 3 explains why this one is. One side-effect of that explanation is supposed to be the “Private and solitary language argument,” which says that we cannot, or at least cannot usefully, ascribe meaning to an individual “considered in isolation”; it thereby reveals something essentially communitarian about meaning.

This chapter briefly defends that fictionalist reading of Kripke’s great work before arguing at more length that no communitarian conclusion follows. Even if semantic ascriptions are all false, they may still be useful, even when made by, or applied to, or addressed by, an individual “considered in isolation”– whatever exactly this turns out to mean.

I read Kripke’s sketches of our ordinary view of meaning in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language as attempts to highlight the features of meaning that enable us to draw the distinction between what seems right and what is right. I argue that Kripke thinks the best way to clarify these features of meaning is to describe metasemantic conditions that a speaker’s words must satisfy if the speaker is to be warranted in asserting a sentence in which the words occur. Although the view of meaning I attribute to Kripke is initially compelling, I argue that it rests on a subtle yet fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between what seems right and what is right.