Blind Rule-Following and "The Antinomy of Pure Reason"

Alex Miller (University of Otago)

Abstract: Since Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language it has been common to identify the “rule-following problem” as finding an answer to the questions: What makes it the case that a given agent is following one rule rather than another? And: what makes it the case that a speaker means one 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 neutralised 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 neutralise the challenge posed by Kripke’s Wittgenstein, a more fundamental problem about rule-following remains unsolved. I will argue that this is a mistake. Specifically, 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 suggested by Boghossian and Wright in their most recent writings on this topic.