Is There a Fact About What You Meant Yesterday?

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Is There a Fact About What You Meant Yesterday?

1. The Challenge

Kripke's (1982) reconstruction of Wittgenstein poses a question that sounds trivial and is not. You have used "plus" many times. Suppose you are now asked to compute 68 + 57 and you answer 125. A sceptic says: by "plus" you previously meant quus, a function that agrees with addition on all arguments you have actually computed but yields 5 for arguments involving numbers larger than any you have used. By your own past meaning, the correct answer is 5.

The challenge is not epistemic. The sceptic does not ask how you know what you meant. He asks what fact about you constituted your meaning addition rather than quaddition. Every candidate fact must meet two conditions. It must be a fact that determines an answer for indefinitely many cases you have never considered. And it must be normative: it must say what you ought to answer, not merely what you are disposed to answer.

Those two conditions are what kill the candidates.

2. Why the Obvious Answers Fail

Past behaviour. Finite, so it is compatible with infinitely many functions. This is the simplest form of the underdetermination and it is decisive against any purely behavioural account.

Dispositions. The natural reply is that meaning is fixed by what you are disposed to answer, not by what you have answered. Kripke gives two objections. The first is finitude: your dispositions are also limited, since for sufficiently large numbers you would die, or become confused, before answering. The second, and more important, is normativity. Dispositions describe what you would do, including your mistakes. Meaning tells you what you should do. A dispositional account makes error impossible by definition, and an account on which you cannot misapply a term has changed the subject.

Idealised dispositions. Restrict to what you would answer under ideal conditions. But specifying the ideal conditions requires saying which deviations count as interference — and "interference" here means "things that make you get it wrong", which presupposes a standard of correctness that was supposed to be explained.

Qualitative states. Perhaps meaning addition involves a special introspectible state. Wittgenstein's (1953) argument against this is that no image or feeling, however vivid, determines its own application. A mental picture of a cube is compatible with more than one use; a formula in the head still needs interpreting; and the interpretation faces the same problem again. This is the regress that generates §201's paradox.

Simplicity. Addition is simpler than quaddition, so charity favours it. But simplicity is a constraint on how we ascribe meaning, not a fact about the speaker. It tells us what is reasonable to attribute, not what was the case.

3. Naturalistic Replies

Several philosophers have argued that the sceptic wins only against a restricted menu.

Fodor (1990) proposes asymmetric dependence: "horse" means horse, even if cows on dark nights sometimes cause "horse" tokenings, because the cow-caused tokenings depend on the horse-caused ones and not vice versa. Millikan (1990) proposes teleosemantics: content is fixed by the biological function of the mechanism, and functions are fixed by selection history, which is a determinate historical fact.

Both accounts have a genuine claim to answer the constitutive question. Whether they answer the normative half is contested. A teleological account says what a mechanism was selected to do; it is a further step to say that a speaker ought to conform. Millikan's response — that the ought is merely a "should" of function, like the should of a heart pumping — is coherent but concedes that the normativity in question is thinner than the one the sceptic demanded.

The dialectical situation, then, is that naturalistic theories may well fix determinate content while leaving the normativity question open. That is not a refutation of them; it is a clarification of what they achieve.

4. The Sceptical Solution and Its Problem

Kripke's own reply on Wittgenstein's behalf is a "sceptical solution". There are no meaning facts, but meaning talk is legitimate because it does not describe facts. Ascriptions of meaning have assertibility conditions, not truth conditions: we are entitled to say that someone means addition when their responses agree with the community's.

Two objections seem to me serious.

Boghossian (1989) argues that the position is unstable. If there are no facts about meaning, then there are no facts about truth conditions generally, since the truth conditions of a sentence depend on what its parts mean. But the sceptical solution itself distinguishes sentences with assertibility conditions from sentences with truth conditions — a distinction it is no longer entitled to draw. The global irrealism about meaning undermines the semantic vocabulary the solution needs.

Second, appealing to the community reproduces the problem one level up. What fact determines that the community means addition? The community's dispositions are finite too. Kripke is aware of this and bites the bullet: there is no fact, only the practice of agreement. But then the account explains correctness by conformity, and conformity is exactly what a rule was supposed to be more than.

5. The Non-Reductive Response

McDowell (1984) and Wright (1980), in different ways, refuse the sceptic's demand rather than meeting it.

The demand was: specify, in terms that do not already presuppose meaning, the fact that constitutes meaning. McDowell's answer is that the demand should be rejected. Understanding a rule is not a matter of interpreting a formula; it is a practical capacity to go on in the same way, exercised within a form of life. Wittgenstein's §201 says precisely this: there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, exhibited in what we call following the rule.

Ginsborg (2011) develops a middle path: the rule-follower takes her response to be appropriate, and this primitive normative attitude is part of the phenomenon rather than something to be reduced.

The cost of the non-reductive line is that it offers no account of meaning in independent terms, and it can look like refusing to answer. Its defenders reply that the demand was confused: a reductive explanation of normativity in non-normative terms is not something we should expect, any more than we expect a reduction of validity to psychology.

I find this persuasive, with a qualification. Rejecting the reductive demand is legitimate only if one can say why the demand is illegitimate, rather than merely noting that it cannot be met. The strongest version of that argument is the regress: any proposed fact requires interpretation, interpretation is itself rule-governed, so the regress is not an accident of the candidates considered but a structural feature of the demand.

6. What the Argument Establishes

Here is my verdict, which sits between the usual ones.

The sceptical argument succeeds as a reductio of a certain picture of meaning: the picture on which meaning something is a matter of having an inner item — a rule, a formula, an image, a disposition — that contains its own applications in advance. That picture is natural and wrong, and Wittgenstein's target throughout is that picture rather than meaning itself.

The argument does not establish that there are no meaning facts. It establishes that meaning facts are not of the kind the picture requires: they are not self-interpreting inner items, and they are not fully specifiable in non-normative terms.

The question in my title therefore has a two-part answer. Is there a fact about what you meant yesterday? Yes — you meant addition, and the sentence saying so is true. Is there a fact of the kind the sceptic demanded, one that fixes the answer for every unconsidered case independently of your practice and the practice of those around you? No. And on reflection, it is unclear why anything worth calling meaning should have needed one.