McDowell’s Wittgenstein vs. Kripke’s Wittgenstein

In this paper, my aim is to clarify McDowell’s chief objections to Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein presented in his well-known book, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) and then to introduce and explain McDowell’s own interpretation of Wittgenstein’s main remarks on meaning and rule-following. Finally, I argue that McDowell’s construal of Wittgenstein, contrary to what he claims, does not significantly depart from Kripke’s. For McDowell, Kripke has only focused on the first part of section 201 of the Philosophical Investigations, where Wittgenstein states that “This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here” (Wittgenstein 1953, §201). McDowell’s main objection to Kripke, among other objections, is that Kripke has failed to successfully capture the main point of Wittgenstein’s remark presented in the second part of section 201, according to which “It can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another; as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases” (Wittgenstein 1953, §201). Wittgenstein’s suggestion seems to be that there is a way in which a grasp of meaning is not an interpretation at all.McDowell then proposes his own take on these remarks and argues that once we see the practice of rule-following as an activity which is already rule-governed in a community, we can with no harm take it to form a (normative) fact about what the speaker means by her words. This means that Kripke has gone wrong in arguing, on behalf of Wittgenstein, that there is no such fact. More particularly, “shared command of a language equips us to know one another’s meaning without needing to arrive at that knowledge by interpretation, because it equips us to hear someone else’s meaning in his words” (McDowell 1984, 350-351). Within such a linguistic community, there is a capacity for “a meeting of minds” (1984, 351) so that each member can hear what the other means by a word directly. For, the members of such a community have been trained similarly in a community of speakers, whose responses are already meaningful, whose world is already conceptualized, and whose rules are already determined. However, once we carefully read McDowell’s own interpretation of Wittgenstein, we can see that Kripke’s reading is not in any serious conflict with it. Not only this, but Kripke seems to have been aware of the issues McDowell raises and attempted to deal with them. McDowell takes the meaning facts to be constituted by certain communal facts but does not want to subscribe to a reductionist view of meaning. For that reason, he then treats such facts as primitive, irreducible to any other fact about the speaker. But, in Kripke’s remarks, we can find no conflict with this. For Kripke too, Wittgenstein does not deny the legitimacy of ordinary uses of terms like “truth”, “fact”, and the like. On the contrary, Kripke emphasizes, like McDowell, that once we are free of the regress of interpretations, we are fully entitled to use these terms in relevant language games. Moreover, Kripke’s Wittgenstein too sees membership in a community as an essential aspect of the rule-following practice. In the present paper, I discuss these claims in some detail and show that McDowell does not dramatically depart from Kripke in his interpretation of Wittgenstein.