Abstract
A summary of the entire book is given. Apart from descriptions of the contents of each chapter, several additional methodological points are made. I give reasons to avoid, as tools of philosophical analysis, concepts such as “understanding,” “meaning,” and “fact.” I also describe some significant differences between how I understand rule following and how Kripke does. In particular (and this is a difference between my approach and that of most philosophers concerned with this topic), I focus very much on “rule following” as it occurs in the application of tasks that the subject engages in during his interaction with the world, as opposed to intrinsic arithmetic exercises, such as counting numerals or adding them.
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Notes
- 1.
I’m omitting important details about how this works out in order to give a clear overview. The subsequent chapters don’t omit these details.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
See Azzouni (2006, forthcoming), and Chap. 6 of this book. Interpreting Kripke’s formulation, above, is complicated because of his phrase “must purport.” My view is that meaningful declarative sentences can or even “must” purport to correspond to the facts; that’s compatible with some of them not actually so corresponding. (The cogency of this gloss depends, of course, on exactly what “purport” means. The word isn’t entirely clear. Also, whether Kripke’s “clearing away” is intended to be a complete or only partial removal of “correspondence” isn’t clear either.) See the discussion on the use of the knowledge/ignorance idioms in Sect. 6.2, and specifically footnote 15 of Chap. 6, for my ways of maneuvering all this.
- 5.
Here’s a cute corollary of my solution to the rule-following paradox that I won’t describe any further outside this footnote. An issue arises for the view that artificial languages are various useful tools that one can adopt or drop, depending on one’s purposes—a view found originally in Carnap (1956). How is it possible to compare the virtues and vices of such languages cogently without, as a result, ascending to a metalanguage of some sort from the vantage point of which these specific languages can be compared? The solution to this puzzle arises right here.
- 6.
I first offered these different ways of seeing the operation of language in Azzouni (2000), Part IV.
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Azzouni, J. (2017). General Introduction. In: The Rule-Following Paradox and its Implications for Metaphysics. Synthese Library, vol 382. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49061-8_1
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