Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language

A book, subtitled 'An Elementary Exposition', in which Kripke presents what he finds in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: a new form of scepticism about meaning. Suppose you have never added numbers as large as 68 and 57. A sceptic asks what fact about your past behaviour or state of mind shows that by 'plus' you meant addition, giving 125, and not 'quus', a function that agrees with addition for small numbers but gives 5 here. Kripke argues that no fact, whether past usage, dispositions, mental images or simplicity, settles the question, so there seems to be no fact of meaning at all. He offers a 'sceptical solution' modelled on Hume: we cannot find truth conditions for 'he means addition', but we can describe when such claims are warranted, and these conditions depend on a community that checks its members' responses. The private language argument becomes a corollary, since a solitary individual has no such check. A postscript discusses other minds. Many Wittgenstein scholars reject it as a reading of Wittgenstein.

The 'Kripkenstein' paradox is one of the most discussed problems in philosophy of language, and the book is a clear way into Wittgenstein's later thought.