Saul Kripke, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Wittgenstein's later philosophy presents — on the interpretation I find in Philosophical Investigations sections 143-242 — a skeptical paradox about rule- following and meaning.1 The paradox: there is nothing in my past behavior, my conscious experience, or any fact about my dispositions, that determines what I mean by a word in such a way as to make any of my future applications correct or incorrect.2
The skeptic's challenge can be illustrated by quaddition: imagine that all my past uses of "plus" are compatible both with the addition function and with the function quaddition, which agrees with addition for all arguments I have actually computed but yields 5 (say) for any pair of arguments larger than those. Nothing in my past use distinguishes the two.
The skeptical solution — offered, on this interpretation, by Wittgenstein himself — does not refute the paradox by finding the missing fact. It reorients the question: meaning is not constituted by an individual's private states but by a community's agreement in reactions — the practice of taking certain applications as correct and others as incorrect.345
Since Ryle's The Concept of Mind, dispositional analyses have been influential; Wittgenstein's own later work is of course one of the inspirations for such analyses, and some may think that he himself wishes to suggest a dispositional solution to his paradox. The dispositional analysis I have heard proposed is simple.Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, p. 23
Since the sceptic who supposes that I meant quus cannot be answered, there is no fact about me that distinguishes between my meaning plus and my meaning quus. Indeed, there is no fact about me that distinguishes between my meaning a definite function by 'plus' (which determines my responses in new cases) and my meaning nothing at all.Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, pp. 22–23
Readers familiar with Quine's 'quasi-quotation' will be aware that in some cases I use ordinary quotation where logical purity would require that I use quasi-quotation or some similar device. I have not tried to be careful about this matter, since I am confident that in practice readers will not be confused.Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, pp. 11–12
There will be many specific objections to these theories. But all fail to give a candidate for a fact as to what I meant that would show that only '125', not os', is the answer I 'ought' to give. The ground rules of our formulation of the problem should be made clear. For the sceptic to converse with me at all, we The Wit~~ensteinian Paradox must have a common language.Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, pp. 12–13
V. Quine, Word and Object (MIT, The Technology Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1960, xi + 294 pp.), especially chapter 2, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays New On of The] oumal of II I do not mean the term 'introspective' to be laden with philosophical doctrine. Of of of our own of our tion, as we shall see, form a key feature of his argument.Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, pp. 15–16
Presented in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) as "the argument I find in Wittgenstein." Kripke is explicit throughout that he is presenting his Wittgenstein — that the argument is philosophically interesting in its own right whether or not it tracks the historical Wittgenstein. Goldfarb and McDowell press the exegetical objection: Wittgenstein, on their reading, does not endorse the skeptical paradox; he diagnoses and dissolves it without conceding it. I take that exegetical worry seriously and have never claimed the historical Wittgenstein is identifiable with my Wittgenstein. The skeptical solution is the harder-to-defend constructive piece: even granting the paradox, the community account faces difficulties (Wright's work develops one set of refinements; Boghossian, Blackburn, Wilson explore alternatives). I hold the philosophical force of the paradox firmly; the constructive solution more tentatively.