A Kripkensteinian Dispositionalism

Abstract

I argue that Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s conclusion that there is no such thing as intending a certain thing by a given word, or sentence, and hence no correctness criteria governing the use of linguistic expressions does not entail the, absurd, corollary that communication is impossible. Building on this, I also argue that we should not think about meaning in terms of correctness criteria but, rather, in terms of agreement in dispositions ‒ or, in the case of an isolated speaker, in terms of stability of dispositions. The resulting view is therefore a form of dispositionalism, but radically different from the dispositional theories already suggested in the literature on Kripkenstein’s rule-following paradox.