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On Kripkenstein

Kripke’s analysis of the rule-following considerations depends on a strict separation between ontological justification and epistemological justification. His sceptical challenge centers on the former, not the latter. And so does his sceptical solution.

However, that does raise some questions. Does it make sense to separate the two completely? What would it mean that there is ontological justification if that is not somehow epistemically accessible? How could ontological justification be action-guiding if it is not something that we can know, discuss, or, minimally, be aware of? The same question arises when we look at the sceptical claim that there are no justifying ontological facts: if the sceptic claims that there are no relevant facts (ontology) doesn’t that entail that there is also not relevant knowledge (epistemology)?

Kripke’s appeal to ‘blind inclinations’ reflects a strict separation of the ontological and the epistemological dimensions, I guess. But is such giving up on epistemic justification ultimately tenable? For in what sense are we still speaking of justification if the relevant criteria are purely ontological, with no link to the epistemological?

Note also that in developing his sceptical challenge Kripke appeals to interpretation, e.g., when emphasising that a mental image allows for different interpretations. Such different interpretations can be given by an outside observer, but also by the user in question. But how does that sit with the exclusively ontological nature of Kripke’s considerations? Interpretation is an act, one that bridges what something is and what something means; and as such it has also an epistemological dimension, it seems.

An interesting question with regard to Kripke’s sceptical challenge is whether rigid designators might be an exception. They never change their reference, so one could maintain that one correct instance of use of such an expression is sufficient to fix the reference once and for all. Or, to put it differently, rigid designators seem to lack the variable dimensions that allow non-rigid designators to vary in what they refer to and hence make them open to the question whether (and if so how) two different instances of use are really ‘the same’.

So, according to Kripke, Wittgenstein locates meaning, including its normative dimension, in social facts instead of individual facts. If that is correct then why does he nevertheless insist that this a sceptical solution? Why can we not characterise the situation as follows: the sceptic argues that there are no grounding facts, period. Kripke agrees that there are no grounding individual facts, but that according to Wittgenstein there are grounding social facts. Why is that a concession that the skeptical challenge is unanswerable in its own terms’? It reads much more like an objection to the sceptic that they haven’t looked at all the relevant facts.

Another thing to note is that the sceptical challenge centres around there being no individual fact, that is no fact that can be described purely in terms of an individual’s features. But social facts, such as an individual being a member of a particular linguistic community, their having gone through a specific form of training, and so on, are of course also facts about an individual, albeit it not individual facts in the above sense.

So, the distinction between individual facts and social facts is not a real dichotomy: there are social facts that involve individual facts, and there are individual facts that involve social facts. And in many cases these involvements are constitutive: without them the facts as such, social or individual, would not exist.

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 27/07/2025