Abstract
Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity and Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language have both played a pivotal role in shaping late 20th-century and contemporary philosophy of language and mind. In Lecture II of Naming and Necessity, Kripke outlines a “causal-historical picture of reference” that he promotes as a successor to the theories of reference developed by Frege and Russell. In Chapter 2 of Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Kripke presents a number of arguments, suggested to him via a reading of the later Wittgenstein’s “rule-following considerations”, that aspire to undermine any broadly dispositional account of meaning. This is an interesting combination of views, since, as I shall argue in this chapter, the causal-historical picture of reference defended in Naming and Necessity and the dispositional theories of meaning attacked in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language are arguably both species of the same broadly naturalistic approach to the determination of meaning and content. This opens up a number of interesting questions, for example: do the arguments against dispositional theories of meaning proposed by Kripke and others in the wake of the rule-following considerations cast doubt on the plausibility of causal-historical approaches to the nature of reference? Or are there resources made available in causal-historical approaches to reference that can be deployed to defend dispositional theories of meaning from the arguments of the rule-following considerations? Although the point of contact between Kripke’s two famous books has not gone entirely unnoticed (see, e.g., Chapter 4 of Colin McGinn’s Wittgenstein on Meaning), apart from a few pages (pp. 164–166) in McGinn’s book and a few discussions by Penelope Maddy (“How the Causal Theorist Follows a Rule”), Martin Kusch (A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and Rules), and a small number of others, it has received scant attention in the literature. The aim of this chapter is to explore the potential connections between the two.