[1] In my paper on the Chomsky-Kripke controversy (Barbiero 1996a), I claimed that Kripke's skeptical solution to the problem of apparent rule-following was inadequate as an explanation of the problem it purported to solve. My objection to Kripke's account was that while it appears to explain apparent rule- following in terms of a community's agreement, it simply begs the question of how communities come to agree. In doing so, I claimed, it does not effectively explain how such agreement can carry the normative force required of it. I suggested that an adequate explanation would have to address the problem of how the normative aspect embodied in given behavioral regularities can be assimilated, and those regularities reproduced by individual members of the community. I called this the problem of reproduction, and suggested a solution based on a model showing how individuals can internalize the normative requirements of the publicly observable behaviors that serve them as examples to follow.
[2] With this paper, I would like to expand on some of the points made in my previous paper, and reply to some of the questions Kenny Huen raises in the first part of his "Clarifying the Sceptical Solution in Kripke's Wittgenstein."; The remarks presented here will be divided into separately downloadable parts (with paragraphs and notes numbered in a single sequence running from the Introduction through Part 2). Part 1 explores the meaning of explanation and explanatory adequacy, and shows that Kripke's skeptical solution offers what might be called a covert explanation of apparent rule-following behavior. In Part 2, I fill in some of the details and draw out some of the implications of the model of learning I very briefly sketched in my (Barbiero 1996a), and suggest some questions for further consideration. In a Postscript, I consider a non-skeptical response to Kripke's skeptical paradox.
[3] Is it legitimate to raise the question of the explanatory adequacy of Kripke's skeptical solution? On the surface, it would appear not. The Wittgensteinian position generally is that the search for explanation is philosophically misguided, and one can hardly speak of explanatory adequacy if there is no explanation to speak of. But it seems to me that Kripke's account does in fact count as an explanation.
[4] To provide an explanation, in the sense in which the term will be used here, is to show how a phenomenon can be understood in terms of its relevant constituent factors. I would distinguish this kind of explanation, which for present purposes might provisionally be termed a constitutive explanation, from a strictly causal explanation. In a case in which, for example, a response or set of responses is observed of an individual or in a selected population, a constitutive explanation would provide us with some account of the constituent factors in relation to which that response or set of responses is constituted as such. In a sense, a constitutive explanation redescribes the phenomenon to be explained at a level different (perhaps "deeper" is a word that will fit here) from that at which we describe it before we attempt to explain it. Note that, again, this kind of explanation need not entail reference to causal factors of any sort.
[5] It should be clear that as it is understood here, explanation has nothing to do with any (entirely spurious) attempts to, as Huen puts it, "uncover the veiled essence of life" (Huen 2.2). At best, such attempts may yield pseudo-explanations of some sort -- that is, statements that may have the form of explanations, but which in fact explain nothing. If in raising this possibility it was Huen's purpose to present an either/or choice between a Wittgensteinian approach in which one is invited only "to acknowledge that life is so going on" (Huen 2.2) and the kind of pseudo-explanation that purports to reduce things to their supposed "essences," then clearly he is offering a false choice. This becomes even clearer when we consider that, for reasons to be shown below, Kripke's skeptical solution is, for all intents and purposes, itself an explanation of the type described above.
[6] Huen, it should be remarked, indirectly acknowledges the explanatory drift of Kripke's argument. For as he says in regard to the skeptical solution's claim that it is a brute fact that people in a community tend to agree in their responses, "this brute fact [of agreement] may be said to be an `explanation' in the sense that by reference to it, the puzzle about the possibility of rule-following is settled" (Huen 2.2). This is precisely the issue, and I see no reason to put scare quotes around the word explanation. Solving such a puzzle, if we would like to call it that, is precisely what an explanation, in the sense discussed above, should do. Accordingly, I want first of all to show how, in the most general sense, Kripke's skeptical solution counts as an explanation of a given type of behavior. Following that, I will show how the skeptical solution provides a specifically constitutive explanation of that behavior.
[7] Kripke claims that the skeptical solution purports only to say something about the conditions under which certain assertions can be made regarding apparent rule-following behavior and, more generally, concept possession. On the surface, at least, this does not look much like a claim for the explanation of that behavior. But the surface here is deceiving.
[8] It seems fairly clear that when, under certain circumstances, we claim that certain things can be asserted about someone's behavior, we are at the very least licensing a given explanation of that behavior. To say, for example, that we are justified in asserting X of Jones's behavior is to say that we are justified in using X to describe or explain Jones's behavior, depending on the context, the content of X, our purposes in asserting X, and so forth. In other words, under the proper circumstances, a justified assertion may count as a valid explanation. If, in the case of Jones's apparently following the rules of addition, we claim that the only justified assertion we can make regarding his behavior is that his responses agree with those likely to be given by members of his community in the appropriate circumstances, then we are in fact explaining Jones's apparent rule-following behavior in terms of his agreement or disagreement with the responses of the appropriate members of his community.
[9] What I am getting at here is that while Kripke's skeptical solution seems only to be about certain moves in a language game rather than about the explanation of behavior per se, the language game in question is the one in which we attempt to explain behavior. We might say in fact that it is the language game of explanation within the framework of folk psychology -- ignoring, for present purposes, the negative connotations this latter designation may carry. Such kinds of explanatory conjectures, while lacking the rigor and formality of scientific theories of behavior, do serve us -- often very well -- in our everyday efforts to explain and predict the behaviors of others. Accordingly, Kripke's skeptical solution (like much of Wittgenstein's later work, for that matter) can be understood as a critique -- and to a large extent a correction -- of certain explanatory strategies encountered in folk psychology.
[10] Thus when Kripke states that Wittgenstein thought that "all talk of an individual following rules has reference to him as a member of the community" (WRPL 109), he seems to be saying that when we attempt to explain someone's behavior by saying that he or she is following a rule, what we're really saying is that his or her responses agree with those likely to be given by members of his or her community. This latter would then count as the actual explanation for the behavior under consideration. As I suggested above, it seems to me that in taking this line, Kripke seeks to correct a commonly offered folk-psychological explanation of a given type of behavior (i.e., that the person is correctly following a rule) by replacing it with another (i.e., that the person's responses agree with those of his or her community). The skeptical solution thus compels the conclusion that explanations in terms of individual rule-following do not in fact explain behavior, since (as it is claimed) reference to rule-following turns out to refer to no fact about the supposed rule-follower, but rather to the "brute fact" that members of a community agree in their judgments. The upshot is that -- again, in this context -- replacing talk of rule-following with talk of agreement is, in effect, replacing one explanation with another. (Note, though, that when we claim that one explanatory account is supposed to correct another we are not necessarily committing ourselves to saying that one account is true and the other false. I will have more to say about this later (paragraphs 28-29).)
[11] In sum, the skeptical solution offers a de facto explanation of behavior by virtue of its purported correction of an allegedly mistaken move in the folk psychological language game of behavioral explanation. It is for this reason that we might characterize it as a covert, rather than an overt, explanation of apparent rule-following behavior.
[12] It is interesting to note that Kripke's replacement of talk of rule-following with talk of agreement fits the pattern of a classic explanatory reduction. Consider that Kripke presents rule attribution as part of a broader, more general strategy by which we ascribe concept possession to people. By subsuming the particular phenomenon (rule-attribution) under a more general, covering phenomenon (concept attribution), Kripke is effectively making the case that a range of phenomena broader than that under specific consideration can be reduced, for purposes of explanation, to a single principle broad enough to account for the general class of relevant cases. The single principle to which both the specific phenomenon (ascription of rule-following) and the general phenomenon of which it is a subtype (ascription of concept possession) are reduced is, of course, agreement.
[13] It is significant in this respect that Kripke formulates this principle in classic explanatory form -- that is, as a lawlike conditional, albeit a contraposed one (WRPL 95). The structure of Kripke's formulation serves to trace the explanatory link between the explanans (agreement) and the explanandum (attribution of concept possession) in such a way that we are allowed to see the explanandum as situated within a range of possibilities dependent on whether or not the conditions set out in the antecedent obtain. Further, this treatment allows us to see the explanandum as non-unique in relation to occasion and this, as Pylyshyn points out (Kasher 242 and 250 n 10) is precisely what we would want from an explanatory theory.
[14] As noted above, when we provide a constitutive explanation for a phenomenon, we redescribe it in terms of its relevant constituent factor or factors. I think it should be clear that, given the skeptical solution's argument, the relevant constituent factor involved in the attribution of rule-following is understood to be the agreement between the rule-follower's responses and the responses of his or her community, in enough particular cases. Accordingly, Kripke redescribes Jones's apparent rule-following behavior as consisting in Jones's agreement, in enough particular cases, with the responses likely to be given by members of his community.
[15] Consistent with its position that agreement is the factor constituting (apparent) rule-following behavior as such, the skeptical solution offers agreement as a brute fact. I believe we are justified in interpreting "brute fact" in the usual sense, that is, as a fact that obtains without any other fact obtaining. Given the context of Kripke's argument a brute fact would be a fact, relative to the folk-psychological language game in which we explain Jones's apparent rule-following behavior, to which we can appeal in explaining Jones's behavior, and which we need not account for in terms of any other facts. It is for this reason that I referred to it in my earlier paper as an explanatory primitive (Barbiero 1996a section 2.2). If agreement is the brute fact in terms of which Jones's responses are meaningful, then there is nothing more to be said in explanation of Jones's apparent rule-following other than that his responses agree, in enough instances, with those likely to be given by others in his community. Explanation must indeed come to an end somewhere, and for Kripke, the explanation of apparent rule-following behavior comes to an end with the invocation of agreement.
[16] In my earlier paper, I framed the matter of agreement in terms of particular cases and the responses of individual members of the community. Huen has objected to this (Huen 1996 2.4). But it seems to me that a consideration of agreement from the point of view of individual cases is justified for two reasons, one of them general, and the other specific to Kripke's essay.
[17] As a general matter, social accounts of meaning -- and Kripke's certainly is one -- carry a certain burden of proof. (I note that this is an observation Chomsky makes (Kasher 31).) It is the burden of social theories to provide a convincing, or at least plausible, account of how individuals within the given population share meanings they are said to share. The point is that a social account of meaning must be able to show, in principle, how individuals conform to the regularities that are supposed to function as, constitute, or undergird meaning, depending on the claim of the specific social theory under consideration. It seems to me that if we are to grant social theories of meaning any explanatory validity, we must do so on the basis of their carrying this burden adequately.
[18] More specific to the current discussion, Kripke himself frames the matter of agreement in terms of particular cases. In fact the effect of his discussion is to present agreement as a kind of statistical matter emerging from an aggregation of individual instances. Consider the terms in which he describes the standard communities are supposed to use when ascribing concept mastery to any of their members:
Simply put, the standard consists in the condition that the given person come up with the appropriate response often enough to merit attribution of concept mastery. (Perhaps we can say that in enough cases of agreement, agreement is statistically significant enough to merit our saying that the person in question really "has got it.")
[19] Kripke is speaking here specifically of the concept of addition, but the generalization I have made is consistent with those he makes elsewhere. The point here is that individual instances count. I need not belabor the fact that the phrases "particular responses" and "enough cases" allow no mistaking that we are in fact considering agreement in terms of individual cases, and Kripke's reference to "[a]ny individual" is self- explanatory. Additionally, one could point to instances in which Kripke refers to "particular inclinations to give particular answers to particular addition problems" (WRPL 91), licenses the attribution of concept possession to someone on condition that that person's "answers to particular...problems agree" with others' (WRPL 91), or, in describing a teacher's grounds for attributing mastery of addition to a child, holds that the child must get a "certain number" of problems correct (WRPL 90). (I am taking "certain number " in the only way it makes sense in this passage, that is, as a significant sum arising from an aggregation of specific instances.) Should we ignore the significance of the language I have (admittedly inexhaustively) cited above, we need only heed Kripke's reminder that " the point is that if, in enough concrete cases, Jones's inclinations agree with Smith's, Smith will judge that Jones is indeed following the rule " (WRPL 91). Clearly, even if Kripke rejects facts about individuals as a legitimate basis for explaining their behavior, he does acknowledge the importance of individual cases and particular instances as factors to consider when ascribing concept mastery.
[20] It would be useful here to look briefly at the relationship Kripke sets up between agreement and the Wittgensteinian concept of the form of life. For however it may function in Wittgenstein's later thought, form of life for Kripke tends to be presented in terms of agreement. This reinforces the idea that it is the latter notion, not the former, that provides the relevant explanatory factor (in the sense discussed above) of apparent rule-following behavior.
[21] Although Kripke devotes a little less than two pages to a sustained discussion of the notion of the form of life, a clear picture of the relationship between agreement and form of life does emerge. In essence, Kripke presents the notion of form of life in such a way as to establish the phenomenon of agreement as fundamental to the existence of the form of life, as indeed comes out clearly in his definition of a form of life in terms of its presumably underlying agreement(s) 1, specifically, as a "set of responses in which we agree, and the way they interweave with our activities" (WRPL 96). Kripke can be read here as conceding the organic/holistic drift of some of Wittgenstein's remarks on forms of life, but the emphasis clearly is on the agreement of responses, which in this formulation (as indeed is the case throughout the course of Kripke's discussion of forms of life in WRPL 96-98) is effectively presented as playing a constitutive role vis-a-vis the form of life. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that as far as Kripke's skeptical solution is concerned, forms of life are established on the basis of a constituent set of agreeing responses. In short, for Kripke, the form of life would appear to depend on2 the relevant agreement of response rather than vice versa.
[22] (Tellingly, the notion of form of life takes second place to agreement in Kripke's ordering and explication of the skeptical solution's three key concepts (WRPL 96-99). Indeed, in his summing up of the essay's argument (WRPL 107-109) he makes no mention of the concept of form of life; while the summary's allusions to agreement and community, especially at point 6 (WRPL 109), may be interpreted as implying the latter concept, it is significant that it is precisely in terms of agreement -- and only in terms of agreement -- that such an implication can be extracted, and with a bit of effort at that.)
[23] The concept of form of life aside, it seems to me that it is important to appreciate fully the extent to which Kripke, while purporting to expound on Wittgenstein, is in fact doing something distinctively his own. As noted above (in paragraph 9), Kripke's skeptical solution can be read as a critique of certain folk-psychological explanatory strategies, and in this sense it is consistent with much of Wittgenstein's later work. But whereas Wittgenstein's approach generally is not to explain but simply to point out examples illustrating how or that such and such is done, Kripke does something very different: he analyzes, formalizes, and ultimately, explains. As he acknowledges, he expresses what he takes to be Wittgenstein's views "more straightforwardly" than Wittgenstein would have done himself (WRPL 69). As I have shown above (paragraphs 12-13), the resulting product is a generalized, reductive, explanatory account -- something far different from Wittgenstein's deliberately unsystematic remarks.
[24] In addition, Kripke does all this in a way that is consistent with a framework that he established for himself over the course of his own work. For it seems to me that there is a striking resemblance between the theory of meaning embodied in the skeptical solution and the so-called causal theory of reference central to Kripke's earlier work on naming. If the former insists that assertions are justified in relation to agreement within a given community, the latter establishes naming on the basis of a series of referring events that depend on what is, in effect, agreement within a referring community to use the name in the given way. This resemblance holds even when we take into account the intentionalism contained in the earlier theory. It would seem then that as with, e.g., Dreyfus's Heidegger (Dreyfus 1991), where one gets as much Dreyfus as Heidegger, with Kripke's Wittgenstein, one gets as much Kripke as Wittgenstein.
[25] Or perhaps more Kripke than Wittgenstein. Kripke's departures from Wittgenstein's line of thought in the private language argument have been well-documented. Stern, for example, has convincingly shown that Kripke's skeptical solution virtually inverts Wittgenstein's thinking on language and meaning, and offers a highly vulnerable, consensus-based solution where Wittgenstein offers a "straight solution" (Stern 176-181.) Wright has documented similar discrepancies between Kripke's and Wittgenstein's framing of the private language argument (Wright 242-243). Fogelin has shown that Kripke's reliance on public checkability depends on a selective deployment of skepticism, and that it is itself liable to being undermined by the skeptic's all-encompassing doubt (Fogelin 245). As Fogelin further notes, Kripke in a belated footnote acknowledges, but does not explore the implications of, this possibility (Fogelin 246 on WRPL note 87 added in proof). In sum, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that a close identification of Kripke's skeptical solution with Wittgenstein's own views -- which is what I take Huen to be arguing -- should leave us, well, skeptical. Even so, the questions Kripke raises, whether they are considered a novel interpretation or a misinterpretation of Wittgenstein, are interesting in their own right.
[26] As I have argued, the skeptical solution reduces a given folk-psychological explanation of concept possession to the purportedly brute fact of agreement. Does this in fact provide an adequate explanation for the phenomenon in question? I argued in my earlier paper that it does not. What I would like to do now is explain briefly what I mean by explanatory adequacy.
[27] Explanatory adequacy is something Chomsky has insisted on since the generative linguistics program was first formulated. Following Chomsky, we can say that a theory provides an adequate explanation if it allows all facts relevant to its domain to be derived from the entities or factors it posits to account for those facts. Further, the explanatory theory must be such that the set of admissible hypotheses will be minimal (KL 55). All told, an adequate explanation will provide comprehensive coverage of all relevant data while using the minimum necessary explanatory factors. While accepting Chomsky's requirements of comprehensiveness and parsimony, I would like to make explicit a standard that those requirements may be seen to imply: that of accuracy.
[28] For present purposes we might say that there are explanations of greater or lesser explanatory reach, or accuracy, and that the former are to be preferred to the latter. An explanation can thus be understood as an assertion or set of assertions that may be more or less accurate, as the case may be, rather than simply true or false. Adequacy here therefore need not be defined in terms of whether or not a given conjecture is true or false or meets given necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather in terms of whether or not it provides for an explanatory model that is more accurate and/or accounts for a more significant range of the data than a competitor. It might therefore be useful to think of explanations as locations within a graded space of approximation. If this is the case, then we might accept one explanation over another by virtue of the fact that it more comprehensively tells us what we need to know compared to its competitor, or is the closer or more plausible approximation, given the kind of phenomenon to be explained, the context in which explanation is called for, and so forth.
[29] It follows that talk of one explanation being offered in correction of another does not necessarily commit us to dealing in truth conditions, and consequently to holding that the preferred explanation is true and the rejected one false. What explanatory correction does commit us to in practical terms is the position that the preferred explanation refers to a constituent element or elements that are of an order appropriate to account for the broadest range of relevant phenomena and to carry sufficient explanatory force across relevant cases. What we need to fulfill this commitment is an explanatory agent that is of the right order to function as a plausible constituent factor while not, remaining within the relevant context, itself begging explanation.
[30] I argued in my earlier paper that agreement is not such a factor, and that we have to say more than that a person's reponses agree with those of his or her community. Specifically, it is still left to us to explain how it is that his or her answers can come to agree with those of the community. This the skeptical solution does not do. Let me make clear here that my objection is not to Kripke's effective approach, which is to explain, by default or design, a given phenomenon, but rather to the termination of the chain of explanation at the ostensibly brute fact of agreement. My criticism rests on the feeling that agreement is not the place to stop; agreement of response, in other words, is of the wrong order to be considered brute. Agreement itself is what needs to be explained -- a position, interestingly, that Wright suggests in his perceptive essay on the Kripke-Chomsky controversy (Wright 245).
[31] This leaves us with a question: How can publicly observable norms produce the behavioral regularities they apparently do? How does a community come to agree in its judgments, in other words? This brings us to the problem of reproduction, and it is to that problem that I turn in Part 2.