Rule-following, dispositiosn and Pettit

Abstract

In the literature following Saul Kripke’s book on Wittgenstein’s rule-following discussions, much effort has been put into formulating a dispositional theory of meaning and content as a means of answering the meaning sceptic. Philip Pettit has provided a dispositional theory that distinguishes itself from other dispositional theories in that it takes speakers’ practice of checking and correcting each others’ use of words to be indicative of meaning, instead of depending on a naturalistic specification of a subset of meaningconstitutive dispositions. However, Pettit’s theory faces certain obstacles of its own. In this thesis I aim to outline Pettit’s theory and discuss what I think of as some problems with it.