Wittgenstein and Kripke raised the problem: what makes a rule-following interpretation correct? If following a rule requires interpretation, which itself requires rules, how do we break the regress? The answer lies in shared practices and forms of life rather than in private, mental rules—a conclusion with radical implications for semantics and normativity of meaning.
Begin with simple cases: what makes 125 the correct continuation of the sequence 2, 4, 6, 8... vs. some other number? Explore the regress: any interpretation of the rule seems to require further interpretation. Study Kripke's skeptical argument that there is no fact about what is correct, then examine responses: community responses, normative capacities, or appeal to facts about rules. Reflect on how this connects to linguistic normativity.
From language games and the private language argument, you know that Wittgenstein rejects the picture of meaning as a private inner item—a mental image or rule that "hooks onto" reality independently of public practice. Meaning is constituted in use, within shared forms of life. The rule-following problem sharpens this into a precise philosophical challenge: what is it, exactly, that makes any particular response the *correct* one when following a rule? This question doesn't just concern unusual cases—it threatens to destabilize the very notion of correctness in any domain, including mathematics and logic.
Start with the simplest case. Someone has been doing addition problems and has always produced the right answers. Now you ask them: what is 68 + 57? The expected answer is 125. But Kripke's skeptical hypothesis (drawing on Wittgenstein) raises this challenge: nothing in their past behavior or their past mental states fixes that they were following the rule "add" rather than some deviant rule—call it "quus"—that agrees with addition for all previously computed cases but gives a different answer for new ones. "Quus" might say: for numbers below 57, compute the sum normally; for numbers 57 or above, the answer is always 5. Since 68 + 57 was never computed before, both "add" and "quus" are consistent with all past behavior. What fact about the person determines that they meant *addition* and not *quaddition*? This is not a practical worry—the challenge is that *no* fact seems to determine it.
The regress makes the problem even sharper. One might say: the person has a rule in mind—they can introspect and report what rule they were following. But any such introspective report is itself a piece of behavior requiring interpretation. The rule for interpreting that report is itself subject to the same skeptical challenge. If you try to fix meaning by appeal to an explicit interpretation, the interpretation itself needs a rule, and so on. Wittgenstein's diagnosis is that meaning cannot consist in any interpretation, because interpretation always presupposes a background of practices that are already in place. What stops the regress is not a final, bedrock interpretation, but brute participation in a shared practice.
The community response—associated with Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein—is that what makes "125" the correct answer is not any private mental fact but the fact that the person's response agrees with how the community responds. Correct use just is what the community calls correct. This response is controversial: many argue it eliminates normativity rather than explaining it, because community agreement is itself just another pattern of behavior, equally subject to deviant interpretation. A more robustly Wittgensteinian reply emphasizes forms of life: rule-following bottoms out in our natural responses, trained capacities, and embodied practices. There is nothing *more* that constitutes following the rule of addition than being trained into a shared practice and responding naturally as other practitioners do. This isn't a reduction of normativity to mere description—it's the claim that normativity only makes sense from inside a practice, not from a God's-eye view outside all practices.
Topics in reflective domains aren't scored by quiz answers. Read, reflect, and mark when you've thought it through.