Meaning and Explication: Knowledge of Meaning and Kripkenstein's Rule-following Paradox

Abstract

The aim of this paper is twofold. The first is to show how Kripke's influential discussion of the rule-following paradox (Kripke 1982) is at bottom motivated by a rationalist idea about knowledge of meaning that each linguistic agent should be able to non-inferentially know what one's own words mean, qua a speaker who confers meanings on them by their use. The second is to argue that a promising strategy for incorporating the rationalist idea is to recognize how the required kind of non-inferential knowledge of meaning is implicated in a speaker's practical ability to perform what I call acts of meaning explication.