Meaning Skepticism and Cognitive Science

Abstract

In Chap. 4 of his book Knowledge of Language, Noam Chomsky deals with the meaning skepticism developed in Saul Kripke’s much discussed book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.¹ Chomsky admits that “[o]f the various general critiques that have been presented over the years concerning the program and conceptual framework of generative grammar, this [i.e. Kripke’s] seems to me the most interesting.” (Chomsky 1986, p. 223) Nevertheless, he believes himself to be capable of refuting Kripke’s analysis simply by referring to the possibility of constructing an empirical theory about our cognitive capacities, in particular about our semantic capacities, and especially about our semantic competence with respect to the word “plus” (or the sign “+”), which serves as the main example in Kripke’s book.

This article grew out of the paper “Über eine mögliche Inkonsistenz in Chomskys Auffassung von Sprachregeln”, presented at the congress Analyomen-Perspectives in Analytical Philosophy in October 1991 at the University of Saarbrücken (published as Mühlhölzer/Emödy 1994) which I wrote jointly with Marianne Emödy. Marianne Emödy and I have had innumerable discussions on the present topics over the past eight years, and I am most thankful to her for them. Furthermore I am grateful to Noam Chomsky, Christoph Demmerling, Andreas Kemmerling, Hilary Putnam, Heinz-Jürgen Schmidt and Arnim von Stechow for valuable comments on previous drafts of this article and to Mark Helme and Kimberly Miller for correcting and improving my English.