What Is It to Follow a Rule?

Abstract

What is it for an agent to follow a rule, rather than merely act in accordance with

it? An intuitive and plausible answer to this question is that to follow a rule is to

perform an intentional act such that S follows a rule R iff S intends to act in accor-

dance with R and subsequently acts on that intention. This intentional account

of rule-following faces essentially two sets of problems: (1) Kripkean sceptical ar-

guments, originally derived from Wittgenstein, suggesting that the requirements

of a rule outstrip the possible content of our intention, and (2) a regress argument

due Boghossian, namely that the intentional view requires the agent to represent

the conditional content of the rule in such a way that an inferential step is required

from the antecedent to the consequent, which, given some plausible assumptions

about inference, leads to a regress.

In this paper, I will defend the intentional view of rule-following, using a

game-theoretic account of semantic content outlined in AUTHOR and AUTHOR.

I will argue that by placing the agent in the basic constitutive practice of using the

terms that figure in an expression of the rule, we can give an answer to (1). Like-

wise, by positing that the agents have an in-built mental mechanism which is such

that it responds to the constitutive structure of the content being represented (see

Quilty- Dunn and Mandelbaum 2018) and by placing the resulting movement of

thought in a basic constitutive practice of inferring, we can avoid Boghossian’s

regress.