Rule-following and finitude

Abstract

One of the arguments put forward by Saul Kripke’s notorious meaning sceptic, who challenges the very intelligibility of the notion of meaning, draws on the idea of finitude. The role of the finitude argument in the broader dialectic is that of undermining dispositionalist approaches to meaning. My aim in this paper is not to adjudicate the effectiveness of this attack, an effectiveness that I take to have been convincingly established, but to clarify the conception of our finitude on which the argument relies, and to investigate the nature of the constraint it imposes on views of meaning beyond dispositionalist approaches. I believe that the force of Kripke’s remarks about finitude made in the context of the argument have a more universal purport than has been recognized. They supply the materials for a way of thinking about what it is to have a finite mind, and thus for a better understanding of the kinds of creatures that we are, and the kind of phenomenon meaning is.