Meaning in time: on temporal externalism and Kripkenstein’s skeptical challenge

Synthese 200 (288):1-27 (2022)
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Abstract

The main question of metasemantics, or foundational semantics, is why an expression token has the meaning (semantic value) that it in fact has. In his reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work, Saul Kripke presented a skeptical challenge that threatened to make the foundational question unanswerable. My first contention in this paper is that the skeptical challenge indeed poses an insoluble paradox, but only for a certain kind of metasemantic theory, against which the challenge effectively works as a reductio ad absurdum argument. My second contention is that as a result of rejecting the theory which entails a paradoxical outcome, we will see that the foundational question essentially involves a temporal dimension. After arguing that the skeptical challenge gives us a strong reason to adopt a historical view of meaning, I shall further argue against certain authors who claim that meanings not only have histories but futures as well, or that the meaning of a word may change retroactively in time as a consequence of counterfactual change in its future use. The major aim of the paper is thus to bring together the arguably interrelated debates about the skeptical challenge and temporal externalism in philosophy of language.

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Jaakko Reinikainen
Tampere University

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References found in this work

Philosophical investigations.Ludwig Wittgenstein & G. E. M. Anscombe - 1953 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 161:124-124.
Wittgenstein on rules and private language.Saul Kripke - 1982 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 173 (4):496-499.
A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s phenomenology.Robert Brandom - 2019 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

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