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What brings one to be skeptical about "meaning"? About whether my words mean anything at all, or whether your words mean anything at all? Or, because rule-following is commonly thought analogous to meaning, about whether we can tell 1) in our own case, that we are following the rule, or 2) in the case of others, which rule they are following? I strongly suspect that the analogy to rules itself conceals part of the answer--if only because "following a rule" is just slightly more specific than "meaning something" (by one's words). Whatever brings us to be skeptical about meaning, the situation is likely to look perfectly normal from one persepctive and impossible from another (from the philosophical perspective).
In the case of "following a rule" it looks like there is a difference in what questions are applicable depending on whether we're asking whether we (I) are following a rule or whether others are. It doesn't quite make sense to ask myself which rule I am following. (Except after a momentary lapse of attention.) Perhaps I should say, it doesn't quite make sense to ask which rule I am following now, whereas it makes perfect sense to ask which rule I should be following now. ("What are we doing again?") Which rule I'm following isn't actually indeterminate. But something about my possibilities of action is. The skeptical question for the first person, however, is whether I am (actually) following the rule I think I'm following. It looks as if there's no way of knowing this. And that's why it's a gripping possibility.
For the second person, on the other hand, I can in fact ask which rule you are following. But the question will usually have the force of, "Which rule do you mean to be following?" or possibly "Which rule should you be following?" I am not observing you detached from any human knowledge (the way Quine's field-linguist observes the natives saying "Gavagai"); it will probably not occur to me to say that "either of two rules would fit your behavior equally well." But if I have no way of getting in touch with you to ask which rule you mean to be following--where, if your answer shows that you have a different repertoire of rules than I do, the conversation will end, or I will perhaps try to teach you something--the skeptical possibility here looks gripping, too. (I want to say it's less gripping than the first person skeptical possibility, for the reason that our own isolation as individuals is always accessible to us, always tempting to enlarge upon, whereas the utter unknowability of others is less so. But perhaps if I am isolated I am isolated from you, too.)
So it looks like there are perspectival differences in arrival at the skeptical problem of whether you or I are following a rule or not. Do the same differences hold in the case of skepticism about "meaning"? It is hard not to resist the idea of skepticism about "meaning" (presumably, as a successful activity, as a verb) on the grounds that what it is "to mean" just isn't clear. Nor is it clear that philosophers who talk of "meaning skepticism" mean to be skeptical about an activity and not about a quality that is somehow present in the world or not. But this may be significant.
Can I be skeptical about what I mean? Or that my words "really" mean what I think they do? Well, I can be uncertain that I've phrased what I said in the best way--so it might look, to you, as if I replace one thing that I meant with another, when I improve my wording. But I am not really uncertain about what I mean, though you may think me indecisive or inattentive to detail. The second question also has a natural (i.e. nonthreatening) manifestation: I am just learning the language, or a certain vocabulary, and come to find out that the way I've been using a word isn't quite right. That may inspire significant self-doubt in me about my language abilities. But is this the skeptic's question? The possibility that nothing I say means what I think is as terrifying as it is impossible to verify. There is a complication, here: "the meaning of a word" has a fairly circumscribed use, whereas "the meaning of...what I said/my words" does not have so limited a use. And, if I want to be reassured of these things, that will not take the same form as being reassured (by looking in a dictionary, asking someone) that a word means what one thinks it does.
Can I doubt whether I mean what I say? Well, I can ask myself whether I am not deceiving myself. That, that is, is one meaning of "mean what I say." My doubt that you mean what you say will, often, take the form of entertaining the possibility that you could be deceiving me. I will not look at you and wonder whether your words (individually or taken together) refer to anything at all. Unless there are signs that you might be crazy. (Kripke seems convinced by the possibility that any of us, at any time, could be crazy.) The truly difficult thing here is that, whether you or I "mean" any particular thing we might say depends on what we said. "Meaning" has to do with implications. And different things we say will have different implications. Knowing your pain is acknowledging it, because your pain (your expression of it) makes a claim on me, whether or not I respond to it. If you sincerely mean that you're in pain, then you want someone to acknowledge it, to respond in the appropriate way. If you "don't mean it," you won't care. The words (or sounds) with which you express your pain "mean" a call for response, although we may not often speak of them (except in certain circumstances) as "meaning" this: we will simply respond, or not respond. We may use the word "mean" to speak generally of entailments between speech and commitments in the world in this way. And this seems to get at the most plausible version of what philosophical "meaning" is. But then to be skeptical about any such entailments is to be skeptical that the world exists, let alone other people or the entailments of their words.
So it looks as if the fact of our separateness, the fact of first person/third person semantic differences, is the origin of the grip skepticism about "meaning" or rule-following or other minds can have. Whether or not any of these forms of skepticism is "incoherent" I don't intend to address here: I see how, given the discussion of meaning as entailing commitments in the world, meaning skepticism would be. But that does not prevent the problem from arising (this must be why Cavell calls skepticism "unstable" rather than incoherent). The ways we say that these forms of skepticism are unstable--the ways we treat them--will therefore be similar, and will concern what we actually say of ourselves and others, and how these two cannot come apart. I want to say, they cannot come apart in general: we would not have our commitments (what our words mean) without other people; they can, of course, come apart in what your and my use of the same words entail.
In the case of "following a rule" it looks like there is a difference in what questions are applicable depending on whether we're asking whether we (I) are following a rule or whether others are. It doesn't quite make sense to ask myself which rule I am following. (Except after a momentary lapse of attention.) Perhaps I should say, it doesn't quite make sense to ask which rule I am following now, whereas it makes perfect sense to ask which rule I should be following now. ("What are we doing again?") Which rule I'm following isn't actually indeterminate. But something about my possibilities of action is. The skeptical question for the first person, however, is whether I am (actually) following the rule I think I'm following. It looks as if there's no way of knowing this. And that's why it's a gripping possibility.
For the second person, on the other hand, I can in fact ask which rule you are following. But the question will usually have the force of, "Which rule do you mean to be following?" or possibly "Which rule should you be following?" I am not observing you detached from any human knowledge (the way Quine's field-linguist observes the natives saying "Gavagai"); it will probably not occur to me to say that "either of two rules would fit your behavior equally well." But if I have no way of getting in touch with you to ask which rule you mean to be following--where, if your answer shows that you have a different repertoire of rules than I do, the conversation will end, or I will perhaps try to teach you something--the skeptical possibility here looks gripping, too. (I want to say it's less gripping than the first person skeptical possibility, for the reason that our own isolation as individuals is always accessible to us, always tempting to enlarge upon, whereas the utter unknowability of others is less so. But perhaps if I am isolated I am isolated from you, too.)
So it looks like there are perspectival differences in arrival at the skeptical problem of whether you or I are following a rule or not. Do the same differences hold in the case of skepticism about "meaning"? It is hard not to resist the idea of skepticism about "meaning" (presumably, as a successful activity, as a verb) on the grounds that what it is "to mean" just isn't clear. Nor is it clear that philosophers who talk of "meaning skepticism" mean to be skeptical about an activity and not about a quality that is somehow present in the world or not. But this may be significant.
Can I be skeptical about what I mean? Or that my words "really" mean what I think they do? Well, I can be uncertain that I've phrased what I said in the best way--so it might look, to you, as if I replace one thing that I meant with another, when I improve my wording. But I am not really uncertain about what I mean, though you may think me indecisive or inattentive to detail. The second question also has a natural (i.e. nonthreatening) manifestation: I am just learning the language, or a certain vocabulary, and come to find out that the way I've been using a word isn't quite right. That may inspire significant self-doubt in me about my language abilities. But is this the skeptic's question? The possibility that nothing I say means what I think is as terrifying as it is impossible to verify. There is a complication, here: "the meaning of a word" has a fairly circumscribed use, whereas "the meaning of...what I said/my words" does not have so limited a use. And, if I want to be reassured of these things, that will not take the same form as being reassured (by looking in a dictionary, asking someone) that a word means what one thinks it does.
Can I doubt whether I mean what I say? Well, I can ask myself whether I am not deceiving myself. That, that is, is one meaning of "mean what I say." My doubt that you mean what you say will, often, take the form of entertaining the possibility that you could be deceiving me. I will not look at you and wonder whether your words (individually or taken together) refer to anything at all. Unless there are signs that you might be crazy. (Kripke seems convinced by the possibility that any of us, at any time, could be crazy.) The truly difficult thing here is that, whether you or I "mean" any particular thing we might say depends on what we said. "Meaning" has to do with implications. And different things we say will have different implications. Knowing your pain is acknowledging it, because your pain (your expression of it) makes a claim on me, whether or not I respond to it. If you sincerely mean that you're in pain, then you want someone to acknowledge it, to respond in the appropriate way. If you "don't mean it," you won't care. The words (or sounds) with which you express your pain "mean" a call for response, although we may not often speak of them (except in certain circumstances) as "meaning" this: we will simply respond, or not respond. We may use the word "mean" to speak generally of entailments between speech and commitments in the world in this way. And this seems to get at the most plausible version of what philosophical "meaning" is. But then to be skeptical about any such entailments is to be skeptical that the world exists, let alone other people or the entailments of their words.
So it looks as if the fact of our separateness, the fact of first person/third person semantic differences, is the origin of the grip skepticism about "meaning" or rule-following or other minds can have. Whether or not any of these forms of skepticism is "incoherent" I don't intend to address here: I see how, given the discussion of meaning as entailing commitments in the world, meaning skepticism would be. But that does not prevent the problem from arising (this must be why Cavell calls skepticism "unstable" rather than incoherent). The ways we say that these forms of skepticism are unstable--the ways we treat them--will therefore be similar, and will concern what we actually say of ourselves and others, and how these two cannot come apart. I want to say, they cannot come apart in general: we would not have our commitments (what our words mean) without other people; they can, of course, come apart in what your and my use of the same words entail.
