Critical Notice

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 Unless specified otherwise, all references in the text are to Rails to Infinity.

2 As Wright notes, the regress here is not quite the regress fastened on by Kripke's Wittgenstein. See pp. 186–7.

3 For critical discussion, see A. Miller, ‘An Objection to Wright's Treatment of Intention’, Analysis, 49 (1989): 169–73, J. Edwards, ‘Best Opinion and Intentional States’, Philosophical Quarterly, 42 (1992): 21–33, R. Holton, ‘Intention Detecting’, Philosophical Quarterly, 43 (1993): 298–318, and A. Miller and J. Divers, ‘Best Opinion, Intention Detecting, and Analytic Functionalism’, Philosophical Quarterly, 44 (1994): 239–45.

4 Wright, Realism, Meaning and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 206.

5 Ibid., p. 207.

6 Chomsky, ‘Recent Contributions to the Theory of Innate Ideas’, Synthese, 17 (1967): 2–11. Quoted by Wright at p. 171.

7 Even if I'm wrong in feeling pessimistic and unenthusiastic about Wright's suggested recipe for meshing the Central Project with the main deliverances of the rule‐following considerations, the suggestion I now go on to develop is nevertheless compatible with it (and so in any case can be co‐opted by Wright).

8 Evans, ‘Semantic Theory and Tacit Knowledge’, in C. Leich and S. Holtzmann, Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule (London: Routledge, 1981). For more discussion of worries surrounding the notion of tacit knowledge, see Wright, ‘Theories of Meaning and Speakers’ Knowledge’, in his Realism, Meaning and Truth, and also A. Miller, ‘Tacit Knowledge’, in B. Hale and C. Wright (eds) A Companion to the Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

9 Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 132.

10 Those familiar with the literature on response‐dependence will recognize this as the issue pursued by Mark Johnston in his papers on the ‘missing‐explanation argument’. See, e.g., ‘Explanation, Response‐Dependence, and Judgement‐Dependence’, in P. Menzies (ed.) Response Dependent Concepts, Canberra, Australian National University, RSSS, Working Papers in Philosophy, Vol. 1 (1991). For discussion see P. Menzies and P. Pettit, ‘Found: The Missing Explanation’, Analysis, 53 (1993): 100–9, A. Miller, ‘Objectivity Disfigured: Mark Johnston's Missing Explanation Argument’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 55 (1995): 857–69, A. Miller, ‘More on the Missing Explanation Argument’, Philosophia, 25 (1997): 331–50, M. Johnston, ‘Are Manifest Qualities Response‐Dependent’, The Monist, 81 (1998): 3–43, A. Miller, ‘The Missing Explanation Argument Revisited’, Analysis, 61 (2001): 76–86, and J. Haukioja, ‘Why the New Missing Explanation Argument Fails Too’, Erkenntnis, 64 (2006): 169–75.

11 Truth and Objectivity, p. 132.

12 Take it as read here and in (vi) that the judgements referred to are made by Jones – an appropriate subject – in cognitively ideal conditions for the self‐ascription of linguistic understanding.

13 Note that although we speak of practical capacities corresponding to understanding particular sentences, there is no suggestion that such a capacity can be ascribed independently of the capacities corresponding to understanding the other sentences of the language. That is, such capacities may have to be ascribed en bloc. See Miller, ‘Tacit Knowledge’ §4.

14 McDowell, ‘Intentionality and Interiority in Wittgenstein’, in his Mind, Knowledge and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), quoted by Wright at p. 339.