ABSTRACT
The main conclusions for which I have argued are (1) a rule is a social institution, (2) following a rule is participating in a social institution, and (3) an institution can usefully be analysed in terms of collective processes having a self-referring or performative character. The (Wittgensteinian) answer to Kripke’s sceptical challenge is that the facts of meaning are the facts of institutional membership. Meaning is a social phenomenon. Obviously, meaning is also a psychological phenomenon. The point is that it cannot be sufficiently characterised in a narrow, individualistic way. The attempt to build an account of meaning on such a narrow basis produces inadequate, or question-begging and obscurantist explanations of normativity. Is this sociological answer to the sceptic a ‘straight’ or a ‘sceptical’ solution as those terms are employed by Kripke? Furnishing a sociological fact of meaning brings it under the rubric of a straight answer, and this is how I have presented it. At the same time the answer can, and should, count as a sceptical solution in as far as it acknowledges that there is no individualistic fact of meaning. This, remember, was the real point of the sceptic’s challenge. So the present position is both straight and sceptical. It goes along with the sceptic’s argument against individualism, but provides a direct answer to the sceptic’s wholly reasonable questions about the nature of meaning and rules.
