Kripke's Finiteness Objection to Dispositionalist Theories of Meaning

ABSTRACT: It is often thought that Blackburn and Boghossian have provided an effective reply to the finiteness objection to dispositional theories of meaning, presented by Kripke's Wittgenstein. In this paper I distinguish two possible readings of the sceptical demand for meaning-constitutive facts. The demand can be formulated in one of two ways: an A-question or a B-question. Any theory of meaning will give one of these explanatory priority over the other. I will then argue that the standard reply only works if B-questions are seen as prior, while the dominant dispositionalist theories of meaning see A-questions as prior. Kripke's Wittgenstein (KW1) challenges theories of meaning to specify which facts about a speaker could conceivably make it the case that the words and symbols he or she uses possess determinate meanings. Most current answers to this question deploy the general dispositionalist strategy which KW aims to refute. These answers claim that the speaker's dispositions to apply terms to objects in the surrounding world constitute or determine, in some way, the meanings of these terms. KW presents a battery of argumentation against the dispositionalist. One can separate (at least2) two strands in his argumentation: the normativity and the finiteness objections. Usually the normativity objection is taken to be the more powerful one. The finiteness objection is often dismissed mor