Shelf Mark & & a ON RULES AND THE METAPHYSICS OF MEANING

I hereby declare that I composed this thesis myself, that it is my own work, and that it has not been submitted for any other degree or qualification. Peter Campbell In this work 1 develop an argument which shows that rule-following is impossible, and investigate its impact on the philosophy of language. By way of orientation, 1 start with a critical evaluation of existing ‘rule-following considerations’, arguments derived fi-om Wittgenstein which purportedly put rule-following under pressure. Having shown that its predecessors are unsound, and with the explicit aim of avoiding their flaws, I then formulate the new ‘indexical ’ argument. The conclusion that rule-following is impossible is difficult to accept because we think that the ability to folldiw rules is constitutive of language-mastery. If this is correct, then to show that rule-following is impossible is to show that language is impossible. Such ‘meaning nihilism ’ is not a tenable position, and some way of avoiding this conclusion has to be found. Various proposals in the literature have the potential to do this: principally (a) th