Rule-Skepticism and Primitive Normativity

13.06.2024 15:00 - 10:24

Haiqiang Dai (Beijing Normal University)

In his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private language, Saul Kripke established a rule-skepticism, according to which any strategy to respond to it needs to provide facts determining that a subject is, e.g., following the rule of addition rather than that of quaddition. In this talk, I intend to propose a primitive-normative strategy to address the rule-skepticism. Firstly, I will reconstruct the skeptical argument, pointing out that the core issue is to solve the problem of rule-deviation. Then, an account of primitive normativity is proposed, based on the analysis of what is "seeming right" and what is "seeming wrong", to answer the deviation problem about rules. Finally, I will show that under my account, the primitive normativity and the public normativity are intrinsically interrelated, which can provide the source and foundation for the general phenomenon of normativity. This strategy relies on the regularity and primitive-normative attitude constructed by the subject in training, and it can satisfy both the factual and the normative conditions as required by the Kripkean skeptics.

 

Link: univienna.zoom.us/j/69176693894 
Code: APSE

Location:
ONLINE on Zoom