Hannah Ginsborg at the Normativity Workshop

In her paper Hannah argued for a solution to Kripke-inspired scepticism about rule-following by appealing to what she called 'primitive normativity'. She located her approach in terms of dispositionalist and anti-reductionist responses to the problem. The most fundamental problem for the former approaches is that they cannot account properly for the normative aspect of rule-following, and the most fundamental for the latter is their inability to account for the 'disoposition-like' nature of rule following. Hannah's approach operates below the level of facts about meaning yet above the level of mere behavioural responses.

Her approach rejects Kripke's way of setting up the shape a possible solution to the problem might take. He notes that there are two points at which the sceptic will apply pressure: what you meant by past uses of a rule, and what funds your present confidence in applying it? And he insists that a justification of the latter confidence can only be funded by a justification of what you meant in the cases of past usage. Hannah challenged this way of framing the problem. She claimed that one can justify one's present confidence in applying a rule without appeal to facts about past meaning. Invoking examples like children applying a mathematical rule such as 'add 2' without properly understanding the meaning of '+', yet still with enough confidence and reliability in relation to past patterns of application to distinguish such activity from blind responses, she claimed one can be justified in one's present confidence by appeal to such 'primitive normativity' - i.e. normativity that flows from a rulish compulsion to 'go on in the right way' that doesn't explicitly or even implicitly rely on the internalisation or acceptacnce of the meaning of the rule. Once we have answered this half of the sceptical challenge we can help ourselves to a suitably formulated version of dispositionalism to answer the other half: one meant the intended rule because one possessed a disposition to apply it, interfering factors notwithstanding.

Here are some objections that came up in discussion. A general point which recurred was that examples of primitive normativity are not central to the rule-following considerations and it is not clear that appeal to them can work for all applications of rules. Or, to put the point another way, to talk of such primitive normativity is to fall below the bar of rule-following proper and thus to perhaps change the subject rather than answer the problem at hand.

Another objection was that perhaps rules about meaning were being sneaked in the backdoor - isn't 'conforming to past patterns of application' to conform to an understanding of what you meant to do in the past, namely, apply a certain pattern?

It was further pointed out that the patterns of application were such small snatches of finite behaviour that it was not clear one could cite them as cases of rule-following at all.

It was also pointed out that appealing to Kant's conception of aesthetic judgement to understand primitive normativity would not do. For such judgement is involuntarily wrung from one in a way that does not involve a surveying of past usage and so is fundamentally disanalogous to the case of a primitive rulish compulsion to conform to past patterns of application.

I myself do not feel the force of rejecting anti-reductionist responses on account of their not accounting for rule-following being 'like' other dispositional responsive mechanisms. Perhaps it is only 'like' such mechansims!

Although I will not detail them here, Hannah presented robust responses to all these objections and convinced me that something could be made of this original response to the problem.