Meaning Skepticism and Cognitive Science

In Chap. 4 of his book Knowledge of Language, Noam Chomsky deals with the meaning skepticism developed in Saul Kripke’s much discussed book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.1 Chomsky admits that “[o]f the various general critiques that have been presented over the years concerning the program and conceptual framework of generative grammar, this [i.e. Kripke’s] seems to me the most interesting.” (Chomsky 1986, p. 223) Nevertheless, he believes himself to be capable of refuting Kripke’s analysis simply by referring to the possibility of constructing an empirical theory about our cognitive capacities, in particular about our semantic capacities, and especially about our semantic competence with respect to the word “plus” (or the sign “+”), which serves as the main example in Kripke’s book.