Roger Scruton Quote
No linguistic behaviour can logically determine its own sequel, since no past time can logically determine the future. A man may 'follow a rule' as we do, and yet, at some future time, diverge from us, insisting all the while that what he is doing is the same as what he has always done. We cannot establish, once and for all, and with no possibility of doubt, that another really does understand a word as we do — whether that word be 'he' or I. The only point is that, if he begins to make mistakes in his use of I, this shows either that he has ceased to understand the word (and there are psychotics of whom this is true) or else that he always understood it wrongly (a most disturbing possibility). The problem of distinguishing between those alternatives is acute: but it is a general problem in the theory of meaning, and has nothing special to do with 'I'.
No linguistic behaviour can logically determine its own sequel, since no past time can logically determine the future. A man may 'follow a rule' as we do, and yet, at some future time, diverge from us, insisting all the while that what he is doing is the same as what he has always done. We cannot establish, once and for all, and with no possibility of doubt, that another really does understand a word as we do — whether that word be 'he' or I. The only point is that, if he begins to make mistakes in his use of I, this shows either that he has ceased to understand the word (and there are psychotics of whom this is true) or else that he always understood it wrongly (a most disturbing possibility). The problem of distinguishing between those alternatives is acute: but it is a general problem in the theory of meaning, and has nothing special to do with 'I'.
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About Roger Scruton
His publications include The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), Sexual Desire (1986), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), and How to Be a Conservative (2014). He was a regular contributor to the popular media, including The Times, The Spectator, and the New Statesman. Scruton explained that he embraced conservatism after witnessing the May 1968 student protests in France. From 1971 to 1992 he was lecturer, reader, and then Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, after which he was Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, from 1992 to 1995. From then on, he worked as a freelance writer and scholar, though he later held several part-time or temporary academic positions, including in the United States. In the 1980s he helped to establish underground academic networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, for which he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit (First Class) by President Václav Havel in 1998. Scruton was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours for "services to philosophy, teaching and public education".