Matt Dougherty

According to Paul Boghossian’s ‘Inference Problem’, rule-following generates a regress because it involves inference, which itself involves rule-following. Boghossian claims the Problem leads to an ‘antinomy of pure reason’, showing that ‘we both must—and cannot—make sense of the notion of someone’s following a rule’. I argue that there is no antinomy by proposing a solution to the Problem based on the idea that following a rule consists in acting on a commitment to exercising one’s knowledge of how to follow it.