In 1982 Saul Kripke published Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language and ushered in a new era of Ludwig Wittgenstein interpretation. Although elements of Kripke's view of Wittgenstein could be found in the preceding literature (notably in Robert Fogelin's Wittgenstein), nothing had captured attention like his presentation of the "rule-following considerations."

Kripke presented his essay as a reconstruction of the problems Wittgenstein is addressing between around §140 and §203 of the Philosophical Investigations. These issue in the form of a paradox—that there can be no such thing as the meaning of a word; no fact of the matter that entails that a word is used according to a rule, whereby some applications of it are determined to be correct and other applications incorrect. In §201 Wittgenstein wrote "This [is] our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made...