Chomsky, Knowledge of Language and the Rule-Following Considerations

According to Noam Chomsky, speakers of a language
have a substantial body of propositional knowledge of that
language that they draw upon in language production and
comprehension. Since the late 1950s Chomsky"s project
has been to characterise that knowledge and give an
account of its acquisition. Arguably, one of the most
powerful philosophical challenges to Chomsky"s output is
generated by the rule following considerations of Philosophical
Investigations §§ 138-242. My aim in this paper is to
characterise the nature of this challenge, a topic that,
rather surprisingly, has received relatively little attention in
the philosophical literature.