 The Orthodox domination of the secondary literature on private language was largely ended by Saul Kripke’s account of Wittgenstein’s treatment of rules and private language, in which Wittgenstein appears as a sceptic concerning meaning. Kripke (p. 5) denies commitment to the identity of this sceptical figure with its historical source, and, appropriately, his account has spawned a literature of its own in which discussion often proceeds largely independently of the original private language argument: Kripke’s Wittgenstein, real or fictional, has become a philosopher in his own right, and for many people, it is not an issue whether the historical Wittgenstein’s original ideas about private language are faithfully captured in this version. The complexities of the subsequent discussion of the philosophical—as opposed to interpretative—questions raised by Kripke’s Wittgenstein need a separate article to themselves. (For a survey, see Boghossian [1989].) All that will be settled here is the interpretative question.