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Reading Crispin Wright's "Kripke's account of the Argument Against Private Language", you'd think he got the gist. In fact, the exposition of the skeptical paradox captures in few pages much of the complexity of Kripke's seemingly innocent dialectics, and he does realize how Kripke makes a point which really is all about semantics:
"A second response to the skeptical argument which Kripke discusses (41-50) is the idea that meaning green by 'green' "denotes an irreducible experience, with its own special quale, known directly to each of us by introspection." If there were such an experience "as unique and irreducible as that of seeing yellow or feeling a headache," then-in the presence of the relevant idealizations-it could simply be recalled in response to the skeptic's challenge and that would be that. Kripke's response to this proposal, drawing ex- tensively on themes explicit in the Investigations, is surely decisive. Quite apart from the introspective implausibility of the suggestion, it is impossible to see how such an experience could have the content that understanding is conceived as having, could have, as it were, something to say about the correct use of E in indefinitely many situations." p. 772
I'm not sure anyone ever understood the second part well—I think it's for the good reason that Kripke himself didn't consider it as an exhaustive framework, but rather as a thought experiment which could give us a hint as to where the solution may lie. For this reason, I'll skip this part
However, I couldn't pass the last section, "Resisting the Skeptical Argument", where Crispin Wright asks the very interesting question which Kripke fails to explicitely answer: what kind of rule is the skeptic after? What is the kind of rule he argues to be impossible? Well, inferential rules, it seems. One we can infer from past usages, or, for that matter, any consideration, so far as they are factual. He complains about it in these terms:
"What is unsatisfactory about the suggestion is that it gets the intuitive epistemology of understanding wrong. Recognition that a certain use of an expression fits one's former (and current) understanding of it would not, it seems, except in the most extraordinary circumstances, have to proceed by inference to the best semantic explanation of one's previous uses of that expression." p.773
Thus, "Kripke's skeptic persuades his victim to search for recalled facts from which the character of his former understanding of E may be derived." (p.774) At this point, Crispin Wright's comprehension of "infer" seems to emcompass even causality (at least the classical type). As such, I would argue that his complains are unfounded: it's as if meaning had to come from nothingness.
Hence there ought to be some sort of Deus ex machina to save meaning: Crispin Wright proposes that such things as intentions can play saviors. They can stop the skeptic, according to Crispin Wright, because they have content by their own virtue:
"To come to know that you have a certain intention is not to have it dawn on you that you have an intention of some sort and then to recover an account of what the intention is by reflecting upon recent or accompanying thoughts. It is the other way round: you recognize thoughts as specifying the content of an intention that you have because you know what the intention is an intention to do." (p. 776)
Well, I'll be damned, we have found the source of all semantics! It's all in this magical thing call intention. Now, to be fair, Crispin Wright doesn't believe that intention is the right kind of thing, but he seems to argue that the solution lies in something similar, something which has the same quality of being uninferred, of getting its content ex nihilo.
For my part, I fail to see how this makes for an appropriate response. Just as life isn't an explanation for cells' growth but rather a term that enters in its description, intention can't explain how it has content, i.e. how it relates to its realisation.
