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Articles

Towards a New Kind of Semantic Normativity

 

Abstract

Hannah Ginsborg has recently offered a new account of normativity, according to which normative attitudes are essential to the meaningful use of language. The kind of normativity she has in mind –– not semantic but ‘primitive’ — is supposed to help us to avoid the pitfalls of both non-reductionist and reductive dispositionalist theories of meaning. For, according to her, it enables us both to account for meaning in non-semantic terms, which non-reductionism cannot do, and to make room for the normativity of meaning, which reductive dispositionalism cannot do. I argue that the main problem with Ginsborg’s account is that it fails to say what makes it possible for expressions to be governed by conditions of correct application to begin with. I do believe, however, that normative attitudes are essential to meaning, but they have to be thought of as fully semantic. And I suggest that conditions of correct application can be present only when those attitudes are present.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the organizers of the Cracow Workshop in Analytical Philosophy on the Normativity of Meaning, Belief and Knowledge, where I presented a version of this paper. Special thanks to Robert Myers and Olivia Sultanescu for much discussion of earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I have myself defended an ‘unorthodox’ kind of normativity (in Verheggen, Citation2011), but it is different from the one I shall introduce here. In a nutshell, what I argued there is that statements about the meaning of linguistic expressions have hypothetical implications, that is, implications about how the expressions are to be used given the speaker’s goals in using them, which, contrary to what most semantic non-normativists contend, are essential to meaning.

2 For a rich critical discussion of some aspects of Ginsborg’s views, not least including how they can address Kripke’s sceptical challenge, see Haddock, Citation2012.

3 Of course, the terms in which to cash out conditions of correct application, be they, say, truth-theoretic or assertibility-theoretic, are open to debate. But this is not what is in question here.

4 See Blackburn (Citation1984), McDowell (Citation1984) and Millikan (Citation1984), among others.

5 The former has been called meaning determining normativity – conditions of correctness are determined by, say, norms or conventions; the latter, which I mentioned at the outset because it has been the most widely debated, has been called meaning engendered normativity – conditions of correctness imply that expressions ought to be applied in certain ways. (See Glüer and Wikforss, Citation2010).

6 E.g., she writes: ‘The correctness I shall identify as essential to meaning does indeed “distinguish the production of a term from mere noise”. But … it contrasts not with incorrectness, but with the mere absence of correctness; and it cannot be equated with truth in contrast to falsity. Rather, it is required in order that a mere noise can become a candidate for truth or falsity in the first place’ (Ginsborg, Citation2012, p. 132). The notion of correctness she is discussing here is not the semantic notion, but the primitive one, which she usually calls appropriateness – more on this below.

7 Contrary to what I shall suggest in the last section.

8 Which are here equivalent to meanings.

9 To mention a few that I shall not further elaborate on here, it is not clear how we are to think of the non-semantic understanding that constitutes the awareness of appropriateness. It is not clear just in what way this additional step explains what distinguishes the genuine speaker from the parrot. All Ginsborg has done is assert that only the genuine speaker is capable of having the awareness required for genuine understanding to be present. This comes close to saying that only the former has genuine understanding because only the former has the ability to have it. Indeed we still do not know how the meanings of words are grasped to begin with – how do we go from awareness of non-semantic appropriateness to understanding of semantic correctness? After all, the latter requires grasp of the contrast between correct and incorrect applications and grasp of propositional content, whereas the former does not.

10 Note that it is because Ginsborg thinks that an account of meaning from outside language in the reasonably full-blooded sense of ‘from outside language’ can be given that she thinks her account can provide an explanation of how we first come to grasp the meaning of an expression. It enables us to explain this ‘by explaining how [a speaker’s] uses of the expression came to stand in [certain] nonintentionally characterized relations [to one another or to extralinguistic reality]’ (Citation2011b, p. 165). However, if I am right, explaining this is precisely what cannot amount to explaining grasp of meaning.

11 I first made this claim in Verheggen, Citation2011. I say ‘strongly suggests’ rather than ‘establishes’ because I have focused on dispositions and other internal candidates for the determination of meaning. But I have not considered external candidates, such as objects and events in the environment of speakers. It might be thought that these present a different case and that they could be invoked in a reductionist account of meaning. Even in light of what I have argued so far, it is hard to see how this could be made to work. But I have argued against this at length in Verheggen, Citation2013.

12 Note that this does not necessarily involve the appreciation that these conditions are fulfilled or not on any particular occasion of use, nor the explicit awareness of what these conditions are like for any particular occasion of use, but the awareness, possibly rather inarticulate, that such conditions are an essential ingredient of meaning.

13 See Verheggen, Citation2013, for an attempt to provide such an account.

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