Meaning and the Emergence of Normativity

Abstract

Linguistic meaning has an essential normative dimension that prima facie cannot be reduced to descriptive, non‐normative, terms. Taking this point for granted, this paper however aims at proposing a naturalist view of semantics – inspired by Wilfrid Sellars’ original works – focused on the way the constitutive normative aspects of meaning might be properly explained and accounted for, rather than eliminated.

Keywords:

• normativity
• meaning
• naturalism
• Wilfrid Sellars
• semantics
• reduction

Notes

1 James O’Shea, Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

2 Paul G. Horwich, Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

3 Paul Boghossian, ‘Is Meaning Normative?’, Fifth International Congress of the Society for Analytical Philosophy, Bielefeld, 2003 (Padereborn: Mentis, 2005).

4 Ibid., p. 209.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., p. 217.

7 Ibid.

8 See James O’Shea, ‘On the Structure of Sellars’ Naturalism with a Normative Turn’, in Willem de Vries (ed.) Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity and Realism: Essays on the Anniversary of ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

9 See, for example, Paul M. Churchland, ‘Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes’, reprinted in Jack S. Crumley (ed.) Problems in Mind (Toronto: Mayfield, 2000), pp. 184–97.

10 I confess that I find this point quite problematic: causal explanation seems to be necessarily eliminative, making what it is intended to explain vanish, and therefore neglecting its specific nature. For an insightful reflection on this topic, see Jacques Bouveresse, Langage, perception et rálité, Vol. 2 (Physique, phénoménologie et grammaire), ed. Jacqueline Chambon (Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon, 2004) especially Ch. 2.

11 See, for instance, Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 167.

12 See Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Some Reflections on Language Games’, Philosophy of Science, 21 (1954), pp. 204–228. Reprinted in Science, Perception and Reality (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963; Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1991).

13 Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

14 Hilary Putnam, ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’, reprinted in Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

15 Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).

16 For more on this point, see Jeffrey Sicha’s presentation in Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds: The Early Essays of Wilfrid Sellars (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1980).

17 See Rudolf Carnap, Introduction to Semantics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948); and Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language, trans. A. Smeaton (London: Routledge, 2001).

18 Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds: The Early Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. J. Sicha (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1980), p. 276.

19 Ibid., p. 277.

20 ‘Is There a Synthetic “A Priori”?’, in Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality (1991), p. 312.

21 Ibid., pp. 312–13.

22 Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind’, in Science, Perception and Reality, pp. 44–5.

23 Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’, in Science, Perception and Reality, p. 6.

24 Sellars, ‘Is There a Synthetic “A Priori”?’ p. 318.

25 Wilfrid Sellars, Naturalism and Ontology (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co.,1980), p. 78.

26 See, for example, Jaegwon Kim, ‘Making Sense of Emergence’, Philosophical Studies, 95 (1999), pp. 3–36.

27 Paul E. Meehl and Wilfrid Sellars, ‘The Concept of Emergence’, in Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven (eds) Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 1: The Foundation of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), pp. 239–52.