In the middle of the 20th century, it was a common Wittgenstein-inspired idea in philosophy that for a linguistic expression to have a meaning is for it to be governed by a rule of use. In other words, it was widely believed that meanings are to be identified with use-conditions. However, as things stand, this idea is widely taken to be vague and mysterious, inconsistent with “truth-conditional semantics”, and subject to the Frege-Geach problem. In this paper I reinvigorate the ideas (...) that meaningfulness is a matter of being governed by rules of use and that meanings are best thought of in terms of use-conditions. I will do this by sketching the Rule-Governance view of the nature of linguistic meaningfulness, showing that the view isn’t by itself subject to the two problems, and explain why the idea has had a lasting appeal to philosophers from Strawson to Kaplan and why we should find it continually attractive. (shrink)

n the middle of the 20th century, it was a common Wittgenstein-inspired idea in philosophy that languages are analogous to games and for a linguistic expression to have a meaning in a language is for it to be governed by a rule of use. However, due to the influence of David Lewis’s work it is now standard to understand meaningfulness in terms of conventional regularities in use instead (Lewis 1969, 1975). In this paper I will present a simplified Lewis-inspired Conventions (...) view which embodies the basic idea and argue that it is inferior to the older Rules view. Every theory of meaningfulness in a language must yield a plausible story of what it is to speak the language, that is, of what it is to use an expression with its meaning. Those who have adopted something like the Conventions view standardly take use with meaning to consist in trying to use the expression in the conventionally regular way (Lewis 1969, Davis 2003, Loar 1981). I argue that this proposal fails since use with meaning is compatible with intentional misuses. In contrast, on the Rules view we can take use with meaning to be analogous to making a move in the game and to consist in using it while the rule is in force for one which is compatible with intentionally breaking it. And nothing structurally analogous can be found on the Conventions view without inflating it into the Rules view, which completes the case against it. (shrink)

‘Rule-following’ is a name for a cluster of phenomena where we seem both guided and “normatively” constrained by something general in performing particular actions. Understanding the phenomenon is important because of its connection to meaning, representation, and content. This article gives an overview of the philosophical discussion of rule-following with emphasis on Kripke’s skeptical paradox and recent work on possible solutions. Part I of this two-part contribution is devoted to the basic issues from Wittgenstein to Kripke. Part II will be (...) about recent answers to the skeptical paradox and Boghossian’s and Wright’s new puzzles. (shrink)

‘Rule-following’ is a name for a cluster of phenomena where we seem both guided and “normatively” constrained by something general in performing particular actions. Understanding the phenomenon is important because of its connection to meaning, representation, and content. This article gives an overview of the philosophical discussion of rule-following with emphasis on Kripke’s skeptical paradox and recent work on possible solutions. Part I of this two-part contribution was devoted to the basic issues from Wittgenstein to Kripke. Part II is about (...) recent answers to the skeptical paradox and Boghossian’s and Wright’s new puzzles. (shrink)

It doesn’t have (just) one, and this matters for how we ought to pursue a theory of meaning and communication.

According to some philosophers, a sentence's semantics can fail to constitute a complete propositional content, imposing mere constraints on such a content. Recently, Daniel Harris has begun developing a formal constraint semantics. He claims that the semantic values of sentences constrain what speakers can literally say with them—and what hearers can know about what was said. However, that claim is undermined by his conception of semantics as the study of a psychological module. I argue instead that semantic constraints should be (...) understood as properties of public languages. (shrink)

Context-sensitive expressions appear ill suited to the purpose of sharing content across contexts. Yet we regularly use them to that end (in regulations, textbooks, memos, guidelines, laws, minutes, etc.). This paper describes the utility of the concept of a metacontext for understanding cross-contextual content-sharing with context-sensitive expressions. A metacontext is the context of a group of contexts: an infrastructure that can channel non-linguistic incentives on content ascription so as to homogenize the content ascribed to context-sensitive expressions in each context in (...) the group. Documents composed of context-sensitive expressions can share content across contexts when supported by an appropriate metacontext. The bible has its church, the textbook its education system, the form its bureaucracy, and the manifesto its social movement. Some metacontexts support cross-contextual content-sharing. Some don’t. A promising research programme (one with practical importance) would take metacontexts as its unit of analysis. (shrink)

Kripke thought that the meaning paradox articulated in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language arises due to a logical tension. This diagnosis, however, doesn’t account for the enduring controversy surrounding the paradox. I argue that the meaning paradox stems instead from a tension inherent in two conflicting philo- sophical methodologies: theoretical internalism and theoretical externalism. Inter- nalism, as a philosophical methodology, takes for granted the contents of our minds, whereas externalism takes for granted empirical data and shared notions of common (...) sense. Two of the constraints on a straight solution to the paradox—the Guidance Constraint and the Error Constraint—rely for their plausibility on theoretical inter- nalism and theoretical externalism, respectively. A straight solution thus rests on resolving the tension between these two conflicting philosophical methods. There are, accordingly, two ways to dodge the problem. Kripke’s skeptical solution favors theoretical externalism, but a skeptical solution favoring theoretical internalism is available as well. (shrink)

This paper critically examines Unnsteinsson’s Collapse Argument, which contends that “Easy” views of saying something or expressing a proposition collapse into the Gricean view (Unnsteinsson, Talking About: An Intentionalist Theory of Reference, Ch. 4). Easy views maintain that saying/expressing is simply a matter of uttering a sentence with its meaning, without requiring Gricean communicative intentions. Unnsteinsson argues that Easy views must appeal to such intentions to explain what makes saying/expression intentional and rational and that this collapses them into the Gricean (...) view. I show that this argument fails for several reasons. First, the intentions that the Easy views must posit to explain what makes saying/expressing rational are not equivalent to the Gricean communicative intentions. Second, the constitutive question of what makes an act into a saying/expressing and the rationalizing question of what makes it rational are distinct. Thus, even if Easy theorists would have to appeal to something like Gricean communicative intentions in answering the latter question, this wouldn’t cause their answer to the former question to collapse into the Gricean answer. (shrink)

This paper presents a new argument to defend the normativity of meaning, specifically the thesis that there are no meanings without norms. The argument starts from the observation inferentialists have emphasized that incompatibility relations between sentences are a necessary part of meaning as it is understood. We motivate this approach by showing that the standard normativist strategy in the literature, which is developed in terms of veridical reference that may swing free from the speaker’s understanding, violates the ought-implies-can principle, but (...) ours does not. In addition, our approach is superior because, unlike the representationalist approach, it can be extended from declarative sentences to non-representational uses of language. In this paper, however, we only formulate the argument for the base case that involves incompatibility relations between declarative sentences. The goal is not to derive norms from something that is not normative, but to explicate the distinctive type of normativity that is built into meaning as it is understood by language-users. The explication proceeds in two steps. (1) For any sentence s a speaker understands, there is an incompatible sentence s’ the speaker understands to be incompatible with s. (2) In virtue of understanding this incompatibility of meanings, she ought not to be committed to both s and s’. This prohibition is not derived from instrumental practical reason, nor is it based on representational correctness, but its source is the incompatibility of meanings. (shrink)

This is a short response piece to Jeremy Schwartz's "Saying 'Thank You' and Meaning It", published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2020, 98, pp. 718-731. -/- Schwartz argues against the received view that 'Thank You! is for expressing gratitude, claiming instead that it is for expressing one's judgment that gratitude is appropriate or fitting. I argue against the judgment view while defending the received one. -/- I mainly consider the objection that the judgment view is implausible since it makes ‘Thank (...) you!’ semantically indistinguishable from the declarative sentence ‘Gratitude is appropriate to you’ and show that Schwartz’s attempt to sidestep it relies on misunderstanding Kaplan's view of what it is for a sentence to be an expressive vs. a declarative. (shrink)

Brandom (Citation1994) made inferentialism an intensely debated idea in the philosophy of language in the last three decades. Inferentialism is a view that associates the meaning of linguistic expression with the role said expression plays in inferences. It seems rather uncontroversial that the correct theory of meaning should distinguish between linguistic correctness and factual correctness. For instance, speaker S can be wrong in saying ‘I have arthritis’ in two distinct ways: (i) S fails to apply a word correctly to make (...) a true statement due to having made a factual error, and (ii) S uses an expression incorrectly because they are wrong about its meaning. In this paper, I show that properly understood normative inferentialism can make room for such a distinction. I propose that linguistic correctness is a structural issue: linguistic mistakes stem from the improper or insufficient acquisition of an inferential role. Factual correctness, on the other hand, is a one-off issue of the correct application of inferential rules to a particular situation. I argue that, by tying the issue of correctness to the game of giving and asking for reasons, inferentialism can establish a reliable method for distinguishing between two types of correctness (and mistakes). (shrink)

Saul Kripke’s paradoxical argument in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) has generated an extravagant number of responses. A major debate prompted by this book has focused on the plausibility and role of the supposed normative character of meaning; the argument itself is often taken to rely on the assumption that meaning is irreducibly normative. Following Boghossian (1989), the normativity of meaning has been understood as closely tied to the existence of semantic correctness conditions. After a brief introduction to (...) the background of the debate, this work will focus on whether the normativity of meaning may be better understood as stemming from a different type of correctness, namely linguistic correctness. Linguistic correctness differs from semantic correctness insofar as it is related to conventional, and not truth-functional, meaning. I will begin by clarifying some of the features of linguistic correctness. First, I will outline some reasons why the distinction between linguistic and semantic correctness should be maintained. Then, I will anticipate a possible criticism and argue that linguistic correctness does not belong to the domain of pragmatics, as it is relevant to our understanding of conventional meaning. Finally, I will try to show that linguistic “oughts” are constitutive of meaning. Having established these basic features of linguistic correctness, I will investigate whether the fact that it is constitutive of meaning can vindicate the idea that meaning is robustly, irreducibly normative. By applying arguments from the realm of moral philosophy – within which, too, there have been attempts to show that constitutive facts can give rise to categorical moral norms – I will argue that linguistic correctness cannot give rise to categorical semantic norms. Linguistic correctness may be, nevertheless, a useful tool for explaining some of our intuitions about meaning. (shrink)