It is very common these days to come across the claim that the notions of mental content and linguistic meaning are normative notions. In the work of many philosophers, it plays a pivotal role. Saul Kripke made it the centerpiece of his influential discussion of Wittgenstein’s treatment of rulefollowing and private language; he used it to argue that the notions of meaning and content cannot be understood in naturalistic terms. Kripke’s formulations tend to be in terms of the notion of (...) linguistic meaning, but his argumentative strategy makes it clear that he holds both versions of the claim.... (shrink)

My paper examines the popular idea, defended by Kripke, that meaning is an essentially normative notion. I consider four common versions of this idea and suggest that none of them can be supported, either because the alleged normativity has nothing to do with normativity or because it cannot plausibly be said that meaning is normative in the sense suggested. I argue that contrary to received opinion, we don’t need normativity to secure the possibility of meaning. I conclude by considering the (...) repercussions of rejecting semantic normativity on three central issues: justification, communication, and naturalism. (shrink)

In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke rejects some of the most popular accounts of what meaning facts consist in on the grounds that they fail to accommodate the normative character of meaning. I argue that a widespread interpretation of Kripke's argument is incorrect. I contend that the argument does not rest on the contrast between descriptive and normative facts, but on the thought that speakers' uses of linguistic expressions have to be justified. I suggest that the line (...) of reasoning that I attribute to Kripke can be seen as putting pressure on the idea that predicate satisfaction is to be explained in terms of a relation between predicates and properties. (shrink)

According to Normativism, what an expression means has immediate implications for how a subject should or may (not) employ that expression. Many view this thesis as imposing substantive constraints upon theories of linguistic meaning. In this paper, I shall not consider that view; instead, I shall address the prior issue of whether or not one should accept Normativism. Against certain recent prominent lines of attack common to a number of different anti‐Normativist discussions, I shall defend both the Normativist thesis and (...) an attempt to appeal to a certain platitude in its support. (shrink)

[David Papineau] This paper disputes the common assumption that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses a problem for naturalism. My overall strategy is to argue that norms of judgement derive from moral or personal values, particularly when such values are attached to the end of truth. While there are philosophical problems associated with both moral and personal values, they are not special to the realm of judgement, nor peculiar to naturalist philosophies. This approach to the normativity of judgement is made (...) possible by naturalist views of truth, that is, views which do not presuppose normativity in explaining truth. /// [Julia Tanney] This paper attempts to describe why it is not possible to account for normative phenomena in non-normative terms. It argues that Papineau's attempt to locate norms of judgement 'outside' content, grounded in an individual's desires or reasons, mislocates the normativity that is thought to resist appropriation within a 'world that conceives nature as the realm of law'. It agrees, however, that a theory of content that locates norms 'inside' content will not be forthcoming-at least if this is to require fashioning the norms that in some sense govern judgment or thought into individually necessary conditions for contentful states. (shrink)

1. Professor Brandom’s paper is addressed to a methodological question: When we set out to account for the intentionality of thought and language, what resources may we exploit? Which notions may we use? Brandom is a famously ambitious theorist. Unlike his colleague, John McDowell, Brandom has long maintained that we should at least aspire to explain intentionality in non-intentional terms. This leaves it open, however, which non-intentional resources are legitimate.

It is widely assumed that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses problems for naturalism. Thus John McDowell urges that 'The structure of the space of reasons stubbornly resists being appropriated within a naturalism that conceives nature as the realm of law' (1994, p 73). Similar sentiments have been expressed by many other writers, for example Robert Brandom (1994, p xiii) and Paul Boghossian (1989, p 548).

[David Papineau] This paper disputes the common assumption that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses a problem for naturalism. My overall strategy is to argue that norms of judgement derive from moral or personal values, particularly when such values are attached to the end of truth. While there are philosophical problems associated with both moral and personal values, they are not special to the realm of judgement, nor peculiar to naturalist philosophies. This approach to the normativity of judgement is made (...) possible by naturalist views of truth, that is, views which do not presuppose normativity in explaining truth. /// [Julia Tanney] This paper attempts to describe why it is not possible to account for normative phenomena in non-normative terms. It argues that Papineau's attempt to locate norms of judgement 'outside' content, grounded in an individual's desires or reasons, mislocates the normativity that is thought to resist appropriation within a 'world that conceives nature as the realm of law'. It agrees, however, that a theory of content that locates norms 'inside' content will not be forthcoming-at least if this is to require fashioning the norms that in some sense govern judgment or thought into individually necessary conditions for contentful states. (shrink)

Paul Horwich has argued that Kripke's Wittgenstein's 'sceptical challenge' to the notion of meaning and rule-following only gets going if an 'inflationary' conception of truth is presupposed, and he develops a 'use-theoretic' conception of meaning which he claims is immune to Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical attack. I argue that even if we grant Horwich his 'deflationary' conception of truth, that is not enough to undermine Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical argument. Moreover, Horwich's own 'use-theoretic' account of meaning actually falls prey to that sceptical (...) challenge. (publisher). (shrink)

Paul Horwich has argued that Kripke's Wittgenstein's 'sceptical challenge' to the notion of meaning and rule-following only gets going if an 'inflationary' conception of truth is presupposed, and he develops a 'use-theoretic' conception of meaning which he claims is immune to Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical attack. I argue that even if we grant Horwich his 'deflationary' conception of truth, that is not enough to undermine Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical argument. Moreover, Horwich's own 'use-theoretic' account of meaning actually falls prey to that sceptical (...) challenge. (publisher). (shrink)

In this book Saul Kripke brings his powerful philosophical intelligence to bear on Wittgenstein's analysis of the notion of following a rule.

Discussion of Wittgenstein's philosophy has suffered from a scarcity of commentators who understand his work well enough to explain it in their own words. Apart from certain notable exceptions, all too many advocates and critics alike have tended merely to repeat slogans, with approval or ridicule as the case may be. The result has been an unusual degree of polarization and acrimony—some philosophers abandoning normal critical standards, falling under the spell and becoming fanatical supporters; and others taking an equally extreme (...) opposite view, deriding the absence of analytic technique, and refusing to see anything of value in Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

In this new book, the author of the classic Truth presents an original theory of meaning, demonstrates its richness, and defends it against all contenders. He surveys the diversity of twentieth-century philosophical insights into meaning and shows that his theory can reconcile these with a common-sense view of meaning as derived from use. Meaning and its companion volume Truth (now published in a revised edition) together demystify two central issues in philosophy and offer a controversial but compelling view of the (...) relations between language, thought, and reality. (shrink)

Many people claim that semantic content is normative, and that therefore naturalistic theories of content face a potentially insuperable difficulty. The normativity of content allegedly undermines naturalism by introducing a gap between semantic 'ought's and the explanatory resources of naturalism. I argue here that this problem is not ultimately pressing for naturalists. The normativity thesis, I maintain, is ambiguous; it could mean either that the content of a term prescribes a pattern of use, or that it merely determines which pattern (...) of use can be described as 'correct'. For the antinaturalist argument to go forward, content must be prescriptive. I argue, however, that it is not. Moreover, the thesis that content supplies standards for correct use is insufficient to supply a similar, a priori objection to naturalism. (shrink)

As meaning's claim to normativity has grown increasingly suspect the normativity thesis has shifted to mental content. In this paper, we distinguish two versions of content normativism: 'CE normativism', according to which it is essential to content that certain 'oughts' can be derived from it, and 'CD normativism', according to which content is determined by norms in the first place. We argue that neither type of normativism withstands scrutiny. CE normativism appeals to the fact that there is an essential connection (...) between content and correctness conditions. But, we argue, this fact is by itself normatively innocent, and attempts to add a normative dimension via the normativity of belief ultimately fail. CD normativism, in turn, falls prey to the 'dilemma of regress and idleness': the appeal to rules either leads to some form of regress of rules, or the notion of rule-following is reduced to an idle label. We conclude by suggesting that our arguments do not support naturalism: it is a mistake to assume that normativism and naturalism are our only options. (shrink)

Anandi Hattiangadi packs a lot of argument into this lucid, well-informed and lively examination of the meaning scepticism which Kripke ascribes to Wittgenstein. Her verdict on the success of the sceptical considerations is mixed. She concludes that they are sufficient to rule out all accounts of meaning and mental content proposed so far. But she believes that they fail to constitute, as Kripke supposed they did, a fully general argument against the possibility of meaning or content. Even though we are (...) not now in a position to specify facts in which meaning consists, the view that there are such facts, and more specifically that they satisfy the intuitive conception of meaning which she labels ‘semantic realism’, remains a live option. Moreover, given.. (shrink)

Paul Horwich gives the definitive exposition of a prominent philosophical theory about truth, `minimalism'. His theory has attracted much attention since the first edition of Truth in 1990; he has now developed, refined, and updated his treatment of the subject, while preserving the distinctive format of the book. This revised edition appears simultaneously with a new companion volume, Meaning; the two books demystify central philosophical issues, and will be essential reading for all who work on the philosophy of language.

Paul Horwich's main aim in Reflections on Meaning is to explain how mere noises, marks, gestures, and mental symbols are able to capture the world--that is, how words and sentences (in whatever medium) come to mean what they do, to stand for certain things, to be true or false of reality. His answer is a groundbreaking development of Wittgenstein's idea that the meaning of a term is nothing more than its use. While the chapters here have appeared as individual essays, (...) Horwich has edited them to make a continuous argument, focused on articulating and developing an important new conception of language. (shrink)

I distinguish among three senses in which meaning may be said to be normative, one trivial, the other two more robust. According to the trivial sense, meaningful expressions have conditions of correct application. According to the first robust sense, these conditions are determined by norms. According to the second robust sense, statements about these conditions have normative implications. Normativity in one or the other of the robust senses, but not in the trivial sense, is commonly thought to pose a threat (...) to naturalism. I argue that, given its trivial normativity, meaning cannot be normative in the first robust sense but it is normative in the sense that statements about the meaning of terms have hypothetical normative implications that are essential to meaning. I further argue that this normativity itself poses no threat to naturalism. Rather, this normativity follows from the fact that the trivial normativity of meaning precludes its naturalization. (shrink)