Abstract
Against a broad consensus within contemporary analytic philosophy, Hattiangadi (Mind and Language 21(2):220–240, 2006, 2007) has recently argued that linguistic meaning is not normative, at least not in the sense of being prescriptive. She maintains, more specifically, that standard claims to the effect that meaning is normative are usually ambiguous between two readings: one, which she calls Prescriptivity, and another, which she calls Correctness. According to Hattiangadi, though meaning is normative in the uncontroversial sense specified in the principle Correctness, it is not normative in the sense specified by Prescriptivity. In this paper, I instead show that meaning is normative in the sense of being prescriptive. My argument for this claim takes the form of a classical disjunctive syllogism. I argue that either Correctness implies (because it presupposes) Prescriptivity, or linguistically meaningful items are ‘intrinsically intentional.’ But linguistically meaningful items are not intrinsically intentional, and thus Correctness implies (because it presupposes) Prescriptivity.
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Notes
The use of the terms ‘interpretation’ and ‘regress’ arguments to characterize two distinct aspects of Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations derives from Williams (1999).
That Wittgenstein is a ‘factualist’ about semantic norms and content is a claim famously denied by Kripke (1982).
For a more detailed discussion of the Humean and Moorean arguments, and in particular how they are supposed by Hattiangadi to bear on or impugn naturalist accounts of semantic content, see Hattiangadi (2007, Chap. 3). For a strengthened version of Moore’s open question argument considered by Hattiangadi in this context, see Darwall et al. (1992).
It has been pointed out to me by Reiner Schaefer that Hattiangadi’s formulation of Prescriptivity is, for instance, ambiguous in regards to the meaning of the verb ‘means,’ contained therein. The ambiguity in question then gives rise to many distinct possible readings of Prescriptivity, e.g.,
(1) S takes ‘green’ to mean blue → (x)(S ought (to apply ‘green’ to x ↔ x is blue)
(2) S’s utterance of ‘green’ actually means blue → (x)(S ought (to apply ‘green’ to x ↔ x is blue)
(3) S uttered ‘green’. ‘green’ means blue → (x) S ought (to apply ‘green’ to x ↔ x is blue)
(4) S intends to follow the rule (x)(apply ‘green’ to x ↔ x is blue) → (x) S ought (to apply ‘green’ to x ↔ x is blue).
Schaefer notes that in the context of some of these possible readings (e.g., 1 and 4) it is not clear that the antecedent does in fact imply the relevant consequent, i.e., that (x)(S ought (to apply t to x↔x is F). Thus, it is not obvious that Prescriptivity should be endorsed, at least absent further clarification, in precisely the form offered by Hattiangadi. However, for the purposes of this paper, I will simply allow that Prescriptivity can be appropriately modified so as to embody a true implication that accurately captures the connection between what a speaker means and how they ought to apply a term. Admittedly, this task may involve important complications and difficulties, but these are unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper to treat in any great detail.
Curiously, since she relies on the success of Wright’s critique in motivating her shift to the meta-ethical arguments of Hume and Moore, Hattiangadi goes on to insist (p 160) that Wright’s anti-reductionist proposal fails to provide an adequate response to Kripke’s sceptic, even absent the assumption that meaning is normative: “it is notable that the failure of anti-reductionist responses to the skeptical problem have nothing to do with the normativity of meaning or content” (p 151).
In other words, no assumption is being made to the effect that meaning is “intrinsically normative” (Hattiangadi, 2009, p 54), where to say that meaning is ‘intrinsically normative’ is to say that “what you mean by a word determines how you ought to use that word, quite independently of moral, prudential, legal and other considerations, and independently of your desires or communicative intentions” (pp 54–55).
A similar concern, due to McGinn (1984, p 147), is considered and addressed by Boghossian (1989, pp 146–49). In particular, Boghossian attempts to show, contra McGinn, that the rule-following considerations extend straightforwardly to mental content, and show, indeed, mental content can no more meet the ‘normativity requirement’ invoked by Kripke (1982) than can dispositional theories of meaning.
It has been argued by McDowell (1998, pp 226, 272) that this sort of application of the regress of interpretations argument rests upon the mistaken application of a content-vehicle distinction in the case of thoughts. On the common sense view, however, it ordinarily makes no sense to talk of thoughts as non-intentional vehicles that stand in need of interpretation in order to possess content. Hence, the regress of interpretations is blocked once it reaches the stage of thoughts, which are not mere non-intentional vehicles but are rather ordinarily endowed, and as such, with intentional content. Yet Hattiangadi (2007, p 170) has shown that even if we are prepared to concede that the content/vehicle distinction has no application in the case of thought, the rule-following scepticism can successfully be deployed, notwithstanding, in a variant way:
“In order to get the regress started, the skeptic has to hold something fixed and vary something else. In the above regress argument it is not vehicles that remain fixed, while contents float free. Rather, what is held fixed are persons, and it is asked what makes it the case that a person has this belief rather than that. The beliefs themselves can be seen as individuated exclusively by their contents, assuming no possibility of differentiation between contents and vehicles. And while it may seem peculiar to think of beliefs as composed of vehicles and content, it is indeed a bit of commonsense that a person can have this belief or that. Hence, the…regress argument does not seem to be sensitive to the same sort of objection as the argument McDowell outlines.” (p 170)
Hattiangadi, it should be noted, does not find this particular aspect of Kripke’s dialectic, as it pertains to dispositionalist proposals, persuasive (c.f., 2007, pp 23–24). Implicit, however, in her rejection, identified and discussed above, of all extant naturalistic proposals, is the implication that she should be prepared to concede, in any case, that if any of the extant naturalistic proposals were able to evade this particular aspect of the skeptical argument, it would nevertheless founder on appeal to another aspect, e.g., what she calls the ‘problem of error’ (p 106). Further consideration of the supposed difficulties with Kripke’s argument on this point is therefore moot in the present context.
Many thanks to the anonymous reviewer for bringing this concern to my attention.
It should be noted that the present objection presupposes the truth of what Shapiro (2006) has called the ‘open-texture thesis,’ a thesis according to which “(b)orderline cases are…cases about which competent speakers are allowed to differ” (Wright, 1987, p 244). Shapiro himself underscores that the (intuitively plausible) open-texture thesis implies for instance that “(if) a is a borderline case of P…(then) in at least some situations, a speaker is free to assert Pa and free to assert Pa, without offending against the meanings of the terms, or against any other rule of language use. Unsettled entails open” (Shapiro, p 10). I myself find this thesis to be intuitively plausible enough, though it is in any case beyond the scope of this paper to subject to rigorous critical assessment. Additional endorsements of the principle can be found in Sainsbury (1990, §9) and Soames (1999, p 210).
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Connelly, J. Meaning is Normative: A Response to Hattiangadi. Acta Anal 27, 55–71 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-011-0125-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-011-0125-1