Abstract
This paper defends the normativity of meaning thesis by clearing up a misunderstanding about what the thesis amounts to. The misunderstanding is that according to it, failing to use an expression in accordance with the norms which constitute its meaning amounts to changing the expression’s meaning. If this was what the thesis claimed, then it would indeed be easy to show that meaning norms do not yield prescriptions and cannot be followed. However, there is another reading: what is constitutive of meaning is not the norm’s being followed, but the norm’s being applicable. On this reading, some standard arguments against the thesis lose their force. After discussing the alternative reading and its consequences, the paper goes on to sketch a model of how norms of meaning become applicable in the first place. This model supports the view that talk of meaning has its pragmatic home in contexts of linguistic calibration.
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Notes
As some have noted (Millar 2002; Buleandra 2008; Glüer and Wikforss 2009), the notion of correctness of application is narrower than that of the correctness of use. The former is restricted to uses of terms in predication and thus, in indicative sentences, while the latter relates, in addition, to their employment in questions and imperatives, and also to their uptake in mere thinking and in acting. One important point to note in this connection is that the correctness of use relates not only to the conditions of application, but also to the consequences of application (even if one talks about the “conditions of correct use”). For the distinction, see Dummett 1973; Brandom 1994, Chap. 3.
Jaroslav Peregrin (2012) professes to have trouble understanding the denial of this thesis. Correctness, he sensibly insists, is after all conceptually linked to what one ought to do.
According to Peregrin (2012: 76), normativists like Robert Brandom think of the norms not as supplying prescriptions but as supplying constraints. I think that the distinction is exaggerated. Given a discursive practice with a moderately rich logical structure and grammar, constraints entail prescriptions. If it is admissible to infer B from A, then one must reply in the negative when confronted with the question whether the inference from A to B is illicit (unless, of course, one of various disabling reasons obtains).
The distinction between being sensitive to a norm and being subject to a norm is also stressed by Robert Brandom (in conversation). Another place in the literature where a similar distinction can be found is Pagin and Glüer 1999, 219ff. However, Pagin and Glüer’s understanding of what it means to say that rules are “in force” (as opposed to being intentionally followed by a subject sensitive to them) is unnecessarily institutional: for Glüer and Pagin, laws are not just one example, but the archetype. In Section 3, I sketch an alternative view according to which the applicability of norms is an aspect of an interpretative scheme within a dynamic practice of (linguistic or other) calibration.
See, for instance, Peregrin 2012; Lauer 2011 (Anti-normativism and the Fraud with ‘Ought’, unpublished).
More precisely, the quote is taken from a section in which Brandom discusses the perspectival character of linguistic interpretation and distinguishes between (perspectivally variant) inferential significance and (perspectivally invariant) content, which is understood as the function from perspective to significance.
David Lauer (2011, unpublished MS, see note 5), following Haugeland (1998), has also stressed that from the perspective of a practice’s engaged participant, there is a difference between, on the one hand, failing to carry out a mandated maneuver and thereby incurring blame of some sort, and on the other, omitting some maneuver and thereby demonstrating that one is and has been following the norms of a different practice altogether.
One could argue that Glüer’s employment of this argument puts pressure on her to give a positive account of the sense in which (according to her concession to the normativist camp) meanings entail correctness conditions. As far as I can tell, she does not say much about this at any point.
An anonymous reviewer has helpfully pointed out that on this anti-normativist understanding of a constitutive norm, the latter would engender a generalized hypothetical imperative, as Hattiangadi indeed suggests in various places (for instance in Hattiangadi 2006, 228ff.).
For a detailed discussion of some aspects of this practice, including a demonstration that “Kripkenstein” worries about rule-following do not arise when normative claims are seen as moves within the practice of linguistic calibration, see also Kiesselbach (2012a).
Let me enter a few remarks regarding the circumstances and moves listed on each score sheet. For one thing, there are clearly simple norms which do without this conditional structure, i.e., which demand the production of some move(s) unconditionally. The format proposed here is the general form within which this possibility finds a place. Secondly, the image of a table (on the score sheet) is actually itself a special case. In principle, the relation between circumstances and moves ought to be understood as a function, and it is certainly possible for circumstances and moves to be locatable on continuous scales. There is no upper limit to the complexity of the function tying circumstances to moves. In fact, there is not even reason to rule out (and some reason to expect, in some cases) the possibility that there is no fully specifiable way of computing the moves from the circumstances. (Instead, norm-attributors and followers may need to employ bits of un-analyzed know how. Face recognition, for example, is an ability for which we are only just starting to see moderately successful attempts at reverse-engineering and hence of finding computable functions. In this case, it is possible that the score sheets of different agents diverge in unexpected ways, requiring them to calibrate carefully. We will come back to this below.) Lastly, we need not impose very strict requirements on what can count as circumstances and moves in an adequate theory of norms, apart from the basic requirements that the relevant agents must be capable of detecting them (in the case of circumstances) and producing them (in the case of moves), with or without the aid of artifacts such as microscopes or fax machines.
For another instance of this structure, see Brandom 1994: 177f.
See Kiesselbach (2012b).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Bob Brandom, an audience at the University of South Florida Philosophy Colloquium and two anonymous referees for their extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this material. Thanks are also due to the University of Pittsburgh for providing me with an office and administrative support during the 2012–2013 academic year. Work on the paper was supported by grants from the Volkswagen Foundation and the German–American Fulbright Commission.
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Kiesselbach, M. The Normativity of Meaning: From Constitutive Norms to Prescriptions. Acta Anal 29, 427–440 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-014-0221-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-014-0221-0