Online research in philosophy

This paper aims to demonstrate that it is by no means clear whether the thesis that meaning is intrinsically normative can be justifi ed. Therefore, we should not regard the explanation or the grasp of the normativity of meaning as an adequacy condition of a theory of meaning — as some philosophers do. In the first part of the paper, I distinguish four intuitive kinds of normativity of meaning. After that, I focus on the question what sorts of normativity can be distinguished in general. I discuss the advantages and problems of a common characterization of normativity, adopted by Schnädelbach and von Wright, and I defend a certain modifi ed version of this characterization. In the third part of the paper, I apply this modifi ed characterization to the four kinds of normativity of meaning distinguished earlier, and I show that only one of the four is compatible with the thesis that meaning is an intrinsically normative concept. In the last part of the paper, I focus on the semantic relations between meaning and use, and I reject some common forms of reducing facts about meaning to facts about use.

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..

It has frequently been suggested that meaning is, in some important sense, normative. However, precisely what is particularly normative about it is often left without any satisfactory explanation, and the ‘normativity thesis’ has thus, justly, been called into question. That said, it will be argued here that the intuition that meaning is ‘normative’ is on the right track, even if many of the purported explanations for meaning’s normativity are not. In particular, rather that being particularly social, the normativity of meaning may follow from the more logical/epistemic relations between use and meaning. Because of this, some use-based theories we still be able to accommodate the normativity of meaning by allowing that while meaning supervenes upon use, the function from use to meaning is a normative one.

In "Assertion," Geach identified failure to attend to the distinction between meaning and speech act as a source of philosophical errors. I argue that failure to attend to this distinction, along with the parallel distinction between attitude and content, has been behind the idea that meaning and content are, in some sense, normative. By an argument parallel to Geach's argument against performative analyses of "good" we can show that the phenomena identified by theorists of the normativity of content are properties in the first instance of speech act and propositional attitude types, rather than content as such.

This study addresses a range of central topics in Anglo-American philosophy of language.

What is the function of concepts pertaining to meaning in socio-linguistic practice? In this study, the authors argue that we can approach a satisfactory answer by displacing the standard picture of meaning talk as a sort of description with a picture that takes seriously the similarity between meaning talk and various types of normative injunction. In their discussion of this approach, they investigate the more general question of the nature of the normative, as well as a range of important topics specific to the philosophy of language.

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.

An overlooked assumption in the semantic literature is about a connection between semantic content (whatever a semantic theory attempts to elucidate) and indirect speech. In simple but clumsy form the assumption is that an adequate semantic theory T for a language L should assign p as the semantic content of an utterance u, by A, of a sentence S in L iff éA said that pù is a true report of u.1 We'll call this assumption MA. So, since Galileo in uttering (1) makes (2) true, by MA, an adequate semantics for Italian must assign to (1) the semantic content that the earth moves.