Perry, Wittgenstein's builders, and metasemantics
| Abstract | Fear not, Perryphiles. I come not to bury, but (ultimately) to praise. In particular, John Perry deserves praise for recognizing, in his important 1994 article “Davidson’s Sentences and Wittgenstein’s Builders”, not only that words may be used to perform speech acts, but also that this usage carries an important metasemantic implication. This being philosophy, however, it will come as no surprise that my praise comes with a caveat. Not about these two main points, with which I very heartily agree, but rather about some details of Perry’s argument. The main aim of this paper is thus to offer a friendly amendment. There will be two additional conclusions: first, about some essential properties of words; second, taking this as a “case study”, about the advantages and costs of an empirically-inclined methodology in the philosophy of language. The game plan is as follows. I begin with two elements of background: Perry’s target, an argument for sentence priority in metasemantics, and his use of Wittgenstein’s Builder’s language game (i.e., the one in §2 of the Investigations) to rebut this argument. I then turn to the novel bits: a critique of Perry, in which I urge that the elements of this “language” lack certain essential properties of genuine words, and my positive friendly amendment, which presents a related critique of the argument for sentence priority. | |||||||||
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