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- Daniel Whiting (2009). Is Meaning Fraught with Ought? Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (4):535-555.According to Normativism, linguistic meaning is intrinsically normative (I shall explore what this amounts to below). One, though not the only, reason for Normativism’s importance is that it bears on the prospects of providing an account of meaning in the terms available to the natural sciences. In turn, since linguistic behaviour is inextricably bound up with both non linguistic behaviour and the psychological attitudes informing it, Normativism might (if true) pose a serious challenge to the project of accommodating creatures such as ourselves within the worldview the natural sciences afford. In this paper, I shall not focus on such heady themes but rather on the prior issue of whether or not one should accept Normativism. Though certainly in circulation beforehand, it is fair to say that Saul Kripke’s (1982) was largely responsible for bringing the thesis to the philosophical forefront.1 In the years following its publication, Normativism looked close to achieving the status of orthodoxy. At one stage, Crispin Wright felt able to remark assuredly that the view ‘strike[s] most people now as a harmless platitude’ (1993: 247).2 In recent years.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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In recent years, several systematic theories of linguistic meaning have been offered that give pride of place to linguistic practice, or the process of linguistic communication. Often these theories are referred to as neo-pragmatist or new pragmatist; I call them 'practice-based'. According to practice-based theories of meaning, the process of linguistic communication is somehow constitutive of, or otherwise essential for the existence of, propositional linguistic meaning. Moreover, these theories disavow, or downplay, the semantic importance of inflationary notions of representation. I introduce the basic ideas and motives behind some practice-based theories of meaning, and offer some reasons why an eliminativist, non-quietist, epistemic practice-based approach to meaning that 1) disavows any explanatory role for the linguistic community as such, 2) prioritizes sentence meaning over word meaning, and 3) may , in the end, be naturalistic, should be favored over its practice-based competitors.
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| | Other links: blackwell-synergy.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The basic reason is this. Even though, as people have been pointing out for some years now, the linguistic meaning of a given sentence generally underdetermines what a speaker means in uttering it, it does not follow that linguistic meaning is infected or infested by what some of these same people call ‘pragmatic meaning’. There is no such thing as pragmatic meaning, at least nothing that is commensurate with linguistic meaning. There is what the sentence means and what the speaker means in uttering it.
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| | Scholar | More options ... In traditional semantic theory the meaning of a word or operator (logical constant) is permeated with normativity. It is held that if one grasps the meaning of a word (or logical constant), one ought to behave in a certain way. This view is labelled as normativism here. Normativists hold that meaning is intrinsically and irreducibly normative. The naturalistic approach to semantics, on the other hand, which tries to reconcile the traditional approach to meaning with a naturalistic world-view, has to naturalise the normative character ofmeaning. Naturalists employ several strategies of argumentation, two of which I deem to be particularly significant. These two strategies are exemplified by P. Horwich’s revisionistic and C. Peacocke’s reductionistic approaches. This paper elucidates and critiques the former. My criticism tries to show that Horwich’s theory does not offer a successful answer to the normativist challenge.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The paper argues that applications of the principle that “ought” implies “can” (OIC) depend on normative considerations even if the link between “ought” and “can” is logical in nature. Thus, we should reject a common, “factualist” conception of OIC and endorse weak “normativism”. Even if we use OIC as the rule ““cannot” therefore “not ought””, applying OIC is not a mere matter of facts and logic, as factualists claim, but often draws on “proto-ideals” of moral agency.
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| | Other links: journals.cambridge.org journals.cambridge.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... “Intentional content,” as I understand it, is whatever serves as the object of “propositional” attitude verbs, such as “think,” “judge,” “represent,” “prefer” (whether or not these objects are “propositions”). These verbs are standardly used to pick out the intentional states invoked to explain the states and behavior of people and many animals. I shall take the “normativity of the intentional,” or “Normativism,” to be the claim that any adequate theory of intentional states involves considerations of value not essentially involved in the natural sciences. Thus, according to Normativism, whether or not someone thinks that fish sleep, or even can represent fish at all, depends upon making a judgment about the person’s goodness or rationality, of a sort that would not be involved in merely determining whether or not fish in fact sleep.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Review Essay of Stephen P. Turner, Explaining the Normative, 2010.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... A number of prominent philosophers advance the following ideas: (1) Meaning is use. (2) Meaning is an intrinsically normative notion. Call (1) the use thesis, hereafter UT, and (2) the normativity thesis, hereafter NT. They come together in the view that for a linguistic expression to have meaning is for there to be certain proprieties governing its employment.1 These ideas are often associated with a third.
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| | Other links: interscience.wiley.com eprints.soton.ac.uk blackwell-synergy.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... 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.
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| | Other links: people.su.se jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... 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.
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| | Other links: people.su.se | Scholar | More options ... In a recent article,1 I defend the claim that meaning is an intrinsically normative notion. To say that meaning is normative is, for present purposes, to say that from a statement of an expression’s meaning there follows immediately and without further ado a statement concerning how that expression should (not) or may (not) be used. Call this Normativism. In a reply,2 Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss (hereafter, G&W), both prominent anti-Normativists, 3 argue that I fail in my attempt to defend Normativism against the objections I consider.
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| | Other links: eprints.soton.ac.uk | Scholar | More options ... Discussion of Daniel Whiting, Is meaning fraught with ought?
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