Abstract
This paper argues that Donald Davidson’s infamous denial in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” that there is any such thing as a language, though it may not be fully supported by the arguments given for it in that paper, is nonetheless entailed by his semantic views generally, according to which the literal, linguistic meaning of a speaker’s words on an occasion is determined by how the speaker intended to be understood. In favor of this view, and thus against conventional languages, the paper then argues that this understanding of linguistic meaning promises, in a way the conventional view of meaning does not, to make sense of linguistic normativity.
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Notes
Davidson calls them “theories” because they are recursive characterizations that model, from the theorist’s perspective, the capacities, regarding each potential utterance of the speaker, on the hearer’s part to understand the utterance, and on the speaker’s part to form an intention as to how the hearer is to understand the utterance. The dispositions modeled are synchronic dispositions to understand and intend to be understood under any possible circumstances. This kind of systematicity does not demand that the theory have any actual application beyond the particular exercise of the capacity it models. On this way of understanding the matter, objections, like those owing to Hacking (1986) and to Bar-On & Risjord (1992), that “Derangement” gives up on the systematicity of semantic theory that was of such central importance to his early papers, have no grip. Similarly, there is no need, on the construal, to retain systematicity or the independence of theory from particular applications of it, by reading Davidson’s “prior” theories as relatively long term, stable theories, as Dummett (1986) and Pietroski (1994) do. See Lepore & Ludwig (2005, especially pp. 285–290), in accord with this reading.
In his discussion in “Derangement”, Davidson classes metaphor along with irony, as a case of saying something true by uttering a sentence that is false. I think this misstates his own position articulated in “What Metaphors Mean”, in which the maker of the metaphor does not say anything at all, hence anything true, beyond the literal meaning of the sentence, which itself is (typically) manifestly false. (Davidson, 2006, p. 210). If the speaker said anything beyond the literal meaning, it should be possible to paraphrase it, and the argument against metaphorical meaning in that paper rests on the claim that this is not possible.
The case of irony is also trickier than Davidson lets on here, for two reasons. First, it is not quite clear in what sense the ironist says something true. He certainly may convey, communicate, or indicate something true by means of uttering words intended to be understood as meaning an opposite falsehood, and do this in a way distinct from making an utterance from which the hearer can infer that truth, as in ordinary implicature. We might even say he asserts that truth (play acting contexts aside). But given that the words said mean and are intended to be understood as meaning the falsehood, it is still odd to put this in terms of his saying that truth. Second, an ironical utterance may or may not be one in which the speaker intends their words to be understood initially – by way of first meaning -- in the way that makes them false. If she does not -- if she intends the utterance to be understood in the first instance in the way that makes it true -- then, on Davidson’s view, she would be conveying something true by saying something literally true. The irony there would be in making an utterance that might typically be expected to be understood as meaning something false on the occasion, but with a literal meaning in the case on which it states an opposite truth.
I find this sort of reasoning generally unpersuasive. First, there are many reasons, e.g., economic efficiency, for holding a party to a contract committed to what the contract’s words conventionally mean that have nothing to do with the claim that that is what the words as used actually meant. And what matters in Searle’s case is surely not whether the sentence as uttered had its conventional German meaning (or any meaning at all) but that the Italians interpret it have that meaning, or at least to be German. More generally, the tendency for practical consequences of speech acts to track the meaning the words would ordinarily or conventionally be taken to have is to be expected regardless of considerations of what they actually meant on an occasion, because it is typically the audience’s interpretation of a speech act that has or constitutes the consequences of the act, and the audience will typically interpret conventionally, unless they know better.
Stainton spells out and endorses further implications of his view that seem to me to amount to a reductio of it. For example, it entails that the shapes ‘Bless Jesus Christ” randomly burned into a piece of toast refers to Jesus Christ (Stainton, 2016, p. 17).
Thus I urge, against Hacking, Bar-on and Risjord, Green and others, and with Lepore & Ludwig (2005), that Davidson’s anti-language conclusion in “A Nice Derangement” is fully consistent with his earlier writings on semantic theory.
Lepore and Ludwig offer a sense of “conventional” on which a convention can be synchronic and thus not dependent on any prior established regularities. (Lepore & Ludwig, 2005, p. 282ff). On this sense of “conventional”, passing agreement on what Davidson calls passing theories can count as agreement on convention. Lepore and Ludwig can of course mean what they want by their words, so long as they clue us in as to what that is. But the strikes me as just papering over a real disagreement with the appearance of agreement. Whatever others may have meant by “conventions of language” and related expressions like “linguistic practices” and “public meanings”, whose significance for communication Davidson rejects and they accept, it has surely been something involving prior linguistic regularities.
The only significance a truth theory would retain if independent knowledge of meaning could serve to confirm it as a meaning theory would be that it articulates the recursive structure of the object language that explains its learnability from a finite basis. This – no small feat in itself -- is the sole point, it seems to me, of the remnant of Davidson’s philosophy of language that remains intact in Lepore and Ludwig’s “modest” version of Davidson’s semantic program, which precisely rejects the need for the radical empirical verifiability of a truth theory. Lepore & Ludwig (2005, p. 166ff). As Davidson’s writings on skepticism and relativism (and more) attest, he deployed his truth theoretic semantics against yet bigger prey than that. See in this connection Kemp (2012, p. 83–85). In Manning (2012), I explore at length the avenues available for countering the considerations Lepore and Ludwig advance as recommending their modest reading.
In his exchange with Dummett, Davidson makes use of such examples to argue that there is no possible conventional link between the mood of a sentence and its illocutionary force. (“Communication and Convention”, in Davidson (1984, p. 268ff).
Essentially, but not in every case. Once enough held true sentences have been assigned truth conditions on which they and the beliefs they manifest are true, there is room for the attribution of explicable error: held true sentences and corresponding beliefs that are false. On Davidson’s view, these will always be theoretically marginal cases, however much they may drive traditional epistemological theorizing.
In Manning (2014), I elaborate on the consequences of these constraints on radical interpretation for the correct understanding of first-person authority.
Several writers have criticized Davidson’s picture by pointing out that speakers may, and perhaps typically do, have the intention to use words in conformity with public or conventional standards, and that they will often accept correction when alerted to a divergence between their intended meaning and conventional meaning. The significance accorded to these facts, and how they are taken to count against Davidson, varies. Some claim that they show that we subject ourselves to public norms of correctness. For example, Dummett writes “A speaker holds himself responsible to the accepted meanings of words and expressions in the language or dialect he purports to be speaking; he is willingness to withdraw or correct what he has said when made aware of a mistake about the meaning of a word in a common language therefor distinguishes erroneous uses from intentionally deviant ones” (Dummett 1986, p. 462); and Stainton: “As an individual, I serve myself to the communal language as it exists” (Stainton, 2016, p. 24). Others claim that they show that the intended meaning of an utterance is either indeterminate or inconsistent, and thus cannot be identified as literal or first meaning. (Green, 2001, p. 252). These are not in themselves implausible readings of the phenomena. But they are hardly compulsory and would not be the proper readings of the phenomena as they appear when viewed through the lens of radical interpretation. It is entirely possible to understand these phenomena as reflecting confused meta-semantic beliefs on the part of speakers and interlocutors, themselves products of mistaken, conventionalist intuitions. Interpretive charity applies broadly, but not so far as to require us to hold that a speaker’s meta-semantic intuitions must be correct.
Turner (2010) presents a book length defense of this general line of argument. Risjord (2016) collects papers assessing the current status of the naturalist/normativist controversy in the social sciences.
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Manning, R.N. Unconventional Linguistic Normativity: Maybe Not So Deranged After All. Philosophia 51, 1425–1443 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00614-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-023-00614-3