Abstract
There may be various reasons for claiming that meaning is normative, and additionally, very different senses attached to the claim. However, all such claims have faced fierce resistance from those philosophers who insist that meaning is not normative in any nontrivial sense of the word. In this paper I sketch one particular approach to meaning claiming its normativity and defend it against the anti-normativist critique: namely the approach of Brandomian inferentialism. However, my defense is not restricted to inferentialism in any narrow sense for it encompasses a much broader spectrum of approaches to meaning, connected with the Wittgensteinian and especially Sellarsian view of language as an essentially rule-governed enterprise; and indeed I refrain from claiming that the version of inferentialism I present here is in every detail the version developed by Brandom.
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Notes
I have dealt with other kinds of objections to inferentialism elsewhere (see Peregrin 2009).
This is important to keep in mind, for besides this normative variety of inferentialism we can also consider a causal variety (which, in effect, is a subspecies of functionalism, well-known from the philosophy of mind); and the latter is very often mistaken for the former. (Unlike the normative variant, the causal variant concentrates on the role of an expression within inferences actually carried out by speakers or thinkers.) It is the latter which some philosophers appear to have in mind when they talk about inferential role semantics (Boghossian 1993; Fodor and Lepore 1993); but I will reserve the word inferentialism for the normative version (and it was coined, by Brandom, in this very sense).
Von Wright (1963) uses the terms command and prohibition in a similar sense; while Sellars (1974, 422) uses constraint and incentive and claims: “It should be stressed that the uniformities involved in meaningful verbal behavior include negative uniformities, i.e. the avoidance of certain combinations, as well as positive uniformities, i.e. uniformities of concomitance. Indeed, negative uniformities play by far the more important role, and the rules which govern them are to be construed as constraints rather than incentives.”
According to Brandom (1994), the basic gears of the underlying communal machinery are the deontic statuses of commitment and entitlement. This way of approaching the speech acts leads to a kind of pragmatics which is essentially normative: it characterizes the speech acts in terms of the kinds of rules that govern them and in terms of those changes of normative statuses of the participants of communication which they bring about. Participation in linguistic communication essentially involves scorekeeping. Semantics, then, is in effect nothing else than a theory of roles conferred on linguistic tokens by the rules, i.e. of the ways in which playing these tokens is capable of changing the deontic statuses of the player and her companions.
Cf. the classic text of Williams (1973).
We can say that it is a norm that we ought to interpret our peers as believing the truth. This is the celebrated Davidsonian principle of charity; but this is a far cry from claiming that we ought to believe the truth.
To avoid misunderstanding: as I stressed that at least some rules of language must remain merely implicit, let me now stress that of course the articulation of what I call normative may amount merely to making the normativity explicit, not necessarily to instituting it. To institute it necessitates taking up normative attitudes—especially towards those who thwart a rule: correcting them, deterring them from doing what they do, denigrating or punishing them. To say that an expression means thus and so is already to move on a metalevel w.r.t. the original game and is not essential for the presence of the normativity.
Remember that we are talking about the insider reading of the normatives. On the outsider reading, the constitutive ingredient of the claim falls out and the claim may be read as a report much more straightforwardly.
See Peregrin (2010b).
For a distinction between what ought to be done (an ought-to-do, in Sellars's term) and what should be brought about (an ought-to-be) see Peregrin (2010a).
Unlike Glüer and Pagin, Hattiangadi does give an example of the employment of the word “correct” which, according to her, does not imply any prescription. She invites us to imagine a theme park where there is a minimum height requirement for some of the more dangerous rides; and she says that to say that somebody is of the correct height in this respect does not imply any prescription. This seems to me to be utterly odd, for surely saying that somebody is of the correct height is tantamount to saying that she is permitted to enjoy the ride (i.e. that if she is not of the correct height, she ought not to enjoy it).
Though the “if” direction of the biconditionals is straightforward, the “only if” might be felt as less perspicuous. But this direction is not important and in fact the “and only if” can be deleted—if we know everything that is forbidden, what is not forbidden follows. Hattiangadi’s (206, 238) objection that “the rule that tells me to apply ‘horse’ only to horses does not distinguish between my meaning horse by ‘horse’ and something else, such as brown horse or black horse” would be relevant only if this were the only rule governing horse. But the inferential pattern governing horse and thus constituting its meaning involves the rules that we can infer (This is a) horse from (This is a) brown horse, but not vice versa.
In this way, we have reached, via a different route, the same result as Whiting (2009).
As Wheeler (1986, 492) points out (in a different context), “speech and thought are brain-writing, some kind of tokenings which are as much subject to interpretation as any other”.
Davidson, of course, does not talk about rules; however, the predicament of his ‘vocabulary of agency’ is, from this viewpoint, the same as that of our normative vocabulary.
In fact I think (and here I may differ from Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne) that some utterances of normatives should be read “attributively”—namely those that are done from the ‘outsider perspective’. Hence to say that an expression of a language is used correctly thus and so may simply mean a report on the fact that this use is legitimate according to the correct rules of the relevant linguistic community. In this context, one may perhaps dispute whether the normative vocabulary is truly crucial. What is, however, crucial is that the same normative may also be used to carry out the peculiar kind of speech act in which a declarative ingredient is coupled with an endorsement.
Cf. Gauker’s (2007) concept of circle of deference.
Note that nothing in this paper hinges on inferential rules being crucial. That is why I say that the argumentation presented here does not presuppose an inferentialist standpoint in a narrow sense.
In this respect it is a reduction similar to Davidson's reduction of his vocabulary of agency to the relationship of holding true.
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Peregrin, J. Inferentialism and the Normativity of Meaning. Philosophia 40, 75–97 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9271-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9271-8