Abstract
Michael Devitt has recently claimed that the Neo-Donnellian position about mind and language puts us “en route to the batty conclusion that we don’t have a language” (2020, p. 391). My aim in this paper is to sketch what I take to be Devitt’s argument for this claim and explain how a Neo-Donnellian might resist it. This will involve sketching Neo-Donnellian answers to two key questions raised by Devitt--first, the question of what a language is, and second, the question of what we get out of having one.
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Notes
I have my doubts about whether he can, both because I find Bianchi and Bonanini’s (2014) reading of Donnellan convincing, and because I question whether Donnellan can incorporate reference-borrowing without a coherent picture of its cognitive analog. I investigate this in a forthcoming paper.
There might be room to disagree about whether saying the Neo-Donnellian view “puts us en route” to a batty conclusion is the same as saying it “implies” a batty conclusion, but Devitt’s earlier formulation of the argument closes the door, I think. There he says the Neo-Donnellian view “in effect” denies we have a language (p. 390).
Bianchi and Bonanini (2014) are less convinced this conclusion is off the table for Donnellan, with an important caveat I’ll discuss shortly. Part of what I’m attempting to do is reject the caveat-free conclusion Devitt is talking about in favor of a conclusion closer (but perhaps not identical) to the more nuanced one Bianchi and Bonanini attribute to Donnellan. Bianchi and Bonanini connect this “extreme consequence” of Donnellan’s view to “radical theses” defended by Davidson. I believe the view to be sketched here has significant but not complete overlap with Davidson’s view.
To see my reading of this sentence as anticipating a wedge between semantics and convention, of course, one has to leave in place something like the (P2) claim that languages are constituted by conventional rules.
Here, Bianchi and Bonanini (2014) argue that Donnellan’s view anticipates Davidson’s (2006) claim that “there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed” (p. 265). Certainly, both Devitt’s conclusion and the one attributed to Donnellan differ from the more extreme, caveat-free conclusion of Devitt’s argument, which contains no “at least” or “not if”.
As Eliot Michaelson has pointed out to me, there are parallels between this response to Devitt and Strawson’s (1950) response to Russell.
More on such cases later.
An anonymous reviewer suggested an alternative picture according to which linguistic conventions are “highly defeasible, normative rules about how one ought to refer.” Such a picture might preserve the idea that conventions provide neither blockades nor guardrails (in virtue of their highly defeasible nature) while giving us “grounds to complain or correct a speaker who violates those rules without good reason” (in virtue of their normative force). I’m sure there are some who would prefer this way of responding to Devitt. However, I’m hesitant to accept that there is a way one ought to refer as a general rule. As noted in the concluding paragraph of this paper, I do think there are specific circumstances in which one ought to use language conventionally (e.g., while testifying in court). However, there also seem to be other, lower-stakes situations in which no such obligation attaches. While it’s true that we still sometimes “correct” other speakers for unconventional uses even in such cases, I’d suggest this is common only when we suspect the break with convention is unintentional. For example, if I suspect a student is confused about how others are using “epistemology”, I might say “’epistemology’ means…” to indicate what an on-trend usage would look like. (Perhaps despite appearances, such corrections can be interpreted as expressing conventional rules that aren’t semantically determinative). But if I know a speaker is deliberately off-trend in casual conversation, as in some cases of slang, humor, or colorful/creative speech, for example, I’m not likely to complain, even if I can discern no good reason for the choice to break with convention. In short, I’m reluctant to think speakers generally have grounds to sanction one another for unconventional uses of language, though we may do it in specific circumstances, and thus I’m not tempted by the view that by their nature, linguistic conventions tell us how we ought to refer.
If there simply were no conventions about how to use expressions—if all uses were one-off uses, for example—successful communication would still be possible, but presumably it would be less common. It’s in this sense that having a language increases the odds of successful communication. Increasing the odds of something does not, of course, constitute a guarantee. See above about guardrails.
See Wulfemeyer (2017) for a defense of this view.
Devitt seems to read Donnellan as ignoring it; Donnellan’s (1978) claims that speaker’s reference determines semantic reference suggests otherwise—perhaps something more akin to a semantic-pragmatic collapse than a true insensitivity to the distinction.
I recognize, of course, that there is also a sense in which they had Jones and the mainland in mind, respectively, but I think this can be dealt with using the notion of cognitive focus. See Wulfemeyer (2021) for development of this idea.
Both cases discussed here involve proper names, but as Donnellan (1978) argued, one can semantically refer via unconventional uses of definite descriptions as well. As with the case of proper names, such uses can be intentionally or unintentionally off-trend.
Importantly, nothing critical changes about the semantics if they were off-trend knowingly and intentionally.
Brian Hutler has anticipated that there may be troublesome cases involving texts with multiple authors which would challenge this claim. If texts are written piecemeal, as when different authors write different chapters or sentences, individual authors may fix meaning for their individual contributions just as they would in single-authored texts. Authorship by committee/consensus is presumably at least a little more complicated. I suppose it’s possible, given a sort of co-focused meeting-of-the-minds, for a group to “fix anew”, where critically that’s something different from stipulating the meaning of future utterances or establishing a semantically-determinative convention. This would be possible only because they all had the same thing in mind, not because their agreement on a particular string of words locked them in semantically.
I refer here to the portion of Davidson (2006, p. 256) where he writes that “we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in a language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.” We seem to agree on the non-semantic role of convention, but he seems here to flirt with the notion of language without convention, whereas I’m after language-plus-convention without semantic import.
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Acknowledgements
For discussion of an earlier version of this work, I’m grateful to the participants at the 2022 Kansas PRISM Workshop, which was organized by Eileen Nutting and held in memory of Stephen White. Special thanks to Ben Caplan for helpful commentary.
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Wulfemeyer, J. Avoiding the ‘Batty’ Conclusion That We Don’t Have a Language. Erkenn (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00703-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00703-5