Rules, Reductionism, and Normativity: A Naturalistic Rejoinder

Philosophical Studies

Semantic Dispositionalism is roughly the view that meaning a certain thing by a word, or possessing a certain concept, consists in being disposed to do something, e.g., infer a certain way. Its main problem is that it seems to have so many and disparate exceptions. People can fail to infer as required due to lack of logical acumen, intoxication, confusion, deviant theories, neural malfunctioning, and so on. I present a theory stating possession conditions of concepts that are counterfactuals, rather than disposition attributions, but which is otherwise similar to inferentialist versions of dispositionalism. I argue that it can handle all the exceptions discussed in the literature without recourse to ceteris paribus clauses. Psychological exceptions are handled by suitably undemanding requirements (unlike that of giving the sum of any two numbers) and by setting the following two preconditions upon someone's making the inference: that she considers the inference and has no motivating reason against it. The non-psychological exceptions, i.e., cases of neural malfunctioning, are handled by requiring that the counterfactuals be true sufficiently often during the relevant interval. I argue that this accommodates some important intuitions about concept possession, in particular, the intuition that concept possession is vague along a certain dimension.

In Putnam's characterization of metaphysical realism, this position is committed to a correspondence conception of truth as well as to the claim that truth outstrips empirical adequacy. Putnam's model-theoretic argument seeks to refute meta-physical realism by arguing that, on this conception of truth, truth and empirical adequacy must coincide. It has been noted in the literature that the argument involves as an auxiliary premise a thesis sometimes called "Semantic Naturalism," according to which semantics is an empirical science like any other. At the time when the model-theoretic argument was presented, Semantic Naturalism was taken to imply, among other things, that if truth is indeed to be defined in terms of a correspondence relation, then that relation ought to be characterizable in physical terms. This paper argues that metaphysical realists should reject Se-mantic Naturalism as a fundamentally physicalist-reductionist program. It does not follow that they ...

Brandom's solution to the problem of rule-following is centred around the idea that we can explain the existence of rules if we focus on our activity of treating performances as correct or incorrect. In this way normative statuses are taken to supervene on normative attitudes, which in turn are deemed to be non describable in purely naturalistic terms. Brandom offers two arguments against the reducibility of normative attitudes to dispositions (Brandom 1994, pp. 42ff). (1): the reduction of attitudes to dispositions to apply sanctions cannot be a proper reduction of normative notions to non-normative ones, because the description of attitudes as dispositions to sanction is not entirely couched in naturalistic vocabulary. In fact, the concept of 'sanction' is a normative notion, something that refers back to a normative theory of what benefit and harm consists in. Moreover, (2) since positive and negative sanctions may consist in acclaim and censure that itself have only a normative significance, there is no direct shift from normative evaluations to bestowals of benefits or impositions of harms. To these two arguments it can be replied that they do not show that normative notions are a necessary ingredient in the explanation of normative attitudes. One can think of abstract communities in which linguistic practices are enough simple to make it possible to offer a dispositionalist reading of the emergence of normative attitudes. It becomes then difficult to say exactly when normative ingredients enter in play (Rosen 1997).

Papers of the 16th International Wittgenstein Symposium, vol. I, 501-505, eds. Roberto Casati and Graham White., 1993

Philosophical Topics , 2022

Platitudes about meaning -Using the word 'approximate' to say of a town that it is nearby, or using the word 'chordate' to refer to string musical instruments, is wrong: that is not what such words mean, hence, it is not how they ought to be used. Though there are many more, and quite different, ways of going wrong in using a natural language, it is probably platitudes like these that originate the idea of semantic normativity. The idea is that statements of meaning ("w means such and such") 1 are normative statements, or, perhaps, entail such statements. E.g. when we say that 'profligate' means completely given up to dissipation and licentiousness (Merriam-Webster's 1997), we assert (or imply) that a speaker may use 'profligate' only to describe people that are completely given up to dissipation and licentiousness (or perhaps, that the speaker believes to be such -more on this later). Views like this have been endorsed by many philosophers. 2 In recent decades, the normativity claim has been often identified with Saul Kripke's particular version of it (Kripke 1982), which, however, concerns speaker's meaning ("S means such-and-such by word w") rather than linguistic meaning ("w means such-and-such (in language L)"). In recent decades, the normativity claim has been challenged by philosophers such as Anandi Hattiangadi, Kathrin Glüer, Åsa Wikforss, and Paul Boghossian. Though I disagree with these authors, and side in many respects with critics such as Jaroslav Peregrin (2012) and Daniel Whiting (2009Whiting ( , 2016)), in this paper I will only occasionally discuss their views. Instead, I will focus on what I take to be a more powerful objection against the inherent normativity of meaning, stemming from the identification of meaning with use. I will propose an abstract model of the connection of social practices and social norms (partly inspired by Lewis 1975), and suggest reasons why such a model applies to natural languages. Finally, I will propose a new relational structure for meaning, normativity, and regular use. The thesis that meaning is a normative notion has been traditionally attributed to the later Wittgenstein. 3 However, as so often, it is not easy to find a clear, fully explicit statement of the thesis in Wittgenstein's later writings. No doubt, since the early Thirties Wittgenstein insisted that meaning (e.g. of a word) is "constituted" by "grammatical rules" (Moore 1993: 51). As a pawn in chess may be identified with the rules by which it is moved, 4 similarly "in language the rules of syntax define the logical element in a word" (Wittgenstein 1967a: 134); a word has no meaning previous to, or independent of such rules (Wittgenstein 2009, p.155, note(b)). Later, Wittgenstein admitted that a game need not be "everywhere bounded by rules" (2009, §68), which, however, does not entail that such a game would be "unregulated" ("No more are there any rules for how high one may throw the ball in tennis, or how hard, yet tennis is a game for all that, and has rules too", ib.). That meanings are constituted by rules (or even are rules) can be interpreted in two different ways. The claim may be that meanings can be identified by compact descriptions of regularities of use (of sounds and scripts); 5 or it may be that meanings should be identified with norms governing the use of such sounds and scripts. Wittgenstein appears to have inclined to the latter view: "Rules are -in a sense-statements: they say: you may do such and such, whereas that you may not do" (1967a: 119-20); "If a rule of the game prescribes that the kings are to be used for drawing lots before a game of chess, then that is an essential part of the game" (Wittgenstein 2009, §567, it. added). Of course, even if rules are understood as norms, they are not categorical norms: as there is no categorical obligation to play chess, neither is there a categorical obligation to speak some language L, hence to follow the rules that characterize L (cf. Wittgenstein 1969Wittgenstein , §133 [= 1967b, §320] 6 and 2009, §81). Norms of language are conditional upon the intention of speaking a language L and counting as speaking L. For contrast, consider a different view that has also been mentioned in connection with semantic normativity (e.g. Peregrin 2012, Glüer, Wikforss 2018), namely Wilfrid Sellars's (1974). Sellars sees the use of a language as pattern governed behavior that is induced by training: "The trainer knows the rules which govern the correct functioning of the language. The language learner begins by conforming to these rules without grasping them himself" (1974: 422, my italics). The linguistic abilities that are acquired (if the training is successful, as it normally is) engender behavior that is not just acquired as, but remains pattern governed behavior: it is correct or incorrect "not as actions are correct or incorrect, but as events that are not actions are correct or incorrect" (p.423). Sellars's example is "the correctness of feeling sorrow for someone who is bereaved". 4 "I cannot say, "This is a pawn and such-and-such rules hold for this piece". Rather, it is only the rules of the game that define this piece. A pawn is the sume of the rules according to which it moves". 5 E.g. by what Horwich calls 'acceptance properties', see below. 6 "You cook badly if you are guided in cooking by rules other than the right ones; but...if you follow grammatical rules other than such-and-such ones, that doesn't mean you say something wrong, no, you are speaking of something else". Such a firm (re-)statement of the essential connection between meaning such-and-such and following such-and-such rules comes from a typescript dictated in 1945 or 1946. This appears to contradict Glüer's and Wikforss's contention that the latest Wittgenstein came to believe that "the analogy between meaning and rule...spells disaster when taken literally" (2010: 164).