Brandom on the Normativity of Meaning

Brandom's "inferentialism"–his theory that an expression's or state's contentfulness consists in its use or occurrence being governed by inferential norms–proves dubiously compatible with his own deflationary approach to underwriting the objectivity of intentional content (an approach that is one of the theory's essential presuppositions). This is because a deflationist argument, adapted from the case of truth to that of correct inference , undermines the key criterion of adequacy Brandom employs in motivating inferentialism. Once that constraint is abandoned, furthermore, Brandom is left vulnerable to the charge that his inferential norms are unavailable to play the meaning-constituting role he claims for them. Yet Brandom's account of meaning tacitly intertwines inferentialism with a separate explanatory project, one that in explaining the pragmatic significance of meaning-attributions does yield a convincing construal of the claim that the concept of meaning is a normative one.     

Toward a Noninferentialist,Nonreliabilist Account of Perceptual Justification

While it may be a datum of common sense that perceptual experiences can justify beliefs, there is no clear consensus about how they can do so. According to what I call “inferentialism,” perceptual experiences can justify beliefs because perceptual experiences have propositional contents and thus can serve as reasons for belief. A critical commitment of inferentialism is that justification requires the obtaining of a nonarbitrary or nonaccidental semantic relation between justifier and justified, a requirement that I call semantic appropriateness (SA). By contrast, reliabilists reject SA and argue that perceptual experiences can justify beliefs because perceptual experiences are part of a reliable belief‐forming process. In this paper, I explore whether a commitment to SA inevitably leads to a commitment to inferentialism. This exploration is largely motivated by doubts over whether perceptual experiences have propositional contents. If those doubts prove to be well‐founded, then it seems either that perceptual experiences cannot justify beliefs or that some form of reliabilism is true. I argue that although we should take the doubts seriously, there is a way to make sense of SA that does not require inferentialism.     

Does Semantics Need Normativity? Comments on Allan Gibbard,Meaning and Normativity

In the book Gibbard proposes, first, that statements about meaning are normative statements and, second, that they can be given an expressivist treatment, along the lines of Gibbard’s preferred metaethics. In my paper, I examine the first step: The claim that meaning statements are to be construed as being normative, as involving ‘oughts’. Gibbard distinguishes two versions of the normativity of meaning thesis – a weak version, according to which every means implies an ought, and a strong version, according to which for every means, there is an ought that implies it. I argue that neither thesis withstands scrutiny. The weak thesis depends on assumptions about the notion of semantic correctness that the anti-normativist rejects, and the strong thesis does not solve the problems Gibbard wants it to solve: the problems of indeterminacy and meaning skepticism. I conclude that semantics does not need normativity.     

Building bridges with words: an inferential account of ethical univocity

Abstract

Explaining genuine moral disagreement is a challenge for metaethical theories. For expressivists, this challenge comes from the plausibility of agents making seemingly univocal claims while expressing incongruent conative attitudes. I argue that metaethical inferentialism – a deflationary cousin to expressivism, which locates meaning in the inferential import of our moral assertions rather than the attitudes they express – offers a unique solution to this problem. Because inferentialism doesn’t locate the source of moral disagreements in a clash between attitudes, but instead in conflicts between the inferential import of ethical assertions, the traditional problem for expressivism can be avoided. After considering two forms of inferentialism that lead to revenge versions of the problem, I conclude by recommending that we understand the semantics of moral disagreements pragmatically: the source of univocity does not come from moral or semantic facts waiting to be described, but instead from the needs that ethical and semantic discourses answer – a solution to the problems of what we are to do and how we are to talk about it.     

逻辑常项与保守性：以tonk为例

根据逻辑推理论,逻辑常项的意义是由它的引入和消去规则确定的。普莱尔（Arthur Prior）提出的tonk对推理论构成了严重挑战。库克（Roy Cook）最近构造了一个禁止传递性的相干的逻辑系统,即Tonk-逻辑,并借助四值语义学重新定义了Tonk-后承概念,在这种概念之下,tonk的引入规则和消去规则都是有效的,同时系统还不是平凡的。本文探讨了保守性与常项的引入和消去规则的协调性之间的联系,并定义了两种较强的协调性概念,即HCU-协调性和HML-协调性概念。借助这两个概念,本文论证,tonk不是HCU-协调的也不是HML-协调的,因而它不是合法的逻辑常项,Tonk-逻辑也不是一种合法的逻辑系统。     

The problem with the Frege–Geach problem

I resolve the major challenge to an Expressivist theory of the meaning of normative discourse: the Frege–Geach Problem. Drawing on considerations from the semantics of directive language (e.g., imperatives), I argue that, although certain forms of Expressivism (like Gibbard’s) do run into at least one version of the Problem, it is reasonably clear that there is a version of Expressivism that does not.     

Expressivism and the Reliability Challenge

Suppose that there are objective normative facts and our beliefs about such facts are by-and-large true. How did this come to happen? This is the reliability challenge to normative realism. As has been recently noted, the challenge also applies to expressivist “quasi-realism”. I argue that expressivism is useful in the face of this challenge, in a way that has not been yet properly articulated. In dealing with epistemological issues, quasi-realists typically invoke the desire-like nature of normative judgments. However, this is not enough to prevent the reliability challenge from arising, given that quasi-realists also hold that normative judgments are truth-apt beliefs. To defuse this challenge, we need to isolate a deeper sense in which normative thought is not representational. I propose that we rely on the negative functional thesis of expressivism: normative thought does not have the function of tracking normative facts, or any other kind of facts. This thesis supports an argument to the effect that it is misguided to expect an explanation of our access to normative facts akin to the explanations available in regions of thought that have a tracking function. We should be content with explanations of our reliability that take for granted certain connections between our psychology and the normative truths.     

Of Marriage and Mathematics: Inferentialism and Social Ontology

Topoi - The semantic inferentialist account of the social institution of semantic meaning can be naturally extended to account for social ontology. I argue here that semantic inferentialism...     

The Meaningfulness of Meaning Questions

Contra an expanding number of deflationary commentators onWittgenstein, I argue that philosophical questions about meaningare meaningful and that Wittgenstein gave us ample reason tobelieve so. Deflationists are right in claiming that Wittgensteinrejected the sceptical problem about meaning allegedly to befound in his later writings and also right in stressing Wittgenstein's anti-reductionism. But they are wrong in taking these dismissals to entail the end of all constructive philosophizing about meaning. Rather, I argue, the rejection of the sceptical problem requires that we abandon the questions that philosophers have traditionally addressed and that we replace them with more appropriate ones, to which constructive answers are forthcoming. However, though quietism is not the only alternative to reductionism, the rejection of reductionism does oblige us seriously to revise our sense of what constructive philosophy can achieve.     

Attitudes to suffering: Parfit and Nietzsche

Abstract

In On What Matters, Derek Parfit argues that Nietzsche does not disagree with central normative beliefs that ‘we’ hold. Such disagreement would threaten Parfit’s claim that normative beliefs are known by intuition. However, Nietzsche defends a conception of well-being that challenges Parfit’s normative claim that suffering is bad in itself for the sufferer. Nietzsche recognizes the phenomenon of ‘growth through suffering’ as essential to well-being. Hence, removal of all suffering would lead to diminished well-being. Parfit claims that if Nietzsche understood normative concepts in Parfit’s objectivist sense, he would not disagree with the claim that suffering is bad in itself – that intrinsic facts about suffering count in favour of our not wanting it. I argue that Nietzsche would disagree. Suffering for Nietzsche is not merely instrumentally necessary for psychological growth, nor is it easy to construe it as something bad in itself that contributes value as part of a good whole. Suffering that can be given meaning through growth is something we have reason to want. Suffering that remains brute and uninterpreted is something we have reason not to want. But for Nietzsche, suffering as such has no invariant value across all contexts.     

Holism, Strawberries and Hairdryers

The paper "Does Epistemological Holism lead to Meaning – Holism" (Cozzo, 2002) touches one of the main problems of a molecularist theory of meaning: how to restrict the class of inferences connected with a word, in order to define the sense of the word. I will discuss the starting point of this approach, mainly the pre-theoretical criterion against meaning holism: meaning holism, following a well-known argument by Dummett, reduces communication to a mystery. However there is a strong background assumption of this argument: communication is sharing the same meanings. Accepting this assumption without acknowledging it makes the entire proposal more problematic than it appears at first sight. In what follows I will try to clarify the possibility of a different reaction to meaning holism, putting forward some distinctions which come to light when the above stated assumption is made explicit. Then, some other comments will follow on the difficulty of avoiding extreme meaning holism, even within Cozzo's elegant attempt to implement a molecularist vision; in the end, his notion of the sense of a word will appear to be difficult to define, if these holistic aspects of language take the space they deserve even in his theory. I conclude with two remarks regarding two relevant requirements for a theory of meaning (conservativeness and harmony). This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Skookumchuck,Kiidk'yaas,Gibbard: normativity,meaning, and idealization (critical notice of Allan Gibbard Meaning and Normativity)

Gibbard argues that ‘meaning is normative’. He explains the claim with an account of the normative which bases it on the process of planning, taken in part as issuing instructions to oneself. It seems to entail that the right kind of plans make norms. One ought to continue adding with plus rather than quus in a Kripkenstein horror story. I focus on Gibbard's characterization of normativity: it is not what one might expect. The main purpose of this review article is to present the way of understanding normativity that makes most sense of what he says, and which makes some otherwise implausible assertions defensible and perhaps even true. I give reasons for thinking that Gibbard's understanding of normativity-through-plans cannot do the work he wants it to. I also argue that he is onto something right, and it opens interesting new questions.     

Is Folk Psychology Different?

In this paper, I seek to refute arguments for the idea that folk psychological explanation, i.e., the explanation of actions, beliefs and desires in terms of one another, should be understood as being of a different character than ordinary scientific explanations, a view defended most prominently in analytical philosophy by Donald Davidson and John McDowell. My strategy involves arguing both against the extant arguments for the idea that FP must be construed as giving such explanations, and also against the very notion of such a different kind of explanation. I argue first that the in some sense a priori and conceptual nature of folk psychological principles does not support the idea that these are other than empirical generalisations, by appeal to recent nativist ideas in cognitive science and to Lewis's conception of the meaning of theoretical terms. Second, I argue that there is no coherent sense in which folk psychological explanations can be seen as normative. Thirdly, I examine the putatively holistic character of the mental and conclude that that too fails to provide any cogent reasons for viewing folk psychological explanations as different from other kinds of explanation.     

Semantic Primitivism and Normativity

Kripke-Wittgenstein meaning scepticism appears as a serious threat to the idea that there could be meaning-constituting facts. Some people argue that the only viable response is to adopt semantic primitivism (SP). SP is the doctrine that meaning-facts are sui generis and irreducibly semantic. The idea is that by allowing such primitive semantic facts into our ontology Kripke's sceptical paradox cannot arise. I argue that SP is untenable in spite of its apparent resourcefulness. No version of SP can account for the normative and practical aspects of meaning while remaining non-reductive. A sparse, basic SP does not adequately deal with the sceptical paradox. A richer SP, with an added intuitive epistemology, can only explain the practical aspect of meaning by aligning itself with reductive use-based accounts of meaning. SP with essential relations between meanings and meaning-bearers could possibly avoid these problems, but we have no reason to think such a version of SP is really non-reductive. I conclude that Kripke-Wittgenstein meaning scepticism should not lead us to adopt SP, instead we should re-examine use-based, dispositionalist accounts of meaning.     

Making It Totally Explicit

Abstract

This paper begins by isolating the reductive component of Brandom's inferentialism. In order to assess to what extent that reductive component is supported by the considerations Brandom marshals in its defense, I assess the comparative degree of support those considerations provide a non-reductive counterpart of Brandom's original, reductive theory. One of the central claims here is that once the reductive and non-reductive theories are placed side-by-side, it is clear that, save one, all of the considerations Brandom marshals in defense of inferentialism equally well support its non-reductive counterpart. This shows that those considerations offer no support for the reductions at inferentialism's heart.

What the considerations raised here ultimately show is that Brandom's defense of the reductive core of his theory ultimately rests on the simple fact that it has a certain feature, namely, that it is reductive in the sense reserved here. I close with a brief discussion of some advantages that some reductive theories have over non-reductive ones, but show how none of these advantages are had by Brandom's theory in particular.     

Brandom and the brutes

Brandom’s inferentialism offers, in many ways, a radically new approach to old issues in semantics and the theory of intentionality. But, in one respect at least, it clings tenaciously to the mainstream philosophical tradition of the middle years of the twentieth century. Against the theory’s natural tendencies, Brandom aligns it with the ’linguistic turn’ that philosophy took in the middle of the last century by insisting, in the face of considerable opposing evidence, that intentionality is the preserve of those who can offer and ask for reasons and thus of language users alone. In this paper, I argue that there is no good reason for giving inferentialism a linguistic twist, and that, in doing so, Brandom is forced to make claims which are implausible in themselves and lead him, in the attempt to mitigate them, to a number of doubtful expedients.     

Can it Ever Be Better Never to Have Existed At All? Person‐Based Consequentialism and a New Repugnant Conclusion

Broome and others have argued that it makes no sense, or at least that it cannot be true, to say that it is better for a given person that he or she exist than not. That argument can be understood to suggest that, likewise, it makes no sense, or at least that it cannot be true, to say that it is worse for a given person that he or she exist than that he or she never have existed at all. This argument is of critical importance to the question of whether consequentialist theory should take a traditional, aggregative form or a less conventional, person-affecting, or person-based form. I believe that, potentially, the argument represents a far more serious threat to the person-based approach than does, for example, Parfit's two medical programmes example. Parfit's example nicely illuminates the distinction between aggregative and person-based approaches and raises important questions. But the example--though not, I think, by Parfit--is sometimes pressed into service as a full-fledged counterexample against the person-based approach. As such, I argue, the example is not persuasive. In contrast, the Broomeian argument, if correct, is definitive. For that argument relies on certain metaphysical assumptions and various uncontroversial normative claims--and hence nicely avoids putting into play the controversial normative claims that lie at the very heart of the debate. The purpose of the present paper, then, is to evaluate the Broomeian argument. I argue that this potentially definitive challenge to a person-based approach does not in fact succeed.     

The Meaning of Lives and the Meaning of Things

Meaning in life is an important aspect of human well-being and motivation. But as the notion of ‘meaning in life’ is not easily assimilated to that of semantic meaning, it is difficult to define. While meaning in life is standardly discussed in terms of meaningful ways of living, I here take the alternative approach of discussing the meaningfulness of things for agents. I claim that such meaningfulness, or significance, consists in the ways in which things invite agent-relevant responses. Meaningfulness in that sense is important for understanding, not just meaning in life for mature human beings, but also meaning for children, meaning in the arts, the continuity between ‘mere’ living and living meaningfully, and the connection between meaning in life and semantic meaning.