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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXV, No. 1, July 2002

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MARK NORRIS LANCE

Georgetown University

JOHN (O’LEARY-)HAWTHORNE

Rutgers University

The three reviews collectively provide a good deal of engaging and substantial criticism. We shall not undertake to defend the text on each critical point that emerges. Rather, we shall, as fairly as we can, explore the reviews from our current perspective, six or seven years after writing the book, registering ways that we remain convinced of much of the substance of the work (both in broad outline and at the level of detailed argumentation), but also ways in which the reviews rightly bring out features of our framework that are improperly handled or else underexplored.

Reply to Schiffer One matter is especially important to clear up. Part One of the book was explicitly intended to provide the beginnings of an account of the function of discourse about meaning, where such a functional account is, crucially, not to be conceived on the model of any sort of analysis of the concept or family of concepts in question. Our introductory analogy was by way of the concept of truth, on the subject of which contemporary philosophy has become oriented increasingly to the question of its point and importance-gesturing, for example, to its usefulness in stating generalizations-without intending thereby to provide any traditional kind of analysis. Our intentions were similar as regards meaning. We offered the beginning of a picture-and it is very much a picture-of the function of meaning discourse, in terms of its role in licensing certain inferences and in licensing certain kinds of censure, without thereby attempting to analyze the concept of meaning. The contrast between the functional project and the analytic project is thus crucial.

It is hardly the point of Part One, therefore, to provide a recipe for such equivalences as

“‘That is a cemetery’ means ‘That is a graveyard”’ means ‘. . . . . . . . .’

208 MARK NORRIS LANCE AND JOHN (O’LEARY-)HAWTHORNE

where the right hand side provides a translation of the left in language that does not explicitly deploy meaning-theoretic vocabulary. It was thus no part of the intention of Part One to defend such particular claims as

(1): “‘That is a cemetery’ means ‘That is a graveyard”’ means “‘That is a cemetery’ ought to be used in the same way that ‘That is a graveyard’ ought to be used.”

The claims that we do make about the place of such meaning claims in socio- linguistic practice-such as that assertion of that equivalence licenses an inference from ‘That is a cemetery’ to ‘That is a graveyard’, and so on-hardly provides a basis for (1); indeed, we had no intention of defending an equivalence such as (1). if conceived as a reductive analysis. (Of course if the ‘ought’ was given a specialized meaning-“semantically ought”-then the equivalence may be more acceptable, but will hardly count as an analysis). Despite a pretty clear statement of the aim of Part One, and a discussion that is largely oriented to that aim, there are occasional lapses that suggest that such claims as (1) are in fact important to us. The project of Part One of the book, however, had nothing to do with a defense of such claims.

Similar remarks apply to the paragraph quoted by Schiffer concerning a functional similarity between claims of the form

‘Sl’ means ‘S2’

and

‘S2’ means that P.

Let us consider, concretely

(2) ‘There are seventeen cemeteries’ means ‘There are seventeen graveyards’

and

(3) ‘There are seventeen cemeteries’ means that there are seventeen graveyards.

The modest point of the paragraph was to claim that, in the mouths of speakers, both serve to license an inference from ‘There are seventeen cemeteries’ to ‘There are seventeen graveyards’, though while the second claim presupposes speaker competence with regard to ‘There are seventeen graveyards’, the first does not. None of this is a claim to the effect that (2) and (3) are synonymous-that is to confuse a claim about the function of a claim with a claim about what a claim means. It is obvious enough that the claim

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that (2) means (3) is indefensible; and it would be a misconstrual of the orientation of Part One to read such paragraphs as that quoted as making such a claim.

The contrast between the functional and the analytic project helps alleviate certain other worries that Schiffer voices. In particular, that meaning claims serve to license various kinds of inferential moves between sentences-part of what was claimed within the context of the functional project-is quite consistent with the claim that the semantic value of a that-clause is a proposition. Even if the kind of fact expressed by a meaning claim is a relation to a proposition, one can still maintain that the point of meaning claims-what they are used to do-is, inter alia, to license inferential transitions between sentences. And we are in full agreement with Schiffer that, given a standard conception of propositions, it makes no sense to think of meaning claims as prescribing inferential relations between propositions.

In what sense does saying something of the form ‘sl’ means ‘s2’ amount to recommending that the two sentences ought to have the same inferential role? The book is pretty clear about this. In making a claim of that form, one is endorsing an inference from ‘s,’ to ‘sz’ (and vice versa). Insofar as one finds the inference from, say, s3 to s1 already compelling, one is, indirectly, also endorsing an inference from s3 to s2. The commitments that one has with respect to s , transfer, as it were, to s2. A word more apparently needs to be said, though, about the sense in which one is recommending an inference from s, to s2. There are various senses in which one might do this. One sense might be this: We agree henceforth to use s, and s2 in such a way that the meanings of s, and s2 will henceforth be such that the inference from s1 to s2 be valid. But that is obviously not the relevant notion of inference license. What is distinctive about the relevant meaning claim is that it recommends that we treat as valid any inference from ‘sI’ to ‘s2’ as used by the relevant community, and that if we ourselves are users of those sentences, we treat, say, a prior commitment to sI as a commitment that could be successfully challenged via a successful challenge to s2. And so on. Similar remarks apply to the relevant censure license: we endorse not merely censuring our future selves, insofar as we reject the inference from s, to s2, but also censuring any member of the relevant linguistic community, past or future, as linguistically incompetent, on the basis of a resistance to the relevant inference. In his review, Schiffer saddles us with the irrelevant construal. While it may be a good idea, as a matter of future practice, to use ‘inflammable’ and ‘not flammable’ interchangeably, no one would think to license our treating a commitment to ‘That is inflammable’ in our current linguistic community as constituting a commitment to ‘That is not flammable’.

Schiffer complains that we do not say much directly concerning propositional attitude ascriptions. Meaning claims, we suggest, are normative. But

210 MARK NORRIS LANCE A N D JOHN (O’LEARY-)HAWTHORNE

what of belief reports? Are they normative too? And if so, in what sense? In hindsight, the book would certainly have benefited from an extended treatment of belief ascriptions. This is not the place to attempt to remedy that defi- ciency to any considerable extent.’ For now, it will suffice to remind the reader-and Schiffer-of the substance of what we do say, for better or worse, about folk psychological ascriptions. Recall that we endorsed an explanatory eliminativism: for the purpose of serious scientific explanation, unrelativized meaning claims and propositional attitude attributions can be dispensed with. Chapter seven develops some ideas of Robert Cummins in a way designed to lend some credence to this sort of eliminativism. The idea, crudely put, is that Quine was right in thinking that our scientific explanatory needs can be perfectly well served by meaning claims that are relativized to a translation manual (just as the explanatory needs of physics can be perfectly well served by simultaneity claims that are relativized to a reference frame), and that something similar can be done for belief and desire attributions. That is not to say that there is no enduring need for unrelativized meaning claims and unrelativized belief and desire attributions. But it would be a deep mistake, we contended, to suppose that our need for such claims is of a piece with the scientific explanatory project. That, we contend, is the fundamental mistake of much philosophy of mind. Some ways of thinking and talking about the world are vital not to our explanatory purposes but for our role as agents who respond to other beings as agents. The concept of ‘what ought to be done’ is vital, for example, not for scientific purposes, but rather for both practical reasoning and for our ability to take the “participant stance” towards others (to use a turn of phrase of Strawson’s). Unrelativized mental and semantic ascriptions similarly owe their need, not primarily to the needs of explanation, but, for example, to our ability to take the attitude of trust (rather than mere reliance) to others and to our past and future self. The reader will find such ideas amplified and developed at many points in the book.

Reply to Horgan and Tammelleo Horgan and Tammelleo radically overestimate the significance of the witch- related thought experiment. The thought experiment is explicitly designed to highlight the propriety of two claims: first, that, puce Sellars and contemporary functionalists, meaning claims should not be thought of as describing patterns of use. Second, that something like a rule of accommodation operates for meaning claimsdefeasibly, saying makes it so. The analogy with a legal constitution-and it is just an analogy-helps, we suggested, to make these features of meaning discourse salient in a way that provides useful therapy for those previously gripped by a functionalist picture. The thought experiment, as we describe it, lends itself nicely to the constitutionalist

’ For some discussion of what makes a claim normative, see the reply to Byrne.

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analogy. But it is just not true that our case against the functionalist paradigm rests largely upon it.

Horgan and Tammelleo suggest that we reject “property-citing inferentialist descriptivism”, which they gloss as the view that meaning discourse “reports facts to the effect that certain ways of using language are semantically sanctioned according to socially accepted norms that are constitutive of a given language”. They are correct that we reject such a view. But let us be clear. We do not oppose the view that meaning discourse is “prop erty-citing”. The view that meaning discourse is property-citing is both harm- less and correct (setting aside for now general issues about nominalism); the claim that a certain morpheme means snow ascribes the property of meaning snow to that morpheme. (It was never our aim to challenge such platitudes as this, as should be clear from our discussion of the truth of meaning claims in Part two of the book.) That meaning claims function to license and censure in the ways that we describe is fully compatible with their satisfying various platitudes about property ascription. If the term ‘prescription’ is being used so that truth-apt declaratives are automatically excluded from the status of being prescriptions, then we certainly agree that “meaning claims need not be prescriptions themselves in order to function as inference licenses and censure licenses”. In the book we explicitly used “prescription” more liberally than that and not without point: segments of discourse whose linguistic function is centrally prescriptive can usefully be classified as prescriptive even if truth- apt.

What we saw as more dangerous-and a real target-was the view that meaning discourse describes social norms, and in that sense describes the actual inferential role of this or that sentence in a community. Such a picture is indeed to be resisted. The witch story that we told has some therapeutic value here. For it reminds us how willing we are to endorse claims of synonymy between two terms despite vast differences in inferential role between them.

The authors grant many of the intuitions that drive the example and try to accommodate them within a ‘property-citing inferentialist’ approach. One scenario that interested us was one in which people from the Land of Faerie come to the target community and adopt a translation manual in which ‘witch’ in the mouths of the target community means ‘witch’ in the mouths of the Faerie community. Another was one in which, by contrast, people from the Land of Science came to the target community and adopted a homophonic translation manual. ‘Witch’ in the Land of Faerie roughly means ‘magic-user’. According to that translation manual, when people in the target language declared ‘I am a witch’ they always said something false. ‘Witch’ in the Land of Science roughly means ‘feminist nature scientist’. When people


in the target language declared ‘I am a witch’ then by the lights of Land of Science’s manual, they said something true.

We liked the idea that in scenario one, the translation manual is correct and that in scenario two, the translation manual is correct as well. But how could this be given that ‘witch’ in the mouth of Faerie people is clearly not synonymous with ‘witch’ in the mouth of Science people? We suggested an answer: If Faerie and the target language accept a translation manual, that has constitutive relevance to the meanings of their utterances-including their earlier selves; same for the Land of Science and the target community. (This extends the idea of the social determination of meaning that Burge was interested in).

Horgan and Tammelleo accept the idea that each translation manual is correct and attempt to accommodate this within a “property-citing descriptive inferentialism”. The key idea is that “meaning is something that can retain its identity while changing in certain respects” (p. 198). Just as ordinary objects can survive through accidental change, so, the idea goes, can meanings. It is not clear that the metaphor is helpful rather than misleading. What the authors are getting at is something we fully agree with, namely, that despite important differences in usage between the earlier and later communities, the word ‘witch’ in the mouths of the earlier community is synonymous with the word ‘witch’ in the mouths of the later community. But what is the cash value of reconceptualizing this in terms of a quasi-substance, the meaning, that persists through change? If one admits propositions, as we do, this does not help: for that timeless entity which is the proposition common to both earlier and later uses of, say, ‘Lo, a witch’ is hardly a quasi-Aristotelian enduring substance. The gloss ‘Identity-preserving alteration of meaning’ is also confusing. In the case of a genuine substance, we distinguish between genuine change and mere Cambridge change. A table that changes from red to blue, endures as one and the same thing through a genuine change. A table that gets approached by a cat does not thereby change at all, even though its relational properties change. If one wished to transplant the model of changing-substance to meanings, one would wish to distinguish between the case where a meaning survives through genuine change from a case where, as it were, there is mere Cambridge change of the meaning-where it just so happens that some relational facts about the meaning alter. But what could such a distinction amount to in the case of meaning?

Leaving aside questions of the aptness of this or that metaphor, the real question is whether one can defend a descriptive-inferentialist gloss on what constitutes the identity of meaning over time in each case. It still seems very dubious that one can. Consider our two worlds-in world one, the Faeries translate earlier uses of ‘witch’ in the target community homophonically and in world two, the scientists translate earlier uses of ‘witch’ homophonically.

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If one grants that in world one, the meaning of the earlier use is identical with the meaning in the mouths of the Faeries and that in world two, the meaning of the earlier use is identical with the meaning in the mouths of the Scientists, then one is disbarred from a descriptive inferentialist approach. Here is why. Identity is transitive. The meaning of ‘witch’ in the mouths of the Faeries is not identical to the meaning of ‘witch’ in the mouths of the Scientists. So the meaning of ‘witch’ in the mouths of the earlier folk in world one cannot, given what has been conceded, be identical to the meaning of ‘witch’ in the mouths of the earlier folk in world two. But the use of ‘witch’ in the mouths of the earlier folk in world one matches exactly the use in world two as far as descriptive-inferential role goes. So identity of meaning-synonymy, that is-cannot be cashed out in terms of descriptive inferential role. The neo-Aristotelian redescription only helps to obscure the matter.

Two final points. At one point, the authors offer a variant picture, one that trades on vagueness. Here is the idea: there is no fact of the matter what the meaning of ‘witch’ is in the mouths of the earlier community. It is vague (and here, vagueness is no epistemic matter) which meaning is the meaning of ‘witch’ in the mouths of that community. Different meanings, with radically different accompanying extensions, are compatible with all the truths about that community. If this is the picture, it is not, after all, one in which there is “identity-preserving alteration of meaning”. At best, there is on this picture no fact of the matter whether the later meaning is identical to the earlier one. This does indeed offer a different approach to the phenomena. But it is a very dangerous one. If such vagueness besets our target community, shouldn’t we think it similarly besets our own? When unpacked, this view will likely bear a striking resemblance to Quine’s original indeterminacy thesis-ne which we argue in the book cannot be coherently maintained.

For completeness, we mention another radical view in the vicinity: one might dispense with ‘synonymy’ and make do with an ‘is the best translation of‘ relation. Here’s the difference: while synonymy, we suppose, is transitive, one might deny this of ‘is the best translation of‘. It is clear enough how this idea can supply a different treatment of our original case: but it is not one that squares very well with the notion of an “identity preserving alteration of meaning”.

To reiterate, the thought experiment discussed above was not intended to bear the brunt of the argumentative purposes of the book. We agree that intuitions vary and that, as we have discovered, the ones we plumped for in the book are highly contestable. Indeed, at least one of the authors finds him- self with no current stable views on the case. Nevertheless, we remain doubt- ful whether a “descriptive inferentialist approach” can offer a very helpful perspective on that case and others like it.


Reply to Byrne Alex Byrne raises a variety of legitimate concerns.

First, the ‘witch’ example. Byme rightly distinguishes questions about which translations are reasonable from questions about which translations are correct. He imagines a case where the Faeries and Scientists are quizzed about some hypothetical user of ‘witch’-who very much resembles our target community of users-and notes that each will find a homophonic translation reasonable. He also notes, correctly, that it cannot be the case that both translations are correct (since synonymy is transitive). So in that case, reasonable translation comes apart sharply-at least somewhere-from synonymy. Why not, he wonders, say the same in the original cases?

There were, as we said, two themes that we were trying motivate using the ‘witch’ example. The first theme was the implausibility of a descriptive- inferentialist approach to meaning-roughly, one according to which meaning is constituted, at least in large measure, by actual conceptual role. We still believe that the thought experiment (along with the wide range of other arguments and considerations that we offer) helps to make vivid the difficul- ties faced by such a view. The second theme was, as it were, a “constitutional picture” of translation, according to which translational choices have a constitutive relevance to the content of utterances, even by people who are not directly party to those choices. The evidential force of the thought experiment vis-8-vis this view is more questionable. Adopt the view and a certain perspective on the thought experiment becomes natural and attractive. But, certainly, the thought experiment does not oblige one to adopt that perspective; we said that even back then. (Rather, as we said, it is the ability of the constitutional picture to provide systematic and appealing accounts of a variety of a phenomena that we took to bear the weight. Moreover, as Byme’s discussion certainly confirms, there may well be some perfectly reasonable options for thinking about the case in question, one whose relative merits can only be judged in the light of more global considerations.

One final point of clarification. What would we say about a case in which both the Faeries and the Scientists look at one and the same target community, which is intrinsically more or less as we described, and each opts for a homophonic translation? We briefly discussed such a case in the book (see p. 81-82). In that case we agreed that it cannot be the case that both translations are correct. But who would be correct? Or would we here say that the translational claims have no truth value? We are committed to rejecting the latter as a recipe for handling such cases. Nor are philosophers especially well suited to “step in” and resolve the dispute by invoking some favorite theory of meaning. In certain cases, something amounting to an “epistemicist” approach is natural: assuming each translating community is ignorant of each other’s existence, each translation is rationally permissible (matters are more

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complicated when there is mutual awareness), but we observers are in no position to know which is correct. Reading a little between the lines, Byme seems somewhat sympathetic to extending this epistemicist approach to a wide variety of cases, including our original thought experiment. Such a project is a perfectly worthy one.

Second, the question of normativity. First, we repeat a point made at the beginning of our reply to Schiffer. Our project was not intended to be that of providing translations of meaning ascriptions into claims in which normative vocabulary was explicitly deployed. On a few occasions we misleadingly suggested otherwise; and for this reason Byrne was understandably misled. We agree, then, that “claims that a means (the same as) b are not claims about how words should be used’’. That is perfectly consistent with what we wanted to insist upon: that the role of meaning claims crucially involves that of licensing certain inferences, certain censureship and so on. We agree, moreover, that it is not especially useful to gloss ‘“witch-MF’ means ‘witch-F”’ as a claim to the effect that “‘witch-MF’ should be used in similar ways as ‘witch-F’.” The crucial point is that the meaning claim licenses certain inferences, certain challenges and so on. Thus if you are committed to (a) ‘Judy is not a witch-F’, and I am committed to (b) ‘Judy is a witch MF’, then someone who asserts that meaning claim licenses my challenging (a) by (b).

Byrne raises a deep and important issue, one that becomes especially compelling for us on account of the fact that we do not undertake to translate meaning claims into explicitly normative ones: What exactly is it for a claim to express a normative truth? As he points out, the most natural and simple- minded answer is unacceptable. It would be controversial to maintain that any truth that necessitates an uncontroversially normative truth is itself a normative truth. For the full microphysical description of the world arguably necessitates many normative truths; but it is certainly not obvious that we would wish to count that description a normative truth. So now we have the makings of a puzzle: Even granting that meaning claims entail certain uncontroversially normative truths, that does not thereby qualify them as normative truths. But if that doesn’t what does?

One kind of fix will naturally suggest itself to certain philosophers: perhaps the normative truths are ones that a priori entail some paradigmatic normative truth. But that won’t do. If I tell you that someone put a newborn baby on a rack, it is at least arguable that this information will a priori entail he did something with disvalue (whether or not the disvalue is overridden is of course a further question), but it is not clear that the former fact is itself normative. Couched in such terms, the issue is indeed perplexing. In the book we, in effect, tried to sidestep it rather than answer it. We used the label ‘normative’ in what will seem to some to be a somewhat deviant manner. To a large extent, what matters is the distinctions we were trying to draw, not


the label itself. If the distinctions turn out to be important, but you dislike the use of ‘normative’, there will be little to disagree about.

The issue raised by Byrne is an issue about how to draw the line between two kinds of facts, normative and non-normative. The distinctions that we were interested in were primarily functional. For example: from a functional perspective, we can arguably distinguish between those terms whose life is very much tied to their role in practical reasoning and those which were not. And we can distinguish between those terms whose life is very much tied to their role licensing certain kinds of actions from those which are not. (We used ‘normativehon-normative’ to mark the latter distinction, though we readily admit that such a distinction needs further exploration and articulation than it receives in the book.) The connection of such functional distinctions with more traditional ones is far from straightforward. For example, we doubted (and still doubt) that there is a tenable distinction between ‘truth-apt’ and ‘non-truth-apt’ declarative sentences that can be wrought from such functional distinctions (puce the emotivists). And we doubted (and still doubt) that metaphysical claims about the non-identity of the properties picked out by explicitly normative language with natural properties can be wrought from such claims. Yet such functional distinctions are important in themselves. They yield insight into the workings of our concepts and of our language. And they make the intractability of certain philosophical undertakings utterly intelligible. The project of getting an understanding of how meaning discourse functions has been relatively ignored. One of the central aims of the book was to emphasize its importance.

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