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Verheggen on Davidson and Kripke on Rule-Following and Meaning

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Verheggen on Davidson and Kripke on Rule-Following and Meaning Verheggen on Davidson and Kripke on Rule-Following and Meaning ALEXANDER MILLER University of Otago ABSTRACT: This paper discusses Claudine Verheggen’s account of what she takes to be Donald Davidson’s response to the sceptical paradox about rule-following and meaning developed in Saul Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s ‘rule-following consider- ations.’ It focusses on questions about the normativity of meaning, the social character of meaning, and the role of triangulation in Davidson’s account of the determination of meaning, and invites Verheggen to compare the non-reductionism she finds in Davidson with that developed in Crispin Wright’s judgement-dependent account of meaning. RÉSUMÉ : Cet article examine ce que Claudine Verheggen considère comme étant la réponse de Donald Davidson au paradoxe sceptique développé dans l’interprétation qu’offre Saul Kripke des remarques de Wittgenstein sur la possibilité de suivre une règle. Je me concentre en particulier sur des questions concernant la normativité de la signification, le caractère social de la signification et le rôle que la notion de triangulation joue dans la position de Davidson sur la détermination de la signification. J’invite aussi Verheggen à comparer le non-réductionnisme davidsonien avec celui défendu par Crispin Wright dans sa conception de la signification en tant que dépendante du jugement. Keywords: Davidson, rule-following, Wittgenstein, Kripke, Wright It is a great privilege to comment on Claudine Verheggen’s contribution to this very stimulating book1: her work reveals many potentially important points of 1 Myers and Verheggen, Donald Davidson’s Triangulation Argument: A Philosophical Inquiry. Unless otherwise specified, all references are to this. Dialogue 59 (2020), 207–217 © Canadian Philosophical Association/Association canadienne de philosophie 2020 doi:10.1017/S0012217320000049 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 28 Sep 2021 at 17:43:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. 208 Dialogue contact between late-Wittgensteinian and late-Davidsonian inquiries that have been hitherto neglected, and will repay careful study by anyone interested in either. In this brief commentary, I will merely ask some (I hope, friendly) ques- tions about the approach to meaning that Verheggen attributes to Donald Davidson. 1. Normativity and Meaning Verheggen represents Davidson as putting forward a form of semantic non- reductionism that can yield a response to the sceptical argument adumbrated in Chapter 2 of Saul Kripke’s celebrated discussion of Wittgenstein’s rule- following considerations.2 Although facts about “sheer associations between expressions and extra-linguistic items”3 are not capable of determining facts about meaning, facts about the meanings of speakers’ words are “determined … by the features of their environment on which they have triangulated linguis- tically and which they have agreed to take as the relevant aspects determining the meanings of their words,”4 where linguistic triangulation is a process that takes place in a semantic context, a context in which facts about what speakers mean or think are assumed to obtain. I’ll come back to non-reductionism in due course, but first I want to ask some questions about normativity and the social character of meaning. In the second chapter, Verheggen suggests that the Davidsonian view is hospitable to what is known in the literature as meaning engendered normativity (the idea that mean- ing opens up space for normative assessment of speakers and their linguistic usages, but is not necessarily itself a product of prior conventional norms). This emerges from a discussion of a familiar sort of objection to the idea that meaning is normative in a sense beyond the trivial sense imported by its gener- ating correctness conditions. In response to this, Verheggen argues that on the Davidsonian position, meaning is normative in a sense that is “far from trivial”5 and “over and above its being trivially normative.”6 It is usually agreed on all sides that meaning is normative in the sense that it generates hypothetical prescriptions (e.g., (i) if I mean chair by ‘chair’ then if I want to tell the truth, I ought to apply ‘chair’ to an object x only if x is a chair). It is often objected that this cannot make meaning normative in any sense over and above the trivial since, for example, facts about the weather imply hypothetical 2 Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. 3 P. 90. 4 P. 90. 5 P. 42. 6 P. 62. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 28 Sep 2021 at 17:43:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. Book Symposium: Donald Davidson’s Triangulation Argument 209 prescriptions too (e.g., (ii) if it is raining outside, then if I want to stay dry, I ought to take an umbrella), but no one thinks that facts about the weather are nor- mative. Against this, Verheggen argues that there is an important disanalogy between the weather case and the meaning case. Unlike facts about the weather, facts about meaning essentially generate hypothetical prescriptions, and this dif- ference turns on the fact that speakers themselves contribute, via participation in triangulation, to the constitution of what their words mean, while no such con- tribution is made to the constitution of the facts about the weather. The argument here is subtle, but it seems to go along the following lines. In order for the hypo- thetical ‘oughts’ generated by the fact that it is raining not to apply to me, it is enough that I am indifferent to whether or not I get wet. If I am indifferent to the rain, it is not the case that I ought to take an umbrella, but the fact that it is raining remains in existence. In contrast, since I myself contribute to a process that determines that, e.g., I mean sunny by ‘sunny,’ indifference on my part to whether or not I produce meaningful utterances would lead to it no longer being the case that I mean sunny by ‘sunny.’ So in this case if indifference on my part leads to the suspension of the relevant hypothetical ‘oughts,’ that can only be because the erstwhile fact that I meant sunny by ‘sunny’ no longer obtains. (There are some changes in desire that leave the meaning fact intact and generate changes in the relevant ‘oughts’—if I want to trick you into vis- iting Glasgow in late December, I ought to tell you that it is usually very sunny, but unlike the weather case, facts about meaning are constituted “not altogether independently of my desire.”7) I’ll make two comments about this. First, the argument seems to depend on some principle to the effect that if I have a say in the constitution of a fact, that fact cannot remain intact if I subsequently become indifferent to it. It’s not obvious how good this principle is. For example, I may have a say in the constitution of the fact that I promise to spend less time on Facebook. If desire subsequently leads me to spend even more hours of the day scrolling down the screen, don’t we want to say that the fact that I promised to spend less time on Facebook is still intact, and that it is precisely because of this that my current behaviour can be said to be in violation of it? Likewise, in the meaning case, couldn’t it be that the way in which I contribute to the constitution of the fact that I mean sunny by ‘sunny’ leaves it intact even if I subsequently no longer desire to produce meaningful utterances? Perhaps the conditions in which I learned how to use the word trump any subsequent changes in desire. Second, I suspect that it doesn’t really undermine the standard anti- normativist point made by those who deny that meaning facts are normative in any sense over and above the trivial. As anti-normativists see it, the point about the weather is an illustration of the fact that hypothetical prescriptions do not generate any genuine normativity. Consider an example that I think 7 P. 60. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 28 Sep 2021 at 17:43:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. 210 Dialogue originates with R.M. Hare: the statement ‘If you want to go to the largest grocer in Oxford, you ought to go to Grimbly Hughes,’ although it contains an ‘ought,’ is actually equivalent to the purely descriptive statement ‘Grimbly Hughes is the largest grocer in Oxford.’8 So, hypothetical prescriptions don’t generate genuine normativity. This is illustrated by the fact that weather facts generate hypothetical prescriptions but are clearly not normative, but even if the generation of hypothet- ical prescriptions is, as Verheggen claims, essential to meaning, unless the ‘Grimbly Hughes’ argument is overturned, this won’t show that meaning is norma- tive in a sense over and above the trivial. So, Verheggen appears to have mistaken an illustration of the anti-normativist position with an argument for it, and conse- quently underplayed the real anti-normativist consideration. Summarising this dis- cussion, Verheggen writes: “only hypothetical implications follow from [ascriptions of meaning], but, contra the anti-normativists … these implications are essential to meaning.”9 Again, though, the anti-normativist needn’tdenythat these implications are essential, but can argue that, although essential, they don’t engender any genuine normativity. Meaning could indeed be essentially hypothet- ically prescriptive but still fail to be normative in any sense beyond the trivial. 2. Communitarian and Interpersonalist Views of Language Verheggen distinguishes between communitarian views of language, according to which “having a (first) language essentially depends on meaning by one’s words what members of some community mean by them,”10 and interpersonal views, whichholdthat“the possession of language and thought essentially depends on having triangulated linguistically with others … [but] does not require that the tri- angulators assign the same meanings to the same words.”11 She represents Kripke as putting forward a communitarian view of this sort in response to his inability to find facts capable of making it the case that expressions mean what they do: Kripke’s answer is that ascriptions of meaning to a speaker’s utterances have asserti- bility conditions rather than truth-conditions.
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