Speakers use "snow is white" to express the thought that snow is white.
While true, this is hardly "likely to have far-reaching philosophical consequences." It is a triviality. If the notion of use employed is non-meaning-laden, on the other hand, what we will get is "a behavioristic reduction of meaning" in the Quinean mold, which is widely reviled. And so the slogan is either trivial or false. Heck's mission in the paper will be to carve a way between the horns of this dilemma: to find a role for the use-meaning thesis that is neither trivial nor false.
First, he wants to make a distinction between epistemological and metaphysical motivations for the thesis. McDowell takes the Quinean project (which rejects a meaning-laden notion of use) to rest on a mistaken epistemology: we perceive meaning in utterances directly (just as, in perception, we perceive facts directly), so the question of how we construct meaning from behavioristically-conceived noises rests on a falsehood. (The misconception is comparable to sense-datum conceptions of perception; it is a "sense-datum conception of understanding", in McD's terms.)
To this, Heck replies that the rejection of meaning-laden notions of use need not (and should not) be epistemological, but metaphysical. Use-meaning theories aim to "answer...the question [of] what it is for expressions to mean what they do, what determines what they mean, in the metaphysical sense."
Now the terms of the debate shift: is there a reasonable project in the vicinity of characterizing meaning (metaphysically) in terms of use? McDowell's objection will also shift: he will maintain that there is no metaphysically interesting project, either. Heck responds:
"Although I believe there is more to be said to motivate the metaphysical project, one part of me wants simply to say that it is obvious that there is a real problem about the nature of meaning." (3)
...in other words, this might be a difference in perspective about what is, at root, metaphysically mysterious.
But we proceed to a more concrete way in which McDowell formulates his denial of the existence of a metaphysical project: namely, his claim that homophonic theories of truth, properly understood, are metaphysically deflationary in just the way that is needed here, to dispel mysteries surrounding the question of giving a metaphysical analysis of meaning (possibly, in terms of use.) Heck's response is that McDowell doesn't correctly understand homophonic theories of truth. In particular, McD fails to appreciate the difference btw (i) semantic questions, having to do with LF and [[]], and (ii) meta-semantic questions, e.g., "what it is for a particular expression to have the reference that it does." Heck proposes to regiment calling answers to (i) a "theory of truth" and answers to (ii) a "theory of meaning."
Homophony is where semantics ends; it is the end-product of semantic machinery, hence the machinery of a "theory of truth." Take the output of such a module, such as
(1) "Snow is white" is true iff snow is white.
McD's claim is then that there can be no question about "what it might be for [(1)] to be correct: it wears its correctness on its face" (5).
Heck replies that there is a sense in which (1) is obvious upon reflection, but that we should be very careful in appreciating exactly why and how this is so. First, to say that it is obvious upon reflection is not to say that it is metaphysically necessary. (It is contingent that our words mean what they do.) Even in non-disquotational cases, such as within a semantics of indexicals, there are two ways of taking the understanding of such claims. Heck's example, borrowed from McGee, is one of a speaker who asks, "why am I here?" To say that "I am here" is true iff I am here is not helpful; nor even is a Kaplanian explanation of why such sentences express "logical truths." Certainly it is not an explanation of in what it consists that she is here. (I'm not sure what would count as such an explanation!) Secondly, no "serious" semantic theory will actually be homophonic, since ambiguity in he object-language will be reduced/eliminated and indexicals will be analyzed away. Moreover, the feeling of obviousness-upon-reflection will evaporate whenever the object and meta-languages are distinct.
So, in what does the truth of (1) consist? A use-meaning thesis is supposed to be the beginning of an answer. Davidson was interested in this question as well as in the formal semantics question, which he called "giving a theory of truth." For Davidson, a way of putting the crucial question (again, to which the use-meaning thesis is supposed to be the beginning of an answer) is: "What is it for a theory of truth to be correct?" (8) Davidson's answer, which is a version of a use-meaning theory, is developed via claiming that what meaning must consist in is data available to the radical interpreter. A radical interpreter has (of course) her own mental and perceptual states--her own intentionality--but no semantic knowledge of the language she is interpreting. Davidson rejects meaning-laden notions of use (denying them to the radical interpreter) for just the reason we met at the introduction of the McDowellian dilemma: to assume a meaning-laden notion of use would be to trivialize the question we are trying to answer.
Dummett, who also rejects meaning-laden notions of use, wants metaphysical explanations to bottom out in semantic competence. A speaker's semantic competence consists in her knowledge of a theory of truth for her language. It is by exploring the nature of semantic competence that (I gather?) Dummett wants to connect meaning and use.
Do we, as speakers, really know a theory of truth for our (native) language? Surely this knowledge would be tacit, knowledge-how. "On [Dummett's] view," Heck writes, "the structure [of a theory of truth for LFs] has little purpose other than to articulate this complex ability into component sub-abilities." To know a language is simply to be able to speak it.
Enter McD, the eternal antagonist, once again. McD now argues that Dummett's notion of a speaker's knowledge of her language is nothing better than a Quinean one--" 'no more than a mere description of outward behavior, with the mental...aspect of language use left out.' " (11). Chomsky similarly criticizes Dummett's practical, ability-based conception of what it is to speak a language, since it leaves out the speaker's knowledge of her language. (Knowledge of the language, like knowledge of swimming or walking, becomes a "facon de parler.") "The problem...concern[s] general facts about how our use of language is integrated with our conscious mental life." (12). (Consider the host of plausible-sounding arguments that only rational creatures can use language; that rationality and language-use are intimately connected.)
We are lead to the slogan that thought is prior to language. Does the use-meaning thesis face a similar dilemma when we consider whether we are entitled to explain meaning in terms of a mental-content-laden notion of use? A mental-content-laden notion of use might be called a Gricean one. NB that our explanation of meaning in terms of use, on such a notion of use, would not answer, but presuppose an answer to, the problem of intentionality.
What about arguments that purport to show that we need language to have sophisticated mental states? Children certainly have prelinguistic mental states, yet it is also undeniable that their capacity to entertain sophisticated thoughts grows with, and is facilitated by, their language ability.
We may, in some cases, be able to bootstrap from our knowledge of simple sentences (and therefore, our simple thoughts) to more complicated thoughts and sentences: an understanding of past tense and past tense sentences in terms of present-tense ones may be a good example of this. What the example suggests is a hybrid approach: part Dummettian, part Gricean. A substantial challenge remains, however, in "developing the Dummettian approach at the fundamental level."
In closing, we revisit Dummett's Martians. Dummett's Martians are taken to drive a rejection of content-laden notions of use in explaining meaning, since they present a skeptical scenario in which behavior is the same and mental contents are different. However, Dummett's argument here is epistemological, and we should take a page from McD and be as suspicious of it as we are suspicious of arguments from illusion to sense-datum theories of perception.
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Heck, "Use and Meaning."
Fusco, your senior thesis is really impressive. (I'm re-reading it now). I'm one of the lucky few with a copy.
ReplyDeleteI'm reading an intro to phil of language book and hopefully it will open some doors for me (like being able to understand your blog).
-s