DAVIDSON ON MEANING, UNDERSTANDING AND
NORMATIVITY*
Pascal Engel
Cadernos de Filosofia, Universidade
Novella de Lisboa
2, 1997, 9-30
It is a commonplace that XXth century analytic
philosophy of language has been concerned with an analysis of meaning. Philosophers
in this tradition have produced various accounts of this notion in terms of
other basic concepts: truth-conditions, speaker’s intentions, use and
assertibility-conditions, to name a few. But no paradigm of analysis has really
taken precedence over the others. This seems to be due to the fact that meaning
is such a complex and multifarious phenomenon. This leads to doubt of the very
possibility of a comprehensive theory of
meaning for natural languages. A number of philosophers, however, have
attempted to formulate various general requirements for the formulation of a
theory of this kind, both at the descriptive and at the more fundamental
philosophical level. Their move was to try to avoid the general question of
what meaning is , which would call
for an analysis of this notion in terms of more basic concepts, such as truth
conditions, thought or rules. Instead they have asked: what is it, for a
speaker, to know a language and to understand
it ? And they have tried to characterize
meaning as a certain body of knowledge which every speaker has. They have
called this knowledge knowledge of a “theory of meaning” in the following
sense: a theory of meaning (a TM, for short) is the kind of knowledge through
which a speaker gives meaning to the expressions of his own language. A theory
of meaning in the ordinary sense of a philosophical account of this notion
would be an account of the principles of a TM for a particular language, of the
kind of characterisation of the knowledge of language that one could give.
Davidson (1984) is perhaps the
philosopher who has developped this strategy the most forcefully. He claims
that an analysis of meaning must rest upon a proposal about the general form
that a theory of meaning should take. Such a theory must account for the
speaker’s understanding of his own utterances, and of our understanding (or, as
he says, interpreting) the utterances of others. It should, according to him,
take the form of a description of the truth-conditions of sentences, and hence
be based on a theory of truth for the speaker’s language. This account has
attracted much attention and criticism. It is not my aim here to detail this
proposal and its difficulties[1]. I want, rather, to point out here
that Davidson’s insistence on the understanding of language leads to certain
characteristic tensions in his view, which also affect rival views. My
objective is to claim that such tensions are not peculiar to Davidson’s view,
and that any conception which adopts the basic starting point that a theory of
meaning is a theory of understanding encounters or parallel difficulties.
1. Three ways of
reading the equivalence
Let us start from a basic equation: a
theory of meaning (TM) is a theory of understanding. This equation has been
advanced by Dummett (1975). Basically it says that any sort of description of
meaning in a language must be related to the capacity that speakers have of
understanding their own language and to have command upon it. It rules out from
the start any sort of description of meanings as abstract entities which would
play no role in an account of the actual speaker’s competence or in his use of
expressions in current linguistic pratice. Or rather it does not rule out such
descriptions, but requires that they be related at some point to some features
of their competence[2]. This slogan — “a theory of meaning is a theory of
understanding” — seems sound enough. But it can be read in several ways,
according to the kind of features of “understanding” one favors.
The notion of understanding is highly
ambiguous, and it can be read at least in three senses. First, understanding
what an expression means can be understood as understanding the content of this expression, something like its linguistic meaning in the
language. For instance I understand what “cat” means when I know what this word
means in English (that it designates certain animals). Second, understanding
the sense of an expression means that I know how to use it (e.g. that I manifest correct grasp of this
expression when cats are around and when I am asked to identify them, or asked
to feed them, etc.). Third, understanding may mean that I have the proper mental state, or psychological
representation, responsible for my grasp of either the content of the word or
its proper use. Here “understanding” means a form of psychological competence,
located, presumably in the mind or brain of the speaker. Each of these senses
gives us a different reading of our slogan. As Barry C. Smith (1992) points out
this equivalence can be read, as any equivalence, from left to right, from both
sides, and from right to left[3].
(1) First, when read from right to left,
the equivalence says that we grant priority to a theory of meaning for a
language. A speaker understands his language when he knows the basic facts of
meaning which supply the interpretations of his and other utterances. The idea
here is that all there is to know about understanding a language is the
specification of the content of a theory of meaning for that language and
of the way such a content is ascribed to a speaker through the practice of
interpretation. Facts about the use of sentences and expressions by speakers,
will be, on this view incorporated in facts about the method of interpretation
of meanings. And facts about the inner cognitive workings of semantical
competence will be simply irrelevant.
(2) Second, the equivalence can be read
in a strict way, by giving no priority on either side. The idea here is that
facts about meaning cannot be by themselves facts about understanding: we must
have independent grounds for ascribing knowledge of the theory of meaning to
speakers. But these grounds cannot be based upon the inner psychological
workings of competence. They must rest upon the ways people use their
sentences, and manifest their knowledge of the TM in various
ways.
(3) Third, the equivalence can be read
from right to left, by giving priority to the psychological facts about
speaker’s semantic competence. The structure of the TM must bein some sense
reflected in the cognitive underpinnings of the mind of the speaker.
Less abstractly, Davidson is a
paradigmatic representative of reading (1), Dummett of reading (2), and Chomsky
of reading (3). Let us call them, following Smith (ibidem) respectively the interpretative
stance, the descriptive stance, and
the psychological stance. Each stance
emphasizes the idea that a TM for a speaker’s language is needed, some set of
syntactico-semantical rules formulated in a systematic way. But they disagree on
the other factors: use and cognitive set up. Against the psychological stance,
both the interpretative and the descriptive stance agree that psychological
facts are irrelevant for an account of understanding language, mostly on the
ground that language is a public phenomenon, which is manifested in the overt
and public use of expressions. But they disagree on the way use is incorporated
in their account. For Davidson, facts about use and included in facts of
interpretation of speakers, whereas for Dummett they must be settled
independently. In other terms, we must for Dummett, have grounds, separate from
facts of interpretation, for ascribing to the speakers knowledge of meaning. For
instance we must say that there are certain conventions of use for words in a
population. For all its emphasis on use, Dummett’s view does not amount simply
to what is often called a use conception of meaning, and associated to the name
of Wittgenstein. For Wittgenstein does not believe that facts about use could
be incorporated in any sort of systematictheory
: on the contrary he insists on the local, or piecemal, character of
meaning “facts”. Indeed, for Wittgenstein, there are no real “facts” about
meanings as particular uses, but only a collection of vague and changing
criteria which do not lend themselves to any systematic account.[4]
2. Davidson’s
interpretative stance
Having described in an abstract and
programmatic manner the various options, I turn now to Davidson’s particular
proposal. For Davidson, as it is well known, a TM is a compositional theory,
formulated in the Tarskian format of a set of axioms for each kind of
expression of a language L, from which one can derive a set of “T-sentences” of
the form “ S is true iff p ” (with
the necessary adjustments needed for indexical and other sentences the truth of
which is relative to a speaker and a time), and providing the truth conditions
of the sentences of L. In what sense does such a TM specify the knowledge that speakers have of their language?
Not in the sense that speakers have an explicit knowledge of what the axioms and the theorems of the TM state, nor
a grasp of the semantic machinery of a Tarskian truth-theory, with complex
logical notions such as sequences and satisfaction of predicates. Not in the
sense that speakers could have a tacit knowledge of such a theory, at some
“subintentional” or otherwise unconscious level, deeply rooted in their
cognitive modules. What the TM specifies, for Davidson, is the knowledge that
an idealised, competent, and rational theorist
, equiped with the appropriate theory,would
know. The knowledge that a TM
specifies is not the knowledge of the speaker, but the knowledge that the theorist , or the interpreter, should
use if he were to interpret the speaker’s linguistic behaviour from the
outside, granted that this speaker is a rational animal, obeying certain
idealised norms of conduct and of thought. The only facts about use that
Davidson allows himelf to consider are behavioral facts about the sentences the
speaker produces, and external facts about his environment. In addition
Davidson supposes that we have means of recognising in the speaker a certain
kind of propositional attitude, which is a kind of belief: belief about the truth of a number of his sentences, or his holding-true certain
sentences. From this meager input, the interpreter postulates that the
sentences that the speaker hold-true have a certain structure, and that he has
beliefs which are, by and large true and logically coherent (this is the famous
“principle of charity”). From there, he works out his interpretations, linking
them to particular circumstances of use, and reaches in the end an
interpretation, which is the output of a process of successive revisions, until
the “best fit” is attained.
Hence, for Davidson, a TM is is a rational reconstruction., from the part of the interpreter, of the
speaker’s competence. It is not, therefore, a specification of the knowledge
that the speaker has of his language, but a specification of what the interpreter knows, when he does such ascriptions of meaning with a TM.
This view has three main consequences,
which are endorsed by Davidson, but which immediately raise problems for his
account, and which all have to do with the fact that meanings are ascribed from
the outside or the “third person” point of view.
First, because it is a theory of what
the interpreter understands instead of what the speaker understands, it is at
least indirect: it does not tell us anything about what the speaker himself understands. So we cannot be sure that the features of the theory, which are the only one to which
we have access, are features of the speaker’s own competence. For instance if
the theory is recursive and compositional, there is no garantee that the
speaker’s competence is itself recursive and compositional. These features
could well be artifacts of the theory, and thus they could have nothing to do
with the actual psychological competence of the speaker. Davison would grant
this point, but it is problematic if the theory is supposed to be genuinely
explanatory of the speaker’s competence.
Second, because the interpreter works
only from the third person point of view, by ascribing meanings and structures
to the sentences of the speaker, it does not take into account what the speaker
himself, in the first person, considers as the meanings of his words. Here too
Davidson would grant this point, and say that this “first-person access” to
meanings is just a relic of the psychologistic view of the meanings of words,
or of Quine’s “myth of the museum”: if meanings are public, why care about what
“in our minds” we take our words to mean? Still, it is problematic, for we have
a genuine “first-person authority” over what we mean by our words, and Davidson
grants this. But he grants this only for the
interpreter. He, Davidson says, has authority over what he means, and from
there he works out his interpretations. How can we be sure that this asymetry
exists only for the interpreter?
Third, since understanding a language is
a matter of knowing how to interpret it, how can we be sure that the products
of our interpretations yield a systematic theory of the language itself? Interpretations
can vary, and there is no garantee that what they reach is a systematic body of
knowledge over a single object, the language. Here too, Davidson grants this
consequence. He admits that, under the actual conditions of interpretation and
of use, “there is no such thing as a language” (Davidson 1986), but only
particular encounters, which yield only partial overlaps. A “TM for a language”
is only, on this view, a useful idealisation, but it is not something which
exists independently of these acts of interpretation. But here again, it seems
to deprive of any objectivity the very account of a “theory of meaning for a
language” which was aimed at.
3. Meaning and
normativity
These difficulties have led philosophers
like Dummett to reject Davidson’s view. As I said above, Dummett (1975) objects
to Davidson’s conception of a theory of meaning that it is too modest , because it does not allow
really an attribution of knowledge of semantic facts to speakers. Such an
ascription of knowledge, according to Dummett, is almost trivial, in the sense
that it permits only ascription of the knowledge of T-sentences, without any
ascription of what the theory states. It
is just as if one said that someone who knows that «“Snarks are boojums” is
true iff snarks are boojums» knows that snarks are boojums. But this person may
know that the T-sentence is true, without knowing what it states, or what
proposition it expresses. In other terms, a TM, in Davidson’s sense, leaves out
what it was purported to capture, namely meaning. For Dummett, this is not
enough. Ascriptions of knowledge of meaning must be related to facts about use.
But what are such facts about use? “Use” is a very ubiquitous and ambiguous
notion. But we can formulate Dummett’s requirement in the following way. On the
one hand, facts about use must relate meaning to the manifestation of meaning (this is often called the “manifestation
requirement”): there must be particular circumstances were an ascription of
meaning is deemed to be correct or not. It is not clear whether Dummett
conceives of these as behavioral facts, and the point is disputed. But at least
he conceives of them as facts about the conditions
of assertion of sentences. The
interpretation of this notion is also a moot point, and I do not want here to
engage into the complex discussions which it has raised. But the point can be
formulated in a way which is more or less independent of the notion of
assertibility conditions used by Dummett, and which allows to express a number
of his objections.
Meaning is normative.[5] Facts about use of linguistic
expressions are facts about the ways speakers take the applications of these
expressions as correct or incorrect,
or as conform to certain rules of usage. Rules can be obeyed or disobeyed,
and there are facts of the matter as to whether people conform to these rules
or not. Not at the individual level, for, as Wittgenstein’s remarks about
“following a rule” purport to show, one does not obey a rule “privately”, and
no state of mind can fix the particular interpretation of a rule. But at the
communal or public level, everyone knows, provided he belongs to a community of
usage, which rules he follows. The community can sanction incorrect uses, and a
speaker can, from the other’s sanction, know when he conforms to these norms of
usage. Now such normative facts about meanings are part of what the speakers
know when they know they language. They are not, if we accept Wittgenstein’s
criticisms of private language, psychological facts, but public facts. But fo
all that, they are not inaccessible to speakers; indeed they lie in the open,
and are available to anybody. They are an ineliminable part of what a speaker understands when he understands the
meaning of his expressions.
But Davidson’s kind of view seems to be
unable to account for this normativity of meaning. Rules of meaning, or
semantic rules are, on his view, reduced to a descriptive feature of the
structure of a TM. Now this seems to be unfair to Davidson’s view. For does he
not insist on the fact that an interpreter must, to set up his interpretative
procedure, rely on certain very general norms
of rationality, such as the fact that the speaker or thinker is in general
truthful, reliable, coherent and justified in his beliefs? Aren’t these maxims
of rationality in interpretation what accounts for the normativity of meaning? Isn’t
this very feature what explains Davidson’s rejection of any sort of reduction
of semantic facts to physical or natural facts and the ground of his “anomalous
monism”? Although this is certainly Davidson’s reason for this rejection, the
answer is that they do not account for “the normativity of meaning”, at least
on Dummett’s view. For Davidson’s “standards of rationality”, although they
certainly imply that there is something normative in meaning, only imply that
this normativity is a feature of the theory
of interpretation, not of the
speaker’s knowledge of it. The kind of normativity that Davidson has in mind
when he uses this word is not the normativity which attaches to particular rules of usage , but a much
“higher profile” kind of normativity, which goes with the theory of
interpretation itself.[6] It is one thing to say that certain
sorts of “theories” that we use for interpreting the behaviour of agents, such
as the theory of decision (which Davidson incorporates into his theory of
interpretation) are “normative”, in the sense that they rest upon idealised standards, or idealised descriptions, not in the sense that they incorporate specific norms which would go together
with kinds of words or expressions. In Davidson’s sense, a norm is an idealised
description. It is not a particular rule of usage. Indeed, when he deals with language
use, Davidson actually denies that there is anything intrinsically “normative”
in meaning: interpreters do not need to know any sort of rules or conventions
which speakers would obey. Sofor him if there is something normative in
meaning, this something is not a feature of meaning itself, it is a feature of
its description, and a feature of the theory of interpretation. The only aim of
interpretation is getting people right.
The notions of convention, rule, practice, norm, according to him, is of no use
in the practice of interpreting another person’s words. It’s only and idle
wheel. As he says famously, “just as Lear
gains power through the absence of
Cordelia, I think treatments of language prosper when they avoid uncritical
evocation of convention, linguistic rule or language games. [7]
On Dummett’s view, on the contrary, such
notions as rules or conventions attached to particular expressions and
sentences are essential to a description of semantic competence. What a speaker
knows, when he know how to speak a language are certain patterns of correct use
of his words. These patterns are relatively fixed, and their set constitutes
what it is to be a language.[8] Meaning, therefore, is
normative in the sense that speakers know ways of evaluating the applications
of their expressions. This knowledge belongs to what Dummett call the
“assertibility conditions” of sentences, in terms of which he proposes to
formulate a theory of meaning.
If we focus in this way on the normative
character of meaning, we have a better grasp of Dummett’s emphasis on use, and
of his descriptive stance. Indeed it should rather be called a normative
stance. We can also understand better why Dummett, like Davidson, eschews any
attempt to reduce meaning to a set of semantic rules which would be “tacitly”
known by speakers, in the Chomskyan or cognitivist fashion. For such “rules”
are only “rules” by courtesy: they are not rules which the speaker himself recognizes. A rule, to be a
rule, must be articulable by the speaker at the conscious level, and it makes
not sense to say that a rule is folowed tacitly or unconsciously (unless one
reduces a rule to a regularity). This
is the gist of Wittgenstein’s reflexions on rule-following.[9]
The emphasis stressed on the normativity
of meaning, as an instrinsic feature of the rules of usage that the
speakers attach to their expressions, and sanctionned by a community of users,
is but another way of insisting on the fact that the speaker’s semantic
competence must not exceed what he is able to grasp, and what he can recognize,
from inside his practice, as right or wrong about his
use. Dummett’s (or for that matter, the Wittgenstenian) objection to Davidson’s
account is that the construal of semantic understanding as an extrinsic
feature of the speaker’s practice
(a feature of the theory of interpretation) generates “an intolerable divide
between the concepts of meaning and understanding”[10].
4. A dilemma for the
meaning-theorist
Now how can we appraise the argument from
the normativity of meaning? Given its obvious links with the three difficulties
that I raised about Davidson’s view, I take it seriously. But if we formulate
it as a requirement that we must reintroduce the notions of rule, of practice,
or of norms of usage within the project of a theory of meaning, it is in fact
quite destructive of this very project.
It is not quite clear, first, that
Dummett himself can integrate this requirement within his own descriptive
stance on a theory of meaning. For he conceives of this project as requiring
that we specify the meanings of the expressions of a language without using the notion of meaning ,
i.e without presupposing the speaker’s prior command of any language. Remember
that Davidson’s conception is “modest”, since it presupposes that the
interpreter has a command of his own language when he interprets others. In
this sense, he does not construct his theory of meaning “from the outside”. On
the contrary, the requirement of “full-bloodedness”, as Dummett’s calls it, prescribes
that the theorist of meaning takes an “outside” perspective on the speakers. It
amounts to the idea that in order to be able to account for a speaker’s grasp
of meanings through an account of his linguistic abilities. To account for what a speaker understands, we must, for
Dummett, state what he is able to do, to describe certain skills. How are we to
construe this claim? It seems that, like any skill or ability, ability to
master a form of expression must be the outcome of a tacit or implicit knowledge, which is not articulated at the propositional level. Dummett,
however, does not want to account for this form of tacit knowledge in the
psychological, Chomskyan fashion, as a knowledge of tacit rules governing the
expressions and included somewhere in the speaker’s cognitive capacity. Sometimes,
Dummett speaks as if this tacit knowledge could be described in a behavioural fashion, as is we could associate to each kind of expression a
certain kind of behaviour. But this raises familiar problems: there is no set
of behaviour(s) which can be associated to a set of meanings, or of beliefs, of
a speaker. Dummett rejects holism in the theory of meaning, and he criticizes
precisely Davidson for being committed to a form of holism in his theory of
interpretation. But holism seems to be unavoidable at least at the
methodological level.[11]
If he wants to stick to the normativity
argument, and if he does not want to espouse a psychological view of tacit
knowledge, the partisan of the descriptive stance must admit that there is no more to rules of usage than what
speakers can themselves know, quite openly, and not through some form of
implicit knowledge. He must grant the Wittgensteinian point that rules are “there”,
laid in view, and there is no “deeper” account of them either in psychological
or in behavioural terms. But if he grants this, the partisan of the descriptive
stance must also grant that a systematic description of meaning in the form of a
“theory” is threatened. He allows that speakers have knowledge of their
language which does not reach deeper that the judgments that they make about the correctness of certain patterns
of usage, but that when we reach these judgments, we reach “bedrock”.[12] Such a move would amount to
the view that what we could do is only a descrption
, from the inside of a community’s practice, of the rules of usage. This
quite Wittgensteinian move would be, as it were, purely descriptivist.
But it seems then that we face a
dilemma. If, on the one hand, we insist on the fact that for a TM to be a
genuine theory of understanding, it must not be divorced from what a speaker
himself (and not an interpreter) must actually know and master, such a
knowledge must be knowledge of the rules that are in order within the practice
of a community which speaks this language. But these rules cannot be associated
in any systematic way with the speaker’s competence, and do not lend themselves
to a systematic account. So the argument from normativity prevents us from
giving a TM. On the other hand, if we accounted for semantic competence in
terms of a tacit knowledge of semantic rules instanciated in the psychology of
the speaker, the normativity of linguistic usage would be lost. Rules would
become merely causalregularities ,
and normative force would be lost. So there is a tension between the
requirement of descriptivity (of use) and the requirement of systematicity (of
a TM).
5. Another way of
dealing with normativity
The tension, and the potential dilemma,
can indeed be removed if we reject he argument from normativity the outset. Indeed
this is what Davidson does. But it is also what the psychological stances does.
According to Davidson, the normative features of meaning are but epiphenomenal
features that we attach to meanings when we know our language. But an account
of understanding language does not need them. According to the partisan of the
psychological stance, knowledge of language is the product of an explanatory
psychological capacity which allows us to recognize, tacitly, certain features
of syntax and semantics, which are internal to the speaker’s psychology. This
is indeed in line with Chomsky’s attitude towards the notion of a language
itself. For him, what the description of semantic competence deals with is not
an external language, in the ordinary sense of a set of
rules mastered by the speakers of French, English, Portugese, etc., but what he
calls an I-language, an internal language, or the idiolect of a speaker
(Chomsky 1986)[13]. But on this view, normativity of
linguistic usage would also be an epiphenomenon.
But taking the psychological stance is
at odds with the phenomenology of linguistic understanding, just as the notion
of tacit knowledge of semantic rules is at odds with the customary notion of
knowledge. Can speaking a language really be described in norm-free terms?
It seems to me that we cannot, and that
on this point the argument from normativity is correct. But it makes the norms
mysterious if it just registers the fact that certain applications of words are
correct and other not, and the fact that a community sanctions certain uses,
and not others. In that respect I agree with the Chomskyans and with Davidson
that their is something obscurantist in the uncritical evocation of rules and
practices. How then could be remove the dilemma?
It seems to me that we can, if we do not
divorce the various stances that we distinguished: interpretative, descriptive
and explanatory. There is no reason why certain patterns of use of words that
we recognize as correct should not be explained, at least partly, through the
exercise of a psychological, tacit, competence in the way it is envisaged by
the psychological stance. If we find that a word applies, that a sentence is
correct, it may well be that it is because we have certain tacit knowledge, deeply
rooted in our psychology, which allows us to recognize these features, just as
other “modular” structures in our visual system aloow us to recognize certain
visual scenes. Now the problem with this causal
“because” is, as the critics of the notion of tacit knowledge of rules
point out, it is not substituable readily to a normative “because”. Speakers
have the feeling that they obey usage not because of certain causal patterns in
them, but for certain reasons. But
the fact that reasons explanations are usally divorced from causal explanations
does not imply that there is no connexion between the two. To take a closely
related case, consider perceptual knowledge. To have a true perceptual belief,
and for such beliefs to be knowledge, it must be justified in some way. And the
justification does not simply amount to the existence of a reliable causal
mecanism which produces the belief. But this causal element can be part of the
justification. Indeed it may be held that a justified perceptual belief is a
belief produced by a causal mecanism which is known to be reliable. [14] I would claim the same for
knowledge of language: to know what an expression means, one has to know that
the kind of processes by which we grasp this mean are reliable. This is
certainly not enough to give us "knowledge of meaning" in the
intuitive sense, but it is certainly part of it. Even if we grant this, it will
be said, does it account for the normativity of meaning?
No, it does not, since normativity is a
feature which belongs to the first-personal level of knowledge of meaning. I
must have access to the meaning of my words in order to be able to appraise
their use. In fact, as I have already pointed out above, Davidson’s conception
of interpretation incorporates this feature. Davidson grants that there is a
first-personal access of the interpreter to the meanings of the words of his
language (or of his idiolect), and that it is where we start from. But here
somebody who is impressed by Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations will
inevitably raise the question: how do I know that what seems to me to be right is actually right? What reason is there for
basing any account of the meaning of another person’s words on what I take my own words to mean? Davidson answers that this
first-personal knowledge of meaning is only the starting point of the
interpretation procedure. It is essential that, at a later stage, the
interpreter should compare his own conception of the meaning of his words to
the conception that he hypothesizes in others. He might even be led to correct
his own account. A theory of meaning is
the product of a process of comparison between what the interpreter takes his
own words to mean, what he takes another person’s words to mean, and the external features of an environnement. This
triangle of elements will give the proper fit. In other terms,the interpreter
will triangulate. [15] Thus we have in fact, within
Davidson’s own conception, a clue for an account of the origin of the normative
character that we attach to the meanings of our words. This origin, I suggest,
is located in the first-person authority that we have about our own judgments
about meanings. Davidson, however, does not say much about this first-person
authority.[16]
Let us try to say a little bit more,
although sketchily. When I judge that a certain word, say “cat”, has a certain
meaning, say that it applies to these feline animals around there, I have
certain belief. Now this belief may be wrong: I may misapply he word, and
confuse cats with, say foxes, or they might have been robots sent by Martians,
unknown to me. This is quite familiar from Twin-Earth kinds of arguments, or
from externalist arguments such as Burge’s.[17] So I may be wrong about the content of my belief. But in general (except perhaps in cases of cognitive
disorders) I cannot be wrong about the fact that I have this belief. My self-ascribed
belief that I believe that these are cats is always warranted, an immune to error. As
Davidson (1988) and Burge recognize, this is perfectly compatible with externalism
about content.[18] I suggest that this authority
that we have over our own self-asscribed beliefs is the origin of the authority
that we have over our own judgments about meanings. We may be wrong, and the
community, or our subsequent exchanges with our fellow speakers might prove us
wrong, about the nature of these meanings, but it cannot prove us wrong about
the fact that we have such judgments. This feature is in fact a feature of our
beliefs in general, and we could put it in terms of the well known “Moore’s
paradox”: “ There are cats, but I do not believe that there are cats” is not
only an impossibility about our assertions, but also an impossibility about our
thoughts. A speaker would who think such thoughts would be in an incoherent
state of mind, or he would not master the very conditions of his having
beliefs.[19] To believe that p is to believe that p is true, and to believe that one believes that p. This constitutive or conceptual link between
believe, believing true, and believing that one does believe, is integral to
belief. Now consider Davidson’s proposal about theories of meaning. He claims
that interpretation gets started from sentences held-true by speakers, and
held-true by interpreters. The basic propositional attitude of “holding-true”
certain sentences of one’s own language is the condition of interpretation. Because
it is authoritative, its authority is conferred to judgments about meaning, or
about self-knowledge of meaning. That we are always correct about such
attributions is the origin of the fact that we take them to be normative. Indeed
the community imposes it norms on meaning. But on Davidson’s account of
interpretation, we could not recognise these norms unless we could not
recognize the basic normative character of our own self-ascriptions. So we have
here, in the end, the connexion between meaning and normativity. It does not
lie in the rational norms, such as the principle of charity, that are
presupposed by the interpretation procedure, but it lies in this first-personal
feature of our own thoughts. In this way, we can reduce the gap that seemed to
exist in the first place between Davidson’s third-personal point of view on
meaning and the first-person point of view required by the notion of
understanding a language.
This is only half of the story. For
remember that one of the main objections raised by Dummett about Davidson’s
kind of conception of meaning-theories (TM) was that they are overtly
realistic, in the sense that they construe meaning in terms of “transcendent
truth-conditions” which might be inacessible to speakers. On Dummett’s view, if
such truth conditions are inacessible to speakers, we cannot say that they understand them. But this anti-realist
threat does not exist, if we reflect on the fact that the interpreter, on
Davidson’s view, starts up with the truth conditions that he understands. The
truth-conditions do not reach farther that those that he himself is able to
grasp. Still, it may be claimed, the concept of truth that Davidson’s kind of
TM is a realist one in Dummett’s sense. The problem is not that it is realist,
but that it is deflationist. On Davidson’s view, a sentence is not true because
it is “true to the facts”, or because of the existence of a particular relation
of correspondance with an independent reality. There is no more to truth than
the Tarskian equivalence “ S is true iff p
”.[20] But this seems to deprive us
from recognizing one important feature of truth: that truth is not simply a
feature of our asserting certain sentences as true, or taken-them to be true,
or holding true these sentences. Truth is also the aim of our assertions, and in this sense, it is a norm of our assertions that we aim at
truth. I have also suggested that it is a norm of our beliefs that we aim at
truth.[21] This feature should be
incorporated in Davidson’s interpretative conception of meaning. I am not sure
that Davidson would agree. But what I suggest is that if we revise Davidson’s
theory of interpretation in order to take these normative features into account,
we shall reduce the tensions which exist between the various stances on a
theory of meaning that we have distinguished.
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Bilgrami, A. 1992Belief and Meaning, Blackwell, Oxford
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“First-person authority”, Dialectica,
38, 101-110
1986 "A nice derangement of epitaphs", in Le Pore, ed.
Meaning and Interpretation,
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1987, “Knowing one’s own mind”, Proceedings
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1991 “Three varieties of knowledge”, in A.J. Ayer,
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“Truth”, reprinted in his Truth and other
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1975 "What is a theory of meaning (1)", in S. Guttenplan,
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1995 “Une théorie naturaliste de l’esprit évacue-t-elle la
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1997 La vérité, réflexions sur quelques truismes, Paris, Hatier
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*
This paper is the product, in a compressed form, of three lectures given
in April 1997 at the Universitade Nova de Lisboa, in the Department of
philosophy of language, at the invitation of Antonio Marques and Joao Saagua. I
thank them for their invitation, their hospitality, and their comments, as well
as the participants in these occasions, among whom Desiderio Murcho.
[1] I have done that in Engel (1994).
the contrast between a “theory of meaning” in the philosophical sense and a TM
(or a “meaning-theory”) is well put by M. Davies 1981, ch.1.
[2] For the opposite view, see for
instance Montague (1974)
[3]B. Smith’s important paper provided
the stimulus for the present one. See also Engel 1994, ch.7
[4] Some writers, like Wright (1986)
have attempted to formulate, on Wittgensteinian grounds, “criterial semantics”;
but these attempts are not congenial to Wittgenstein’s asystematic conception of
meaning.
[5] This point is well put in Wright,
1986, preface
[6]The notion of a “higher profile”
here is borrowed from Bilgrami (1992) who set up very well the contrast between
these two sorts of conceptions of normativity.
[7] cf. in particular “Communication
and convention” in Davidson 1984, and Davidson 1986.
[8] see in particular Dummett’s (1986)
criticism of Davidson 1986
[9] cf. Kripke 1981
[10] The phrase is not Dummett’s, but
Wright’s (1987, p.210), commeting about Forster’s characterisation of
Davidson’s project.
[11] I cannot dwell upon this here. See
Engel 1994, ch.5.
[12] This is, in substance, Mc Dowell’s
reaction (1987) to Dummett’s view. See his exchange with Dummett in Taylor
1987, and the account of it by Smith (1992), p. 127-129.
[13] Actually, as it has often been
noticed, Davidson’s interpretative view insists on the idiolect of the speaker
too (see especially Davidson 1986).
[14] This version of reliabilism seems
to me to be that defended by Goldman (1986). It does not eleminate normative elements.
cf. Engel 1996, ch. 5, where I also claim that there is not necessarily an
untolerable divide between normative explanations in terms of reasons and causal
explanations in terms of psychological facts.
[15] See in particular Davidson 1991. In
his recent Jean Nicod lectures, given in Paris in 1995, Davidson has insisted
on this triangulation as the basis of “objectivity”.
[16] But see Davidson 1984a. He reduces
first-person authority to the very feature of the interpretation procedure,
which starts from the knowledge of meaning that the interpreter has.
[17] See for instance Burge 1979
[18]
See also Engel 1997
[19] see Shoemaker 1996 about variations
on this theme.
[20] See Davidson 1984, and Davidson
1996
[21] Dummett stress this point in in his
classic paper “Truth”(1959), as well as Wright (1992). I have argued that a deflationist
position on truth suffers from this ignorance of the normative nature of the
concept of truth in Egel 1997. See also Engel 1994, p144-146, 219-220.