Semantic Norms and Temporal Externalism
(all files in PDF format)
Preface, Abstract, Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Semantic Equilibria
Chapter Two: The Expressive Constraint
Chapter Three: Individualism, Non-Individualism
and Anti-Individualism
Chapter Four: Linguistic Norms and
Future Behavior
Dissertation Abstract and Chapter by Chapter Summary
Abstract
There has frequently been taken to be a tension, if not an
incompatibility, between "externalist" theories of content
(which allow the make-up of one's physical environment and the
linguistic usage of one's community to contribute to the contents
of one's thoughts and utterances) and the "methodologically
individualist" intuition that whatever contributes to the
content of one's thoughts and utterances must ultimately be grounded
in facts about one's own attitudes and behavior. In this dissertation
I argue that one can underwrite such externalist theories within
a methodologically individualistic framework by understanding
semantic norms in terms of the need to reach, for each of one's
terms, a type of "equilibrium." Each speaker's commitment
to making her own beliefs and applications consistent allows
one to incorporate these 'external' factors into the contents
of their thoughts and utterances in a way that remains methodologically
individualistic.
Methodologically individualistic accounts are typically taken
to be unable to incorporate 'external' factors such as the world's
physical make-up or communal usage because of arguments suggesting
that the individual's own beliefs and usage underdetermine or
even misidentify what, according to externalist accounts, they
mean by their terms. These arguments, however, only seem plausible
if one presupposes a comparatively impoverished conception of
the individual's beliefs. The beliefs a speaker associates with
a given term extend far beyond the handful of sentences they would
produce if asked to list such beliefs. In particular, speakers
have an implicit, but rich, understanding of their language, their
world, and the relation between them. Speakers typically understand
languages as shared temporally extended practices about which
they can be, both individually and collectively, mistaken. Once
this conception of language is taken into account, the ascriptions
which purportedly forced 'non-individualistic' conceptions of
content upon us (particularly ascriptions which seemed to tie
what we meant to social use rather than our own beliefs) turn
out to be ultimately grounded in the individual's own beliefs.
Indeed, our self-conception does much more than merely underwrite
'non-individualistic' ascriptions. Our understanding of languages
as temporally extended particulars turns out to underwrite our
important, but seldom noticed, practice of retroactively reading
present conceptual developments back into the thoughts and utterances
of our past selves and ancestors. We can both endorse a picture
of linguistic norms that is, ultimately, methodologically individualistic
and allow that future use (as with communal use) contributes to
what we mean by our terms. External factors are relevant to what
we mean because we take them to be so, and the ascriptions we
make reflect our often deep commitment to a picture of languages
as shared practices extending through time.
Chapter One: Semantic Equilibria
The first chapter argues that the possibility of misrepresentation
can be understood as arising from the tension between those items
to which we apply our terms (their putative extensions) and the
beliefs we associate with them (their general characterizations).
Both information-based and inferential role semantics are presented
as unsuccessful attempts to explain semantic norms in terms of
just one of these two elements. It is further argued that a term's
actual extension should be understood as what one gets when one
reaches an "equilibrium" between a term's general characterizations
and its putative extension. However, when semantic norms are
understood this way, a number of problems become salient. There
is no guarantee that there will an equilibrium to be found for
the practices associated with a term, and even if one can be found,
there is no guarantee that there will be just one. Bifurcationism
and indeterminacy about meaning are presented as the outcomes
of these two possibilities respectively.
Discovering whether (1) what a particular term means remains indeterminate
until an equilibrium is actually reached for it, or (2) whether
reaching an equilibrium makes manifest what the term meant all
along, is one of the overarching projects of the dissertation.
Doing so, however, requires finding an equilibrium for the interplay
between the putative extensions and general characterizations
of semantic terms such as "meaning" and "reference,"
and many contemporary disputes about meaning and content can be
understood as the product of conflicting attempts to find such
equilibria. The first chapter presents a number of general beliefs
about meaning along with a number of ascription types brought
to our attention by Kripke, Putnam, Burge and Wilson that provide
evidence for the putative extensions of our semantic terms. The
next three chapters investigate just how much of the putative
extension made manifest in these ascriptions can be incorporated
into an equilibrium for our semantic terms.
Chapter Two: The Expressive Constraint
The second chapter argues that the "expressive constraint," which requires that speakers have beliefs with the same content as their sincere utterances, effectively forces whatever equilibrium we find for either thought or utterance content to be an equilibrium for both. Given that this 'internal' connection between thought and utterance content required by the expressive constraint makes finding an equilibrium for our semantic terms considerably harder, one might try to do without it. However, attempts to explain away the constraint as an overstatement of a merely empirical generalization about the frequent correlation between thought and utterance content are discussed and found to face serious difficulties. Not only do most philosophical accounts of thought and language commit themselves to the expressive constraint, but a number of counterintuitive consequences also follow from giving it up. In particular, rejecting the constraint makes problematic the intelligibility of successful communication and belief attribution. Indeed, it is argued that if the constraint is given up, not only would there be little reason to think that even our self-ascriptions would usually be true, but there would also be nothing wrong with the sincere utterance of a 'Moore sentence' such as "Carburetors are expensive, but I don't believe it" (since one could have good reason to think that one lacked beliefs with the content of even one's sincere utterances). After establishing that we should not give up the expressive constraint, the chapter argues that the two most obvious explanations of the constraint (giving an independent account of linguistic meaning and understanding thought content in terms of it, and giving an independent account of thought content and understanding linguistic meaning in terms of it) are both inadequate. The chapter ends with a less reductive and more synthetic account of the constraint that stresses the interdependence of belief content and linguistic meaning stemming from the fact that our language is itself one of the things about which we have many beliefs.
[A revised version of this chapter is forthcoming in Philosophia
under the title "Expression,
Thought and Language"]
Chapter Three: Individualism, Non-Individualism and Anti-Individualism
The third chapter picks up on some of the themes introduced
in chapter two, and argues that we should incorporate the non-individualistic
ascriptions that Burge appeals to into an equilibrium for our
semantic terms. Not only are such ascriptional practices themselves
fairly deeply entrenched, but they also cannot be clearly isolated
from the extremely well entrenched practices that Kripke appeals
to. Attempts to dismiss or 'explain away' non-individualistic
ascriptions by appealing to more 'pragmatic' factors are shown
to rely upon a number of unrealistic assumptions about what we
take ourselves to be doing when we make ascriptions or defer to
correction. Even those ascriptional practices that might have
seemed to favor individualism (those associated with slips, malapropisms
and serious misunderstandings) turn out to be best understood
within an non-individualistic framework.
General beliefs associated with our speaking a shared language
whose terms have determinate extensions favor incorporating the
non-individualistic ascriptions, and the third chapter argues
that the most frequently cited candidates for entrenched general
beliefs incompatible with non-individualistic ascriptions (those
relating to self-knowledge and behavioral explanation) turn out
to be compatible with them after all. Indeed, accounting for
self-knowledge ultimately turns out to cause more problems for
the individualist. Reconciling our ascriptional practices with
these general beliefs will involve stressing (1) that the proposed
equilibrium is non-individualistic rather than anti-individualistic,
(2) that the de dicto/de re distinction is a distinction
between types of ascriptions, not between types of beliefs, (3)
that the position is methodologically, rather than ascriptionally,
individualistic, and (4) that the position relies heavily on our
self-interpretations to fund the non-individualistic ascriptions.
Chapter Four: Linguistic Norms and
Future Behavior
As stated above, the third chapter stresses the importance of our self-interpretations when reaching an equilibrium for our semantic terms, and argues that our practice of interpreting others in terms of social usage should be incorporated into an equilibrium because speakers understand themselves as engaging in a shared practice when using language. In much the same way, the fourth chapter argues that, because we understand this shared practice as itself extending through time, we can adopt a "T-externalistic" position in which we endorse the everyday ascriptions of content that reflect a sensitivity to future usage. Most of the potentially unintuitive consequences of allowing future use to contribute to what we mean (such as, say, those associated with self-knowledge and behavioral explanation) will have already been defused if we have succeeded in incorporating the non-individualistic ascriptions Burge appeals to. Furthermore, the ways in which those consequences were made palatable for the non-individualist discussed in chapter three work equally well for the T-externalist. Alternative ways of describing the relation between present and future usage are discussed and found to have a number of unintuitive consequences of their own. Finally, it is argued that since attempts to find a more temporally-bound equilibrium turn out to be no more intuitive than their T-externalistic competitors, there is no reason why we cannot endorse our temporally sensitive ascriptions in these cases.
[Much of this last chapter appears in my "We
Live Forwards but Understand Backwards: Linguistic Practices and
Future Behavior"(Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
80 (1999) pp. 157-177). However, that paper focuses on the conditional
claim that if you accept social externalism, you have no
reason not to accept temporal externalism as well. Since I argued
for the truth of the antecedent in Chapter 3, such 'conditional'
claims tend to be replaced in this chapter by more unqualified
assertions of the view.]