“The Meaning of ‘Meaning is Normative’ ” (original) (raw)

2013, Philosophical Investigations

This paper defends the thesis that meaning is intrinsically normative. Recent anti-normativist objectors have distinguished two versions of the thesis-correctness and prescriptivity-and have attacked both. In the first two sections, I defend the thesis against each of these attacks; in the third section, I address two further, closely related, anti-normativist arguments against the normativity thesis and, in the process, clarify its sense by distinguishing a universalist and a contextualist reading of it. I argue that the anti-normativist position is successful only against the universalist reading but point out that normativists do not require this reading of the thesis; the contextualist one is both possible and desirable for them. Furthermore, I argue that anti-normativists require the contextualist reading of the normativity thesis to make their case, as well as to avoid meaning relativism. In the final two sections of the paper, I explain how a contextualist understanding of the normativity thesis is compatible with Quine's elimination of analyticity, thus undermining a key underlying reason for anti-normativism, and I respond to the objection that a contextualist reading of the normativity thesis is either self-contradictory or else trivial. Due principally to the influence of Kripke's book on Wittgenstein, it had become commonplace in the philosophy of language to hold the "normativity thesis": that meaning is intrinsically normative. 1 Adherents to this view I call normativists, and in addition to Wittgenstein and Kripke number amongst their ranks earlier Boghossian, Brandom, McDowell, Millar, Putnam, Tanney, Wedgewood and Whiting. 2 Recently, a growing number of anti-normativists have emerged who include Bilgrami, later Boghossian, Glüer, Hattiangadi, Horwich and Wikforss. 3 They distinguish two versions of the normativity thesis-correctness and prescriptivity