Semantic Normativity in Context

Abstract

There are two parallel, contemporary debates in the philosophy of language about the relationship between literal, linguistic meaning, and use. The ‘contextualism’ debate concerns the extent to which the literal meanings of sentences in a language determine the truth conditions or propositional contents of utterances, and the extent to which extra-linguistic context determines utterance content. The normativity debate concerns whether the literal meaning of a sentence in a language has normative implications for a speaker’s utterance of the sentence. Both debates concern the adequacy of the sort of formal semantic theory pioneered by Frege and the early Wittgenstein, and later championed by Davidson and Kaplan, among others. Both debates turn on challenges to the formal semantic tradition inspired by the later writings of Wittgenstein. The contextualist argues that formal semantic theories cannot adequately determine the truth conditions, or propositional contents, of utterances. The normativist holds that formal semantic theories must be normative — they must have implications for whether an utterance of a sentence is correct or incorrect. Semantic nor-mativity is famously employed by Saul Kripke, to argue that there are no semantic facts to correspond to the statements of any given semantic theory. Crucially, Kripke’s sceptic argues that there is no account of what the semantic facts consist in which can adequately ground the normativity of meaning (Kripke 1982; Hattiangadi 2002, 2007).