Abstract
The resemblance is plain to see between Kripke’s Wittgenstein introducing bizarre rules such as quaddition (in illustrating the sceptical paradox against theories of meaning) and Goodman’s introducing the equally bizarre grue (in generating the new riddle of induction). But the two sorts of bizarre cases also differ in interesting respects. For those familiar with Goodman’s case, this similarity sparks a strong temptation to enlist to the meaning sceptic’s cause key elements of Goodman’s new riddle, which are missing from Kripke’s case. In this essay, I characterize a natural way of doing just this, which targets dispositionalist solutions to the sceptical paradox. I also show that, despite initial appearances, this new objection to dispositionalism (the symmetry problem) is not nearly as worrisome as originally thought. The solution offered on behalf of semantic dispositionalists does require a trade-off, though, from the severe form of indeterminacy advanced by the meaning sceptic to a much milder thesis.
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Notes
See also Tennant’s discussion of the contrast between the asymmetry exhibited by Kripke’s quadd and the more familiar add, the symmetry exhibited by Goodman’s grue and the more familiar green, and the problems this can introduce for Kripke’s case (Tennant 1997, pp. 122–124).
Though this problem resembles the disjunction problem for informational accounts of meaning (Fodor 1990), they also differ in important respects. The potential for indeterminacy identified by both problems relies on (at least) two hypotheses, one involving a simple representation and another involving a disjunctive one. But whereas the disjunction problem is troublesome specifically for informational theories (in that non-natural meaning is more robust than natural meaning, e.g., natural information), the symmetry problem applies to a much wider range of naturalistic theories (including those featuring inferential or conceptual roles). And, obviously, the symmetry problem arises due to the definitional features peculiar to grue-like meanings.
See Burgess and Sherman (2014) for an excellent breakdown of the distinction between semantics and meta-semantics.
This runs close to Barry Allen’s (1989) assessment that meaning scepticism is an extension of the new riddle to field linguistics. Aside from our focusing on semantics and meta-semantics, the extent to which Allen’s point applies here does so only for a special case. Still, for this special case, it is not surprising that Norton’s solution to the new riddle applies here in such a straightforward fashion.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks go to Nick Jones and Neil Tennant for discussions (long, long ago) that led to the first draft of this essay. Thanks go to Joseph Baltimore, William Melanson, Richard Montgomery, and Joshua Smith for helpful comments on later drafts.
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Podlaskowski, A.C. The Gruesome Truth About Semantic Dispositionalism. Acta Anal 38, 299–309 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-022-00517-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-022-00517-0