Semantic primitivism and normativity

Ratio

Volumn 14, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 1-17

  Hohwy, Jakob ^a  

^a LA TROBE UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0344667022     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9329.00141     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. S. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 21, Ch. 2 passim
2. Here I follow P. Boghossian, 'The Rule-Following Considerations', Mind, 98 (1989), which provides the clearest account, and defence, of primitivism (about mental content) that I know of. Boghossian says 'robust realism [about meaning is the doctrine that] judgements about meaning are factual, irreducible, and judgement-independent.'
3. Boghossian arrives at primitivism in despair over the failure of reductive accounts, such as dispositionalism. Apart from Boghossian, only few other philosophers have endorsed forms of primitivism. Katz's 'new intensionalism' is some kind of non-natural Platonism, see J. Katz, The Metaphysics of Meaning (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990)
4. Under some readings McDowell's 're-enchanted' world seem primitivist, see J. McDowell, Mind and World (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1994)
5. Some deflationists about truth and reference, such as Schiffer and Johnston, also seem primitivist; see S. Schiffer, Remnants of Meaning (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987), ch. 10
6. and M. Johnston, 'The End of the Theory of Meaning', Mind and Language, 3 (1988)
7. (Whereas P. Horwich, Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) is an example of dispositionalist deflationism about meaning)
8. Notice that my arguments will not turn on the possible queerness (see. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: inventing right and wrong, (London: Pelican, 1977), pp. 38-42) of the facts about meaning posited by the primitivist and causal theorist. I acknowledge, for the sake of argument, that there could be such facts, but I deny that they could fulfil the role they were intended to fulfil
9. See Kripke, Wittgenstein, pp. 7-22
10. See D. Lewis, 'Languages and Language', Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7
11. reprinted in D. Lewis, Philosophical Papers, Vol. I (Oxford: OUP, 1983)
12. and D. Lewis, 'Meaning without Use: Reply to Hawthorne', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 70 (1992)
13. This kind of discussion is the core of M. Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
14. The metaethical theory I provide a brief sketch of, as an analogy with SP, is Moore's primitive moral factualism (without his supervenience thesis); see G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica [1903] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), §§6-10, 26
15. Boghossian, 'The Rule-Following Considerations', p. 541 makes a similar move to mental content, though not in the explicit context of defending Essential SP
16. See T. Burge, 'Individualism and the Mental', in P. French, T. Uehling & H. Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 5: Studies in Metaphysics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979)
17. For this distinction see, e.g., D. Braddon-Mitchell & F. Jackson, The Philosophy of Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 65-74
18. See J. McDowell, 'Criteria, Defeasibility and Knowledge', in J. Dancy (ed.), Perceptual Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 211
19. For object-dependence in general see G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982)
20. I believe this argument really shows that object-dependence is really a poor candidate for being a response even to the original Kripke-Wittgenstein problems (as I think Evans anticipates, see Varieties of Reference, p. 106)
21. See N. Block, 'Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology', in P. French, T. Uehling, H. Wettstein, (eds.) Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 10: Studies in the Philosophy of Mind, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)
22. J. Fodor and E. Lepore, Holism, A Shopper's Guide (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 163-187
23. G. Harman, 'Meaning Holism Defended', in J. Fodor and E. Lepore (eds.), Holism: A Consumer Update, Grazer Philosophischen Studien, 46 (1993), p. 168
24. and P. Boghossian 'Does an Inferential Role Semantics Rest Upon a Mistake?', Mind and Language, 8 (1993). Notice that 'two-factor' CRS, and 'long-armed' CRS both acknowledge Twin-Earth cases and thus will not be compatible with essential SP
25. As I think Boghossian also indicates, in 'Analyticity', in C. Wright & B. Hale (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 353
26. Perhaps this is more in accordance with Boghossian, see 'The Rule-Following Considerations', p. 549
27. j;, then x and y in those worlds are M-indiscernible. Global supervenience: any two P-indiscernible possible worlds are M-indiscernible. See J. Kim, Mind and Supervenience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 154ff
28. Also J. Kim 'Supervenience', in S. Guttenplan (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 579-80
29. For global supervenience see J. Kim, Mind and Supervenience, pp. 82-90, 154-55, 276-78
30. See Kim, Mind and Supervenience, ibid
31. I think J. Van Cleve, 'Semantic Supervenience and Referential Indeterminacy', Journal of Philosophy, 89 (1992), p. 361
32. The debate about non-reductive supervenience is far from closed, see, e.g., E. Lepore and B. Loewer 'Mind Matters', Journal of Philosophy, 84 (1987)
33. and their 'More on Making Mind Matter', Philosophical Topics, 19 (1989)
34. But see also B. Leiter and A. Miller, 'Mind Doesn't Matter Yet', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 72 (1994)
35. J. Kazez, 'Can Counterfactuals Save Mental Causation?', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 73 (1995)
36. and especially J. Kim 'Explanatory Exclusion and the Problem of Mental Causation', in C. Macdonald & G. Macdonald (eds.), Philosophy of Psychology, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) who gives, I think, many arguments that support my general line. Lepore and Loewer, in 'Mind Matters' and 'More on Making Mind Matter', suggest a global supervenience thesis such that mental causation is weak, i.e. underwritten by counterfactuals, not strict laws. Kim notes that if strong causation entails weak causation, then we have overdetermination, and if strong causation does not entail weak causation then we violate the closure of the physical
37. My own general view is that mental causation is best dealt with by a functionalist approach, e.g., in terms of Jackson and Pettit's notion of programme causation, see F. Jackson and P. Pettit, 'Functionalism and Broad Content', Mind, 97 (1988). But note that this notion is compatible with reduction