Intuitions about Disagreement Do Not Support the Normativity of Meaning

Abstract

This is the penultimate draft of a paper forthcoming in dialectica. Please quote and cite the published version. Allan Gibbard (2012) argues that the term 'meaning' expresses a normative concept, primarily on the basis of arguments that parallel Moore's famous Open Question Argument. This paper argues that Gibbard's evidence for normativity rests on idiosyncrasies of the Open Question Argument, and that when we use related thought experiments designed to bring out unusual semantic intuitions associated with normative terms we fail to find such evidence. These thought experiments, moreover, strongly suggest there are basic requirements for a theory of meaning incompatible with Gibbard's ultimate goal of providing an expressivist account of meaning-related concepts. The paper concludes by considering a possible way in which meaning could be normative, consistent with the intuitions about disagreement; but this form of normativism about meaning appears incompatible with Gibbard's expressivism. ABSTRACT

On Gibbard’s Defence of the Dispositional Theory of Meaning

“…It should be noted that the normativity of meaning, according to Gibbard, is a feature of the concept of meaning, but meaning naturalism is a feature of the property of meaning. For a good detailed discussion of Gibbard’s treatment of normativity, see Baker (2016).…”