Normativity of Meaning and Content

The thesis that content and/or meaning are normative has been a subject of intense discussion since the publication of Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Generally it is granted on all sides that certain mental states like judgments or beliefs and certain uses of language are semantically correct or incorrect. An immediate dividing line between views consists in how to think of semantic correctness. On the first and most widespread construal to say that a mental state or a use is incorrect is just to say that it results in a factual mistake. We might call this representational correctness. This is plausibly true of both mental states and some meaningful uses of language (predications, sayings, assertions). However, several philosophers have argued that there's also distinctively linguistic sense of correctness which follows from the nature of linguistic meaning itself. On this construal to say that a use is incorrect is to say that it results in a linguistic mistake or misuse. This is not supposed to be true of mental states, but of all meaningful uses of language (even uses of interrogatives, imperatives, 'Ouch!', 'Thank you!' etc.). Another dividing line, that between anti-normativists and normativists, consists in whether correctness in either sense entails normativity, in some sense. The anti-normativists deny this while the normativists affirm it. Earlier work on the precise sense of normativity involved was focused on whether semantic correctness is supposed to entail semantic musts or oughts or rather may's. The issue was partly thought to be important since normativity was taken to conflict with naturalism. Recently some philosophers have connected this debate to work in metanormative theory, arguing that we're dealing here with formal and not authoritative normativity, and hence claims to the effect that the putative must's or may's in play would conflict with naturalism are implausible. Note that if one accepts the distinction between representational and linguistic correctness then mixed stances become possible. For example, one could agree with anti-normativists that representational correctness doesn't entail normativity while insisting that linguistic correctness does, or vice versa.