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Summary

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.

Key works Wittgenstein famously suggested that meaningfulness is to be thought of in terms of rules in his Philosophical Remarks, and Philosophical Investigations. Similar suggestions were made in the inferentialist vein in Sellars 1950 and Sellars 1954 and later developed in Brandom 1994. Current discussion takes off in large part from Boghossian 1989 which suggested that representational correctness is normative. Anti-normativist views to the effect that it is not have been defended by Wikforss 2001Boghossian 2003Hattiangadi 2006, and Glüer & Wikforss 2009. Normativist defenses include Whiting 2007, Whiting 2009, and Wedgwood 2007. In contrast, there are also views which understand linguistic meaning in terms of rules of use and take it to be normative. For example, Stenius 1967 ties rules with semantic mood Searle 1969 and Alston 1999 tie them with speech acts and Reiland 2023 with linguistic meaning in general. These are views which focus on linguistic correctness and take it to entail normativity of meaning. Davidsonian individualist criticisms of this perspective include Davidson 1984 Davidson 1986 Bilgrami 1993 Wikforss 2001. Defenses include Millar 2002, and Reiland 2023.
Introductions Greenberg 2005, Glüer et al 2022
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  1. Temporal externalism, Normativity and Use.Henry Jackman - manuscript
    Our ascriptions of content to utterances in the past attribute to them a level of determinacy that extends beyond what could supervene upon the usage up to the time of those utterances. If one accepts the truth of such ascriptions, one can either (1) argue that subsequent use must be added to the supervenience base that determines the meaning of a term at a time, or (2) argue that such cases show that meaning does not supervene upon use at all. (...)
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  2. The meaning of ‘reasonable’: Evidence from a corpus-linguistic study.Lucien Baumgartner & Markus Kneer - forthcoming - In Kevin P. Tobia (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence. Cambridge University Press.
    The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently deter- mined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople’s understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study based on supervised machine learning models, we investigate whether laypeople use the expression ‘reasonable’ mainly as a descriptive, an evaluative, or merely a value-associated term. We find that (...)
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  3. Blackburn’s Wittgenstein: The Quasi-Realist.Ali Hossein Khani - forthcoming - In Ali Hossein Khani & Gary N. Kemp (eds.), Wittgenstein and Other Philosophers (Volume I). London: Routledge.
  4. Kripke's Wittgenstein: The Meaning Sceptic.Ali Hossein Khani - forthcoming - In Ali Hossein Khani & Gary N. Kemp (eds.), Wittgenstein and Other Philosophers (Volume I). Routledge.
  5. Regulative Rules: A Distinctive Normative Kind.Reiland Indrek - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    What are rules? In this paper I develop a view of regulative rules which takes them to be a distinctive normative kind occupying a middle ground between orders and normative truths. The paradigmatic cases of regulative rules that I’m interested in are social rules like rules of etiquette and legal rules like traffic rules. On the view I’ll propose, a rule is a general normative content that is in force due to human activity: enactment by an authority or acceptance by (...)
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  6. What Does Intentional Normativism Require?Daniel Laurier - forthcoming - Philosophical Explorations.
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  7. Rule-Following I: The Basic Issues.Indrek Reiland - 2024 - Philosophy Compass 19 (1):e12900.
    ‘Rule-following’ is a name for a cluster of phenomena where we seem both guided and “normatively” constrained by something general in performing particular actions. Understanding the phenomenon is important because of its connection to meaning, representation, and content. This article gives an overview of the philosophical discussion of rule-following with emphasis on Kripke’s skeptical paradox and recent work on possible solutions. Part I of this two-part contribution is devoted to the basic issues from Wittgenstein to Kripke. Part II will be (...)
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  8. Naturalism without a subject: Huw Price's pragmatism.Brandon Beasley - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (10):1793-1820.
    Huw Price has developed versions of naturalism and anti-representationalism to create a distinctive brand of pragmatism. ‘Subject naturalism’ focuses on what science says about human beings and the function of our linguistic practices, as opposed to orthodox contemporary naturalism’s privileging of the ontology of the natural sciences. Price’s anti-representationalism rejects the view that what makes utterances contentful is their representing reality. Together, they are to help us avoid metaphysical ‘placement problems’: how e.g. mind, meaning, and morality fit into the natural (...)
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  9. Single-minded animals sharing intentionality and norms: Preston Stovall: The single-minded animal: shared intentionality, normativity, and the foundations of discursive cognition. New York: Routledge, 2022, 398 pp, $136.00 HB, $42.36 PB. [REVIEW]Brandon Beasley - 2023 - Metascience 32 (3):437-440.
  10. What Could and What Should Be Said? On Semantic Correctness and Semantic Prescriptions.Aleksi Honkasalo - 2023 - In Essays in the Philosophy of Language (Acta Philosophica Fennica vol. 100). Helsinki: Hansaprint oy. pp. 317-342.
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  11. Taming Holism: an Inferentialist Account of Communication.Haruka Iikawa - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (4):593-612.
    Robert Brandom’s inferentialism notoriously entails meaning holism, which has often been seen as unacceptable because it seems to make communication impossible. This paper aims to improve Brandom’s conception of communication as “navigation-across-perspectives” to reconcile meaning holism and the possibility of communication. The conception proposed here entails keeping track of speakers’ own and the other’s scores of commitments and entitlements. I argue that the whole of commonly endorsed inferences in each practice should determine the contents of utterances and those of the (...)
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  12. Wittgenstein's Non-non-cognitivism.Carlo Penco & Maria Silvia Vaccarezza - 2023 - In Roberta Dreon (ed.), SENZA TRAMPOLI Saggi filosofici per Luigi Perissinotto. Italy: Mimesis. pp. 1-8.
    In this paper, we present one of the main starting points of naturalism in ethics: Geach’s challenge against non-cognitivism. We try to find an answer to Geach’s challenge in the notion of family resemblance applied to ethics. In doing so we recover a not much-discussed influence of Moore on Wittgenstein’s conception of family resemblance, which leads us to define Wittgenstein as non-non-cognitivist in ethics. -/- Pre print (some changes in the published edition).
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  13. Linguistic Mistakes.Indrek Reiland - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (5):2191-2206.
    Ever since the publication of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, there’s been a raging debate in philosophy of language over whether meaning and thought are, in some sense, normative. Most participants in the normativity wars seem to agree that some uses of meaningful expressions are semantically correct while disagreeing over whether this entails anything normative. But what is it to say that a use of an expression is semantically correct? On the so-called orthodox construal, it is to say (...)
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  14. Rules of Use.Indrek Reiland - 2023 - Mind and Language 38 (2):566-583.
    In the middle of the 20th century, it was a common Wittgenstein-inspired idea in philosophy that for a linguistic expression to have a meaning is for it to be governed by a rule of use. In other words, it was widely believed that meanings are to be identified with use-conditions. However, as things stand, this idea is widely taken to be vague and mysterious, inconsistent with “truth-conditional semantics”, and subject to the Frege-Geach problem. In this paper I reinvigorate the ideas (...)
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  15. Normativity of Meaning: An Inferentialist Argument.Shuhei Shimamura & Tuomo Tiisala - 2023 - Synthese (4):1-21.
    This paper presents a new argument to defend the normativity of meaning, specifically the thesis that there are no meanings without norms. The argument starts from the observation inferentialists have emphasized that incompatibility relations between sentences are a necessary part of meaning as it is understood. We motivate this approach by showing that the standard normativist strategy in the literature, which is developed in terms of veridical reference that may swing free from the speaker’s understanding, violates the ought-implies-can principle, but (...)
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  16. Normativity and the Methodology of 4E Cognition: Taking Stock and Going Forward.Pierre Steiner - 2023 - In Mark-Oliver Casper & Giuseppe Flavio Artese (eds.), Situated Cognition Research: Methodological Foundations. Springer Verlag. pp. 103-126.
    In this chapter, I pursue two aims. Firstly, I propose an original survey and analysis of the way proponents of 4E cognition have until now defined the relations between normativity and cognitive science. A first distinction is made between making normativity an explanandum of 4E cognitive science, and turning normativity into a property or part of the explanantia of 4E cognitive science. Inside of the latter option, one must distinguish between methodological, ontological and semantic claims on the value of normativity (...)
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  17. Blind Rule-Following and the Regress of Motivations.Zachary Mitchell Swindlehurst - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 66 (6):1170-1183.
    Normativists about belief hold that belief formation is essentially rule- or norm-guided. On this view, certain norms are constitutive of or essential to belief in such a way that no mental state not guided by those norms counts as a belief, properly construed. In recent influential work, Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss develop novel arguments against normativism. According to their regress of motivations argument, not all belief formation can be rule- or norm-guided, on pain of a vicious infinite regress. I (...)
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  18. Torn Between the Contours of Logic: Exploring Logical Normativity in Islamic Philosophical Theology.Abbas Ahsan & Marzuqa Karima - 2022 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 18 (2):(SI10)5-41.
    Western contemporary logic has been used to advance the field of Islamic philosophical theology, which historically utilised Aristotelian-Avicennian logic, on grounds of there being an inherent normativity in logic. This is in spite of the surrounding controversy on the status of logic in the Islamic theological tradition. The normative authority of logic means that it influences the content of what we ought to believe and how we ought to revise those beliefs. This paper seeks to demonstrate that, notwithstanding the incompatible (...)
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  19. Going on as one ought: Kripke and Wittgenstein on the normativity of meaning.Hannah Ginsborg - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (5):876-892.
    Kripke’s thesis that meaning is normative is typically interpreted, following Boghossian, as the thesis that meaningful expressions allow of true or warranted use. I argue for an alternative interpretation centered on Wittgenstein’s conception of the normativity involved in “knowing how to go on” in one’s use of an expression. Meaning is normative for Kripke because it justifies claims, not to be saying something true, but to be going on as one ought from prevous uses of the expression. I argue that (...)
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  20. The normativity of meaning and content.Kathrin Glüer, Asa Wikforss & Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Normativism in the theory of meaning and content is the view that linguistic meaning and/or intentional content are essentially normative. As both normativity and its essentiality to meaning/content can be interpreted in a number of different ways, there is now a whole family of views laying claim to the slogan “meaning/content is normative”. In this essay, we discuss a number of central normativist theses, and we begin by identifying different versions of meaning normativism, presenting the arguments that have been put (...)
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  21. Yet another victim of Kripkenstein’s monster: dispositions, meaning, and privilege.Andrea Guardo - 2022 - Ergo 8 (55):857-882.
    In metasemantics, semantic dispositionalism is the view that what makes it the case that, given the value of the relevant parameters, a certain linguistic expression refers to what it does are the speakers’ dispositions. In the literature, there is something like a consensus that the fate of dispositionalism hinges on the status of three arguments, first put forward by Saul Kripke ‒ or at least usually ascribed to him. This paper discusses a different, and strangely neglected, anti-dispositionalist argument, which develops (...)
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  22. Teleo-Inferentialism.Ulf Hlobil - 2022 - Philosophiocal Topics 50 (1):185-211.
    The paper presents teleo-inferentialism, which is a novel meta-semantic theory that combines advantages of teleosemantics and normative inferentialism. Like normative inferentialism, teleo-inferentialism holds that contents are individuated by the norms that govern inferences in which they occur. This allows teleo-inferentialism to account for sophisticated concepts. Like teleosemantics, teleo-inferentialism explains conceptual norms in a naturalistically acceptable way by appeal to the broadly biological well-functioning of our innate capacities. As a test-case for teleo-inferentialism, I discuss how the view handles Kripkenstein-style meaning skepticism.
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  23. Is semantic correctness descriptive?Aleksi Honkasalo - 2022 - Theoria 88 (5):899-907.
    According to the normativists, dispositionalist theories of meaning fail because meaning is normative, not descriptive. One way to understand this notion of normativity is in terms of semantic correctness conditions. Anti-normativists typically accept that meaning implies semantic correctness but deny that this in turn implies that meaning is normative. Jeffrey Kaplan has recently argued that while semantic correctness may not imply full-blown normativity, semantic correctness is not descriptive either. I contend that Kaplan's argument has two main problems. First, his focus (...)
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  24. Kripke’s Wittgenstein.Ali Hossein Khani - 2022 - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP).
    Saul Kripke, in his celebrated book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), offers a novel reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s main remarks in his later works, especially in Philosophical Investigations (1953) and, to some extent, in Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956). Kripke presents Wittgenstein as proposing a skeptical argument against a certain conception of meaning and linguistic understanding, as well as a skeptical solution to such a problem. Many philosophers have called this interpretation of Wittgenstein Kripke’s Wittgenstein or (...)
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  25. Rule-Following and Intentionality.Alexander Miller & Olivia Sultanescu - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  26. Husserl on Significance at the Core of Meaning.Jacob Rump - 2022 - Husserl Studies 38 (3):227-250.
    I reconstruct the notion of significance [_Sinnhaftigkeit_] in the later Husserl, with attention to his conceptions of judgment and transcendental logic. My analysis is motivated by the idea that an account of significance can help to connect analytic, Anglo-American conceptions of meaning as a precise, law-governed phenomenon investigated via linguistic analysis and Continental European conceptions of meaning in a broader “existential” sense. I argue that Husserl’s later work points to a transcendental-logical conception of a founding level of _significance_ [_Sinnhaftigkeit_] prior (...)
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  27. Meaning, Rationality, and Guidance.Olivia Sultanescu - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1):227-247.
    In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke articulates a form of scepticism about meaning. Even though there is considerable disagreement among critics about the reasoning in which the sceptic engages, there is little doubt that he seeks to offer constraints for an adequate account of the facts that constitute the meaningfulness of expressions. Many of the sceptic's remarks concern the nature of the guidance involved in a speaker's meaningful uses of expressions. I propose that we understand those remarks (...)
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  28. Brandom and A Spirit of Trust.Willem A. deVries - 2021 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (2):236-250.
    For years, Robert B. Brandom has been working on a book on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Earlier versions of its chapters were available for scrutiny at Brandom’s website. But the book itself is...
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  29. Interlocking content and attitude: a reply to the anti-normativist.Javier González de Prado & Víctor M. Verdejo - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (10):1051-1072.
    ABSTRACT Anti-normativists have advanced the view that the involvement of content in norms is not an essential feature of content, but a contingent feature or side effect of the normativity governing attitudes. In this paper, we argue that, in its original formulation, this view puts too much weight on the idea that belief is the fundamental, and perhaps the only, source of content-involving normativity. In its more refined formulation, however, the view does not make justice to a neutral and encompassing (...)
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  30. Rules of Belief and the Normativity of Intentional Content.Derek Green - 2021 - Acta Analytica 36 (2):159-69.
    Mental content normativists hold that the mind’s conceptual contents are essentially normative. Many hold the view because they think that facts of the form “subject S possesses concept c” imply that S is enjoined by rules concerning the application of c in theoretical judgments. Some opponents independently raise an intuitive objection: even if there are such rules, S’s possession of the concept is not the source of the enjoinment. Hence, these rules do not support mental content normativism. Call this the (...)
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  31. Still committed to the normativity of folk psychology.Alireza Kazemi - 2021 - Philosophical Explorations 25 (1):58-74.
    ABSTRACT In what sense can one claim that intentional explanations are essentially normative, given that people’s actions and thinking are replete with various irrationalities, yet are still pretty well explained by this explanatory framework? This article provides a novel response to this enduring objection. First, following Brandom, it is suggested that, to understand the normativity of intentional states, we should countenance and distinguish between two normative categories of commitment and entitlement, only the former of which is argued to be essential (...)
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  32. Concepts, Normativity, and Self-Knowledge. On Ginsborg's Conception of Primitive Normativity.David Lauer - 2021 - In Christoph Demmerling & Dirk Schröder (eds.), Concepts in Thought, Action, and Perception. London, New York: Routledge. pp. 117-138.
    In a series of intriguing and far-reaching papers, Hannah Ginsborg introduced the notion of “primitive normativity” as the cornerstone of a novel account of the normativity of concepts, thought, and meaning. Her account is supposed to steer a middle course between what she regards as the two horns of a dilemma first laid out by Saul Kripke in his seminal reading of Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following. I propose to investigate Ginsborg’s conception. I begin by establishing the conceptual relations between the (...)
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  33. The Austerity Framework and semantic normativity.Mark Pinder - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (1-2):123-141.
    According to Herman Cappelen’s Austerity Framework, conceptual engineering doesn’t involve concepts, and barely involves engineering. I begin by raising two objections to the Austerity Framework as it stands: the framework cannot account for important normative aspects of conceptual engineering; and it doesn’t give us an adequate response to Strawson-style objections that conceptual engineering serves only to change the subject. I then supplement the Austerity Framework with an account of semantic normativity, which builds on the speaker/semantic meaning distinction, and show that (...)
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  34. Husserlian Phenomenology, Rule-following, and Primitive Normativity.Jacob Rump - 2021 - In Chad Engelland (ed.), Language and Phenomenology. Routledge. pp. 74-91.
    The paper presents a phenomenological approach to recent debates in the philosophy of language about rule-following and the normativity of meaning, a debate that can be traced to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations but that was given new life with Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Taking a cue from Hannah Ginsborg’s recent work on “primitive normativity,” I use some of Husserl’s own comments about meaning and the status of rules to sketch a solution to Kripke’s rule-following paradox by (...)
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  35. Meaning Scepticism and Primitive Normativity.Olivia Sultanescu - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 102 (2):357-376.
    This paper examines Hannah Ginsborg's attempt to address the challenge raised by Saul Kripke's meaning sceptic. I start by identifying the two constraints that the sceptic claims must be met by a satisfactory answer. Then I try to show that Ginsborg's proposal faces a dilemma. In the first instance, I argue that it is able to meet the second constraint, but not the first. I then amend the proposal in order to make room for the first constraint. I go on (...)
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  36. Logical Expressivism and Pluralism.Giacomo Turbanti - 2021 - In Giacomo Turbanti & Luca Bellotti (eds.), Fourth Pisa Colloquium in Logic, Language and Epistemology. Pisa: ETS. pp. 183-202.
    This paper explores some of the assumptions orienting the debate about logical pluralism. I argue that these assumptions are grounded in the truth-conditional character of the semantic metavocabularies in which the debate is conducted. Then, I suggest an expressivist strategy to reinterpret the pluralist claim that there are different logics and I show how the expressive role of logical vocabularies can be equally well characterized by means of different expressive resources not involving the notion of truth.
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  37. Two epistemological arguments against two semantic dispositionalisms.Andrea Guardo - 2020 - Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts 1 (1):13-25.
    Even though he is not very explicit about it, in “Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language” Kripke discusses two different, albeit related, skeptical theses ‒ the first one in the philosophy of mind, the second one in the philosophy of language. Usually, what Kripke says about one thesis can be easily applied to the other one, too; however, things are not always that simple. In this paper, I discuss the case of the so-called “Normativity Argument” against semantic dispositionalism (which I (...)
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  38. The problem with descriptive correctness.Jeffrey Kaplan - 2020 - Ratio 33 (2):79-86.
    In the 1980s and early 1990s, the normativity of meaning was thought to be more-or-less 'incontestable.' But in the last 25 years, many philosophers of mind and language have contested it in several seemingly different ways. This, however, is somewhat illusory. There is an unappreciated commonality among most anti-normativist arguments, and this commonality, I argue, poses a problem for anti-normativism. The result, however, is not a wholesale rejection of anti-normativism. Rather, an insight from the anti-normativist position can be harnessed to (...)
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  39. Propositional Attitudes as Commitments: Unleashing Some Constraints.Alireza Kazemi - 2020 - Dialogue 59 (3):437-457.
    ABSTRACTIn a series of articles, Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen and Nick Zangwill argue that, since propositional attitude ascription judgements do not behave like normative judgements in being subject to a priori normative supervenience and the Because Constraint, PAs cannot be constitutively normative.1 I argue that, for a specific version of normativism, according to which PAs are normative commitments, these arguments fail. To this end, I argue that commitments and obligations should be distinguished. Then, I show that the intuitions allegedly governing all normative (...)
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  40. On Being Bound to Linguistic Norms. Reply to Reinikainen and Kaluziński.Matthias Kiesselbach - 2020 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28 (4):1-14.
    The question whether a constitutive linguistic norm can be prescriptive is central to the debate on the normativity of meaning. Recently, the author has attempted to defend an affirmative answer, pointing to how speakers sporadically invoke constitutive linguistic norms in the service of linguistic calibration. Such invocations are clearly prescriptive. However, they are only appropriate if the invoked norms are applicable to the addressed speaker. But that can only be the case if the speaker herself generally accepts them. This qualification (...)
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  41. Logical Form and the Limits of Thought.Manish Oza - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Toronto
    What is the relation of logic to thinking? My dissertation offers a new argument for the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking in the following sense: representational activity counts as thinking only if it manifests sensitivity to logical rules. In short, thinking has to be minimally logical. An account of thinking has to allow for our freedom to question or revise our commitments – even seemingly obvious conceptual connections – without loss of understanding. This freedom, I argue, requires that (...)
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  42. The value of thinking and the normativity of logic.Manish Oza - 2020 - Philosophers' Imprint 20 (25):1-23.
    (1) This paper is about how to build an account of the normativity of logic around the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking. I take the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking to mean that representational activity must tend to conform to logic to count as thinking. (2) I develop a natural line of thought about how to develop the constitutive position into an account of logical normativity by drawing on constitutivism in metaethics. (3) I argue that, while (...)
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  43. Revision, endorsement and the analysis of meaning.Paul-Mikhail Catapang Podosky & Kai Tanter - 2020 - Analysis 80 (4):693-704.
    Recently there has been much philosophical interest in the analysis of concepts to determine whether they should be removed, revised, or replaced. Enquiry of this kind is referred to as conceptual engineering or conceptual ethics. We will call it revisionary conceptual analysis (RCA). It standardly involves describing the meaning of a concept, evaluating whether it serves its purposes, and prescribing what it should mean. However, this stands in tension with prescriptivism, a metasemantic view which holds that all meaning claims are (...)
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  44. Implicit norms.Pietro Salis - 2020 - Phenomenology and Mind 17:56-68.
    Robert Brandom has developed an account of conceptual content as instituted by social practices. Such practices are understood as being implicitly normative. Brandom proposed the idea of implicit norms in order to meet some requirements imposed by Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following: escaping the regress of rules on the one hand, and avoiding mere regular behavior on the other. Anandi Hattiangadi has criticized this account as failing to meet such requirements. In what follows, I try to show how the correct understanding (...)
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  45. The Knowledge Norm of Belief.Zachary Mitchell Swindlehurst - 2020 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 9 (1):43-50.
    Doxastic normativism is the thesis that norms are constitutive of or essential to belief, such that no mental state not subject to those norms counts as a belief. A common normativist view is that belief is essentially governed by a norm of truth. According to Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi, truth norms for belief cannot be formulated without unpalatable consequences: they are either false or they impose unsatisfiable requirements on believers. I propose that we construe the fundamental norm of belief (...)
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  46. Unfollowed Rules and the Normativity of Content.Eric V. Tracy - 2020 - Analytic Philosophy 61 (4):323-344.
    Foundational theories of mental content seek to identify the conditions under which a mental representation expresses, in the mind of a particular thinker, a particular content. Normativists endorse the following general sort of foundational theory of mental content: A mental representation r expresses concept C for agent S just in case S ought to use r in conformity with some particular pattern of use associated with C. In response to Normativist theories of content, Kathrin Glüer-Pagin and Åsa Wikforss propose a (...)
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  47. Von Grund zu Grund. Zum Zusammenhang von Denken und Wissen bei Wilfrid Sellars.Anke Breunig - 2019 - Paderborn: mentis.
    Foundationalism about intentionality parallels foundationalism about epistemic justification. Reassessing Sellars’s attack on the Myth of the Given, the author argues that both views are inadequate, and for similar reasons. She explores the relation between meaning and knowledge, develops a new argument against the Given, and sketches how Sellars and Carnap perform the linguistic turn differently. -/- Wie ist Wissen begründet? Wie bezieht sich Geist auf die Welt? Nach der hier ausgearbeiteten neuen Interpretation von Wilfrid Sellars’ Kritik am „Mythos des Gegebenen“ (...)
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  48. Peter Olen: Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity. [REVIEW]Catherine Legg - 2019 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 7 (3).
    Commentary on Peter Olen's book "Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity", originally prepared for an 'Author Meets Critics' session organized by Carl Sachs for the Eastern Division Meeting of the APA in Savannah, Georgia, on 5th January, 2018.
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  49. Rule-Following, Meaning, and Primitive Normativity.Alexander Miller - 2019 - Mind 128 (511):735-760.
    This paper explores the prospects for using the notion of a primitive normative attitude in responding to the sceptical argument about meaning developed in chapter 2 of Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It takes as its stalking-horse the response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein developed in a recent series of important works by Hannah Ginsborg. The paper concludes that Ginsborg’s attempted solution fails for a number of reasons: it depends on an inadequate response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s ‘finitude’ objection to (...)
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  50. The Logical Structure of Human Behavior.Michael Starks (ed.) - 2019 - Las Vegas, NV USA: Reality Press.
    It is my contention that the table of intentionality (rationality, mind, thought, language, personality etc.) that features prominently here describes more or less accurately, or at least serves as an heuristic for, how we think and behave, and so it encompasses not merely philosophy and psychology, but everything else (history, literature, mathematics, politics etc.). Note especially that intentionality and rationality as I (along with Searle, Wittgenstein and others) view it, includes both conscious deliberative linguistic System 2 and unconscious automated prelinguistic (...)
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