The Meaning

[matthew...@gmail.com]

Here's an excerpt from my Brandom essay I wrote for Dr Cooper.
Comments welcome.


Brandom agrees with Quine’s critique of the analytic/synthetic
distinction. So he agrees that there is no such thing as the meaning
or the significance of a term. But in that case how can one be in a
position to judge that a given practice is pv-suff for some vocabulary
to have the significance that it has? How can one tell that one has
characterized enough of the use of the vocabulary to capture the
meaning if there’s no such thing as the meaning? It would seem that
the only answer to this question, the only way to be in a position to
make that judgment, that you have something that really is PV-suff, is
to have characterization of the entire practice with the vocabulary.
But as we know, the entire practice of the vocabulary (since there
will be sentences involving the vocabulary and/or any other bit of
vocabulary) means that you will need, in order to have something that
is PV-suff to describe the entire language. This undermines the idea
of any kind of bootstrapping, because the meanings of all the other
terms in the language have to be brought in to the characterization of
the practice which is sufficient for any piece of vocabulary.

One way of responding to this is to say that Brandom does not give a
general answer to the question of how one can tell whether something
is PV-suff or not. Instead, he presents different forms of arguments
for each particular case because the vocabularies cut across each
other in various ways that are not the same from case to case. In
general, there must be some semantic account of what those meanings
are that one is trying to capture. For example with indexical
vocabulary, we know what we are looking for is something that will
exhibit the essential features of indexicality that will be inter-
substitutable with indexicals in specifically modal and epistemic
contexts, because that is where we have found the core of indexicality
to be. But that is because we have a semantic account of the kind of
meaning we are trying to get at, and so now we can ask “would a
creature who was acting in a way describable in such and such a way,
would their term be inter-substitutable with an indexical in one of
these contexts? The answer then for normative vocabulary is going to
depend on what the essential features of normative vocabulary are.
Brandom would say that the essential features include being useable to
make explicit your commitment to various patterns of practical
inference and so on. Brandom simply does not offer a general answer to
the question of how to tell what the criteria of adequacy is for PV-
suff. Instead he argues that this must be decided on a case by case
basis by looking at the kind of vocabulary one is talking about, and
it is always going to be sensitive to how good a job one has done in
specifying the semantic criteria of adequacy that are the output
measure in that case.

The other point raised is that all the vocabularies that we can
actually talk about are going to be language fragments. That they are
only going to be vocabulary that is used in the context of lots of
other vocabulary, so how can we abstract out and say that we have a
set of practices here that are sufficient for using these bits of
vocabulary, for these locutions, depends on your being able to use all
the others? Here Brandom would argue that we can do a sort of
separation of variables. We have to assume all along that these are
language users and so that they can use some sort of autonomous
discursive practice and they can use some autonomous vocabulary that
this is just a fragment of. But we can look at different fragments of
it and help ourselves to the background abilities to use everything
that isn’t in the fragment that we have got here. Though the fragment
is not autonomous, often it will be the case that the autonomous
practice minus the fragment is something that we can actually
intelligibly describe someone as using. For instance we can
intelligibly describe creatures who use only non-logical expressions,
and who don’t have conditionals of negation in their language. So then
we can assume that we have got creatures that have all the abilities
to use the non-logical vocabulary that we have described, and what we
need to argue is that the additional abilities that we are throwing in
would be enough to transform their practical capacity to use the non-
logical vocabulary into the capacity to use the logical vocabulary. So
though this is clearly a problem, it is one that can be addressed at
least in the particular cases of the vocabularies Brandom claims to
have some results for; namely normative, modal, and intentional
vocabularies.