Dorit Bar-On

Davidson’s well-known language skepticism—the claim that there is no such a thing as a language—has recognizably Gricean underpinnings, some of which also underlie his continuity skepticism—the claim that there can be no philosophically illuminating account of the emergence of language and thought. My first aim in this paper is to highlight aspects of the complicated relationship between central Davidsonian and Gricean ideas concerning language. After a brief review of Davidson’s two skeptical claims and their Gricean underpinnings, I provide my own take on how Davidson’s continuity skepticism can be resisted consistently with his rejection of the Gricean priority claim, yet without giving up some of Grice’s own insights regarding the origins of meaning

Here are some things that I know right now: that I’m feeling a bit hungry, that there’s a red cardinal on my bird feeder, that I’m sitting down, that I have a lot of grading to do today, that my daughter is mad at me, that I’ll be going for a run soon, that I’d like to go out to the movies tonight. As orthodoxy would have it, some among these represent things to which I have privileged epistemic access, namely: my present states of mind . I normally know these states directly, immediately, non-inferentially – I know them the way no one else can know them, and in a way I know nothing else. It’s the job of philosophers to tell us what the scope and source of this self-knowledge and to explain what renders it privileged

Philosophers are often interested in explaining significant contrasts between ordinary descriptive discourses, on the one hand, and discourses – such as ethics, mathematics, or mentalistic discourse – that are thought to be more problematic in various ways. But certain strategies for ‘saving the differences’ can make it too difficult to preserve notable similarities across discourses. My own preference is for strategies that ‘save the differences’ without sacrificing logico-semantic continuities or committing to deflationism about truth, but also without embracing either truth-pluralism or global expressivism.I motivate my preference by examining, as a test case, mentalistic discourse. I begin by reconstructing three philosophical puzzles that have led philosophers to think of mentalistic discourse as problematic (Section 2). These puzzles concern the semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical status of contrasts between first-person present-tense attributions – ‘avowals’ – and all other ordinary contingent attributions. I then briefly present my own,neo-expressiviststrategy for addressing the puzzles (Section 3). Unlike traditional ‘simple expressivism’ (which is the analogue in the mentalistic realm of ethical emotivism), neo-expressivism is not committed to avowals’ being non-truth-apt or having non-propositional meanings. And yet it does not require embracing either deflationism about truth or global expressivism. It preserves continuities between mentalistic and other discourses while allowing us to capture discontinuities. Moreover, it is possible to apply the neo-expressivist framework in other areas where the notion of expression is deemed explanatorily useful, as illustrated by consideringethical neo-expressivism(Section 4). In the final section (5), I make more general comments on truth and meaning and tease out some of the commitments of the approach I advocate.

Research on the evolution of language is often framed in terms of sharp discontinuities in syntax and semantics between animal communication systems and human language as we know them. According to the so-called “pragmatics-first” approach to the evolution of language, when trying to understand the origins of human language in animal communication, we should be focusing on potential pragmatic continuities. However, some proponents of this approach (e.g. Seyfarth and Cheney Animal Behavior 124: 339–346, 2017) find important pragmatic continuities, whereas others (e.g. Origgi and Sperber 2000) find sharp discontinuities. I begin (in Section 1) by arguing that this divergence is due to the fact that the proponents implicitly rely, respectively, on two different views of pragmatics, corresponding to different conceptions of what is involved in context-dependence – one “Carnapian”, the other “Gricean”. I argue that neither conception is fit to serve the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the evolution of language. In Section 2, I examine a recent formal “semantic-pragmatic” analysis of monkey calls, due to Philippe Schlenker et al. (in, e.g., Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (6): 439–501, 2014, Trends in Cognitive Science 20 (12): 894–904, 2016a, Theoretical Linguistics 42 (1–2): 1–90, 2016b), which appears to improve on the Carnapian and Gricean conceptions. However, I argue that the appearances are misleading and that the S-P analysis is no better suited than Carnapian analyses for the purposes of those seeking to establish human-nonhuman pragmatic continuities. Understanding why this is so will point the way toward my preferred, genuinely intermediate conception of pragmatics (as defended in Bar-On Biology & Philosophy 36 (6): 1–25, 2021), which – I argue in Section 3 – is better fit for these purposes. Drawing on recent discussions of chimpanzee communication, I briefly indicate which aspects of extant primate call communication – both gestural and vocal – could potentially count as pragmatic according to this conception.

‘There is no such thing as a language,’ Donald Davidson tells us. Though this is a startling claim in its own right, it seems especially puzzling coming from a leading theorizer about language. Over the years, Davidson’s important essays have sparked the hope that there is a route to a positive, nonskeptical theory of meaning for natural languages. This hope would seem to be dashed if there are no natural languages. Unless Davidson’s radical claim is a departure from his developed views, the Davidsonian program appears to have undermined itself.In a recent book, Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language: An Introduction, Bjorn Ramberg promises to establish that Davidson's startling claim is not an aberration. Rather, it 'emerges as a natural development of his theory of meaning'. He reads the claim that there is no such thing as a language as the claim that the concept of a language has no useful theoretical role. Like the concepts of meaning and reference, it is a 'ghost of reification' which Davidson attempts to 'exorcise' from our philosophical thinking about linguistic communication. All three concepts can be seen as mere ladders to be kicked away once the edifice of a Davidsonian theory of linguistic communication is properly erected on the sole foundation of the concept of truth. The result, he assures us, ‘is not a theory which undercuts itself, but a comprehensive, coherent account of the phenomenon of linguistic communication’.

Ordinarily, if a person produces a nonreflective, ‘unstudied’ self-attribution of a present mental state – an avowal – we do not presume that they have produced the avowal on some specific epistemic basis; and we do not expect them to know how they know the self-attribution to be true. This no-‘how’ character of basic self-knowledge is puzzling, given that we regard avowals as manifesting factual, and indeed privileged, knowledge. I am here interested in views that accommodate both the baseless, no-‘how’ and the factual, privileged character of basic self-knowledge. I argue that leading constitutivist views, which embrace both, fail properly to meet the doxastic (as opposed to justificatory) requirement on basic self-knowledge, thereby failing to preserve its genuinely factual character. I then argue that an alternative, neo-expressivist approach is better placed to meet the doxastic requirement, as well as being at least as well-placed as constitutivist views to address the justificatory requirement on baseless self-knowledge.

Here are some things that I know right now: that I’m feeling a bit hungry, that there’s a red cardinal on my bird feeder, that I’m sitting down, that I have a lot of grading to do today, that my daughter is mad at me, that I’ll be going for a run soon, that I’d like to go out to the movies tonight. As orthodoxy would have it, some among these represent things to which I have privileged epistemic access, namely: my present states of mind. I normally know these states directly, immediately, non-inferentially – I know them the way no one else can know them, and in a way I know nothing else. It’s the job of philosophers to tell us scope and source of this selfknowledge and to explain what renders it privileged.

As I am sitting at my desk in front of my computer, a thought crosses my mind: There's water in the glass. The thought has a particular content: that there is water in the glass. And, if all is well, there is water in the glass, so my thought is true. According to external-world skepticism, I still do not know that there is water in the glass, because my way of telling what's in front of me does not allow me to rule out the possibility that I’m only under some kind of illusion about what's in front of me. Analogously, according to content skepticism, I cannot know that I am thinking that there is water in my glass, even if in fact that is what I am thinking. This is because for all I know, my way of telling what I am thinking does not allow me to rule out the possibility that I am only under some kind of illusion about what I am thinking.

Suppose, familiarly, that you and a friend have landed in an alien territory, amidst people who speak a language you do not know. Upon seeing you, one of them starts yelling, seemingly alarmed. You say to your friend, “She thinks we want to hurt her. She's scared. We must seem very strange to her.” Your friend, who is facing you, says, “No, I think she's actually trying to warn you: there's a snake right above your head, on that tree. You see the sling in her hand? I think she's going to try to shoot it down.“On a prevalent view, much discussed in recent years, you and your friend have engaged in a mini-theoretical enterprise. Using certain observations of the alien's behaviour as your data, and deploying certain generalizations and principles concerning human behaviour, you advance hypotheses regarding the internal psychological states which issued in her observed behaviour.

Expressivism, broadly construed, is the view that the function of utterances in a given area of discourse is to give expression to our sentiments or other (non-cognitive) mental states or attitudes, rather than report or describe some range of facts. This view naturally seems an attractive option wherever it is suspected that there may not be a domain of facts for the given discourse to be describing. Familiarly, to avoid commitment to ethical facts, the ethical expressivist suggests that ethical utterances (e.g., “Gratuitous torture is wrong”, “What John did was morally good”) do not serve to ascribe ethical properties to objects, actions, persons, or states of affairs. Instead, they simply function to give voice to certain of our sentiments (or ‘pro/con’ attitudes). Along similar lines, philosophers have entertained versions of expressivism about the aesthetic, the modal, the mental, what is funny, even about theoretical science and knowledge ascriptions.

i. Introduction: Naturaiizing Semantics It seems as though everyone these days is in the business of ‘naituraIizing': apistamologists, philosophers of mind and language, even moral phi- `lcscpheers and philosophers of mathematics. Quine is cften cited as the one who started Et, but expressions of the naturalizing urge can no doubt be found much earlier in the history of phiioscphy. Lccsaly speaking, the- naturalizing urge is the desire to fashion human epistemic achievements in particular arcs after the achievements of the natural sciences. Naturalists believe that..

So-called basic self-knowledge (ordinary knowledge of one's present states of mind) can be seen as both 'baseless' and privileged. The spontaneous self-beliefs we have when we avow our states of mind do not appear to be formed on any particular epistemic basis (whether intro-or extro-spective). Nonetheless, on some views, these self-beliefs constitute instances of (privileged) knowledge. We are here interested in views on which true mental self-beliefs have internalist epistemic warrant that false ones lack. Such views are committed to a form of disjunctivism about basic self-knowledge. We begin by presenting an influential disjunctivist view about perceptual knowledge (Pritchard 2008, 2012, and elsewhere) and articulate a problem for it. We then consider two versions of disjunctivism about basic self-knowledge – one 'constitutivist', the other 'neo-expressivist' – and argue that both can avoid an analogue of this problem for self-knowledge. However, we give reasons for preferring the disjunctivism yielded by neo-expressivism. We conclude by considering briefly whether an acceptable disjunctivism about mental self-beliefs can point the way toward a sensible disjunctivism about perceptual beliefs.