Paul Horwich

It is not uncommon for philosophers to maintain that one is obliged to believe nothing beyond the observable consequences of a successful scientific theory. This doctrine is variously known as instrumentalism, fictionalism, constructive empiricism, theoretical skepticism and the philosophy of "as if". The purpose of the present paper is to subject such forms of scientific antirealism to a two-pronged critique. In the first place it is argued that there is no genuine difference between believing a theory and being disposed to use it to make predictions, design experiments, and so on; so traditional instrumentalism is incoherent. In the second place, a retrenched position is considered in which theoretical belief would be tolerated but said to be justified on merely pragmatic, and not epistemic, grounds. In criticizing this point of view it is shown that the onus of proof rests on anyone who maintains it; furthermore, the only possible rationale for it (which is based on underdetermination of theory by data) is described, and various deficiencies in this argument are exposed.

It is often maintained that the normative aspects of language put a substantial constraint on our conceptions of meaning and truth—to the extent, some would say, of altogether precluding purely ’naturalistic’ or ’descriptive’ accounts of them. The purpose of this chapter is to establish that this is not so. It is not here denied that language is pervaded with normativity—with oughts and ought‐nots. But these phenomena are explained without supposing that truth and meaning are intrinsically normative notions. What is suggested, in other words, is that the evident normativity of language can give no reason to reject wholly non‐normative accounts of those notions—accounts such as the deflationary theory of truth and the use‐regularity theory of meaning.

Our beliefs and inferential transitions are subject to evaluation as rational or irrational by reference to general epistemic norms. But what could determine certain norms as the correct ones? This chapter explores and opposes the answer that certain patterns of belief formation are justified by virtue of the fact that they constitute the relevant concepts or the meanings of the relevant words. This ‘semantogenetic’ proposal goes back to Hilbert, Poincare, and the logical positivists, and was recently defended by Boghossian, Peackocke, Hale, and Wright. Among the arguments developed against it are that although it might account for the epistemic legitimacy of certain beliefs, it cannot explain why certain commitments are epistemically obligatory; and that the practices that provide words with their meanings are ‘conditionalized’ and therefore do not coincide with the practices recommended by our epistemic norms.

It is proposed here that the meaning of each word, w, is constituted by its ‘basic acceptance property’—a property roughly of the form, ‘Our acceptance of such‐and‐such sentences containing w explains our overall use of it’. Seven arguments in favour of this idea are developed—the principal one being that what engenders the meaning of a word will be the property that explains the symptoms of that meaning, which are the word's various uses. Objections to this position are then considered, on the basis of considerations of indeterminacy, determination of reference, holism, pragmatics, propositions, ambiguity, synonymy, definition, individualism, externalism, and the relation between language and thought.

This chapter considers the phenomenon of meaning from the perspective of Chomsky’s ‘I-linguistics’ and his empirical postulation of the ‘language faculty’. After a sketch of that model, the question is raised as to how meaning should be incorporated within it. In accord with the use-theoretic perspective of this book, an answer is developed whereby the association of I-sounds with I-meanings is achieved by virtue of the conceptual roles of those I-sounds, i.e., their basic acceptance-properties. It is shown that this picture compares favourably with various alternatives, including those suggested by Fodor’s mentalese, Davidson’s view of compositionality, naturalizations of the reference relation, and by Chomsky-style explicitly-represented definitions.

This chapter criticizes the standard truth–theoretic model of implicit definition whereby we stipulate that a word is to have whatever meaning will make true a certain set of sentences containing it. The alternative model proposed here is that, in such cases, the word derives its meaning from our way of using it, from our regarding those sentences as true—and so it acquires that meaning even if they are not true. It is argued, on this basis, that there is no route from meanings, so constituted, to our a priori knowledge in logic, arithmetic, or geometry.

My answer will be ‘no’. And I’ll defend it by: distinguishing a concept’s having normative import from its being functionally normative; sketching a method for telling whether or not a concept is of the latter sort; responding to the antideflationist, Dummettian argument in favor of the conclusion that truth is functionally normative; proceeding to address a less familiar route to that conclusion—one that’s consistent with deflationism about truth, but that depends on the further assumption that meaning is intrinsically normative; and arguing that this further assumption is mistaken.

We begin by mentioning various important philosophical problems whose solutions call for an account of meaning: problems concerning the nature of truth, thought, justification, and philosophy. The chapter continues with a list of notorious puzzles about meaning that were highlighted by Frege, Brentano, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Dummett, Grice, Kaplan, Putnam, and Kripke. Then there is a summary of the main elements of the theory to be presented in the following chapters, which is designed to resolve these puzzles.

"Deflationism" has emerged as one of the most significant developments in contemporary philosophy. It is best known as a story about truth -- roughly, that the traditional search for its underlying nature is misconceived, since there can be no such thing. However, the scope of deflationism extends well beyond that particular topic. For, in the first place, such a view of truth substantially affects what we should say about neighboring concepts such as "reality," "meaning," and "rationality." And in the second place, the anti-theoretical meta-philosophy that lies behind that view -- the idea that philosophical problems are characteristically based on confusion and should therefore be dissolved rather than solved -- may fruitfully be applied throughout the subject, in epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of science, metaphysics, and so on. The essays reprinted here were written over the last twenty five years. They represent Paul Horwich's development of the deflationary perspective and demonstrate its considerable power and fertility. They concern a broad array of philosophical problems: the nature of truth, realism vs. anti-realism, the creation of meaning, epistemic rationality, the conceptual role of "ought," probabilistic models of scientific reasoning, the autonomy of art, the passage of time, and the trajectory of Wittgenstein's philosophy. They appear as originally published except for the correction of obvious mistakes, the interpolation of clarifying material, and the inclusion of new footnotes to indicate Horwich's subsequent directions of thought.