Aleksi Honkasalo

Many philosophers contend that meaning is essentially normative and that explaining this normativity is a central challenge for theories of meaning. From the 1990s onwards, this claim, which used to be taken as self-evident, has become increasingly controversial. Although the claim still has advocates, the debate has shown that how the claim should be understood remains unclear. The four articles in this dissertation critically examine the various ways of interpreting the normativity of meaning. (Note that since the fourth article had not been published at the time of the publication of this dissertation, it was only included in the print version of the dissertation)

Professor Panu Raatikainen’s academic work in philosophy ranges from the philosophy of mind and language to truth and science, logic and mathematics. His signature contribution in any area is bringing argumentative transparency to foggy and complex debates. This edited volume brings together leading philosophers who have encountered Panu Raatikainen in various academic occasions, as well as past and present colleagues. It celebrates Raatikainen’s 60th birthday with a mosaic of papers discussing various topics handpicked from his long and prosperous career. The articles engage in critical, constructive dialogue with Raatikainen’s key ideas and arguments focusing on three central topics in analytic philosophy: the nature of reality in which we live, the nature of truth of claims or thoughts about reality, and the nature of language expressing these thoughts and referring to reality. The volume also contains novel philosophical reflection on the nature of philosophy itself.

This paper critically examines the idea that language use is governed by semantic rules. In the literature, two competing rules have been proposed: the truth rule and the rule of use. The truth rule requires speakers to always use expressions truthfully, while the rule of use requires speakers to use expressions in accordance with meaning. The rule of use has been claimed to be better at making justice to the intuitions on linguistic mistakes, but it is unclear how these rules of use should be formulated. By focusing on a recent suggestion by Indrek Reiland, I assess various candidates for rules of use and show that even these fail to accord with the intuitive notion of linguistic mistakes. I propose that linguistic mistakes should be understood in terms of what I call expressions’ linguistic function. However, this implies that only rules that can capture this notion of linguistic mistakes rely on speakers’ intentions and therefore should be taken as instances of the general relationship between means and ends rather than being intrinsic to meaning.

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 on dispositionalism leaves it open for other descriptive facts to provide the basis of semantic correctness conditions. Second, he fails to show that the problems of dispositionalism are connected to semantic correctness in a way that demonstrates problems with descriptive theories of meaning.