Olivia Sultanescu

Even though the principle of charity is often invoked in contemporary discussions in the philosophy of language and mind, it is rarely the primary topic of investigation. This special issue revisits questions about the nature, status, scope, and justification of the principle; furthermore, it explores how reflection on these questions helps address a wide range of topics. The contributions are divided into two broad themes. The first theme is an investigation of the grounds and limits of the role of the principle of charity in our engagements with others. What, if anything, makes it the case that understanding others requires counting them right in most matters? The second set of contributions concerns not the justification of the principle of charity but its consequences. The contributors explore how the principle might enable us to tackle further questions and make progress on other fronts, not only concerning language, mind, and knowledge, but also concerning reasons, actions, and values.

The concept of truth always had a special significance within Donald Davidson’s view of language and thought. For instance, Davidson always maintained that a basic requirement for understanding another individual is finding a great deal of truth in what she says and thinks. This captures his commitment to the principle of charity. What is the relationship between this principle and the constitutive claims about language and the triangulation argument advanced in later work? My primary aim in this paper is not to provide a detailed answer to this question but rather to show that the triangulation argument assigns to the concept of truth, which is at the core of the conception of charity, a new role within the Davidsonian system. While the principle of charity entails that it is in the nature of the thinking mind not only to seek the truth but also to succeed, at least to some extent, in this aspiration, the triangulation argument entails that a concern for what is true is a requirement for being on the path to thought. Only individuals who embody such a concern, that is, only individuals who have an antecedent disposition to seek the truth, can count as speakers and thinkers, for only such individuals can be motivated to engage in the activity of triangulation. A secondary aim of the paper is to show that this expanded Davidsonian conception provides an attractive alternative to a family of views according to which the anchoring of thought and language to the world is to be explained primarily in terms of the distinctive features of one’s natural capacities.

Jaroslav Peregrin’s project in Normative Species: How Naturalized Inferentialism Explains Us is to provide an account of the emergence of normativity. He takes the project to be essential for understanding the kind of creatures we are, namely, normative creatures whose lives are governed by rules. My focus in this response is on linguistic meaning, and on the kind of explanation of language that Peregrin puts forward. While I agree that meaning depends on the intersection of many cognitions, I have doubts about some aspects of Peregrin’s conception of this intersection.

This paper examines the meaningfulness of pointing in great apes. We appeal to Hannah Ginsborg’s conception of primitive normativity, which provides an adequate criterion for establishing whether a response is meaningful, and we attempt to make room for a conception according to which there is no fundamental difference between the responses of human infants and those of other great apes to pointing gestures. This conception is an alternative to Tomasello’s view that pointing gestures and reactions to them reveal a fundamental difference between humans and other apes.

In his treatment of the Wittgensteinian paradox about rule-following, Saul Kripke represents the non-reductionist approach, according to which meaning something by an expression is a sui generis state that cannot be elucidated in more basic terms, as brushing philosophical questions under the rug.  This representation of non-reductionism captures the way in which some of its proponents conceive of it.  Meaning is viewed by these philosophers as an explanatory primitive that provides the basic materials for philosophical inquiry, but whose nature cannot serve as an object for that inquiry.  There is, however, an alternative way of conceiving of non-reductionism, which makes it possible to tackle philosophical questions about the nature of meaning head-on.

This chapter addresses the question of what makes expressions meaningful according to the conception of meaning offered by Donald Davidson. It does so partly by examining Kathrin Glüer’s interpretation of this conception. I argue that Glüer misconstrues both the evidence for meaning that the radical interpreter must rely on and the way in which the principle of charity must be deployed. The articulation of the correct construal of the evidence and the principle reveals the thoroughly non-reductionist aspect of Davidson’s approach to meaning. This aspect becomes even clearer in his later work, through the articulation of the triangulation argument.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on rule-following—principally, sections 138–242 of Philosophical Investigations and section VI of Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics—raise a series of provoking questions and puzzles about the nature of language and thought. The literature on this topic is vast. We’ll structure our discussion around Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), the most widely discussed commentary on Wittgenstein on rule-following. In this book, Kripke’s Wittgenstein famously develops a “sceptical challenge” to the idea that that there are facts about the meanings of linguistic expressions and contents of thoughts, and goes on to propose a “sceptical solution” to the challenge, which attempts to preserve the propriety of talk of meaning and content while conceding to the sceptic the non-existence of the kind of semantic or intentional facts on which she casts doubt. After some preliminary comments about rules, meaning, and content (§1), we’ll outline the sceptical argument (§2), and we’ll offer an overview of some of the main responses to it. First, we’ll discuss sceptical responses of the sort proposed by Kripke’s Wittgenstein himself (§3). Then, we’ll consider straight responses, which advance candidate meaning-constituting facts. We’ll examine in detail the two forms of straight solution that are most widely discussed in the secondary literature, reductive dispositionalism (§4) and non-reductionism (§5).

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 as seeking to give shape to the idea that to use an expression under the guidance of one's understanding is to have a reason for that use, which one's understanding allows one to discern and act on. Any philosophical elucidation of meaning must adequately capture the rational nature of our linguistic acts.

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 to argue that, under this new interpretation, it cannot meet the second constraint.

In Donald Davidson's Triangulation Argument: A Philosophical Inquiry, Robert H. Myers and Claudine Verheggen spell out, and extensively build on, the triangulation argument advanced by Donald Davidson. This paper is an introduction to a symposium devoted to their development of that argument. The symposium began in 2018 as an authors-meet-critics session at the Canadian Philosophical Association Annual Congress, and consists in the responses of three critics, Kirk Ludwig, Alexander Miller, and Paul Hurley, followed by Verheggen's and Myers's replies. I offer a brief sketch of each of the two parts of the book, and an overview of the questions raised by the critics.

Dans Donald Davidson's Triangulation Argument: A Philosophical Inquiry, Robert H. Myers et Claudine Verheggen offrent une élucidation ainsi qu'une édification de l'argument de la triangulation avancé par Donald Davidson. Cet article est une introduction à un symposium consacré à leur développement de cet argument. Le symposium a débuté en 2018 en tant que table ronde réunissant les auteurs et des critiques lors du congrès annuel de l'Association canadienne de philosophie, et comprend les réponses de trois critiques, Kirk Ludwig, Alexander Miller et Paul Hurley, suivies des répliques de Verheggen et Myers. J'offre ici un bref aperçu de chacune des deux parties du livre et une esquisse des questions posées par les critiques.

According to the sceptic Saul Kripke envisages in his celebrated book on Wittgenstein on rules and private language, there are no facts about an individual that determine what she means by any given expression. If there are no such facts, the question then is, what justifies the claim that she does use expressions meaningfully? Kripke’s answer, in a nutshell, is that she by and large uses her expressions in conformity with the linguistic standards of the community she belongs to. While Kripke’s sceptical problem has gripped philosophers for over three decades, few, if any, have been satisfied by his proposed solution, and many have struggled to come up with one of their own. The purpose of this paper is to show that a more satisfactory answer to Kripke’s challenge can be developed on the basis of Donald Davidson’s writings on triangulation, the idea of two individuals interacting simultaneously with each other and the world they share. It follows from the triangulation argument that the facts that can be regarded as determining meaning are irreducible. Yet, contra Kripke, they are not mysterious, for the argument does spell out what is needed for an individual’s expressions to be meaningful.

Daniel D. Hutto and Glenda Satne expose, and suggest a way to resolve, what they see as an “essential tension” which has plagued what they take to be the most promising approach to the nature of contentful states, that is, the neo-pragmatist approach. According to this approach, an adequate account of content essentially appeals to the notion of a social practice. This paper is a critical assessment of their proposal. On their view, the tension stems from the fact that participation in a social practice seems to require that, in order to participate in one, an individual must have contentful states. This entails that participation in social practices cannot explain the origin of contentful states. They argue that the tension dissipates once contentless forms of intentionality come into view. I show that the tension cannot be addressed in the way in which they suggest, for the intermediate steps between primitive intentionality and contentful intentionality cannot in fact fully be accounted for. Nevertheless, Hutto and Satne shed valuable light on the location and scope of the gap in the transition between mindlessness and contentful mindedness.