Sara Papic

This thesis is concerned with the foundations of representational content. There is a familiar feature of words, sentences, beliefs, and perceptions: they are about, or mean, or represent something. The sentence “cats are cute” is about cats being cute, and my belief that cats are cute is also about cats being cute. Most things in the world are not about something else – they just are. In virtue of what, then, do words, sentences, beliefs, and perceptions represent the things they represent? In other words, in virtue of what do they have the contents that they do? In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982/1995), Saul Kripke argued that there is no fact of the matter about what we mean by our words. Though Kripke intended to target theories of meaning in the linguistic sense, his arguments ultimately challenge theories of mental content as well. The effects of Kripke’s argument have been devastating: Theories of content have struggled to avoid his sceptical paradox ever since. The aim of this work is to investigate and determine whether several contemporary approaches to meaning broadly understood meet the sceptical challenge Kripke set up nearly fifty years ago. These contemporary approaches include causal theories of reference, teleosemantic theories of mental content, and phenomenal intentionality theories. The result of my investigation is, unfortunately, negative. None of the contemporary approaches examined in this work successfully isolate what makes representations have the contents that they do.

In a recent paper, Max Deutsch argues that there is no “qua problem” for purely causal theories of reference, according to which the extensions of some expressions are grounded in causal relations to members of their extensions during dubbing acts. The qua problem is the difficulty in specifying the facts in virtue of which the reference of “elephant” is grounded by causal contact with something qua elephant and not qua its other properties. If no such specification can be given, reference remains unacceptably indeterminate. This has led many to abandon purely causal reference grounding. Deutsch’s argument for the dissolution of the problem goes as follows: we usually agree that an event can cause its effect qua some of its properties and not qua others. For example, a hot acidic solution causes a glass beaker to break due to its heat and not due to its acidity. Given this assumption, we can simply say that an event caused a dubbing act qua the causally relevant property and not qua the causally irrelevant properties, thus grounding the reference of the term; the qua problem has vanished. I will argue that causal mechanisms, and in particular the facts about causal relevance appealed to by Deutsch, are insufficient to dissolve the qua problem. It is not generally the case that a unique property is causally relevant in purely physical cases of causation; but this is precisely what is required to avoid the referential indeterminacy highlighted by the qua problem. I will demonstrate that if we rely on causal relevance to dissolve the qua problem, there is no way to respect the uniqueness requirement: there are too many properties that are causally relevant to the occurrence of any single dubbing act, including the intentional states of the dubber.

Saul Kripke’s paradoxical argument in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) has generated an extravagant number of responses. A major debate prompted by this book has focused on the plausibility and role of the supposed normative character of meaning; the argument itself is often taken to rely on the assumption that meaning is irreducibly normative. Following Boghossian (1989), the normativity of meaning has been understood as closely tied to the existence of semantic correctness conditions. After a brief introduction to the background of the debate, this work will focus on whether the normativity of meaning may be better understood as stemming from a different type of correctness, namely linguistic correctness. Linguistic correctness differs from semantic correctness insofar as it is related to conventional, and not truth-functional, meaning. I will begin by clarifying some of the features of linguistic correctness. First, I will outline some reasons why the distinction between linguistic and semantic correctness should be maintained. Then, I will anticipate a possible criticism and argue that linguistic correctness does not belong to the domain of pragmatics, as it is relevant to our understanding of conventional meaning. Finally, I will try to show that linguistic “oughts” are constitutive of meaning. Having established these basic features of linguistic correctness, I will investigate whether the fact that it is constitutive of meaning can vindicate the idea that meaning is robustly, irreducibly normative. By applying arguments from the realm of moral philosophy – within which, too, there have been attempts to show that constitutive facts can give rise to categorical moral norms – I will argue that linguistic correctness cannot give rise to categorical semantic norms. Linguistic correctness may be, nevertheless, a useful tool for explaining some of our intuitions about meaning.