Henry Jackman (York University)

Metaphysics and Epistemology Group Talk

Jackman Humanities Building

170 St. George Street

Room 418

Truth, Metasemantics and the Normativity of Meaning

Abstract:  It has frequently been suggested that meaning is, in some important sense, normative. However, precisely what is particularly normative about it is often left without any satisfactory explanation, and the ‘normativity thesis’ has thus, justly, been called into question.  That said, the intuition that meaning is ‘normative’ is on the right track, and the normativity thesis can be explained in terms of an ‘epistemic’ metasemantic theory that allows that while meaning supervenes upon use, the function from use to meaning is a normative one.  Further, it will be argued that the ‘pragmatic’ tradition running from Peirce and James up through Davidson understands the function from use to meaning in just this way, and that otherwise unintuitive claims about truth made by the classical pragmatists are defensible within the context of this normative and epistemic metasemantics.