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Précis of "The Metaphysics of Meaning"

Author(s): Jerrold J. Katz
Source: Philosophical Issues, Vol. 4, Naturalism and Normativity (1993), pp. 128-134
Published by: Ridgeview Publishing Company
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1522833
Accessed: 09-03-2017 09:22 UTC

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 U~~1 ~~~~1 ~PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES, 4
Naturalism and Normativity, 1993

Precis of The Metaphysics of

Meaning*

Jerrold J. Katz

Naturalism says that everything which exists is a spati

object belonging to the vast causal realm we call "natur
naturalist, faith in the progress of science is faith that nat
can, in principle, explain everything. Naturalism domina
phy today in much the way linguistic philosophy dominated
in the century. Titles containing "naturalized", "natura
"naturalistic" appear today with much the same frequency
containing "language", "grammar", and "meaning" appe
the heyday of linguistic philosophy.
Naturalism's hegemony rests on arguments that are wi
compelling. The first aim of The Metaphysics of Meani
forth "MM") is to show that those arguments in fact hav
The book's second aim is to formulate a direct argumen
naturalism. This double challenge is on behalf of realism
ism), the position that there are non-natural, abstract
objects having no spatio-temporal location or causal rel
of the natural realm is real, but the natural realm is not all

*Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990.

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 11. PRECIS OF THE METAPHYSICS OF MEANING 129

One of the philosophical arguments on which the hegemony of

uralism rests is Wittgenstein's; the other is Quine's. The arg
are different, reflecting differences in what each philosoph
bad -i.e., non-naturalist- philosophy to be and also differen
what each took good -i.e., naturalist- philosophy to be. Wit
stein's position is a critical form of naturalism. It sees bad
ophy -which includes the mainstream of traditional philoso
as nonsense arising from misuses of language which put us
grip of a metaphysical picture of reality. Good philosophy,
position, is a certain practice of assembling reminders whic
the linguistically errant philosopher back on the right track.
trast, Quine's position is a scientistic form of naturalism. Tra
philosophy is a mixture of good and bad explanation. Th
pseudo-science or anachronistic science like an explanation i
ing Homer's gods; the good is self-reflective natural science,
natural-science.
Wittgenstein and Quine are the two most influential philosoph
in twentieth century Anglo-American philosophy; their argume
for naturalism are generally considered major contributions to p
losophy, an assessment I share. But, as the history of philosoph
makes clear, the stature of philosophers and the importance of th
contribution are compatible with a failure to establish their princ
philosophical claims. Wittgenstein and Quine, in my view, belon
to a venerable tradition going back at least to Plato.
Both of their arguments for naturalism have to undermine all sub
stantive intensionalist theories of meaning.1 If one survives, it c
provide the grounds for anti-naturalism. Given a non-naturalis
interpretation of such a theory, anti-naturalists can argue cont
Wittgenstein that philosophical statements are meaningful expre
sions of metaphysical truths about reality and can defend an ex
planatory and constructive philosophy against his descriptive a
therapeutic one. Anti-naturalists can argue contra Quine that th
are properties, relations, and propositions, that there is an ana
lytic/synthetic distinction, and that there are necessary a prio

1Intensionalist theories hold that expressions of natural language have se

as well as reference, that senses are entities of some sort, and that they are
objects of study in a theory of meaning for natural language. Quine's natural
is compatible with psychologized meanings that could be reduced to biology
but Quine sees his argument for naturalism as showing that even such a ba
for intensional semantics is mistaken, since the argument, if good, would sh
that there is no objective notion of meaning to serve as a candidate for neu
psychological reduction.

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130 JERROLD J. KATZ

truths over and above the contingent a posteriori tru

ral science.
MM claims that the reach of Wittgenstein's and Quine's argument
exceeds their grasp. Neither could eliminate all intensionalist theo-
ries because, instead of being framed on the basis of a conception o
the entire range of such theories, each argument was tailored to refute
the particular versions of intensionalism with which its author wa
most familiar. Wittgenstein's criticisms were principally directed a
the Fregean position and his own Tractatus position. Quine's were
directed at the semantics of Frege and Carnap. Both anti-inten
sionalist arguments were thus designed to undercut the versions of
semantics within the Fregean tradition.
Fregean semantics defines sense as the determiner of reference and
explicates concepts of the theory of sense (like proposition, syn-
onymy, and analyticity) on the basis of concepts in the theory of
reference. Fregean semantics has so dominated intensionalist think
ing that intensionalists and extensionalists alike have automatically
equated intensionalism with Fregean intensionalism. Since Fregean
semantics was correctly criticized by Wittgenstein, Quine, and thei
followers, if there were no intensionalism outside the Fregean tra-
dition, there would be no tenable intensionalism. But MM argues
there is a version of intensionalism outside that tradition and thus an
intensionalism not refuted by Wittgenstein's and Quine's argumen
Hence, in overlooking such an intensionalism, intensionalists and e
tensionalists have overestimated the force of philosophical arguments
for naturalism.
The roots of non-Fregean intensionalism go at least as far back as
the inchoate theory of meaning found in Descartes, Locke, and Kant
But that theory could not be recognized as an alternative to Fregean
intensionalism until it was developed far more than it had been at
the hands of such traditional philosophers. What was required was
a framework which made possible a purely linguistic explication of
its notion of sense, in contrast to Frege's logical explication of sense
An appropriate framework was created in the generative revolution
in linguistics. The principal idea of generative grammar was that a
grammar, a theory of the grammatical structure of the sentences of
a natural language, can be a formal deductive system like logical and
mathematical systems. Sentencehood corresponds to theoremhood:
the "theorems" of an optimal grammar of a language L are all and
only the sentences of L and the derivations represent the grammatical
structure of sentences. Further, the grammatical notions, like 'well-
formed sentence', 'declarative sentence', 'subject-of', etc., can be
taken as metatheoretic concepts, defined on the basis of sentence

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 11. PRECIS OF THE METAPHYSICS OF MEANING 131

derivations, with a metatheory construed as a theory of langu

general.2
Given the generative framework, it was possible to model a con
tion of semantics on its conception of syntax and phonology.
was conceived of as that aspect of the grammatical structure o
tences which is responsible for sentences having syntactic prop
and relations like being well-formed, declarative or interrog
having coordinate or subordinate structure, etc. The analogou
ception of sense is embodied in the definition of sense (D).
(D) The sense of an expression is that aspect of its structure
is responsible for its sense properties and relations, e.g., h
a sense (meaningfulness), sameness of sense (synonymy),
tiplicity of sense (ambiguity), repetition of sense (redunda
and opposition of sense (antonymy).
Given (D), the sense structure of sentences could be describe
the basis of formal semantic representations, in analogy to f
syntactic representations: ambiguity, meaningfulness, synon
antonymy, and other notions in the theory of meaning coul
defined metatheoretically in terms of semantic derivations.
It is not immediately apparent how philosophically radical
it is to adopt (D) as the definition of sense. In defining the co
of sense as it does and not in terms of the concept of referen
fundamentally changes our entire conception of sense semant
contrast to Frege's semantics, there is now a sharp distinctio
tween sense and reference, and sense structure forms an auton
domain within grammatical structure. One consequence is th
question of the relation between sense and reference now falls out
the theory of sense. The issue of what to say about the contr
sial Fregean principle that sense determines reference -whet
should be retained, modified, or dropped entirely- belongs t
theory of reference. Another consequence is that there is no
pressure to explicate notions in the theory of sense like propo
synonymy, and analyticity within the theory of reference. In
of explicating them in terms of Frege's "plant in the seed" n
of logical containment, they can now be explicated in terms o
"beams in the house" notion of containment that Frege, with
logicist program in mind, criticized as too "unfruitful".

2Chomsky's (Knowledge of Language, Praeger Publishers, New York, 1

recent explicit psychological gloss on the notion of language does not mat
effect this account, though it raises questions about the coherence of his
position. See Katz and Postal, "Realism vs. Conceptualism in Linguistics",
Linguistics and Philosophy, 1991, pp. 531-552.

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132 JERROLD J. KATZ

MM (pp. 66-130) embodies this conception of sense se

an approach it calls the "proto-theory". The proto-the
us to frame a new intensionalism which offers intensio
out of Wittgenstein's and Quine's arguments against Fr
sionalism. With this intensionalism in hand, MM sets out to see
whether Wittgenstein's and Quine's arguments are broad enough to
refute intensionalist theories generally. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 use the
new intensionalism to test Wittgenstein's arguments in the first two
hundred and twenty odd sections of the Philosophical Investigations
(henceforth "PI"). I conclude that none of those arguments refute
the new intensionalism. Many of Wittgenstein's most influental ar-
guments (e.g., the arguments against subliming the language) do not
apply to the new intensionalism. Those that do apply are too tailored
to Fregean and Tractarian intensionalism to be effective against the
new intensionalism. Even Wittgenstein's and Kripke's celebrated ar-
guments about rule following fail in this case. (I will say something
about how the new intensionalism escapes those arguments in my
replies to Boghossian and Zemach.)
Chapter 5 uses the new intensionalism to test Quine's anti-inten-
sionalist arguments. Again, the results are negative. One of the two
principal arguments in Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1953,
pp. 20-46) is directed at the Carnap's meaning postulate approach.
That argument does not apply to the new intensionalism, since it
does not involve a logical explication of analyticity like Carnap's.
The other principal argument, that a linguistic explication of syn-
onymy is viciously circular, does apply, but rests on the unwarranted
assumption that the acceptability of a linguistic concept depends on
the existence of a substitution procedure which operationally defines
it in terms of concepts outside its family. Quine easily establishes
the conditional (C) by showing that any attempt to provide such
procedures for synonymy is circular.

(C) If substitution procedures are the proper basis for explaining

concepts in linguistics, then the concepts in the theory of mean-
ing cannot be made objective sense of.
However, he has no grounds for detaching the consequent. Quine
(1953, p. 56) supposed that Bloomfieldian linguistics vouchsafed sub-
stitution procedures as the proper form of definition for linguistic
concepts, but such assurance lost all value once the generative rev-
olution liberalized the explanation of linguistic concepts. There is
nothing circular about defining the members of a family of linguistic
concepts with respect to one another in the metatheory of genera-
tive grammars. Such meta-theoretic definitions, typical of logistic

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 11. PRECIS OF THE METAPHYSICS OF MEANING 133

systems in other sciences, reveal the interconnections among t

cepts. Without grounds for detaching the consequent of (
has no argument against the theory of meaning.
Chapter 5 argues that, without such an argument, Quin
show that translation is indeterminate. Quine's case for ind
nacy rests on the claim that there are no linguistically neutral
ings, which, in turn, is unsupported without an argument
linguistic explication of synonymy. This point will be discu
ther in my reply to Roger Gibson.
Chapter 6 argues that the principal anti-intensionalist ar
over the last three decades, especially those of Davidson, L
Putnam, depend on Quine's arguments against intension
that there is a domino effect, in which the fall of Quine's arg
topples them as well.
Chapter 7 sets out MM's direct criticism of philosophica
ments for naturalism. It tries to show that such arguments
a fallacy in the spirit of Moore's naturalistic fallacy. It ha
noted that Moore's open question argument wrongly treats
istic definitions (e.g., the good is what is pleasurable) as li
claims rather than claims about reality. To avoid that prob
proposes a new notion of 'naturalistic fallacy' by substituti
retical definitions for lexical definitions and relocating the
the fallacy from the naturalists' use of words to the natur
of explanatory conceptions for theoretical purposes. As a re
new fallacy involves, not a violation of lexicographical const
dictionaries, but a violation of methodological constraints on t
(explanatory power, simplicity, etc.).
A philosophical argument for a naturalistic account of a d
purports to show that the best theories in the discipline are
of natural objects.3 This conclusion is not based on an a p
knowledge of what the best theories in the discipline actu
but on a priori reasons for thinking that the best must be the
natural objects. Thus, such a philosophical argument for na
commits a naturalistic fallacy in the new sense if there can
in which the best scientific theory of the discipline conflicts
optimal theories of the relevant natural objects.

3In MM (pp. 236-239), I called the position involving such an argume

sophical naturalism". I contrasted it with what I called "scientific nat
which is a specific claim within one or another discipline stemming fr
mitment on the part of theories in the discipline to objects which th
themselves characterize as natural objects. I argued that there is n
bootstrap from scientific naturalism to philosophical naturalism, since
in mathematics and logic do not characterize their objects as natural

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134 JERROLD J. KATZ

One such case might go as follows. Say that it is empir

lished that the linguistic rules in our heads take the for
list of sentential structures so large that it contains every
sentence. Since linguistic naturalists suppose that the b
is a theory about the speaker's mental/neurological stat
have to adopt a finite grammar and predict that there is a
glish sentence, namely, the one represented by the long
on the list. But since the grammatical evidence in the h
circumstances is ex hypothesi the same as it is in actu
construction where linguists project an infinity of sen
on the recursiveness of conjunction, modification, embe
the best grammar will be infinite, too. Since it project
of sentences, the best theory of the language predicts
no largest sentence and is inconsistent with the optim
the linguistic reality inside our heads.
Chapter 8 looks at some of the consequences of a successf
of naturalism. One is that philosophy is back where it was
linguistic turn raised false hopes for linguistic solutions to
ical problems. The linguistic turn was to a large exten
istic turn, motivated by dissatisfaction with philosophi
compared to progress in the natural sciences. Twentiet
naturalists saw the weakness of Kant's reform of met
Husserlian phenomenology, and of other metaphysical
practiced along traditional a priori lines to be the sem
pinnings of their notion of synthetic a priori knowled
stein and Quine both sought to exploit that weakness
other dualisms of the philosophical and the natural. If
tique of naturalism is successful, the most recent challe
autonomy of philosophy have been met.

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