Assessment, Scorekeeping and the Normativity of Meaning: a Reply to Kiesselbach

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to examine Mattias Kiesselbach’s account of the thesis that meaning is normative that was presented in his recently published article titled “The normativity of meaning: from constitutive norms to prescriptions.” Kiesselbach’s account has three crucial points: (a) the applicability of norms, (b) the transtemporal character of the constitutive norms and (c) commitments incurred by or attributed to the speaker within the scorekeeping practice. I will discuss all these crucial points, and I will argue that his account raises many questions and the anti-prescriptivist about meaning can have reasonable doubts about all of them.