Précis of The Grammar of Meaning: Normativity and Semantic Content*

Abstract

Daniel Dennett once invited us to consider super-Martians who were highly advanced scientifically yet lacked all intentional concepts.' They spoke the language of austere physics and were capable of perceiving and describing the world at the micro-level. If such beings could accurately report happenings in their environment, make predictions, and generally live out their lives wholly within the scientific image, what would they be missing, Dennett wondered, by virtue of lacking intentional concepts? Dennett's answer was that they would miss out on various higher level patterns describable by way of mentalistic and semantic vocabulary. Such an answer, in outline, is fairly standard today. That is, it is fair to say that the general consensus in modem philosophy is that semantic talk-to focus on the species of concern to us-is descriptive of some sort of high level pattern. There is, to be sure, a fair range of disagreement as to what sort of pattern it is. For some, it is a pattern of causal relations between humans, their language, and macroscopic objects; for others, it is purely the functional organization of individual thought, while various philosophers extend the relevant pattern so as to include either relations to external objects, or relations among the people in one's society. Finally, there are those who take semantic discourse to involve the description, in the first instance, of patterns of behavior within a society one is considering from the outside. What all these view have in common is the idea that the claims made using semantic concepts purport to describe. Semantic descriptions are at a radically different ontological level than are the descriptive claims of basic science, but the fundamental sort of speech act involved in ascribing meaning