Some Reflections on the Sport of Language

Abstract

To understand the relation between language and belief we must revise the image of the language game. Language, I claim, is essentially a sport and mental states are among the equipment with which that sport is played. The primary point of this picture is to allow us to account for one of the central motivating puzzles about the intuitive notion of belief, namely, that beliefs are both essentially causally engaged physical entities and at the same time essentially individuated according to public semantic norms. Unlike elements of games which are purely formal, or normative, entities, a football is essentially characterized both in terms of its physical makeup and the normative properties governing it. Similarly, mental states are essentially physical states of brains, and the like, with specific causal roles, and also individuated accorded to their normative status. The resulting picture thus takes seriously the embodiment of belief states, and linguistic dispositions generally, while retaining a conception of them as essentially playing roles in the public linguistic practice. It stands, therefore, in stark contrast both to the normative formalism of Brandom, who takes semantic content to be a matter of inferential role and understands the latter purely in terms of public normative status, and also to the reductive naturalistic accounts of causal theorists, functionalists, and others. Given constraints on length, the view is presented in a way which requires patience on the part of the reader. Although well known arguments are gestured at, many other approaches to these issues are dismissed in a cursory manner. I thus make no claim to have shown that one must follow the sort of account given here, only to have made it clear that there is such an account, and why one might be inclined toward it