The normativity of meaning without the normativity

Abstract

The normativity of meaning matters because if meaning is normative, then theories of meaning will have to explain normativity, and not all theories of meaning are equipped to do that. Throughout the debate about the normativity of meaning, there has been considerable discussion of what putative features of meaning count as ‘normativity.’ The suggestion of this paper is that the issue of normativity can be bypassed. We can, instead, focus directly on the ways in which various features of meaning constitute constraints on theories of meaning. Since meaning facts directly entail correctness conditions, which in turn rule out certain reductive theories of meaning, correctness conditions—often thought to be peripheral to the debate about the normativity of meaning—matter in exactly the way that the normativity of meaning was thought to matter.