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From Semantic Deference to Semantic Externalism to Metasemantic Disagreement

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Abstract

We argue for an intimate relation between semantic externalism and semantic deference and propose a typology of speakers’ metasemantic views as revealed by their deferential attitudes. Building on this typology, we then offer a classification of metasemantic disagreements understood as verbal disputes between speakers who (consciously or unconsciously) hold divergent metasemantic views about the same word. In particular, we distinguish lower-order metasemantic disagreements between speakers who disagree on the exact source of meaning determination for a word yet agree on the kind of deferential attitude this word is liable to, from higher-order metasemantic disagreements between speakers who do not even agree on the suitable kind of deferential attitude. We demonstrate the fruitfulness of our classification through the concrete implications it has for conceptual engineering.

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We do not analyse or generate any datasets, because our work proceeds within a theoretical approach.

Notes

  1. Wikforss (2017) challenges the very idea of incomplete understanding of concepts but also of word meanings. We cannot address her arguments here.

  2. For more on the distinction between epistemic and semantic deference, see De Brabanter et al. (2007).

  3. This is not the place to provide further substantiation of our claim that semantic deference can be studied empirically. For an outline of how that can be done, see Leclercq and De Brabanter (2019). In that paper, we do not only claim that speakers’ deferential attitudes regarding some word reveal their own metasemantic views on that word; we also claim that speakers’ deferential attitudes should be taken into consideration in philosophers’ metasemantic theories because semantic externalism is a consequence of semantic deference. We expand on the difference between views and theories in Sect. 1.3.

  4. As a referee insightfully points out, in ordinary life, speakers also defer to other authorities than the three pointed out here; they defer to the dictionary, to their parents, to relatives they regard as reliable, and so on. But they do not take these authorities to be the sources of meaning determination; they only rely on them in so far as they believe them to defer to the right source of meaning determination. Accordingly, we do not take these cases of vicarious deference to be distinct kinds of semantic deference.

  5. By meaning we will henceforth mean the semantic contribution of the word to the truth-conditions of the sentences it is part of. This is what Recanati, after Kaplan, named its content. But the character/content distinction is only relevant when descriptive satisfaction-conditions are concerned which lead to different contents depending on the circumstances of their evaluation. This happens when meaning is fixed by a definition, as is the case in conventional externalism. But things are very different in the case of usage-dependent externalism or of indexical externalism. We will thus use the general notion of meaning for what is common in the three cases.

  6. We provide further justification of the view that experts go proxy for the world in a separate publication.

  7. As a metasemantic theory, internalism is a sophisticated theory which mixes—sometimes not without some confusion (Gertler 2012)—metaphysical considerations as to whether the meaning of a word is fixed by the speaker’s mental states only (or requires other elements in the world) with epistemic considerations as to whether the meaning of a word is transparent to the speaker and lies in her own understanding of it. In this paper, we leave these important questions aside because our sole focus is on internalism as a metasematic view that can be (consciously or unconsciously) held by the speaker herself. From the speaker’s perspective, epistemic considerations prevail—the reason why speakers do not defer is because they rely on their own understanding of a word and take its meaning to be transparent, not because they have metaphysical assumptions according to which this meaning must be fixed by their mental states only.

  8. We invite our readers to constantly keep in mind that we assume that lay speakers’ metasemantic views can be held consciously or unconsciously (mostly the latter). To avoid cumbersome repetitions, though, we will not systematically restate this point in the following discussion.

  9. We are giving each example an identifying label for easier reference in the discussion in 2.3.

  10. Putnam (1994) anticipates this kind of disagreement within indexical externalism. He has an excellent discussion (1994, p. 75–78) of how the essence of the kind dog can be described differently by evolutionary biologists and molecular biologists.

  11. To be sure, a speaker who seeks to defer to the community practice can be mistaken about what the community practice is. In that case, some of her truth-evaluations of sentences will be at odds with her dispositions or intentions. But the fact that she uses a wrong representation of community practice in her actual evaluations does not make her an internalist. She has usage-dependent externalist views and wants to conform to the meaning as it is fixed by community practice. Yet she has imperfect mastery of it. And she could be led to admit that she has. Should she get better information on actual community practice, she would then be glad to correct her evaluation.

  12. British ‘chips’ are American ‘French fries’; American ‘chips’ are British ‘crisps’.

  13. The importance of attending to metasemantics has been nicely articulated by Cappelen (2018, p. 58, 2020, p. 147–149).

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the audience and the organisers of the Metalinguistic Disagreement and Semantic Externalism conference held at Universidade Nova de Lisboa in May 2022, and to two anonymous referees for thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Funding

The present research was conducted with the financial support of the F.R.S.-FNRS research project T.0184.16, 2016–2021, Cognitive Transparency of Semantic Contents and Pragmatic Determination of Reference (https://doi.org/10.13039/501100002661).

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Correspondence to Philippe De Brabanter.

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De Brabanter, P., Leclercq, B. From Semantic Deference to Semantic Externalism to Metasemantic Disagreement. Topoi 42, 1039–1050 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09906-5

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