What Meaning Is

Brandom has characterized the focus of his interests as the theory of meaning. Recent additions to his website include a fascinating 1980 typescript “Assertion and Conceptual Roles”. This early piece has a programmatic character. It goes even further than the 1976 dissertation in anticipating the leading ideas of his major works. (I will omit the also interesting mathematical-logical formalization that he experiments with here, but steers away from in Making It Explicit and A Spirit of Trust.)

While Brandom is resolutely modern in his identifications, this sort of investigation was pioneered by Aristotle. Meaning and truth are approached in terms of a kind of normative “saying” that is up to us. But the paradigmatic kind of saying is what Aristotle calls “saying something about something”, so it is not entirely up to us. Finally, the paradigmatic use of language is dialogical, imbued with a Socratic ethic of dialogue and free-spirited inquiry. And what we most fundamentally are is dialogical talking animals.

As Brandom puts it in the first sentence, “The paradigmatic linguistic activity is saying that-p, in the sense of asserting, claiming, or stating that-p for some declarative sentence p” (p. 1).

Today “declarative” is also an important if ill-defined concept in the theory of programming languages, where its use has a close relation to the logical use that is given ethical significance here. In that context, it is often glossed as focusing on the what not the how (or the end and not the means), although that is a simplification.

The deep issue underneath both these disparate cases is something like the meaning of meaning. In what follows, I think Brandom makes some real progress in clarifying what is at stake. It has both ethical and formal dimensions.

“Frege shows in the Begriffschrift that the ways in which sentences can occur as significant constituents of other sentences require us to distinguish the content of such an assertion (what is asserted) and the force of the assertion (the asserting of that content). For when a sentence appears as the antecedent of a conditional, it must have something, let us call it the ‘content’, in common with its occurrence as a free-standing assertion, or there would be no justification for detaching the consequent of the conditional when one is prepared to assert its antecedent. On the other hand, the asserting of the conditional does not include the asserting of the antecedent, since the asserter of the conditional might well take the former to be true and the latter to be false. It is a criterion of adequacy for any account of either of these features of declarative discourse that it be compatible with some correct account of the other” (ibid).

I had not realized that the Fregean distinction of Sinn (sense or force) and Bedeutung (reference) arose in this context of reference relations between parts of compound sentences. It seems likely that this point attributed to Frege was a source for Michael Dummet’s work on compound sentences in which one part refers to another, which Brandom had made significant use of a few years earlier, in the dissertation. Dummet was a leading Frege scholar.

It strikes me also that in a formal context, this inter-reference between components of compound sentences could serve as an inductively definable and thus paradox-free version of “self” reference. In a more discursive, less formal context, it recalls Kantian-Hegelian “reflection” and other interesting weakenings of strict identity like Hegel’s “speculative” identity or Ricoeur’s “narrative” identity. Instead of a formally strict and thus empty global self-reference, it is a matter of specifiable internal cross-reference.

Further below, Brandom will explicitly connect this with the theme of anaphora or internal back-reference that he later develops at length in Making It Explicit as a way in which identities are constituted out of difference. In the current text he will also relate it to the “prosentential” theory of truth. Prosentences like “that is true” are the sentential analogue of pronouns — they refer to sentences that express definite propositions in the same way that pronouns refer to nouns. Brandom is saying that concrete meaning involves both Fregean sense and Fregean reference.

“Exclusive attention to the practice of asserting precludes understanding the conceptual significance which such linguistic performances express and enable, while the complementary exclusion must cut off semantic theory from its only empirical subject matter, talking as something people do” (ibid).

Standard bottom-up compositional approaches to semantics focus exclusively on the “content”, and not on the related doing.

“[I]t might be tempting to think that such a theory offers special resources for a theory of asserting as representing, classifying, or identifying. It is important to realize that the same considerations which disclose the distinction of force and content expose such advantages as spurious” (ibid).

“There is no reason to suppose that the semantic representability of all sentences in terms of, say, set-membership statements or identity statements, reflects or is reflected in the explanatory priority of various kinds of linguistic performances” (p. 2).

“It then turns out that giving a rich enough description of the social practices involved in assertion allows us to exhibit semantic contents as complex formal features of performances and compound dispositions to perform according to those practices. In other words, I want to show that it is possible to turn exactly on its head the standard order of explanation canvassed above” (p. 3).

“To specify a social practice is to specify the response which is the constitutive recognition of the appropriateness of performances with respect to that practice…. But in the case of discursive practices, the constitutive responses will in general themselves be performances which are appropriate (in virtue of the responses the community is disposed to make to them) according to some other social practice. The appropriateness of any particular performance will then depend on the appropriateness of a whole set of other performances with similar dependences. Each social practice will definitionally depend upon a set of others” (p. 4).

This notion of practice is thus inherently normative or value-oriented. Brandom compares his holistic view of practices with Quine’s holistic view of the “web of belief”.

“Definitional chains specifying the extension of one practice in terms of its intension, and that intension in terms of another extension, and so on, may loop back on one another. We will say that any system of social practices which does so … is a holistic system…. Such a system of practices cannot be attributed to a community piecemeal, or in an hierarchic fashion, but only all at once.”

The key point about such a holistic system is that there are mutual dependencies between parts or participants.

“It follows that in systems containing essentially holistic practices, the norms of conduct which are codified in such practices are not reducible to facts about objective performances. The appropriateness or inappropriateness of any particular performance with respect to such a practice cannot ultimately be expressed in terms of communal dispositions to respond with objectively characterizable sanctions and rewards…. The norms themselves are entirely constituted by the practices of socially recognizing performances as according or not according with them” (p. 5).

“Facts about objective performances” have a monological character. In technical contexts this can be of great value. But ethical and general life contexts have an inherently dialogical or mutual character.

“A community ought to be thought of as socially synthesized by mutual recognition of its members, since a plausible sufficient condition of A‘s being a member of some community is that the other members of that community take him to be such…. This simple Hegelian model of the synthesis of social entities by mutual recognition of individuals has the advantage that it preserves the basic distinction between the individual’s contribution to his membership in a group and the contribution of the other members” (p. 6, emphasis added).

Here we have the first appearance of the great theme of mutual recognition in Brandom’s work. Brandom has dug deeply into this particular aspect of Hegel, making very substantial contributions of his own. In ethics, mutual recognition has roots in Aristotelian philia (friendship or love) and the so-called golden rule (do and do not do to others as you would have them do and not do to you). Brandom sees that Hegel treats mutual recognition not only as an ethical ideal but also as a fundamental explanatory principle.

“The crucial point is that the reflexive recognition (as social self-recognition) be an achievement requiring the symmetry of being recognized in a particular respect by those whom I recognize in that respect, and presupposing that my recognitions will be transitive…. A community is then any set P which is closed under transitive recognition…. [N]o one member is omniscient or infallible about such membership…, nor is it required that everyone recognize everyone else in the community” (p. 7).

The symmetry of recognizing and being recognized leads to the idea that authority and responsibility ought to be symmetrically balanced. This has tremendous implications.

“Asserting that-p is, among other things, to explicitly authorize certain inferences…. Saying this much does not yet say what the constitutive recognition of this authorizing consists in…. Our account of the authorizing of inferences will draw upon the second major feature of the social role of assertion” (ibid).

The idea of understanding acts of assertion principally in terms of an inferential constitution of meaning is transformative. Others have suggested or implied something like this, but Brandom expresses it with more clarity and thoroughness than anyone.

Reasoning is not a merely technical activity. The constitution of meaning has fundamental ethical significance.

“This second feature is noted by Searle when he says that an assertion (among other things) ‘counts as an undertaking to the effect that p represents an actual state of affairs’. Leaving aside the representationalist expansion of the content ascribed, we can see in the use of the term ‘undertaking’ the recognition of a dimension of responsibility in assertion, coordinate with the previously indicated dimension of authority. In asserting that-p one is committing oneself in some sense to the claim that-p. What sort of responsibility is involved? The leading idea of the present account is that it is justificatory responsibility which one undertakes by an assertion. Justification and assertion will be exhibited as essentially holistic social practices belonging to the same system of practices, internally related to one another. So the recognitive response-type which is the intension of the social practice of assertion must include recognition of the assertor as responsible for justifying his assertoric performance under suitable circumstances…. Authority in this sense consists in the social recognition of a practice as authorizing others” (pp. 9-10).

“What is essential is that the relation between the intensions and the extensions of a family of social practices underwrite a relation of what we may call (extending the usual sense) anaphoric reference between various performances. The term ‘anaphoric’ is used to indicate that this ‘referential’ relation is internal to a system of social practices, where one performance refers to another as one word refers to another in A: ‘Pynchon wrote the book’ B: ‘But has he tried to read it?’, where the pronouns anaphorically refer to the antecedent terms ‘Pynchon’ and ‘the book’. No relation between discursive and non-discursive items is supposed. A prime use of this expressive resource of anaphoric reference to typed utterings is exhibited just below, as a feature of demands for justification” (p. 12).

In Making It Explicit, Brandom uses linguistic anaphora to explain the constitution of objects as objects. Here he gives it an even broader role. Anaphora or back-referencing is the birth of substance, solidity, and modality in meaning. Again the ethical dimension comes to the fore. Assertion as lived concerns neither naked Parmenidean being nor pure objective facts.

“The key to our attempt to offer sufficient conditions for assertion by specifying a class of systems of social practices is the relation of justification which a set of assertions can have to another assertion…. Both the dimension of authority and the dimension of responsibility will be explicated in terms of the recognition of justification. Each of the different types of assertion which play a role in the systems we will examine, free-standing assertions, assertions which are the results of inferences authorized by other assertions, and assertions which are part of the justification which another asserting made its asserter responsible for, each of these types of assertion incurs a justificatory responsibility itself and authorizes further inferences. The relevant responsibility is to produce (what would be recognized as) an appropriate justification, if one is demanded…. The utterance of a conventional request for justification addressed to a foregoing assertion is to be always appropriate, and not itself in need of justification. The cognitive significance of the linguistic practices we describe stems from this universal appropriateness of demands for further justification (as Sellars takes the ‘rational’ structure of scientific practice to consist in its being a ‘self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once’…. An utterance in the conventional style of assertions (utterances which undertake justificatory responsibilities and issue inference licenses whose contents vary as the content of the assertion vary) will constitutively be recognized as possessing that authority only so long as the conditional responsibility to justify if queried has not been shirked…. No more for this distinction than elsewhere in the social practice story need we appeal to intentions or beliefs of performers” (pp. 12-13).

As I’ve mentioned a number of times, other variants of this ethics of dialogue or dialogical ethics have been developed by Plato, Gadamer, and Habermas.

“For just as inference passes the authority of assertion one way along the anaphoric chain, it also passes the justificatory responsibility incurred the other way along that chain” (p. 14).

“The extended responsibility induced by the presentation of a justification is defeasible by the performance of a counter-justification, comprising further assertions…. The categories of justificatory and counter-justificatory performances are not disjoint” (p. 17).

“Each of these conditions codifies some aspect of our ordinary practices of giving and asking for reasons” (p. 18).

“[A] set of basic and extended repertoires related by an accessibility relation will be called a conceptual idiom…. It is in terms of these still rather particularized structures that we will define assertional contents or conceptual roles” (pp. 18-19).

Next in this series: Conditionals and Conceptual Roles

Convention, Novelty, and Truth in Language

We have been exploring the earliest publicly available work of the great contemporary philosopher Robert Brandom, his doctoral dissertation from 1976. He has been concerned to develop the philosophy of language along pragmatist lines, while working hard to point out that a pragmatist approach need not be construed as globally rejecting talk about objectivity, truth, and reality. The pragmatist approach is appealing as a sort of third way that avoids both subjectivist and objectivist excesses. This is the last chapter before his conclusion.

“[W]e saw how the notion of truth and the truth conditions of sentences could arise in a pragmatic investigation into the social practices which are the use of a language by a population. That is, we saw how an account of social practices (which are whatever the linguistic community takes them to be) can require us to consider the sentences uttered in those practices as making claims which are objectively true or false, regardless of what the community takes them to be” (Brandom, Practice and Object, p. 129).

He has argued earlier that understanding the meaning of compound sentences (in which one clause refers to and modifies another) implicitly does after all presuppose a technical concept of truth that goes beyond the warranted assertibility that Dewey recommends as a less pretentious replacement for truth-talk.

Both in ordinary life and in ordinary ethical discourse, warranted assertibility — justification in taking things to be such-and-such — is able to do the work commonly allotted to claims about truth that is what it is independent of us. But insofar as we engage in the meta-level discourse about discourse that is already implied by the understanding of compound sentences, it becomes necessary to introduce a distinction between how things are for us and how they are in themselves. This kind of situation can also be seen as motivation for Kant’s talk about “things in themselves”.

“[W]e will see how that sort of inquiry requires that a sophisticated grammar be attributed to the language being investigated, and in particular requires notions of syntactic deep-structure, meaning, and denotation or reference. We thus extend the method of the previous chapter to consider sub-sentential linguistic components, and see what it is about the practices associated with them in virtue of which it is appropriate to associate them with objective things or features” (pp. 129-130).

He will defend Chomsky’s notion of deep syntactic structure objectively existing in natural language against Quine’s instrumentalist critique.

Only by abstraction from things said do we come to consider individual words in isolation. In common with his later work and at odds with the standard compositional account of meaning in linguistics and analytic philosophy of language, in the understanding of meaning Brandom here gives explanatory priority to sentences over words, and to propositions over terms. This will be more explicitly thematized in his later work.

The compound sentences analyzed by Dummett that Brandom refers to as requiring an auxilary notion of truth beyond epistemic justifiability partake of the character of discourse about discourse, because some parts of them refer to and modify other parts.

He considers what it means to investigate the use of a natural language — what he will later call normative pragmatics. Investigating language use implicitly means investigating proprieties of use, along with their origin and legitimation. We may also collect ordinary empirical facts about the circumstances of concrete “takings” of propriety and legitimacy and their contraries, without prejudice as to whether or not those takings are ultimately to be endorsed by us.

Using the neutral language of “regularities”, he specifies a sort of minimalist, almost behaviorist framework for investigating language use that is designed to be acceptable to empiricists. In later work, he develops a detailed analogy between the deontic moral “necessity” of Kantian duty and a “subjunctively robust” modal necessity of events following events that is inspired by the work of analytic philosopher David Lewis on modality and possible worlds.

“We may divide these regularities of conduct into two basic kinds: Regularities concerning what noises are made, and regularities concerning the occasions on which they are made…. The phonetic descriptions are just supposed to be some rule which tells us what counts as an instance of what utterance-type…. Without attempting to say anything more specific about these regularities, we can express what a speaker, as we say, ‘knows’, when he knows how to use an utterance-type by associating with it a set of assertibility conditions” (p. 130).

“In terms of these notions, we can represent a language by a set of ordered pairs called sentences. The first element of each ordered pair is a phonetic description and the second element is a set of assertibility conditions…. A linguist who has such a representation of the sentences of some alien language ought to be able, subject to various practical constraints, to duplicate the competence of the natives, that is, to converse with them as they converse with each other” (p. 131).

Here he is applying a stipulative re-definition of the ordinary English word “sentence”. “Ordered” pair just means it is always possible, given a member of the pair, to say which member it is. The pair here consists of 1) the sequence of sounds by which a particular sentence is identified, and 2) the conditions under which it is appropriate to use that sentence.

“[A] theory of the use of a language just is some mechanism for generating a list of ordered pairs of phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions which codifies the social practices which are speaking the language” (p. 132).

Every sentence in every natural language has the two above aspects — a recognizable series of sounds that identifies it, and conditions for its appropriate use.

“Speaking only about the first element of the ordered pairs which we have taken to specify a language, Quine takes the task of a theory of syntax to be the generation of the infinite set of phonetic descriptions. He then argues that if the aim of a theory of syntax is determined by this target description of speaker competence, then many different axiomatizations will generate the same set of phonetic descriptions, and hence be descriptively adequate. Insofar as a theory of syntax is a part of the project of generating the right set of sentences, then, we may choose between alternative theories only on the basis of convenience of their representation (pp. 132-133).”

This is an example of Quine’s instrumentalism that was mentioned earlier. Syntactic constructs in a natural language like English are identifiable by their mapping to distinct series of sounds. I haven’t spent enough time on Quine directly to say much more at this point, but to identify syntax with the phonetics used to pick out syntactic distinctions seems reductionst. Before criticizing it, he elaborates on Quine’s view.

“Representing the conversational capacities as ordered pairs of phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions, we will see a good translation as associating with each phonetic description in one language a phonetic description in the other which is paired with the same assertibility conditions…. In this way a translation function would enable one to converse in a foreign language. If the goals of translation are regarded as determined in this way by pairs of phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions, then convenience of representation and arbitrary choice will enter here as much as on the syntactic side” (p. 133).

“Denotational relations are presumably correlations between phonetically distinguishable elements … which appear in the phonetic descriptions of many sentences, and some element which regularly appears in the assertibility conditions of those sentences. A theory of denotation would consist of a relatively small list of such correlations, together with a set of structural rules which would permit the derivation of the full set of ordered pairs which are the sentences of the language, by combination of the various elements…. If one such axiomatization or recipe is possible, many are” (p. 134).

“More generally, given any scheme, we can substitute as the denotation of any phonetically specified expression anything systematically related to it, …and adjust the rest of the scheme to get the same assertibility conditions” (pp. 135-136).

“The point is that we may think of a language as being an abstract object consisting of a set of social practices…. If one now considers the various theoretical notions which have been thought to be crucial to the specification of a language by those who are not primarily concerned with social practices — the syntactic and semantic structure of its sentences, their meaning and the denotation of expressions occurring in them — one finds these notions playing drastically reduced roles” (p. 136).

“It is our purpose in this chapter to show how to circumvent … conventionalism while retaining the pragmatic point of view which renders language as comprised of social practices” (p. 137).

Classic 20th century analytic philosophy has a very thin notion of language use, effectively identifying it with empirically existing conventions. In contrast to this, Brandom sees in Noam Chomsky’s linguistics a crucial recognition of the ubiquity of linguistic novelty. He quotes Hilary Putnam’s critique of conventionalism:

“We see now why conventionalism is not usually recognized as essentialism. It is not usually recognized as essentialism because it is negative essentialism. Essentialism is usually criticized because the essentialist intuits too much. He claims to see that too many properties are part of a concept. The negative essentialist, the conventionalist, intuits not that a great many strong properties are part of a concept, but that only a few could be part of a concept” (ibid).

In contemporary usage, “essentialism” is a bad thing that consists in taking putatively unproblematic essences of things for granted. In contrast, Plato and Aristotle’s preoccupation with questions of what we translate as “essence” reflects a significant problematization.

Brandom now turns to a careful criticism of Quine.

“Quine’s arguments as we have reconstructed them seek to show that, for a particular specification …, the role of a translation function (or of syntactic deep structure, or of denotational scheme) can be played equally well by a number of different notions” (p. 138).

“Such sound conventionalist arguments cannot be refuted. They can be shown not to impugn the usefulness or objectivity of the notions they apply to. To do this one simply has to come up with some other project, with respect to which the various versions of, e.g., translation, do not play equally well the role that notion is invoked to play” (pp.138-139).

“The question I want to consider is, roughly, where the assertibility conditions and phonetic descriptions come from. In virtue of what does a sentence have the assertibility conditions and phonetic description that it does?” (p. 140).

Questions about conventional use are questions of empirical fact. Brandom’s “in virtue of what” question is on the other hand properly philosophical, in a sense that Plato and Aristotle would recognize.

We come to Brandom’s defense of Chomsky against Quine.

“Chomsky has argued on statistical grounds that most sentences used by adult native speakers have never been heard or used by that speaker before, and indeed that the majority of these have never been uttered by anyone in the history of the language. This is a striking empirical observation of far-reaching theoretical significance. Let us consider the sentences of English which have never yet been used. Not just any phonetic description is the phonetic description of some sentence of this set…. But a native speaker can not only discriminate between the phonetic descriptions which are on this list and conform to them in his own utterances, he has exactly the same acquaintance with the assertibility conditions of such a sentence that he does with the assertibility conditions of some familiar sentence like ‘Please pass the salt’. That is, a native speaker can discriminate between occasions on which it might be appropriately used and those on which it would be inappropriate. Granting, as we must, that there is a community of dispositions concerning these novel sentences which is sufficient to determine a social practice regarding their use, a notion of correct or incorrect utterance, surely this fact is remarkable. Why should the community agree as much about how to use sentences no one has ever heard before as about how to use common ones?” (pp. 140-141).

“For human beings, training in the use of the relatively few sentences we have actually been exposed to determines how we will use (or would use) the vast majority of sentences which we have not been exposed to” (p. 142).

“The question ‘In virtue of what is there a correct usage for a sentence no one has ever used before’ is distinct from, but not independent of the question ‘How do individual members of the linguistic community come to acquire dispositions which conform to the standard of correct usage for novel sentences?’ The questions are distinct because no individual’s dispositions, however acquired, establish a standard of correct usage. The questions are not independent since using a sentence is a social practice…. The question of how such agreement is achieved, its source and circumstance, is clearly related to the question of how individuals come to behave in ultimately agreeable ways…. The explanation of projection by populations must ultimately rest on facts about individual projective capacities…, although that explanation need not resemble the explanation of any such individual capacity” (pp. 143-144).

He clarifies what he means by projection.

“I want to argue that a theory of grammar is properly a part of the attempt to explain and predict the projective capacities of language-using populations. A theory of syntactic structure, of meaning, and of denotation and truth are to provide a framework for accounting for the empirical fact that the practices of a population which are the use of [a] relatively small number of sentences of a natural language determines, for that population, the use of a potentially infinite remainder they have never been exposed to” (p. 144).

“The notion of ‘grammar’ which I am addressing here is that of an interpreted categorial-transformational grammar. Such a grammar is an account of the generation of surface sentences of a language … from an underlying set of deep structures” (p. 144).

This is grammar in a Chomskyan rationalist, antibehaviorist sense.

“The projective capacities which are to be explained are obviously not entailed by the practices and dispositions codified in a set of those phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions…. An account of projection is thus an explanation of how people, being the sorts or organisms that we are, can engage in the complex social practices we do engage in. It is just this sort of inquiry which we considered … as the sort of inquiry within which the objects involved in a practice become important” (p. 145).

This puts new light on how individual words and phrases come to mean what they do.

“Consideration of projective facts of this sort can lead us, further, to attribute structural classes of sub-sentential components to some speaker” (ibid).

“We are interested in seeing how, by looking at facts about the acquisition of vocabulary and compounding forms by a subject, we can in principle explain his open-ended competence to use novel utterances, by exhibiting that competence as the product of projective capacities associated with classes of sub-sentential components” (p. 147).

“Projective classes for an individual were pictured as attributed on the basis of two sorts of acquisition, roughly the acquisition of some projective form, and the acquisition of vocabulary” (pp. 147-148).

“Indeed, it is only in terms of such projective dispositions that we can explain the notion of correctness for novel utterances. We can only explain how there should be such an agreement in terms of shared structural classes induced by familiar expressions, which determine the projection to novel utterances” (p. 148).

Linguistic structure is a theoretical object of just the kind whose status is a matter of dispute between the realists and the instrumentalists.

“This picture of linguistic structure as postulated to account for a speaker’s ability to use novel utterances correctly, on the basis of facts about the acquisition of capacities to project sub-sentential expressions, leads immediately to a change in the criteria of adequacy we impose upon translation functions, and accordingly to a change in the notion of the ‘meaning’ of a sentence which is preserved by translation” (p. 150).

From an empiricist point of view, questions about norms are questions of fact about what is usually the case. Empirical norms are “norms” in a non-normative, statistical sense of “normal” that has nothing to do with what should be the case, except accidentally. The projection of grammar to novel cases on the other hand is possible because grammar has a properly normative sense of “right” usage that is independent of whatever we conclude are the facts about statistically “usual” usage.

“[I]f translation is really to transform the capacity to speak one language into the capacity to speak another, it must transform an individual’s capacity to project novel sentences…. In order to learn to speak the new language, to form novel sentences and use them appropriately, an individual must have a translation-scheme which does more than match assertibility conditions. It must generate the matched assertibility conditions of an infinite number of sentences on the basis of a familiarity with the elements out of which they are constructed, as exhibited in fairly small samples” (p. 150).

Speaking is not merely the utterance of sounds, and it is not just an imitation of other speaking. Concrete meanings presuppose learned notions of rightness or goodness of fit that are furthermore always in principle disputable. This also requires a non-behaviorist account of learning.

“Our account of this fact must show how what the subject learned to do before enables him to use this expression in just this way now, even though he has never been exposed to a correct use of it” (p. 151).

“Projection is not just a matter of using novel utterances, but also of using familiar ones under novel circumstances” (ibid).

“We can conclude that competence involved, not just in using … a free-standing utterance, but in projecting it as a genuine component of compound utterances, cannot be expressed merely by assertibility conditions, but requires some additional element” (p. 153).

“We should notice that the argument we have just considered is formally analogous to two arguments we have seen before. In the first place, it is just the same style of argument which we employed … in order to show that truth conditions were required to account for the contribution by component sentences to the assertibility conditions of compound sentences containing them…. All we have done here is to extend the earlier argument to sub-sentential compounding, an extension made possible by the more detailed consideration of why compounding is important. Second, this argument … is analogous to the ‘syntactic’ arguments of Chomsky…. In each case similar surface forms (phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions respectively) are assigned different deep structures on the basis of their different projective roles…. So it is clear that these expressions would have to be associated with something besides assertibility conditions in our theory of their projection anyway” (pp. 154-155).

“Our explanation of the fact that there are correct phonetic descriptions and assertibility conditions for sentences no one has ever used before will be that the use of those sentences is determined by the grammar, … and that any individual’s learning to use the language is his learning to conform to the regularities of projection codified in that grammar” (p. 156).

“We have found that explaining the actual, empirical generation of the sentences of the language, shown by the sorts of projection of one corpus of utterances onto another which actually occur, requires that structural elements underlying phonetic structure be assigned to parallel structural elements underlying the assertibility conditions…. Just as the structure underlying the phonetic descriptions is plausibly identified as syntactic structure, so the corresponding structure underlying assertibility conditions is plausibly identified with semantic structure” (ibid).

“The same argument which gave us objective truth conditions … may thus be extended, within the context of our more detailed account of the empirical project which produces a grammar, to yield a parallel account of the function and origin of objective denotations” (p. 158).

“The case of the brown rabbit with a white foot shows that the denotations associated with the expressions ‘rabbit’ and ‘undetached rabbit-part’ must determine in some way the boundaries which white patches must exhibit in order to be grounds for reporting white rabbits or white undetached rabbit-parts” (ibid).

“But the boundaries which determine what objects or objective features are denoted by the expressions are not apparent boundaries…. Explaining the different patterns of projection of the elements of these pairs requires an objective difference in boundaries around white patches” (p. 159).

“It is important to realize that our grammar does not just seek to account for individual linguistic competence. It seeks to account for the shared projective practices in virtue of which there is a distinction between correct and incorrect uses of sentences no one has ever used before…. The grammar must account for the correct and incorrect potential uses of even quite complicated sentences which the ordinary man would never use” (ibid).

“[D]enotational schemes are part of an empirical explanation of certain social practices. Such explanations must cohere with the empirical explanations we are prepared to offer for other sorts of human conduct…. It is a prime virtue of the account we have offered of the question to which a grammar would be an answer that it shows us we can pick the objects in terms of which we explain projective practices in the same way we pick the objects in terms of which we explain color vision, indigestion, and quasars” (p. 162).

Here he is appealing to empirical explanation, and to something like the positivist notion of the unity of science. I am inclined to go to the opposite extreme, and to argue that genuine explanation is never merely empirical. There are empirical things, and we do want to explain them. There also is an empirical field of experience, but it too belongs to what is to be explained. In themselves empirical things do not explain anything. I think, though, that coherence does not apply only to explanation. There is also an implicit coherence on the level of what is to be explained. That is the sounder basis of the ideal of the unity of science.

In later work he explicitly criticizes empiricism in the philosophy of science, but he continues to be interested in empirical things, as evinced by many of his examples and by the theme of “semantic descent” in A Spirit of Trust.