The Possibility of Philosophical Understanding: Reflections on the Thought of Barry Stroud by Jason Bridges Niko Kolodny Wai-hung Wong

Author:Jason Bridges, Niko Kolodny, Wai-hung Wong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-09-01T16:00:00+00:00

4.

I have examined a number of considerations which might seem to support Stroud's nonreductionism, and I have argued that none of them is effective. Should we conclude that Stroud is wrong to deny the possibility of reductive dispositionalism about meaning, or of any other kind of view which seeks to explain meaning solely in terms of extensionally characterized regularities in our use of expressions? I shall argue in this section that we should not. Stroud is right, I will suggest, to think that we cannot make sense of the “life” of linguistic expressions solely in terms of their use conforming to regular patterns. But I will argue that this does not commit us to the austere form of nonreductionism which denies the possibility of any general account of meaning and which, in effect, takes (p.167) facts about meaning as primitive. Rather, I shall suggest, a proper appreciation of what is objectionable about reductive dispositionalism points the way to a view which allows us to explain meaning “from outside” language without simply identifying the meaningfulness of an expression with its figuring in nonintentionally characterizable regularities.

To begin developing this line of argument, I want to return to language-game §2. Stroud holds, as we saw, that we can think of the sounds produced and responded to by the builder and his assistant as having “life” or meaning without supposing that their use is guided or justified by inner states or processes. What makes them meaningful, and gives them the particular meanings they have, is simply a matter of their regular use. But, as we also saw, Stroud holds in addition that this use has to be understood in intentional and indeed in specifically semantic terms. What makes the sounds meaningful is that they are used in the linguistic activity of ordering building-stones. Now I have been arguing in the previous two sections that Stroud does not do enough to motivate the nonreductionist aspect of his view. But this is not because I think that the kind of reductive dispositionalism which we have been considering is correct. On the contrary, I agree with Stroud that we cannot make sense of the sounds in language-game §2 as meaningful simply in virtue of the extensionally characterized lawlike regularities in which they figure. Unlike Stroud, though, I do not see this as a consequence either of Kripke's quus hypothesis, or of the impossibility of trying to characterize meaning “from outside” language. Rather, I see it simply as a reflection of pretheoretical intuitions about what is required for meaning and understanding. If, to reconsider a possibility I mentioned briefly in section 1, automata were programmed to produce and respond to expressions of language-game §2 in just the way the builder and his assistant do, it would be intuitively implausible to claim that the expressions were meaningful, at least for the automata themselves. The same would be true, although perhaps to a lesser extent, in the case of animals who were conditioned to respond to the expressions by fetching the corresponding building-stones.

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