dummett's ought from is

Dummett’s Ought from Is

by Karen GREEN *

Summary Dummett has offered an argument which begins with certain criteria of adequacy for any

account of the way in which communication functions and which ends with normative and revisionary conclusions concerning our logical practice. This argument, which hinges on Dummett’s criticisms of holism, is inadequate as it stands, for the holist can give an adequate description of the functioning of communication. There is a plausible defence of intuitionism to be extracted from Dummett’s writing, but it should be recognised that it has a normative starting point and does not follow from the criteria of adequacy with which Dummett apparently begins.

Rksumt Dummett a avance un raisonnement qui commence par certains crittres d’adequation pour

toute description de la manitre dont la communication fonctionne, et qui se termine par des conclusions normatives et revisionnaires concernant notre pratique logique. Ce raisonnement, qui est en relation avec la critique dummettienne du holisme, est inadkquat tel qu’il est, car le holiste peut donner une description adequate du fonctionnement de la communication. I1 y a une defense plausible de I’intuitionnisme qui peut &tre extraite de I’article de Dummett, mais il faudrait recon- naitre qu’elle a un point de depart normatif et ne depend pas des criteres d’adequation dont Dum- mett semble partir.

Zusammenfassung Dummett hat ein Argument vorgelegt, das mit einem gewissen Adaquatheitskriterium fur

jegliche Erklarung der Art und Weise beginnt, wie Kommunikation funktioniert, und das mit normativen und revisionistischen Konklusionen beziiglich unserer logischen Praxis endet. Dieses Argument, das von Dummetts Kritik am Holismus abhangt, ist fur sich genommen inadaquat, weil der Hdist eine adaquate Beschreibung des Funktionierens von Kommunikation vorlegen kann. Es gibt eine plausible Verteidigung des Intuitionismus, die aus Dummetts Arbeiten gewon- nen werden kann; es ist jedoch zu bedenken, dass sie einen normativen Ausgangspunkt hat und nicht aus dem Adaquatheitskriterium folgt, mit dem Dummett anscheinend beginnt.

By his advocacy of what he takes to be the intuitionist’s best case for revising our inferential practice, Michael Dummett has generated consi- derable interest in intuitionistic logic. Time and again we come across in his writing the following argument, which is central to his case. The premisses of

* Monash University, Department of Philosophy, Clayton, Victoria, Australia, 3168.

Dialectica Vol. 45, N O l(1991)

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the argument appear to be empirical descriptive claims about the nature of understanding. The conclusion derived is normative and revisionary. Yet the fact that a normative conlusion is derived from what appears to be a merely descriptive starting point constitutes a prima facie objection to this strategy. For, whatever one might think of the naturalistic fallacy in ethics, there is no reason to expect that an account of the way in which ordinary, often confused and ignorant speakers manage to communicate with each other, will yield normative conclusions about the way we should reason.

Dummett’s argument for intuitionism can be put like this. The meaning of an expression must be manifest in the use that is made of it1. If this were not the case it would be impossible for people to learn the meanings of the expressions of a language and it would be impossible for them to manifest a knowledge of those meanings once they were learnt. The meaning of a sentence can be equated with its truth condition2. I f we adopt classical logic then we are committed to the view that certain sentences have truth conditions which it transcends our capacity to recognise as obtaining when they do. So if we adopt classical logic we cannot give any substance to the view that we fully understand the language that we speak, because nothing that we are able to do could count as a manifestation of a knowledge of the meanings of those sentences of our language that possess transcendent truth conditions. Since we should be able to explain how we are able to speak and understand a language we ought t o adopt intuitionist logic, which is based on an account of truth in terms of warranted assertability, and which therefore offers the prospect of an explanation of what understanding consists in.

A belief that sentences have transcendent truth conditions implies a belief in a world that is independent of our ways of conceiving it and so a belief in realism. Hence we can call anyone who combines it with truth conditional semantics, a semantic realist. Those who are convinced by the above argument that truth should be explicated in terms of warranted assertability are semantic anti-realists. Dummett’s argument suggests that semantic realism involves inadequacy at two levels. First there is a lacuna in the explanation of the way language functions. The semantic realist claims that we understand sentences and hence grasp their truth conditions but is unable to say, in any non-circular way, how a grasp of those truth conditions is manifest in use. How then are we to distinguish someone who, for instance, asserts some

I Michael Dumrnett, Elements of Inluitionisrn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 376 and ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? ( l l ) ’ , in Gareth Evans and John McDowell (eds), Truth undMeuning, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 70-71. * In formulating Dummett’s argument I am following his comments in Truth and other enigmus, London, Duckworth, 1978, p . X X I I and Elements of Intuitionism, up. cil., p . 313.

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instance of the law of excluded middle on faith, without grasping its content, from another whose assertion is enlightened by a grasp of the way things have to be in order for the assertion to be true? If this distinction cannot be made out we have no genuine account of what understanding consists in and an inadequate grasp of the way language functions. Secondly, there is an epistemological inadequacy. For, if one adopts classical modes of reasoning one is led to assert sentences merely because they are licensed by the favoured logic, even though one has no genuine grasp of their content. Intuitionism, by contrast, appears to offer the prospect both of a world-view that can be justified in terms of the evidence available and a way of explaining to ourselves how it is that we can come to understand and communicate this world-view to each other.

However, as already mooted, the argument is open to the following objection, which can be put in the form of a dilemma. There are two ways that we can interpret the requirement that we give an account of the functioning of language. The first is purely descriptive. People use language in all sorts of ways. Sometimes they make utterances that are ambiguous or incoherent. Sometimes they use sentences which they d o not fully understand. Dummett may be correct in asserting that given the nature of our capacities for learning, meaning must be manifest in use, but if the consequence of describing our linguistic practice in these terms is that we are led to the conclusion that we from time to time utter sentences without associating a determinate content with them, why should we baulk? As individuals we have every reason to believe that we will, from time to time, successfully use sentences that we do not fully understand. This must be so since we sometimes sincerely assert con- tradictions, without recognising them as such3; at other times we hold incoherent theories of the world; and we sometimes misuse vocabulary or talk volubly on subjects of which we have only the faintest grasp. It is no doubt the use to which we put these sentences which ultimately makes it manifest that they have only incoherent or partial meanings, but the fact that we as speakers do sometimes use sentences without fully understanding them means that such a possibility must be allowed for in any purely descriptive account of the way language functions. If our account leads us to include some of the sentences that we assert on the basis of classical reasoning, as among those that are not fully understood, why should that lead us to revise our inferential practice? Communication usually succeeds but there is little reason to expect that our actual language will ever be or need to be epistemologically perfect. It may,

Saul Kripke has given a vivid account of a case which should be interpreted in this way in ‘A Puzzle about Belief‘ in Ashavi Margalit (ed) Meaning and Use, Dortrecht, Reidel, 1979, pp. 239-288.

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rather, be integral to its functioning as a means of communication between creatures with our limitations, that sentences with indeterminate contents can work perfectly well as rough indicators of what we are likely to expect both from other people and from the world.

On the other hand, our account of the functioning of language may already be implicitly normative. Language may indeed be put to many uses, yet an account of the functioning of language ought to be able to distinguish completely successful acts of communication, if there are any, from the many misunderstandings and partial successes that are features of our imperfect everyday practice. Dummett can often be read, like Frege, as interested pri- marily in genuine communication4. And he assumes an essentially Fregean model of the occurrence of such acts of communication. According to this model, a successful act of genuine communication takes place when a sentence that has a full and unambiguous meaning is sincerely uttered by a speaker, who knows what that meaning is, and whose utterance is understood by a listener in virtue of his or her knowledge of the meaning of the sentence.

If we interpret the argument in this light it no longer seems that the considerations captured in the slogan ‘meaning is use’ can simply be constraints that fall out of the task of describing how language functions. For, on the view that is already implicitly revisionary, much of what passes for communication is really only ersatz communication. We often utter sentences and perhaps agree with each other as to their truth without in fact associating any truth conditions with them. Now it is clear that there are rules that govern the per- formance even of such ersatz communications. We accept, for instance, that one who is competent in the use of the sentence “Either there is a greatest prime or it is not the case that there is a greatest prime” will manifest this competence by using the sentence correctly in inferences and by using the con- tained expressions properly in other sentences. And we can distinguish such a person from one who does not possess this competence. So if the constraints on the learnability and manifestability of language captured in the slogan simply fall out of the preconditions of communication between finite minds, we must conclude that ersatz communication accords with these constraints as fully as does genuine communication. The argument cannot then be that the considerations captured in the slogan by themselves point to the need for revision. In order to draw the conclusions he does from the constraint ‘meaning is use’ Dummett must be interpreting it in a way which is more controversial than at first appears. Rather than incorporating innocent considerations having to do with the learnability and manifestability of linguistic competence the

His approach is like that which he ascribes to Frege, Michael Dumrnett, Truth ond orher enigmas, op. cit., p. XIV.


slogan is in fact taken by him to imply that each sentence must, taken in conjunction with a finitely specifiable fragment of the language, have a meaning (a truth condition) a grasp of which can in principle be manifest in the kind of act that is central to the use of sentences in general, that is, in an act of assertion, in the face of evidence, that the truth condition obtains. If ‘meaning is use’ is interpreted in this fashion it is strong enough to yield the conclusions that Dummett desires. But it is no longer a principle that falls out, in a simple way, from the requirement that we be able to learn and manifest competence in language. It appears then that either the principle ‘meaning is use’ is too weak to entail the conclusion that Dummett requires or it is more controversial than it at first seems.

Dummett is not unaware of the possibility of an objection to his argument along these lines. The first horn of the dilemma that I have adumbrated involves a holistic view of language. It involves accepting that there may be sentences which play a perfectly useful role in the language as a whole without it being possible to say what behaviour, apart from using them correctly in the language as a whole, would count as a manifestation of a knowledge of their truth conditions. Dummett’s reasons for believing that what the slogan ‘meaning is use’ requires is that each individual sentence has a specifiable meaning, are implicit in his rejection of holism. It is to these arguments, therefore, that we now turn.

In ‘What is a Theory of Meaning?’ Dummett casts some light on his reasons for believing that the holist is unable to conform to either the learnability or manifestability constraint on theories of meaning. He begins the paper by stressing that a theory of meaning for a language is a ‘theory of how the language functions as a language’ and since a language is something which speakers use as an instrument of communication the theory of meaning must say what it is that someone knows when he or she knows the language5. The holist claims that we cannot assign meanings to the sentences of a language individually but that, nevertheless, a grasp of the meanings of the sentences of a language which is sufficient for participation in the practice of communicating with it will emerge from a knowledge of speakers’ dispositions to assent to and dissent from sentences in the face of evidence, and from a knowledge of speakers’ conditional dispositions to assent and dissent, in other words a knowledge of the inferential connections between sentences. Dummett points to an ambiguity in the idea that knowledge of meaning emerges out of a knowledge of the situations in which speakers hold true or false the sentences

Michael Dummett, ‘What is a Theory of Meaning?’ in Samuel Guttenplan (ed), Mind and Language, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, p. 99.

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of their language6. If we take it that it is the totality of all speakers’ dispositions to assent to and dissent from sentences that is relevant to the determina- tion of meaning, then no one speaker will come close to a knowledge of the meanings of the sentences of their language. Since such knowledge could not be possessed by individual speakers the holist will, according to Dummett, face the temptation of shrinking the notion of a language down to that of an idiolect. The speaker knows, after all, his or her own dispositions to judge sentences true or false. But this strategy fails, according to Dummett, for two reasons. First, he says, it inverts the true relationship between a language and an idiolect; a language is something essentially social so idiolects should not be taken as primary. Second, the totality of an individual’s dispositions to assent to and dissent from sentences is unlikely to be sufficiently extensive to determine the references of all the words in his or her language.

These comments of Dummett’s are somewhat brief and unsatisfactory, but they can be bolstered in the following way’. If one assumes the Fregean model of the functioning of communication then a holistic account of meaning cannot be accepted, for, either the holist thinks of meaning as residing in the language as a social entity, in which case, since no one knows the whole language, no one knows the meanings of the expressions used; or one thinks of meaning as residing in each speakers’ idiolect, in which case each of us may know the meanings of the expressions in our own mouth, but cannot have access to the meanings of those expressions in another’s; in Dummett’s words, ‘ I cannot know anything that a man believes until I know everything (or guess) everything that he believes. And so it becomes incomprehensible how anyone can tell another anything’*. Now Dummett does not make it explicit that his argument assumes the Fregean model for communication but clearly this is the case. Communication is impossible, if holism is true, just in case we assume that to understand another is to know the meaning of the words the other uses. Dummett’s argument works if no other model for the functioning of communication is available9.

Quine argued that since meaning consists in verification conditions and the unit of verification is nothing less than a theory taken as a whole, it is

Ibid., pp. 134-135. Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosoph-v of Language, Duckworth, London, 1973, pp. 597-

Ibid., p. 599. Recently Dummett has acknowledged that ordinary speakers need not know the meanings

of all the sentences of a language and should be attributed beliefs about, rather than knowledge of meanings, Michael Dummett, ‘Reply to Tennant’ in Barry Taylor (ed), Michael Duinineff: Contributions to Philosophy, Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 1987, p. 240, nevertheless, his recognition of this fact has not, to my knowledge, lead him to explicitly recognise the inadequacy of the objections to holism that I discuss in this paper.

600.

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impossible to determinately assign meanings to sentences individuallyi0. Dum- mett effectively turns this on its head, proposing that, since communication requires that speakers be able to recognise the meanings of the sentences they use, it must be possible to finitely specify the verification conditions of sentences.

Folk theory goes along with Frege and Dummett in identifying understanding a sentence with a knowledge of its meaning. But anyone familiar with the work of Kripke, Putnam and Searlei’ will be aware that it is virtually impossible to specify anything that is such that a knowledge of it is sufficient for the understanding of a name or natural kind term and which is at the same time necessary for such understanding. If this is true of terms it is equally true of the sentences that contain them. What is there that is known by all speakers who understand the sentence ‘Thales said that everything is water’? It is not sufficient that one knows that ‘Thales said that everything is water’ means that Thales said that everything is water, for one could know that without knowing whether or not ‘Thales said that everything is water’ also means that parliament said that standing orders are suspended. It may be sufficient for understanding this sentence that a person can manifest the knowledge that it means that the presocratic philosopher called ‘Thales’ said that everything was made of stuff like this - where water is indicated - but this is not necessary. It may be sufficient that he or she knows only that the person who is being spoken of by others made this improbable claim.

From these well-known observations the following picture emerges. If the meaning of a sentence determines what has to be the case in order for that sentence to be true or false, then the meaning will often be something which will only be known by a person who has a thorough grasp of the historical and expert use of the terms in the sentence. But such knowledge goes far beyond what is known by ordinary speakers who nevertheless can communicate using the sentence. Some philosophers have gone so far as t o take these facts to show that ordinary speakers have no propositional knowledge of meaning at a1112. We know how to speak, but this ability shouldn’t be explained in terms of knowing that sentence s means m. But this is going too far. To understand

lo Willard Van Orman Quine, ‘Epistemology Naturalized’; in Willard Van Orman Quine, Ontological Relativity and Orher Essays, Columbia University Press, New York, 1969, pp. 80-81.

Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1980, Hilary Putnam, ‘The Meaning of Meaning’, in Mind, Language and Reality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 215-271, 1975 and John Searle, ‘Proper Names’, Mind67, 1958, pp. 154-161.

l 2 Stephen Stich makes this claim in relation to grammatical competence, Stephen Stich, ‘What Every Speaker Knows’, Philosophical Review 80, 1971, pp. 476-496. Michael Devitt makes it in relation to semantic competence, Michael Devitt, Designation, Columbia University Press, New York, 1981, pp. 92-101.

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a sentence requires more than having appropriate thoughts when the sentence is uttered, as Michael Devitt has suggested. That could happen in all sorts of deviant ways. A cerebral stimulator might induce an appropriate thought in one’s mind whenever a foreign sentence was uttered, but if one were unaware that those thoughts were appropriate, given the meanings of the sentences heard, one would not understand the sentences. To understand a sentence is to have appropriate thoughts in virtue of the possession of some knowledge about the use of the sentence. So, a person who understands a sentence has some knowledge that distinguishes them from those who do not. Which is not to say that for every sentence there is some one thing known by each and every person who understands it.

As we saw, in rejecting holism, Dummett accused the holist of reducing language to a collection of solipsistic idiolects and contravening the essentially social nature of language. But the holist can reply that the accusation does not hold, since the social character of language itself requires that Frege’s model of the functioning of communication be abandoned. The references of the expressions of a language are determined by the language as a whole. Since language is a social entity, that has developed in a historical context, both context of use and experts’ dispositions to assent to and dissent from sentences may at times be more crucial for determining reference than are the dispositions of the majority. Clearly the idiolect of any single individual will not contain enough information to determine the references of many of the expressions that the individual uses. What this shows is that we communicate, not by a complete recognition of the socially determined meanings of the expressions we use, but in virtue of some more limited knowledge which is sufficient for their use. We speak the same language, because we take ourselves to be answerable in our use to a society which has in place socially recognised mechanisms, such as dictionaries, experts and schools, that can be appealed to when the need arises to settle a dispute over meaning. To speak the same language as another is not to know exactly what that other knows.

On this view, communication does not involve the mutual recognition of the meaning of a sentence, so the holist has to give another account of the process of communication. Davidson, developing Quine’s thoughts on translation, suggests that understanding the utterances of another is always a process of interpretation. What is known by any individual who speaks a language will be an idiosyncratic fragment of the language, considered as a social whole, which may deviate to a greater or lesser extent from the most widely accepted usage13. Each speaker knows which indexical and eternal sentences

l 3 Donald Davidson, ‘Belief and the Basis of Meaning’, Synthese27.1974, p. 321.

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are true in his or her idiolect, and we interpret another speaker of the same language by assuming, in the first instance, that they hold true most of the sentences we do, and by accounting for the differences between us in terms of divergence in belief or meaning as the case may require. The choice will at times be indeterminate, being constrained only by the principle of charity which says that we should interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our own standard^'^.

But this brings us straight back to Dummett’s objection. In order to apply the principle of charity to the speech dispositions of the other it seems that we will have to know the totality of their idiolect and that makes communication impossible. The principle of charity is a holistic constraint, but for this very reason it is implausible that its application is part of the ordinary process of communication. There are other difficulties with the principle too. Charity involves attributing truth and rationality to the other, yet often interpreting the language of another culture, or making sense of an individual’s behaviour, is best achieved by attributing to them false theories or inconsistent beliefslS. Does this show that after all Dummett is right and the holist cannot explain how communication functions?

I believe not. We can expain how we communicate, even if there is no determinate propositional meaning attached to each sentence and known by all competent speakers, if we take into account the following facts. First, it is central to communicating with speakers of the same language that each speaker knowns that they are answerable in their use to the rest of the linguistic community. This has the following consequences. One can successfully use expressions without really knowing their meaning, relying on the expectation that one’s words will be taken to mean whatever they conventionally mean and, in interpreting others, one can rely on the fact that each individual will have been trained to conform, in their dispositions to assent and dissent, to the communal norm. Each of us has our own beliefs as to the linguistic meanings of the sentences we use, which determine what we mean when we use those sentences, but each of us is also prepared to discover that words do not mean what we thought they meant. In interpreting the other, when we have reason to believe that they are members of our linguistic community, our first step is to assume that they mean by their words what we would mean were we to utter those words in the same context, and usually this will work. When it doesn’t and the result is an attribution to the other of a belief that we have

l4 Donald Davidson, ‘Radical Interpretation’, Diuleciicu 27, 1973, p. 324. l 5 Stephen Stich, ‘Could Man be an irrational Animal?’ Synihese64,1985, pp. 115-135.

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good independent reason to think they do not have, or a belief, desire or senti- ment too bizarre by our own lights, we will reinterpret their speech along one of the following lines. We will take it that either we or they have mistaken beliefs as to the meanings of some words, or that there is an inadequacy in either our or their methods of belief formation or they have other beliefs, desires or emotional responses which will serve to make comprehensible the belief expressed. In such cases sympathy, in conjunction with context, will guide our interpretation.

What I mean by sympathy is not dissimilar to what is captured in some versions of the principle of charity. Sympathy allows us to comprehend the other by giving us a sense of what it would be like to be placed as they are. But whereas the principle of charity is a theoretical constraint on interpretation which involves attributing rationality and ‘optimising’ truth, sympathy is a natural capacity which gives us a sense of the beliefs, desires and intentions of others, partly independently of the interpretation of their speech. Davidson sees the problem of radical interpretation as one of giving simultaneously an account of meaning and of belief for, as he says, we have no way of specifying the sophisticated beliefs of a person apart from interpreting their wordslh. And this is true. But it does not imply that there are not many simple beliefs, desires and feelings that we can recognise independently of the interpretation of speech. Even where sophisticated beliefs are concerned it is, I believe, largely sympathy that ultimately guides our choice of interpretation.

Sympathy is not unlike charity but is not subject to the paradoxes of irrationality”. Sympathy involves the idea that we can understand another’s speech and interpret their beliefs, even when these are less than fully rational, just in case we are able to recognise that we would in similar circumstances have similar beliefsI8. It is one of the more counterintuitive aspects of Davidson’s account of language and belief, and of the role that the principle of charity plays in his theory account of interpretation, that it leads him to conclude that very small children and animals do not have beliefs or desires because they do not have the concept of belief. We commonly do attribute beliefs, desires and fears to animals and very small children. We are able to do this because our natural sympathy, which is ultimately grounded in basic similari- ties in perceptual and affective responses, gives us a good guide to the contents of their minds. Beliefs are expressed in language, but they are also generated by perceptions. It is our sympathetic response to the behaviour of children and

l 6 Donald Davidson, op. cit., fn. 1 I , p. 3 I 1-3 13. Donald Davidson, ‘The Paradoxes of Irrationality’ in Richard Wollheim and James

Hopkins (eds), Plzilosophical Essuys on Freud, Cambridge University Press, 1982. l 8 StephenStich, op. cit., fn. 13, p. 122.


animals which enables us to interpret their beliefs and desires and which, in the case of children, makes it possible for us to teach them to associate appropriate linguistic expressions with those beliefs and desires.

The importance of sympathy can be brought out by contrasting the problem of the radical interpretation of human speech with that of interpreting dolphin speech. As radical interpreters of humans, we can rely on a huge store of information that we sympathetically assume. Pain will be experienced in circumstances similar to those that cause us pain. What is clearly seen, heard, smelt by us will, in all probability, be clearly seen, heard, smelt by a native in similar circumstances. The correlations that are obvious to us between vocal utterance and perceptual cue will be obvious to the native too. With the dolphin, assuming that they do communicate, we really do have to solve for meaning and belief simultaneously. If we could see (or more accurately, echo-locate) and feel as the dolphin sees and feels we might begin to recognise how the structures that they vocally produce tie in with other structures in what is perceived. Without this capacity, interpreting their speech becomes the completely theoretical task of constructing a model simultaneously of what they perceive, and hence believe, and what the sounds they make mean.

Language, on this view of the matter, educates our sympathy. It enables us to respond more precisely to others by endowing their beliefs and desires with finer structure. Language is not understood through a pure exercise of rationality and computation, it also requires sympathy. It is a virtue of this model of communication that the reality of radical interpretation seems better captured in it than on Davidson’s. The radical interpreter does not begin by noting assent and dissent behaviour indiscriminately. Rather, some common utterances, for instance, requests for and offers of food and comments concerning palatibility, are quickly interpreted, for beliefs and desires in this area are easily manifest. Success in these areas provides the translator with clues that can be put to work in interpreting beliefs that are too sophisticated to be expressed independently of language.

This model provides the holist with an account of how communication functions. But it might be questioned whether it is still holistic. If the principle of charity were taken to be constitutive of Davidson’s holism, the account based on sympathy clearly would no longer be holistic. It might be further thought that explaining interpretation as an exercise in sympathy implies that sentences have meanings that are independent of language. But this would be too strong an interpretation of the picture intended. What happens, when the radical interpreter recognises in the native’s behaviour a belief or desire that he or she might express in similar circumstances? The native’s utterance is

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interpreted by a sentence of the theorist’s own idiolect. It is mapped onto a sentence which has its meaning in virtue of the place it occupies in the theorist’s own language. Because of this, it will only give a rough and inaccurate guide to the native’s meaning. As time goes by, the radical interpreter will come to appreciate the connections between the sentences of the native’s language and the ways in which translations of those sentences into the theorist’s language misrepresent the native’s beliefs and desires. Ultimately, the theorist will interpret the native as the native does, by having internalised an idiolect sufficiently close to the native social norm to be counted a speaker of the natives’s language. At this stage the theorist’s interpretation of the native will be quite accurate, since the native’s utterance will be interpreted by a sentence of the theorist’s idiosyncratic version of native, which, with luck, will be very close to the native’s own.

Dummett’s objection to the holist’s account of the functioning of communication is that the principle of charity requires one to know the complete pat- tern of the other’s linguistic dispositions before one can interpret them. It is a matter of some controversy just how the principle of charity should be taken and it might be claimed that what 1 have called sympathy is just what Davidson intended by charityI9. Still, Davidson’s talk of ‘optimising’ truth suggests Dummett’s interpretation and his subsequent objection. Sympathy, which has many elements in common with charity, is not open to the objection, for it clearly allows the possibility of interpreting the other’s utterances piecemeal. It is still holistic, for it allows that interpretation will improve as more is learnt of the interconnected structure of the subject’s linguistic dispositions, for, on the proposed picture, meaning does emerge out of the interconnected structure of language as a whole.

Still, ‘holism’ has a number of senses and this raises the question whether there is not yet some sense which justifies Dummett’s contention. ‘Holism’ may mean holism of the mental, the assertion that the content of a person’s beliefs and desires is given by their place in that person’s idiolect taken as a

l 9 In discussing charity Davidson sometimes mentions sympathy, ‘The Paradoxes of Irra- tionality’ op. c i f . , p. 303. There is nevertheless a difference; it is built into sympathy, as I use the term, that we can understand irrational behaviour and belief. This is not to say that we can understand complete irrationality, but recognisable elemcnts of irrationality, of thc kind to which we might ourselves be subject, do not jeopardise comprehenGon. The difference can be marked by pointing to two senses of ‘understand’. We can understand an alien culture and still say of nieni- bers of that culture that they have beliefs which, by our norms of reasoning, are irrational. Or we can use ‘understand’ normatively and say of the people of such a culture that it is impossible to fully understand what they are getting at since their beliel‘s arc irrational. This leads to an account of irrational helief somewhat similar to that oft’eied by Dan Sperber, ‘Apparciitly Irrational Beliefs’ in Martin Hollis and Stephen Lukes (eds), Rafionality and Relarivisn?. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1982, pp. 149-180.


whole*O. The account of the functioning of communication that I have offered is holistic in this sense. On the other hand, holism may be equated with the view that there is no distinction between changes in meaning and changes in belief 21. It may also be the view that the linguistic meanings of expressions are given by their place in the language, when this is taken to be a social entity. Yet again, it can be equated with the claim that no sentence is immune to revision. Which is itself grounded in the view that since every sentence has its meaning in virtue of its place in the language as a whole, and theories are only verified as wholes, any sentence of a theory will be able to be revised if we are prepared to make appropriate changes elsewhere22.

Dummett objects that a theory that could not characterise the distinction between disputes concerning meaning and disputes concerning belief, would be i n a d e q ~ a t e ~ ~ . Even if this is accepted, in the model of the functioning of communication proposed, a workable, though not absolute, version of this distinction can be drawn. The distinction marks the difference between disputes among individuals who agree in their beliefs about the socially recognised meanings of the expressions used, and disputes over the socially appropriate use. This distinction is also useful for negotiating the fact that individual idiolects differ and people misuse words. In determining whether what a person said was true, we look to what their words are publicly acknowledged to mean. In determining whether what a person believed was true we look to their idiolect and the context of their utterance. When there is a dis- crepancy between what they believed and what they said, we give a rendition of their belief in words we take to be more appropriate to the expression of their state of mind.

It is when we consider the language as a social entity, that it becomes impossible to ultimately distinguish changes in meaning from changes in

2o This statement may be misleading, suggesting that utterances are an outer code for inner thoughts, which are meanings, but this would obscure the fact that the individual’s idiolect is only apt for expressing the beliefs that it does because of its relationship to the public language. Idio- lect and language are dialectically related. The items of an individual’s idiolect only have meanings in virtue of being tokens of a public language. An utterance can only be recognised as deviant if words are not put to their normal use. This assumes a normal use. At the same time, the language as social entity is not something that exists independently of the idiolects of speakers. It is perhaps best thought of as an idealised idiolect, the one that would be spoken by an ideal rational language master with all relevant evidence available.

Michael Dummett, Truth andother enigmas, op. cif . , p. 387. 22 John McDowell accepts yet another version of what holism consists in, seeing the holist as

one who refuses to fall into the trap of believing that one could give an account of content from a position ‘outside’ of a language which already has content, ‘In Defence of Modesty’ in Barry Taylor (ed) op. cit., pp. 59-80. Interpreting holism in this way makes antiholism totally unattrac- tive and this is not a position that Dummett ever intentionally occupied, Michael Dummett, ‘Reply to McDowell’, op. cit., pp. 253-268.

23 Michael Dummett, ‘What is a Theory of Meaning’, op. cif . , p. 118.

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belief. We can nevertheless allow a rough distinction between changes which leave most of the structure of language intact, changes in belief, and changes which result in more widespread revision, changes in meaning. Still, it is experts who ultimately determine the appropriate use of the expressions in their fields of expertise and, when disputes arise between experts, there is no further social authority to appeal to. In such contexts disputes over meaning are indistinguishable from disputes over the way things are. Moreover, such disputes are always implicitly normative. They are disputes as to how we should use words in order to have the best explanation of and representation of the world. Does this show, after all that Dummett is right and that the holist cannot give an adequate account of communication?

In fact, a stronger argument for intuitionism than the one we have been considering does emerge at this point, but it, like traditional defences of intuitionism, has a normative and epistemological starting point24. If I am right, there is no path from the merely descriptive account of the way language functions to the conclusion that we should adopt intuitionist logic. If speakers often don’t know the full linguistic meaning of the expressions they use and therefore rely on the existence of experts for their confidence that the sentences they utter have determinate truth conditions, it is not very surprising that there are some sentences such that nobody can now specify, in a non- circular way, their truth conditions. Such sentences are a bit like counterfeit coin, for our expectation that there is someone who can back up our use of them by making their truth conditions precise is unwarranted, but like counterfeit coin they can be put to perfectly good use. A genuine act of successful communication will only take place when, in virtue of its place in the language, the sentence used has a determinate truth condition, not necessarily known by the speaker and listener, but nevertheless roughly compatible with their beliefs concerning the meaning of the sentence. As logicians, however, we are in the position of experts whose disputes about meaning are always implicitly normative. And as logicians, we should be concerned to fill the epistemological lacuna that is the legacy of classical logic. If this is the case, Dum- mett’s most convincing argument for intuitionism is not, after all, his novel attempt to defend it from a starting point within the theory of meaning, but the more traditional case made in ‘The Justification of Deduction’ which begins with the thought that we ought to be able to give a justification of our deductive practice 2 5 .

24 I have discussed this argument in greater detail in ‘Psychologism and Anti-realism’, Aus-

25 Michael Dummett, Truth andOfherEnigrnas, op. cit., pp. 302-305. tralasian Journal of Philosophy, 64, 1986, pp. 488-500.

Durnmett’s Ought from Is 81

If this latter argument is successful, Dummett will have shown, after all, that an account of the functioning of communication that is capable of distinguishing ersatz from genuine communication cannot be holistic in all the above senses. According to Dummett, holism, like formalism, effectively denies that sentences can be ascribed a determinate content, even one that is in fact known only by the best informed members of the linguistic community26. If Dummett can show that a justification of certain deductive practices is possible, starting only from the premiss that communication has a point that should not be jeopardised by deduction, he will have shown that some elements of our practice can be justified and are immune to revision. He will then have shown that we need not accept holism in the last sense.

Earlier in the paper I distinguished two ways in which one might explain how communication functions, a purely descriptive account and one that was implicitly normative. This distinction implies two senses of ‘meaning’. The first indicates that property of sentences that we are interested in when describing how language functions which is given by their relationship to conditions of assent and dissent and by relationships to other sentences. It is in virtue of meaning, in this sense, that we can recognise ambiguity, incoherence or meaningfulness in a stronger sense. Meaningfulness in this stronger sense (cognitive content) can be equated with the possession of a determinate truth condition (at least in a context of utterance).

Given this distinction the contention of this paper can be summed up as follows. Holism can deliver a perfectly adequate description of the way communication functions. This is not surprising since Quine’s holism arises out of his attempt to give a naturalistic account of language use2’. So holism provides an account of meaning, in the first sense, and with it captures the holism of the mental which is fundamental for the interpretation of belief and action. We may also allow holism, when it is the thesis that there is no ultimate difference between disputes over meaning and disputes over what is the case. For there is no ultimate distinction between saying what the meanings of scientific terms are and saying what there is. Dummett in effect accepts this, for he assumes that his conclusions with regard to the meanings of the logical terms will have metaphysical implications. We can, further, accept holism with regard to linguistic meaning when it is the simple claim that the expressions of the language have their meanings in virtue of their place in the language as a whole. So, Dummett is wrong if he is taken to be arguing that the holist cannot explain how communication functions. But he is on

26 Michael Dumrnett, ‘Critical Notice; Brouwer Collected Works’, Mind89, 1980, p. 61 1. *’ Willard Van Orman Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, Columbia Univers- ity Press, New York and London, 1969, pp. 69-90.

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much stronger ground if we take him to be challenging head on the claim that no sentence is immune to revision or, put otherwise, no part of our practice can be conclusively justified.

Why should it not be the case, that some languages, taken as wholes, are internally self-supporting in virtue of recognisable features of their structure? Even though sentences have their meanings in virtue of their place in the language as a whole, there may be some sentences which cannot be jettisoned, since to do so would be to undermine the very purpose to which language is put. We may have to rebuild the boat while remaining afloat but, it can be argued, some strategies for rebuilding are recognisably incompatible with our vessel’s staying afloat. If it is impossible to give a justification for our deductive practice, then it will equally well be impossible to give a reasoned criterion for distinguishing genuine from mere ersatz acts of communication. Those sentences which are claimed by the authorities to have determinate content will, in the end, have it in virtue of nothing more than the word of the relevant experts. The sentences that are claimed to be logical truths will be so merely in virtue of being upheld as norms by the society’s institutions. Ultimately, the values of the Enlightenment depend on the idea that all reasonable people can agree on the rational justification of beliefs. But if the logical practice on which such justifications are founded is itself unjustifiable, rational justification collapses. Dummett’s objections to holism then reduce to claim that, if we can, we ought to give a justification of our practice. Holism can give an account of the functioning of language but if its account is unable to give us confidence in our best reasoning, it fails to deliver something that we have every reason to require.

Dialectica Vol. 45, NO 1 (1991)

dummett's ought from is

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