Norms and necessity: replies to critics

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe critics in this volume raise several important challenges to the modal normativist position developed in Norms and Necessity, including whether the relation I claim holds between semantic rules and necessity claims generates spurious claims of metaphysical necessity, whether the view is circular (implicitly relying on a more 'robust' form of modal realism), and whether it conflicts with truth-conditional semantics. They also raise probing questions about how it compares to other views of modality, including a Lewisian view and an essentialist view. In these replies, I respond to these challenges in ways that precisify the relevant understanding of ‘semantic rules' and the forms they can take, that make clearer the direction of explanation in modal normativism in ways that show the view doesn't rely on a more ‘robust’ form of modal realism, and that give reason for thinking that there is actually no conflict between modal normativism and truth-conditional semantics. I also aim to give a fuller assessment of how it compares to other approaches to modality, including an essentialist approach.KEYWORDS: Modal normativism; essentialism; possible worlds; truth-conditional semantics; modal realism AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Kristie Miller, Rohan Sud, Jamie Dreier, Boris Kment, and David Plunkett for their helpful comments on prior versions of these replies.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 This builds on work I undertake more thoroughly in my more recent work on modal discourse (2023), which is intended as a further development of the work of Norms and Necessity, making use of work in systemic functional linguistics. Readers interested in developments after my (2020) may find that paper relevant.2 I come closest to discussing these issues in sections 5.2 and 5.3 of Norms and Necessity, though there is nothing exactly like Miller’s objection considered there.3 The easy ontological approach combines with modal normativism to give us simple realism about modal facts, properties, and possible worlds (see my 2020a, Chapter 6).4 See my (Citation2015, 156–157) for the fuller argument that such attempted ‘explanations’ would only be dormitive virtue explanations. Of course, from the normativist point of view, failure to provide explanatory truthmakers is no shortcoming – for it is a central part of the normativist approach that basic modal claims, as non-descriptive, don’t need truthmakers to ‘explain’ what ‘makes’ them true.5 See, e.g. Norms and Necessity, Chapter 8.6 Note that Miller seems open to the idea that such rules are incomplete and renegotiable, but this seems in tension with the requirement that we consider all possible scenarios in order to get the ‘correct’ statement of the rules.7 Though one may need additional introduction constraints to ensure that the worlds are complete and maximal etc. See Steinberg (Citation2013) and my discussion in my (2020a, 132–137).8 See Halliday (Citation2009, 116–138). I had not yet discovered the work in systemic functional linguistics when I wrote Norms and Necessity, but have since aimed to incorporate it into a way of developing and justifying the normativist approach. For discussion see my (2023).9 This, of course, is cohesive with Lewis’s (Citation1986) claim that adding talk of possible worlds adds expressive power to a language.10 See my (2023) for details.11 In my (2015, 263–264) I introduce some relevant restrictions on such rules to (merely) introduce new terms to the language. I also mean to cover rules for introducing a term to a language, without relying on translations from other mastered language(s).12 The closest I come is in discussing conditionalized rules in my (2020a, 99-100), but I do not there clearly draw the distinction that I make here between conditional versus conditionalized rules.13 Wang and Donaldson (Citation2022, 299) give a nice way of distinguishing the condition from the content of a rule, which can be employed to the same effect for what I here call ‘conditionalized’ rules (under the given condition, there comes into effect a rule with a certain content). It is the content that of such rules that (when the condition applies) is necessary.14 Or you could say: accept that tables exist. I accept that move, but getting there also requires views about how ‘exists’ claims work, so it’s simpler to put it in the above form.15 Obviously, to be complete this would need to include relativization throughout to: produces reddish visual conditions for whom, when in what circumstances … . But for present purposes we can leave those complications aside.16 There is not space for a full discussion of the ‘Shamala Harris’ case Sud raises (2023), where ‘Shamala’ is introduced to be a name for a sibling. The case is tricky, as our actual English term ‘sibling’ is a derivative sortal, parasitic on ‘person’ (and so following those co-application conditions, which correlate with the identity conditions for persons) – that’s why ‘If Shamala Harris is a sibling, she is a person’ (Sud Citation2023). If one could introduce a different term as a basic sortal (introducing its own co-application conditions, not parasitic on those for ‘person’), the natural conclusion to draw would be to deny that the referent of the term would be identical to Kamala Harris (and to deny that Shamala would be a person), on grounds of different their identity conditions (parallel to statue/clay cases).17 Thanks to Sud for pressing me on this question.18 Alejandro Perez Carballo (2014) makes a related argument that expressivism in metaethics is compatible with a standard truth-conditional semantics.19 As this usage suggests, it may be useful to switch to a technical term (‘semantic value’) to avoid the ambiguity of the ordinary term ‘meaning’, and to emphasize that it is this technical sense at issue.20 Sud has since suggested to me (personal communication) that one might also want a truth-conditional semantics not just to explain compositionality but also to explain the possibility of communication – as we might think of communication as a matter of speaker A having a mental state with a certain semantic value, and asserting a sentence with that semantic value, causing speaker B to have a mental state with that same semantic value. There isn’t space here to work through the details of this application of truth-conditional semantics. I would, however, suspect that it may be useful to talk of ‘semantic values’ in order to articulate (in our theories) what communication consists in (a deflationary approach can give us the tools for that articulation); but that appeal to these abstract ‘semantic values’ should not be thought of as a ‘posit’ to give anything like a causal explanation of communication. (See also my Rethinking Metaphysics, Chapter 1).21 For a nice clear exposition of truth-conditional semantics and its goals, see (Kölbel Citation2002, Chapter 1). On the above point and distinction between compositional semantics and metasemantics, see also Chrisman (2016, 13-19).22 The terminology ‘metasemantic’ is emerging and contested, and I do not need to take a stand on precisely which questions are (to be) considered metasemantic – it may be that the questions listed in the second group above should be subdivided further. The key point here is merely that the modal normativist approach is compatible with traditional truth-conditional semantics. There has been a rich recent discussion about whether expressivism in metaethics is compatible with a traditional truth-conditional semantics, which is clearly relevant here. See, for example, Perez Carballo (Citation2014), Chrisman (Citation2016, 13-19), and Ridge (Citation2009). Chrisman also notes that the distinction between semantic and meta-semantic issues is prefigured in Blackburn (Citation1984, 16–17).23 Price puts this in terms of the relation between a pragmatic-functional story (which includes questions here labelled as ‘metasemantic’) and a semantics.24 For discussion of the role of grammatical metaphors in sophisticated forms of modal talk, see my (2023).25 I discuss how a normativist may understand the introduction of talk of possible worlds in (2020a, 132-137).26 I think, in contemporary terms, it is also apt to think of inferentialism as a metasemantic theory – as it is often presented as a view about what determines or constitutes the contents of our thoughts or language, or how our social and linguistic practices confer content on the relevant mental states and expressions. (Brandom Citation1994, xiii) See also Greenberg and Harman (Citation2006), who take conceptual role semantics to be a view that ‘the meanings of expressions of a language … are determined or explained by the role of the expressions … in thinking’ (2006, 295). It is an ‘attempt to answer the question of what determines or makes it the case that representations have particular meanings or contents’ (2006, 295), and so would fall on the metasemantic side of issues.27 Some of these ‘introduction rules’ will take the form of the conceptual truths appealed to in easy inferences, such as I discuss in (2015, Chapter 3).28 Of course, that does not stop us from asking ‘substantive’ ought claims (in conceptual ethics) about what terms or concepts we, all things considered, ought to use, or what rules we ought to adopt for them.29 For an initial approach to issues in metaethics that parallels this one, see Warren and Thomasson (Citationforthcoming). I also have further work (in progress 1) on the topic.30 On the other hand, the examples I give (2020a, 99-100) in introducing the idea all seem to be rules with conditional content, not conditionalized rules. (I would now revise those, and more clearly draw the distinction between rules with conditional content, and conditionalized rules.)31 As I have discussed in some of my other work (2003), even rules of childhood ‘pretend’ games can have de re or de dicto form: it can be a rule that Lily is the queen; or it can be a rule that whoever possesses the golden hanky is ‘it’.32 Thanks to Boris Kment for further discussion here.33 One way I can imagine things going is to argue that our best theories all involve license to engage in certain kinds of talk about essences, possibilities, possible worlds, etc. If that is the case, however, I would urge us to consider the idea that the reason for this is that (as established in work in linguistics, e.g. Halliday Citation2009, 116–138) introducing such modes of talking, as grammatical metaphors, adds expressive power, capacities for generalization, and other functions that are centrally useful in formulating generalized scientific theories (see discussion in my 2023).34 I address these issues further in my (in progress 2).