Endre Begby

Lexical norms, language comprehension, and the epistemology of testimony

It has recently been argued (for instance by Sanford Goldberg, expanding on earlier work by Tyler Burge) that public linguistic norms are implicated in the epistemology of testimony by way of underwriting the reliability of language comprehension. This paper argues that linguistic normativity, as such, makes no explanatory contribution to the epistemology of testimony, but instead emerges naturally out of a collective effort to maintain language as a reliable medium for the dissemination of knowledge. Consequently, the epistemologies of testimony and language comprehension are deeply intertwined from the start, and there is no room for grounding the one in terms of the other.

Davidson’s Derangement Revisited: Guest Editors’ Introduction

‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’ was first published 30 years ago (1986). This was just two years after the appearance of Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, the volume that collected Donald Davidson’s by then already classic papers in philosophy of language from the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, one of us (the oldest) had the pleasure of hearing Davidson give Derangement as a talk at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario) in September 1984. The obvious delight and excitement for a fledgling graduate student just then submerged in a struggle to make sense of truth, meaning, and radical interpretation in hearing Davidson give a colloquium paper on language, were tempered, however, by a certain sense of bewilderment. Just enough had been absorbed of Davidson’s early papers that this talk, with its startling, negative concluding claim that there is no such thing as a language, induced the impression that the exegetical target had, somehow, shifted; but how? In what direction? Davidson’s truth-theoretic conception of meaning and his account of the kind of evidence such a theory is built on seem to rest on at least two idealizations; that of a language—an object to be interpreted—and a radical interpreter. The latter is a device that makes vivid and explicit the way in which empirical evidence can be brought to support systematic imputations—in the form of a truth theory for the language—of propositional meaning to linguistic utterances. But the former, the language that is to be thus understood—how exactly is this to be construed? What is the truth theory of the radical interpreter a theory of? This is the question pursued in Derangement. In this paper,

Deranging the Mental Lexicon

Abstract This paper offers a defense of Davidson’s conclusion in ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, focusing on the psychology and epistemology of language. Drawing on empirical studies in language acquisition and sociolinguistics, I problematize the traditional idealizing assumption that a person’s mental lexicon consists of two distinct parts—a dictionary, comprising her knowledge of word meanings proper, and an encyclopedia, comprising her wider knowledge of worldly affairs. I argue that the breakdown of the dictionary–encyclopedia distinction can be given a cognitive and functional explanation: facts regarding language learning and the challenges of coping with linguistically diverse environments require that dictionary and encyclopedia remain deeply integrated rather than categorically distinct dimensions of the mental lexicon. This argument provides support for a psychologized version of Davidson’s conclusion in ‘Derangement’: there is no such thing as a language, in the sense that there is no diachronically stable and uniquely specifiable object that could constitute the language which a person knows. I then apply this conclusion to the question of whether the concept of a public language—understood as a more or less stable body of conventions shared by a group of speakers—could nonetheless retain an important explanatory role in philosophy of language and linguistics.

A Role for Coercive Force in the Theory of Global Justice

Global Justice theory is characterized by an uncompromising commitment to the universal validity of a wide range of social, economic, and political rights. These rights are held by individual human beings irrespective of the material, social, or political conditions they happen to live under. Importantly, these rights also correlate with bystander obligations. In the words of Martha Nussbaum, a leading theorist of the Global Justice movement, ‘the whole world is under a collective obligation to secure the capabilities to all world citizens’ (Nussbaum 2011, 167).1 This chapter raises questions about the sorts of means that we can deploy as we seek to discharge these obligations. In particular, it asks whether there can be a place within Global Justice theory for third-party employment of coercive force to vindicate these rights.

Hermeneutics and Pragmatism

At a first glance, hermeneutics and pragmatism will seem the oddest of pairings, about as different as two philosophical traditions can be. Lightly caricatured, hermeneutics is staid and solemn, historically allied with theology, focused on the highly intellectualized discipline of textual interpretation and exegesis. Pragmatism, on the other hand, is mercurial and iconoclastic, largely oriented toward the sciences, and looking to develop a thoroughly naturalistic picture of the human being and its capacities. Nonetheless, hermeneutics and pragmatism have crossed paths at several points in the history of twentieth century philosophy. While we would likely look in vain for the prospect of a merger, a final confluence, the interaction between the two schools of thought has always produced striking and interesting results. Section 1 of this chapter charts some of the distinctive doctrines of the early (or “classical”) pragmatists. In section 2, we turn to Heidegger’s ambitious reconceptualization (Heidegger 1927) of the hermeneutic problem, from an issue arising within theology and philology to one that purports to capture a fundamental dimension of mankind’s orientation to the world. As many have argued, several distinctively pragmatic themes in hermeneutics are foregrounded as a result of Heidegger’s contribution. In section 3, we look at Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatist treatise Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979). Here, Rorty explicitly turns to hermeneutics in order to outline a positive self-conception for philosophy once the tradition following Descartes and Kant has run its course. Finally, section 4 looks at criticisms that have been levied against Rorty’s ideas from both hermeneutic and pragmatist camps. These criticisms not only display the difficulties of doing constructive philosophy at the intersection of hermeneutics and pragmatism, but may also serve to shed some light on complexities and tensions within each tradition of thought.