Scepticism about Meaning and Reference: Three Arguments by Quine, Putnam and Kripke

Scepticism about Meaning and Reference: ThreeArguments by Quine, Putnam and Kripke

Andrew Jorgensen*University College Dublin

Abstract

Twentieth-century philosophy of language saw a number of related but interestingly distinct argu-ments that independently challenge the objectivity and determinacy of traditional semantic notionslike reference, denotation or extension. Collectively, they can be called ‘semantic scepticism’. Thisessay will examine three of these arguments due to Quine (1960, 1969), Putnam (1978, 1980,1981, 1985) and Kripke (1982), noting the increasing pressure they bring to bear on our commonsense conceptions of meaning and reference. I will begin by identifying that conception indepen-dently.

1. The Sceptic’s Target: The Default position on Language and Meaning

The natural first thought regarding the nature of language has been remarkably consistent,at least within the Western tradition. Empiricists and rationalists alike agree that wordsstand for ideas, as witnessed by the following strikingly similar pronouncements by two ofthe seventeenth century’s heavy-weights. The rationalist Arnauld thought ‘that words aresounds, distinct and articulate, which men have taken as signs to express what passes intheir mind.’ (Arnauld and Nicole 1662 (1865): 100, see also Arnauld and Lancelot 1660,part 2, sect. 1). The empiricist Locke (1690: book 2, chapter 2, §1) claimed that ‘The use… of words is to be sensible marks of ideas; and the ideas they stand for are their imme-diate and proper signification.’ Departures from this typically substitute some other notionfor ideas, either having words stand for elementary things, as in Wittgenstein (1921), or forthoughts in a platonic and non-psychological sense of thought, as in Frege (1892, 1918).The conception of words as standing for things of some sort or another suggests itselfquite readily. For this reason, I will call it the default position.

The naturalness of the default position makes it difficult to see it as embodying anyphilosophical commitments at all, much less disputable ones, but it does and this may bevividly brought out by contrasting it with an alternative picture of language, such as thatof the Dogon people of Mali as reported by Roy Harris:

Each utterance begins within the body of the speaker as a quantity of fluid secretion. This iswarmed in the liver by heat from the heart. The heated verbal fluid turns to vapour, which isexpelled by the lungs, and then acquires acoustic properties in virtue of the action of the larynx,tongue, palate lips and teeth. Good speech is expelled by filling the right lung followed by theleft lung and bad speech vice versa. This pulmonary process gives the expelled vapour a charac-teristic spiral rotation. The rotating vapour is trapped in the ear of the hearer, whence it istransferred to the hearer’s larynx, condensed into liquid, and swallowed. The liquid has variousproperties depending on the vapour rotation, which in turn was determined by whether thespeech was good or bad. In the case of good speech, the swallowed liquid in the hearer’s bodyrefreshes the heart and nourishes the liver. In the case of bad speech, the swallowed liquid dries

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and heats the heart and contracts the liver. The liver rejects the verbal liquid from bad speechand passes it on to the spleen: it darkens the spleen and causes various kinds of physical discom-fort. (Women, who are held to have delicate livers, are most easily hurt by bad speech) In thecase of good speech, the intestines ‘digest’ the verbal fluid, extracting the nutritive elementsfrom it, and distributing this nutrition to other parts of the body. Good speech is thus ‘food’ forthe hearer… (Harris 1981, p.138)

Reading the Dogon account one is struck by the emphasis on the physical, materialaspects of speech; and clearly one can recognise other elements of this picture too, suchas the interpersonal dimension and the fact that certain kinds of speech can have a hurtfulinjurious effect on the hearer.

It is startling just what, from the perspective of the default position, is missing from theDogon account. There is no mention of the semantic dimension of language: even thedescription of the injurious effects of bad speech ignores, as we might put it, that it is thethought that counts. The harmful or benign effects of speech are determined–so the defaultposition claims–not by the physical form of the utterance, but by what it means (and wecould try to back this up by observing that what is written can be just as hurtful as whatis said, although the physical form is quite different). But irrespective of who is rightabout hurtful speech, the comparison serves to bring out the significance of the semanticas a component of the default conception and its role in wider social and psychologicalexplanation.

It is this common-sense picture of words standing for ideas that the sceptical argumentsattack. According to Quine, language on the default picture might resemble a museum.Words stand for ideas just as the labels in a museum label their exhibits (1969: 27). Wecannot accept this picture, he thinks; not because ideas are mental entities, and notbecause it assumes that every word must stand for an idea, but because it assumes thatsemantic relations between words and their corresponding objects possess a degree ofdeterminacy that outruns what can be taken to be implicit in dispositions to overt linguis-tic behaviour (1969: 27).

In current terminology, Quine can be seen as arguing that the semantic relationshipsinherent in the default conception have no truth-maker – nothing that makes them true.1

He cannot see how the range of facts available to ground the semantic relationships cando the job required. This raises the question of just what sort of facts are available tounderwrite semantic relationships and Quine’s view has not gone uncriticised (e.g.Chomsky 1968). The Kripkean version of scepticism, discussed later, also has the notruth-maker form, but relaxes Quine’s assumptions about what sorts of fact are available.It is therefore a stronger form of scepticism.

2. Quine on the Inscrutability of Reference

Quine argues that reference is inscrutable, by which he means not simply that there is noway of knowing what our words (i.e. subsentential expressions) refer to but that there isno fact of the matter about what they refer to (1969: 47). Quine’s argument is presented(1960, 1969) and still best understood through the dramatic device of a radical translator.

A radical translator is a person engaged in the task of translating a completely alien ton-gue for the first time, who cannot rely on any shared cultural knowledge, or indirecttranslation through a chain of intermediate languages (1960: 28). Such a person has onlycertain resources at their disposal. They can rely only on clever guesswork and carefulobservation of speakers’ use of the language in context. These are austere assumptions,and it is important to see why they are relevant to the philosophical foundations of

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meaning. The device of the radical translator is intended to make vivid what sort of factsthe constitutive facts about meaning could be. There are two features of the scenario thatare important. First, it involves a set of facts that might be recognised prior to under-standing the language in question. Social or cultural knowledge is something that onecould only have after one understood a language. Second, the scenario assumes that trans-lation, as a process of coming to understand a language, is a process of theory construc-tion and consequently a form of conscious, deliberative, rational activity. This can becontrasted with the theory that linguistic knowledge is ‘grown in the mind’ or formedthrough autonomous and automatic processes not subject to conscious influence or con-straint (as suggested by Chomsky 1986). In Kripkean Scepticism, we will considerwhether dropping Quine’s assumptions defeats the argument for scepticism.

Quine argues that reflection on the methodology of radical translation reveals thatwhile one can to some extent arrive at translations for certain sentences, taken as wholes,that have a degree of objective validity, in the sense of being justifiable solely in terms ofwhat Quine takes to be the objective linguistic reality, translation loses that objectivitywhen one descends below the level of the whole sentence to the level of separate words.The translation of observation sentences, which directly relate to the immediate environ-ment, is reasonably certain, because the dispositions of speakers of one language to affirmor reject an observation can be closely matched with the dispositions of speakers of theother language to affirm or reject a sentence of their own. This pairs sentences of onelanguage with translations that are true (or false) in the same actual and possible condi-tions, which have, in Quine’s words, the same ‘stimulus meanings’. Stimulus meanings,environmental conditions together with a speaker’s dispositions to assent or dissent fromthe sentence in those conditions, constitute the objective reality the linguist has to probe(1960: 39). Quine notes that to the extent that sentences in one language presupposeother collateral beliefs and background attitudes and information, speaker dispositionsalone will not yield adequate translations and translators will have to make a number ofanalytical hypotheses concerning the individual contributions of hypothetical subsententialelements to overall truth value of a sentence to make further progress with translation.For example, if the speakers always affirm a sentence, this could be because the sentenceis true by definition, like ‘bachelors are unmarried,’ or obvious ‘there have been blackdogs,’ or culturally conditioned ‘God save the Queen’, ‘God is great’. Only by hypothes-ising meanings for the individual words in the sentence, can the translator get any pur-chase on cases like these. However, if translation depends on analytical hypotheses, it willalways be a matter of the translator imposing their own scheme of things on the world,rather than discovering facts about meaning that are objectively there (1969: 34). Evenfor observation sentences, where the objective equivalence of the sentences, considered aswholes, can be established, the attempt to fix meanings for individual words involves suchan imposition.

To illustrate this, Quine considers how one might establish that a sentence meant‘there is a rabbit’ as opposed to ‘there is a conglomeration of undetached rabbit parts’ or‘there is an instantaneous time-section of a rabbit’ or ‘it’s rabbitting’ (a feature-placingsentence like ‘it’s raining’). Quine observes that we can distinguish these categories ofobject by their individuation conditions, that is, by the different answers they elicit to thequestions of when an object of such and such a kind changes, what differentiates it fromanother of the same kind, whether and how such objects persist and so on. Posing andanswering ontological questions of this kind presupposes that the linguist has translatedwhat Quine calls the ‘apparatus of individuation’ (1969: 35), namely the devices such asquantification, pronominal reference, plural marking and verb agreement, and the identity

696 Andrew Jorgensen


predicate (and others) that co-ordinate reference to objects in our language. But for trans-lating these devices, analytical hypotheses are unavoidable.

There has been much discussion over whether it is in fact true that the linguist candistinguish between different translations of individual terms and predicates only by appealto the apparatus of individuation. Evans (1975) argues that important insights into semanticstructure can be gained by observing the behaviour of terms and predicates in combination.Predicates only jointly apply to the same object, so if it is ever the case that two words bothindividually apply in a certain situation but do not apply jointly, a predicate may beinvolved. Contrast feature-placing sentences like ‘it’s raining’ and ‘it’s windy’ with predica-tions like ‘it’s white’ and ‘it’s a rabbit’. If the feature-placing sentences are true individually,their conjunction is also true; not so with the predications. A brown rabbit on a white matmight elicit assent to each predication individually but not their conjunction. Evansbelieves Quine’s additional rivals to ‘rabbit’ can be discounted by considering the inter-action of predicates with a negation operator and by requiring that terms make a recurring(identical) contribution to combinations with all other words (that is, by requiring that,say, ‘white’ makes the same contributions to its combination with ‘paper’ as to that with‘rabbit’). Unfortunately, the case for these requirements is not conclusive. The last one inparticular amounts to an insistence that the semantic contribution of a word cannot besensitive to the sentential context in which it occurs, but this does not seem plausible inview of combinations like ‘white skin’, ‘red hair’, etc. (vs. ‘white paper’, ‘red paint’).2

The lesson Quine would have us draw from all of this is not primarily about transla-tion, which was just a narrative device, but about our own speech. As he puts it ‘radicaltranslation begins at home’ (1969: 46). Our own words are no more determinate thanother people’s, and it only feels otherwise because we do not view it from the externalvantage point of a genuinely distinct metalanguage but take it for granted.

3. Putnam’s Permutation Argument

Putnam offers an argument that is essentially an extension and more formal recasting ofQuine’s (Putnam 1981: 33).3 In Word and Object, Quine had said:

The infinite totality of sentences of any given speaker’s language can be so permuted, mappedonto itself, that (a) the totality of speaker’s dispositions to verbal behaviour remains invariant,and yet (b) the mapping is no mere correlation of sentences with equivalent sentences, in anyplausible sense of equivalence however loose (1960: 27).

The key insight here is that, as per (a), fixing the semantic values of whole sentences doesnot, as per (b), fix the ingredient semantic values of component elements of thosesentences. The gist of the proof can be conveyed without the formal details.4 Take thesentence ‘Felix is a cat’, which is true if and only if the thing called ‘Felix’ is a ‘cat’.Putnam observes that if there is a model on which this sentence is made true by a catcalled Felix, there is also a model on which it is made true by a cherry called Jerry.The point is not the pedestrian one that a sentence may have different interpretations ondifferent models. Putnam shows that there are different interpretations that yield the sametruth conditions for the sentence (i.e. the same truth-value in every possible world), butwhich assign different extensions to the terms and predicates. For example, where onemodel is a permutation of another, each object in the original model will have a counter-part in the alternative. Then, when one model assigns the set of cats to the word ‘cat’,a different model might assign to ‘cat’ just the heterogeneous set of objects that are thepermutated counterparts of the set of cats. This ensures that ‘cat’ is true of entirely



different things, but nevertheless true in exactly the same circumstances in both thepermutated and the intended interpretations. The proof shows that this can happen forthe whole language.

The extensions assigned to predicates in the permutated variant interpretations seemconsiderably less natural than the intended interpretation. For example, instead of the setof cats, we have the set of things that are the permutation counterparts of cats, whichmight be cherries, balls of earwax, the Eiffel Tower and so on. One possible response,due to David Lewis (1983, 1984) has been to single out the naturalness of the intendedinterpretations as the factor that makes it the right one. Specifically, he thinks we shouldthink of certain sets as being more eligible than others to serve as extensions for predi-cates. For this strategy to work, ‘naturalness’ must be conceived as something objective–naturalness from the perspective of the universe–which is a dubious and unfamiliarnotion. For Putnam (1989: 220), it amounts to insisting that something ‘we know notwhat fixes references we know not how’. Recently, Williams (2007) has argued thattaking eligibility ⁄naturalness seriously as an independent constraint has the implausibleconsequence that certain whacky reference schemes might be preferred to the intendedinterpretation on grounds of naturalness.

4. Kripkean Scepticism

Saul Kripke presents an argument for scepticism and attributes it to Ludwig Wittgenstein(1953) (Kripke 1982: 5), although the accuracy of this attribution is disputed (Baker andHacker 1984; Goldfarb 1985; McDowell 1984). The importance of this argument lies inthe fact that it makes none of Quine’s behaviouristic assumptions. Moreover, Kripke doesnot insist that we try to determine the referents of individual words from the truth-valuesof whole sentences. The argument places no restrictions on what types of fact may beappealed to answer the sceptic (1982: 14).

Kripke is more explicit than Quine that the sceptic seeks a truth-maker for semanticrelations. He seeks a fact about a person that could constitute the difference betweenmeaning one thing by a symbol and meaning another and concludes, because apparentlyno plausible truth-maker can be found, that it is not true that one means one functionrather than another (1982: 13, 39). This is an inherently reductionist approach to thequestion of meaning and several commentators have objected to it for that reason(McDowell 1984; Boghossian 1989; and Wright 1989). Kripke takes for granted that itcannot simply be a brute, primitive or sui-generis fact about one that one, say, means addi-tion by ‘+’ (Kripke 51f.). He takes for granted that meaning something by something istoo complex a sort of thing to be taken as primitive and admitting no explanation. If onefollows Kripke in this and concedes that this much reductionism is appropriate, scepticismproves difficult to stop.

The example at the heart of Kripke’s extended discussion is the proper meaning of thesymbol ‘+’.5 Intuitively, we mean only one thing by it when we use it, namely the additionfunction and not the function quaddition, which Kripke defines as identical to addition withrespect to pairs of numbers below the highest anyone has ever counted before, a gazillionsay, but diverging from addition beyond that.6 By definition, we have conformed all ourlives to quaddition (if we have conformed to addition), so what fact about us specifies thatwe mean addition rather than quaddition by ‘+’? All the obvious replies are easily eliminated.It would not do to say no one ever thought of quaddition before Kripke’s discussion – thatconfuses using the word ‘quaddition’ with using the concept. It does not matter thatour teachers used the word ‘addition’ when they taught us (that is just as subject to



interpretation as ‘+’). It does not matter that they taught us a procedure for addition, suchas ‘count out x many things, count y many things and then put them together and countthe union’, because this presupposes a similar question of interpretation for the words inthe procedure, since a commensurately deviant interpretation of ‘count’ will dictate ananswer for ‘+’ that accords with quaddition rather than addition (1982: 15–7). The upshot isthat meaning addition by ‘+’ rather than some other function cannot be a fact about one’sactual current and past behaviour (and physiology, experience, mental states…and whateverelse is relevant), simply because this set of facts eliminates only a minority of the alternativeinterpretations of ‘+’ – only the ones incompatible with one’s actual history. It leavesunconfirmed that one means addition by ‘+’ rather than different functions, like quaddition,that differ from addition only with respect to unconsidered cases.

Some commentators mistake this for the traditional sceptical problem of induction anddraw the conclusion that, since it affects all the sciences equally, it is no problem forlinguistics and the theory of meaning (e.g. Chomsky 1986: 237). The problem, however,is not that of explaining how we may legitimately generalise from a finite base – how wecan tell what someone means by ‘+’ – but, as it were, how the facts can tell – or whatconstitutes the fact of meaning addition? Kripke screens off traditional worries aboutinduction by letting the facts about possible and future cases be fixed. He claims it cannotbe determined what function someone means by ‘+’ even if we knew, counter-factually,exactly how they would answer to any given sum involving any numbers, even onesbigger than a gazillion. Not even God could tell what someone means by ‘+’ (1982: 14).

It is a simple point. One’s dispositions do not adequately discriminate between additionand other functions as interpretations of ‘+’, because one’s actual dispositions include apropensity to err – that is, not to conform to addition (1982: 28ff). Most people make cal-culating mistakes. It is just not true that if we asked someone ‘what is x + y?’ they wouldalways answer with the sum of x and y. If we took the answers a person is disposed tomake as the criterion for what function they mean, that would actually exclude additionfrom consideration! And Kripke anticipated the popular response to this difficulty. Thispropensity cannot be ‘factored out’, as it were, taking one’s actual dispositions to be theproduct of a disposition to add together with perturbing dispositions to fail to add forvarious reasons, as suggested by Forbes (1984) and Blackburn (1984), because that strategysimply presupposes that one has a real disposition to add without providing the groundsto substantiate it (Kripke 1982: 28). After all, one’s actual dispositions can equally befactored into a disposition to conform to some entirely different function together withadditional dispositions to fail to conform to it. The fact, if there is one, that makes it thecase that one means addition by ‘+’ must be something else besides the availability of anotional factorization into a disposition to add and perturbing influences. Notional facto-risation alone is not sufficient as it does not guarantee anything realises those factors.

Kripke takes it that while the sceptical argument remains unanswered, ‘there can be nosuch thing as meaning anything by any word’ (1982: 55). There is some consensus thatthis cannot possibly be right, but much less consensus as to where the argument goeswrong. Before considering some objections, it is worthwhile to compare Kripke’s scepti-cism with Quine’s. Kripke’s is clearly more extreme. Kripke’s sceptic denies that sen-tences mean anything, whereas Quine rejects only meanings that cut finer than hisbehavioural ersatz ‘stimulus-meaning’. Quine’s indeterminacy is apparently restricted tochoices among metaphysically related variants, but for Kripke each new application of aword is an unjustified leap in the dark. Note too that the conception of language asgrown in the mind is vulnerable to Kripke’s argument because it makes no prejudicialassumptions about what the underlying facts about meaning could be. It does not assume



that the objective linguistic reality consists in facts about speakers’ dispositions in certaincontexts, and it does not assume our access to it is via the evaluation of whole sentences.

5. Sceptical Troubles for Alternatives to the Default Conception

It is sometimes claimed that sceptical indeterminacy arguments tell exclusively againsttruth-conditional approaches to semantics (for example see Gauker 2003). Unlike Quine’sand Putnam’s indeterminacy arguments, however, Kripke’s argument does not exclusivelytarget the museum myth conception of words as standing for things, and its key questionscan also be put to theories of meaning that draw inspiration from Wittgenstein’s enigmaticclaim that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in a language’ (1953: §43), such as Brandom’svariety of inferential role semantics to cite a contemporary example (Brandom 1994).

To introduce his problem, Kripke employs referential concepts, such as denotation,but that simply reflects philosophical practice at the time. He can pose it as the questionof what fact makes it the case that ‘plus’ denotes one function rather than another. How-ever, he can and does pose it without using these referential concepts by asking what factmakes it the case that one should answer ‘125’ not ‘5’ to the question ‘68 + 57 = ?’(1982: 13). What makes it the case that a given physically and logico-syntactically indi-viduated word or sentence token is required and justified, in a given context of utterance,by the totality of facts about one’s past speech behaviour?

We can put the problem this way: When asked for the answer to ‘68 + 57’, I unhesitatinglyand automatically produced ‘125’, but it would seem that if previously I have never performedthis computation explicitly I might just as well have answered ‘5’. Nothing justifies a bruteinclination to answer one way rather than another. (Kripke 1982: 15).

Shorn here of the inessential language of reference and denotation, Kripke’s challengecomes to the demand for an account of the proprieties underlying linguistic practice. Assuch, it is a demand that inferentialist, neo-pragmatist accounts of linguistic meaning mustmeet just as surely as traditional mythic varieties. They have however, on the whole, beenmuch more self-consciously aware of this demand (see especially Brandom’s discussion in(1994: 18–30)). Nevertheless, it is by no means clear that Brandom’s account addresses theproblem in a convincing fashion. Two complaints have arisen in the literature on this score.Hattiangadi (2003) challenges Brandom’s claim to advance beyond dispositional accounts ofmeaning one concept rather than another. Whiting (2006) challenges the claim that con-ceptual contents supervene on normative inferential relationships among (non-semanti-cally), physically, logico-syntactically individuated word tokens. In Whiting’s words,

Scorekeeping practice [i.e. the inferential practice Brandom uses to cash out his version of themeaning-as-use semantic paradigm] forms a kind of structure or web whose nodes are perfor-mances connected by proprieties. Why should it not be possible to fill in those nodes, as itwere, in a number of ways? (2006: 11).

These criticisms deserve investigation and careful rebuttal. The felt absurdity of the scep-tical conclusion gives us no right to think Brandom’s particular account must succeedeven if we feel somehow an adequate response to the sceptic must be forthcoming.

6. Incoherence Objections

Very few find the sceptical conclusion palatable and many regard it as bordering onincoherent and self-refuting. For example, Scott Soames (1998a: 213) claims, ‘there is



an important sense in which the sceptic’s argument is self-undermining; if one succeedsin stating the argument, or in justifying one’s belief in the conclusion, then that veryfact falsifies the conclusion’. According to Soames, stating the argument is somethingwe could not do if it were true, for ‘stating the sceptic’s argument is not just a matterof uttering the words’ (ibid. n2); the words have to mean something. Now, on onereading, Soames’ objection simply presupposes the contested default conception; it ismore charitable to view it as, in effect, a challenge to the sceptic to clarify just whatrelation the words do stand in to the thesis of scepticism, given that they do not expressit. Kripke sketches an alternative account of language, called a ‘sceptical solution’ to theproblem, that attempts to show that ordinary linguistic practice is legitimate because‘contrary appearances notwithstanding, it need not rely on the justification the sceptichas shown to be untenable.’ (1982: 66). The alternative picture replaces the question‘what has to be the case for this sentence to be true?’ with the question, ‘under whatcircumstances can this form of words be asserted?’ (1982: 73) Sentences on the post-sceptical conception of language have conditions of warranted or appropriate assertion,but not truth-conditions.

Yet, even this revisionary picture of language can draw the charge of incoherence.

The proponent of the sceptical solution must say something of the form s does not express a prop-osition on the basis of [the sceptical argument] and something of the form s does express a proposi-tion on the basis of [the solution]. … This may not be a case of asserting contradictorypropositions. Presumably, though, it is still incoherent–like ordering someone both to close thedoor and not to close it. (Soames 1998b: 326)

Here, Soames charges that even when the sentences are regarded merely as forms ofwords with assertion conditions, as the new picture insists, it is incoherent to assert asentence and its sentential negation. But the objection has little force. The scepticwants to assert one sentence in the context of the philosophy classroom and the othersentence in the context of the busy street. Their assertions would be ‘like orderingsomeone both to close the door and not to close it’ only if they were made in thesame context.

Paul Boghossian (1989, 1990) argues directly that scepticism leads to contradiction. Hetargets the following formulation of scepticism:

(A) All sentences of the form ‘S has truth condition p’ are false. (1990: 174f)

This he shows implies both that some sentences have truth conditions and that none do.Obviously, any sentence that is false has a truth-condition. So if (A), then some sentencehas a truth-condition. But if any sentence had a truth condition, not all sentences of theform ‘S has truth condition p’ would be false, contra (A). Hence, if (A), then no sentencehas a truth-condition. Unfortunately, Boghossian’s argument is conclusive only againstthis specific formulation of scepticism7 leaving alternative formulations of the doctrineunaffected. Recently, Williams (2008) has advanced a novel argument that would showthat if scepticism is true, then no token argument is in good logical order. If successful,Williams’ argument would show that the costs of scepticism are unacceptably high, andwe would need to revisit the premises of the sceptical argument once more. Some alsoclaim Kripke’s sceptic’s own alternative account is just as subject to the indeterminacyproblems as the truth conditional picture it is designed to overthrow (Wright 1984: 70;Miller Forthcoming). Other prominent criticisms of the sceptical argument are Pettit(1990), Millikan (1990) and Horwich (1995).



7. Conclusion

What follows if the sceptical arguments do succeed? Clearly, linguistic phenomena do notdisappear. At most scepticism would require a reconceptualisation of our linguisticknowledge and linguistic capacities. It would not mean there is no difference between aword like ‘dog’ and a random jumble of letters such as ‘sdfhlaksg’; only that the differ-ence had to be conceived and explained in terms other than as a difference in meaning.What this might look like can be gleaned from studying the one or two rare voices whohave tried to accommodate the sceptical arguments. In philosophy, Davidson (1984)defends Quine’s indeterminacy thesis, while Kusch (2006) defends something likeKripke’s positive account (albeit subject to some reinterpretation). Within linguistics,positions with a close affinity to scepticism, especially regarding indeterminacy of mean-ing, have been articulated by Sampson (1980) and, more radically, by Harris (1981,1996). Perhaps the most radical break with meaning was made by Skinner (1957), whosought to displace the notions of reference and meaning by making sense of verbalbehaviour in the favoured terms of behaviourist psychology (stimulus and response, selec-tion and reinforcement, etc.) (MacCorquodale 1970). No space remains to explore theprospects for such views; suffice it to say it would only be by a remarkable effort thatthey might secure general favour.

Short Biography

Andrew Jorgensen is a philosopher based at University College Dublin and is affiliatedwith Aporo, the Irish Philosophical Research Network (http://www.aporo.org). He iscurrently writing a book on scepticism about meaning and reference. Taking seriouslythe possibility that words do not mean anything is a natural step for Andrew whose PhDdissertation (Temple University, 2002) was an investigation of the equally paradoxicalquestion of whether there might be things that do not exist. He has published on topicsin the philosophy of language and the origins of analytic philosophy in Grazer Philosophi-sche Studien, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, the Polish Journal of Philosophy, andPhilosophia. Raised and educated in New Zealand, he has taught in Britain and Americaas well as Ireland.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Andrew Jorgensen, School of Philosophy, Newman Building, University CollegeDublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland. E-mail: [email protected]

1 See Rodriguez-Pereyra 2006 or Armstrong 2004 for an explanation of the notion of a truth-maker.2 For discussion see Hookway (1988) and Wright (1997).3 But Putnam is not a sceptic. He takes the argument to undermine ‘the view that reference is fated to be reducedto notions which belong to the world picture of physics’ (1989: 220). As Hale and Wright argue, however, thereare no distinctive metaphysically realist assumptions in the argument (1997: 430), so it is rather reductionism aboutreference as such that the argument targets.4 See Hale and Wright (1997: 448–52), Williams (2008: 626–34) and Putnam (1981: 217–8) for formal presenta-tions of the argument. Putnam (1981) gives the result for first-order languages. Hale and Wright (1997) show itholds for second-order languages and languages with modal operators, and Williams (2008) demonstrates it for thekind of expressively rich intensional type languages employed in formal semantics for natural language (such asMontague grammar).5 Although the argument is presented using a mathematical example, Kripke makes clear (1982: 19) that the prob-lem generalises throughout language.



6 Semi-formally, quaddition is that function ¯ such that x ¯ y = x + y, for all x, y< a gazillion, otherwise x ¯y = 5 (Kripke 1982: 9). In his text, Kripke uses ‘57’ as a placeholder for an unfeasibly gigantic finite number; a‘gazillion’ in my retelling.7 He also formulates and attacks a different version of the doctrine, but the argument is not as strong and also lacksgeneral application.

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Scepticism about Meaning and Reference: Three Arguments by Quine, Putnam and Kripke