Tim Sundell

In recent work, we have argued that a number of disputes of interest to philosophers—including some disputes amongst philosophers themselves—are metalinguistic negotiations. Prima facie, many of these disputes seem to concern worldly, non-linguistic issues directly. However, on our view, they in fact concern, in the first instance, normative questions about the use of linguistic expressions. This will strike many ordinary speakers as counterintuitive. In many of the disputes that we analyze as metalinguistic negotiations, speakers might quite strongly resist the idea that their debate is in any sense about language. In this paper, we explore and provide responses to what we take to be the best versions of an objection that our view involves an unacceptable attribution of false beliefs to ordinary speakers.

Lewis’s reference magnetism is meant to address worries raised by Putnam’s anti-realist model theoretic argument (MTA). I won’t try to determine whether it succeeds in that regard. But suppose—as many contemporary metaphysicians do—that it does succeed. Putnam’s got another argument. Putnam’s brain in a vat argument (BVA) is not just another attempt to respond to Cartesian skepticism. It is also, like the MTA, an attack on realism. And because the brain in a vat argument proceeds on the basis of different—and more conservative—assumptions about the nature of reference, a solution to the MTA does not automatically extend to the BVA. So: if we suppose that reference magnetism succeeds in addressing the worries raised by the MTA, what should we think of its prospects for mounting a response to the BVA? I argue that the metaphysical realist does have a response to the BVA. That response, however, is importantly different from what the realist might have thought going in. I argue that the realist should insist on a distinction between a theory’s truth and its overall epistemic success. In turn, the realist can maintain that there are genuinely radical yet non-self-refuting skeptical hypotheses, but that such hypotheses concern not the truth of a theory but a different aspect of epistemic success, namely the fundamentality of its ideology. Such a response is consistent with the conclusion of the BVA. Nevertheless, it deprives that argument of its anti-realist force. The view I suggest thus makes theoretical space for the semantic considerations Putnam brings to bear while preserving the spirit of the metaphysical picture he attacks.

Legal thought and talk is widely thought to involve moral argumentation, especially by those who are themselves actively engaged in legal thought and talk. If this thought is correct, it would seem to underwrite a powerful argument against legal positivism. We show how a distinctive view that we have developed elsewhere about legal communication—a view on which significant parts of legal communication involve what we call “metalinguistic negotiations”—gives us important explanatory resources in responding on behalf of legal positivism to this type of argument.

One of Ronald Dworkin’s most distinctive claims in legal philosophy is that LAW is an interpretative concept. According to Dworkin, interpretative concepts are a special kind of concept—a concept whose correct application depends not on fixed criteria or an instance-identifying decision procedure, but rather on the normative or evaluative facts that best justify the total set of practices in which that concept is used. The main argument that Dworkin gives for interpretivism about a given concept –  LAW, among many others – is a disagreement-based argument. In this paper, we argue that Dworkin’s disagreement-based argument relies on a mistaken premise about the nature of disagreement. We propose an alternative analysis of the type of dispute—what we call “Seeming Variation Cases”—that Dworkin uses to motivate the idea of interpretative concepts. We observe that genuine disagreements can be expressed via a range of linguistic mechanisms, many of which do not require that speakers literally assert and deny one and the same proposition. We focus in particular on what we call “metalinguistic negotiations,” disputes in which speakers do not express the same concepts by those words, but rather negotiate how words should be used and thereby negotiate which of a range of competing concepts should be used in that context. Metalinguistic negotiations reflect disagreements that are “genuine” in any plausible sense of the word and they provide the basis for a promising alternative to Dworkin’s interpretivist analysis of Seeming Variation Cases. We claim that this view has quite general theoretical advantages over Dworkin’s interpretivism about Seeming Variation Cases and of the relevant class of legal disputes in particular. This paper thus has two interlocking goals in legal philosophy: 1) to undermine one of Dworkin’s core arguments for interpretivism and 2) provide the foundations for a non-interpretivist alternative account of an important class of legal disputes.

In constructing semantic theories of normative and evaluative terms, philosophers have commonly deployed a certain type of disagreement-based argument. The premise of the argument observes the possibility of genuine disagreement between users of a certain normative or evaluative term, while the conclusion of the argument is that, however differently those speakers employ the term, they must mean the same thing by it. After all, if they did not, then they would not really disagree. We argue that in many of the cases in which this argument is deployed, the conclusion not only fails to follow from the premises, but is very likely false. Disagreements between speakers who do not mean the same things by their words are common, genuine, and not easily distinguished from ordinary disagreements over the truth of literally expressed content. We make this case by developing the notion of a metalinguistic negotiation, an exchange in which speakers tacitly negotiate the proper deployment of some linguistic expression in a context. Metalinguistic negotiations express disagreements over information that is (a) conveyed pragmatically (rather than via literal semantic content) and (b) about which concepts should be deployed in the context at hand. We argue that neither of these features poses any obstacle to metalinguistic negotiations serving to express genuine, substantive disagreements that can be well worth engaging in. Contrary to what has been widely assumed in the literature, many normative and evaluative disputes—among ordinary speakers and even among philosophers themselves—may be of exactly this type, a conclusion with important consequences for both the subject matter and the methodology of metanormative theory.

I argue for the possibility of substantive aesthetic disagreements in which both parties speak truly. The possibility of such disputes undermines an argument mobilized by relativists such as Lasersohn (2005) and MacFarlane (2007) against contextualism about aesthetic terminology. In describing the facts of aesthetic disagreement, I distinguish between the intuition of dispute on the one hand and the felicity of denial on the other. Considered separately, neither of those phenomena requires that there be a single proposition asserted by one party to an aesthetic dispute and denied by the other. I suggest instead that many such disputes be analyzed as disputes over the selection or appropriateness of a contextually salient aesthetic standard.

Lewisian reference magnetism about linguistic content determination [Lewis 1983] has been defended in recent work by Weatherson [2003] and Sider [2009], among others. Two advantages claimed for the view are its capacity to make sense of systematic error in speakers’ use of their words, and its capacity to distinguish between verbal and substantive disagreements. Our understanding of both error and disagreement is linked to the role of usage and first order intuitions in semantics and in linguistic theory more generally. I argue, partially on the basis of these more general considerations, that reference magnetism delivers implausible results. Specifically, I argue that the proponent of reference magnetism maintains her analysis of genuinely systematic error at the cost of an empirically unjustifiable error theory regarding ordinary usage. In response, I describe an alternative view of content determination— MUMPS, or Meaning is Use Minus Pragmatics—which is not committed to such error theories. Despite this advantage, MUMPS has high prima facie costs. On such a view, there is a great deal of variation in linguistic meaning across speakers and times. As a result, a large number of seemingly mistaken claims are analysed as expressing true propositions. Correspondingly, a large number of seemingly substantive disagreements are analysed as terminologi- cal. However, I argue that these consequences are not as costly as they seem. Despite appearances, MUMPS is consistent with objective, metaphysically realist adjudication of disagreements, even in cases where meanings are not shared and where both parties to a dispute speak truly. MUMPS thus allows for a more nuanced understanding of linguistic usage, change, and variation, without imposing a commitment to any form of metaphysical anti-realism.