Analyticity and Incorrigibility

Philosophy a n d Phenomenological Research Vol. LXVI, No. 3, May 2003

Analyticity and Incorrigibility

MANUEL C A W S

Universitat de Barcelona

The traditional point of view on analyticity implies that truth in virtue only ojmeaning entails a priori acceptability and vice versa. The argument for this claim is based on the idea that meaning as it concerns truth and meaning as it concerns competence are one and the same thing. In this paper I argue that the extensions of these notions do not coincide. I hold that truth in virtue of meaning-truth for semantic reasons-doesn’t imply a priori acceptability, and that a priori reflection based only on knowledge of meaning-in the sense of competencedoesn’t necessitate true conclusions.The main consequence of this view concerns conceptual analysis, as it presupposes we have a privileged-incorrigible in the face of empirical evidence-access to non-trivial truths about the world on the basis of mere a priori reflection founded on meaning. If, as I argue, such access is not incorrigible the project of conceptual analysis loses its special epistemological status.

Conceptual analysis has been the traditional method of research employed in philosophy to treat topics such as belief, pain, emotion or perception, which seem biological in kind. Conceptual analysts do not deny that there is a proper area of empirical study for biological categories, but argue that there is also room for a conceptual analysis of the corresponding concepts, and that confusing both enterprises is a category mistake. Conceptual analysis focuses on meaning, while empirical research studies facts. Conceptual analysis is an a priori cognitive enterprise that doesn’t resort to the results of empirical research. Furthermore, it is imbued with some sort of privileged access to truth that empirical research cannot invalidate. This latter characteristic of conceptual analysis is somewhat puzzling. How is the incorrigibility of conceptual truths in the face of empirical evidence justified? Isn’t the truth of a claim dependent on how the world is? The incorrigibility of the results of conceptual analysis is explained by its practitioners in terms of the fact that this method is a reflection on meaning brought about by people who are competent speakers, and hence, who, in a way, already know this meaning. In this paper I focus on this issue of incorrigibility, pondering up to what point meaning alone can grant the truth of analytic sentences regardless of empirical evidence.

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Analytic sentences are traditionally characterized as sentences that are true in virtue only of the meaning of the expressions that constitute them.’ On the other hand, any judgments expressible with such sentences are judgments the speaker should be willing to conclude, after suitable reflection, based only on his or her linguistic competence. (In order to make reference to this second trait of analytic sentences I will say that these sentences are acceptable a priori.*) The two mentioned marks concern, thus, two different aspects of the supposedly unique phenomenon of analyticity: a metaphysical and an epistemological a ~ p e c t . ~ These two aspects are traditionally thought not to be independent. Thus, on the one hand, the meanings of the expressions constituting analytic sentences determine that these sentences have to be true. Competent speakers know this meaning. Such knowledge is supposed to be sufficient to allow them to conclude judgments expressed by means of these sentences. Hence, truth in virtue ofmeaning entails a priori acceptability. For example, if the meaning of ‘bachelor’ is unmarried male, then any proficient user of this term is supposed to be able, in virtue of his or her competence, to conclude a priori, say, that bachelors are males. On the other hand, the a priori acceptability of a sentence by a competent speaker guarantees that the sentence is true in virtue of meaning. The sentence is a priori accepted if and only if knowledge of its meaning determines that it be so. And knowledge of the meaning determines so only in case meaning grants that the sentence is true. Thus, a competent speaker is willing to accept the sentence ‘Bachelors are males’ a priori because the meaning of ‘bachelor’ involves the trait mule, but if it does, it is because ‘bachelor’ only applies to males. Sentences that are a priori accepted by competent speakers are hence incorrigible or non- revisable in the face of empirical evidence.

In what follows I challenge the former argument. I argue that the use of the term ‘meaning’ in the argument is ambiguous, and that we should distinguish between a pair of notions whose extensions do not coincide: meaning as it concerns competence, and meaning as it concerns truth. I hold that truth in virtue of meaning-truth for semantic reasons-doesn’t imply a priori acceptability, and that a priori reflection based only on knowledge of meaning-in the sense of competence4oesn’t necessitate true conclusions. The main consequence of this view concerns conceptual analysis, insofar as i t presupposes we have a privileged incorrigible access to non-trivial truths about the world on the basis of mere a priori reflection founded on meaning.

’ This paper assumes the view that analyticity should be predicated of sentences or utterances, and not of propositions, since the latter lack meaning. This is an adaptation of a well-known technical use of the expression ‘acceptance.’ See, for instance, John Peny (1993a). By the use of this label I do not mean to commit to the idea that all a priori knowledge is analytic. See, for instance, Paul Boghossian (1995).

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If such access is not incorrigible, as I argue, the project of conceptual analysis loses its special epistemological s t a t ~ s . ~

Logical Necessity The view of analyticity described above is maintained, for instance, within logical empiricism. According to this tradition all analytic sentences are translatable into logical truths by substitution of terms by synonymous expressions. Translation is facilitated by meaning postulates which are true by convention. Logical truths, on the other hand, are true because of the meaning of the logical particles that appear in them. Thus, it is a convention, even if only implicit, that ‘bachelor’ means wunarned male. ‘Bachelors are unmarried males’ has to be true because it can be translated into ‘Unmanied males are unmarried males,’ which is a logical truth. Knowledge of the language is knowledge of the conventions that rule it. Any competent speaker who is reflective enough can then perform the translations that will allow him or her to accept a priori an analytic sentence. On the other hand, if a sentence is a priori accepted by competent speakers in terms of the conventions that rule the use of the expressions contained in it, these conventions will determine that it has to be true: if it is a convention of the language that ‘bachelor’ applies to all and only unmarried males, then the corollary that all bachelors are males will have to be true. The empiricist standard links, furthermore, necessity and analyticity: necessary claims are expressed by sentences that are analytic-i.e., which are either logical truths or translatable into logical truths.

The most notorious challenge to the empiricist view on analyticity was developed by Willard Quine (195 1, 1960). This author’s attack is based on a skeptical position concerning meaning. Quine’s skepticism, however, is neither shared by his positivist predecessors nor is it predominant nowadays. The empiricist picture of analyticity has come lately under a different sort of criticism derived from direct reference theories. This criticism concerns cen- trally the coupling of necessity and analyticity. Thus, Saul Kripke (1980) exemplifies his point that there are necessary claims that are not a priori with cases of what has come to be called metaphysical necessity: identity claims, or claims concerning the origin of certain entities-like particular human beings-may be necessary even if they are a posteriori. Not being acceptable a priori, sentences expressing such claims cannot be analytic. On the other hand, David Kaplan (1989) has argued that there are analytic sentences that do not express necessary claims. Any utterance of sentences such as ‘I am here now’ is such that any competent speaker of English will know it has to be

I see what I argue as a defense of Ruth Millikan’s point that the study of categories such as that offunction should be conducted as a part of empirical science, and not of conceptual analysis. See, for instance, Millikan (1993).


true because of the meaning rules that govern the use of the expressions in the sentences. In spite of that, any such utterance expresses a contingent claim. Against empiricists, who maintained that analyticity and necessity go together, and that, given that analyticity reduces to logical truth by translation, necessity reduces to logical necessity, Kripke’s and Kaplan’s arguments have shown that not all necessity is reducible to logical necessity, and that not all analyticity implies logical or any other sort of necessity. In this section, I want to add to these arguments by defending that logical necessity is not sufficient for a priority and, hence, for analyticity. Let me motivate the point with an example.

Consider the. case of the term ‘jade.’ Let’s assume that it refers to a disjunctive kind: the kind formed by the substances jadeite and nephrite. The truth-conditions of sentences involving this term are determined, in part, by the property of being jade. For instance, if we say of something that it is jade, the truth-condition of our claim will be determined by the relevant object and the property of being jade: the condition will be that the object has the property of being jade. But this property is identical to the property of being jadeite or being nephrite. Hence, the truth-condition of the mentioned sentence will be identical to the condition that the object is either a piece of jadeite or a piece of nephrite. The point defended here is independent of the acceptance of disjunctive properties? It only relies on the acceptance of the fact that whatever is contributed to truth-conditions by ‘jade’ is identical to what is contributed by ‘jadeite or nephrite.’ Once this accepted, if we reflect on the truth-conditions of sentences such as ‘All jadeite is jade’-which would ordinarily be judged as not analytic, and which express claims that are clearly not a priori-we’ll conclude that these truth-conditions are such that they have to obtain in any case, independently of how the world is, and that they have to obtain for what seem to be logical reasons; namely, in virtue of the logical structure of the truth-conditions. In the case of the mentioned sentence the truth-condition is that all jadeite is either jadeite or nephrite. The same point can be exemplified by means of sentences ordinarily considered analytic, such as ‘All bachelors are males’ (provided we take ‘bachelor’ to contribute to truth-conditions the logically complex property being unmarried and male).

Should we consider that sentences such as ‘All jadeite is jade’ express logical truths? The issue seems to be a terminological one. One might want to reserve the term ‘logical truth’ for sentences such that not only does the structure of their truth-conditions determine that these truth-conditions have to obtain, but which also have a syntactic form that allows us to identify them as such. What is important here is to acknowledge that there are also sentences whose truth-conditions have to obtain in virtue of their structure

See, for instance, David Armstrong (1978).

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while this fact is not reflected in the sentences’ syntactic form or in the conceptual resources whose possession is necessary for somebody to be deemed competent in the sentences’ use. The lack of syntactic and conceptual coun- terparts to aspects of the structure of truth-conditions is a well-known phenomenon, generally acknowledged by partisans of an understanding of propositions as what has come to be called informational content. John Perry, for example, has reflected on instances of this phenomenon under the label unarticulation.6 The proposal defended in this paper involves adding to this general perspective the idea that predicates may make a more logically complex contribution to truth-conditions than simple universals. Thus, a term like ‘bachelor’ contributes the logically complex property being a bachelor, i.e., the property of being unmarried and male, whose logical structure is not reflected at the syntactic level. An analogous point can be made for ‘jade.’

In sum, if we adopt the positivist view of linking truth in virtue of meaning with logical necessity, or with translatability into logical necessity, then, as Kaplan has shown, we find out that there are sentences we ordinarily deem analytic that turn out not to be true in virtue of meaning because they express contingent claims. On the other hand, and if the point just made is correct, there are logically true sentences that cannot be considered analytic because they are not acceptable a priori: they can be translated into sentences that we would ordinarily identify as analytic, but not merely on the basis of the conceptual resources associated with competence in the language.

Semantic Necessity The most extended understanding of analyticity nowadays, however, explains truth in virtue ofmeaning on the basis of meaning rules, rather than in terms of logical truth. The explanation goes as follows. Sentences determine truth- conditions in terms of the expressions that compose them. Each expression contributes a different aspect to the truth-condition in terms of the semantic rule pertaining to that expression. For some sentences (and utterances of sentences), reflection on the corresponding semantic rules suffices to allow us to conclude their truth. We have considered an example of this sort of sentences in the previous section. Any utterance of ‘I am here now’ is known to have to be true because the semantic rules concerning their components determine so. The same can be said of explicit logical truths such as any instance of the form p or not p. In this case, their truth-conditions have to obtain in virtue of the semantic rules pertaining to the logical constants involved.’

See, for instance, Perry (1993b). The former account seems to explain what it is for a sentence to be true in virtue of meaning-i.e., it accounts for the metaphysical aspect of analyticity (contrast Boghossian (1995)).

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There are at least two categories, exemplified in the previous paragraph, in which we can classify sentences that are true in virtue of semantic rules. In the first place we have sentences involving logical particles whose meaning determines that the truth-conditions of these sentences have to obtain for logical reasons. Sentences of the form p or not p are a case in point. These are the sentences ordinarily identified as logical truths. In the second place, we have sentences involving some term whose mode of reference (or some aspect of it) is predicated of the referent or the extension of the term. Thus, any utterance of ‘I’ in the right context refers to its utterer. Any utterance of ‘I am uttering’ will then be true if and only if the person that utters it has the property of being uttering, i.e., always. Similar examples are easily constructed on the basis of descriptions (‘The current US president is a president’) or complex predicates (‘All white dragons are white’). Of course, sentences in this second category will be true for semantic reasons in so far as they man- age to express a condition on the world.’ ‘You are the addressee of this utterance’ will be true in virtue of meaning provided it is addressed to some indi- vidual. ‘The current president of the US is a president’ will be true in virtue of meaning provided there is a current President of the US.

The mode of reference of a term has aspects of a far more complex nature than the above examples, based on simple semantic rules, may suggest. We are aware of a variety of semantic laws, from general claims concerning how the reference of terms in major lexical categories is determined, to rules concerning the reference of a particular lexical item in a particular language. This allows for a diversity of sentences of which we can say that they are true for semantic reasons-i.e., because there are laws of empirical semantics from which the truth of such sentences follows-from ‘Any actress is a female’ or “Bill Clinton is called ‘Bill Clinton’,’’ to sentences involving other aspects of the mode of reference of most lexical categories. Consider, for instance, R to be the relation that has to obtain between an object and the utterance of a name ‘N’ in order for that utterance to refer to the object-that is, possibly the relation of there being a Kripkean causal chain linking the object to the utterance of the name. Then, sentences like ‘N Rs to the first expression in this utterance’ will be true for semantic reasons. Similar examples can be obtained for natural kind terms. Consider, for instance, the plausible law of semantics that natural kind terms refa to the kind or substance that is nomologically responsible for the stereotypical traits associated to objects to which the term is applied. Consider also the laws specifying the stereotype for, say, ‘jade’ and ‘heat.’ If these laws are true, sentences like ‘Jade is the substance generally responsible for jade-like appearance’ or ‘Heat is the prop-

* Actually, this is also the case for sentences in the first category. T d y is bald or T d y isn’t bald wiU have to be true in so far as it expresses a condition on the world, and to express it there will have to be somebody to whom ’Tdy’ refers, and some property to which ‘bald’ refers.

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erty ordinarily responsible for the sensation of heat’ will turn out to be true for semantic reasons?

Examples such as the latter may serve to illustrate the fact that there are semantic laws that involve reference to conceptual resources. There are semantic laws that involve reference to conceptual resources associated by convention to the identification of the referent of a term. We will see this fact treated more extensively in the following sections, but let me mention now what would be a paradigmatic case of this phenomenon. It is plausible that there is a group of expressions whose semantics is determined in terms of the ordinary criteria of application of the expression. For instance, there may be predicates whose use is governed by a convention that requires of the speaker that he be willing to apply the predicate to a thing if and only if certain logical combination of criteria applies to that thing. In cases such as this, the referent of the predicate is likely fixed by the mentioned combination of criteria. A possible case would be that of the term ‘bachelor.’ This term may well refer to a complex property” that is the conjunction of the properties identified by the criterion of application involved in the convention for the use of the term; namely, being unmarried and being mule. It shouldn’t matter, in principle, how possession of these criteria is implemented in the agent, but of course, it will ordinarily involve competence in the use of other terms. In the case of ‘bachelor,’ the convention governing the application of the expression requires that the speaker is willing only to apply it to things and only to things he has identified as unmarried and males, and this will ordinarily entail that he is willing to apply the expressions ‘unmarried’ and ‘male’ to that entity. Naturally, if the semantics of bachelor is the former, we have an explanation of why, for instance, ‘Bachelors are males’ should be true for semantic reasons. Semantic laws involving reference to conceptual resources do not concern only this sort of predicates. Logical constants, for example, may have criteria of application determining one semantics. We may call terms whose semantics is fixed by the conceptual resources r e q d for competence in their use implicitly defined terms.

Semantics is a discipline whose laws make explicit what meaning is. Laws concerning how and what a term contributes to the truth-conditions of the sentences in which it appears are relevant in assessing the truth-value of sentences. It seems natural then to encompass under the label ‘true in virtue of meaning’ any sentence that is what I have been calling truefor semantic reasons: that is, any sentence whose truth follows from the laws of semantics

~

These, as all the examples used in the paper are not intended as theoretical proposals in empirical semantics, but as speculative idealizations that may help us reflect on semantic issues from a philosophical perspective. Again, the point is independent of commitment to any variety of complex properties. Instead of saying re& to a complex property we may say determines a condition on oblects that I S individualized in terms of a logtcal combination of cntena of application

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alone. The question now is up to what point this explanation of truth in virtue of meaning constitutes also a good account of analyticity.

The essential problem for considering truth in virtue of meaning, or truth for semantic reasons, as equivalent to analyticity is that the extensions of these notions don’t seem to coincide. In particular, there are sentences that turn out to be true for semantic reasons but do not seem analytic because they are not a priori acceptable. The proposal as it stands fails, thus, to account for the epistemic trait of analyticity. The most obvious cases of this phenomenon involve co-reference. Consider, for instance, what seems a clear example of analytically true sentence: ‘If Cicero was bald then Cicero was bald.’ An explanation of the necessary truth of this sentence is based on its being a conditional statement in which both antecedent and consequent express the same condition on the world. That they do is explained in terms of the fact that in both antecedent and consequent the property of being bald is predicated of the referents of the tokens of ‘Cicero,’ and the fact that these referents happen to be the same person. Compare now ‘If Cicero was bald then Cicero was bald’ with its co-referential counterpart: ‘If Cicero was bald then Tully was bald.’ A piece of reasoning similar to the one we have just used, except that it involves the semantic facts-i.e., the semantic laws-that ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’ refer to Cicero, allows us to conclude that the second quoted sentence has to be true. The sentence can then be said to be true for semantic reasons, but we do not deem it analytically true.

Analogously, we can provide similar semantic explanations of the fact that the sentence ‘All bachelors are unmarried males’ has to be true (based on the fact that the referent of the term ‘bachelor’-i.e., the property of being an unmarried male-is identical to the referent of the term ‘unmarried male’)” and of the fact that the sentence ‘All jade is either jadeite or nephrite’ has to be true. This latter sentence seems then to be true for semantic reasons, but it is not analytic because it is not a priori acceptable. Of course, one could reply that while in the case of ‘bachelor’ not only does this word refer to the property of being an unmarried male, but it also means unmarried male, in the case of ‘jade,’ while this word may refer to the disjunctive kind jadeite or nephrite, it certainly does not mean jadeite or nephrite. It would be this fact that explains the analytic character of the firstly quoted sentence, and the lack of it in the second case. It seems then that with the sentence ‘bachelor means unmarried male’ we convey something that goes beyond the fact that ‘bachelor’ contributes the property of being an unmarried male to the truth-condi-

” In the case of an analytic sentence such as ’All bachelors are males,’ an analogous argument for its necessary truth would have to involve the premise that all entities that instantiate the conjunctive property being an unmarried male also instantiate the property being a male. This seems a basic ontological claim, of the sort pre- supposed by any semantics.

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tions of the sentences in which it appears. In the following sections we will ponder what this extra element is.

Let me emphasize, however, that arguments based on semantic facts such as the ones used above for ‘All jade is either jadeite or nephrite’ and ‘If Cicero was bald then Tully was bald’ do show that these sentences have to be true. The laws of semantics used in these arguments are laws that concern meaning-or at least an aspect of it; what we will call later truth-conditional meaning-and so, we have reasons to say that such sentences are true in virtue of meaning. Furthermore, it seems that only laws such as the ones used in these arguments-that is, laws that spell out how and what expressions contribute to truth-conditions-can serve as basis to prove that certain sentences have to be rrue for semantic reasons: only such laws can serve to argue that certain sentences have truth-conditions that have to obtain. For instance, when one says that ‘bachelors are males’ has to be true because ‘bachelor’ means unmarried male, for his or her point to be correct he has to be under- stood as saying, at least in part, that ‘bachelor’ refers to the logically complex property of being an unmarried male.

Aside from the issue of co-reference, we have seen examples of candidates for rruth in virtue of meaning whose a priori character seems dubious. In particular we can think of sentences that exploit semantic characteristics of lexical items such as proper names and natural kind terms. Think, for instance, of sentences patterned after the form ‘N Rs to the first expression in this utterance’ mentioned before (where Rry is, say, the relation x is such that he was dubbed by means of a token of the type of y and there is a Kripkean causal chain of uses of rhis name linking his or her dubbing to y). or the ones concerning how stereotypical traits may contribute to determine the reference of natural kind terms, like “Jade is the substance causally responsible for the stereotype involved in the convention abiding which we become competent in the use of the term ‘jade’.’’ One can be a perfect user of ‘Bill Clinton’ or ‘jade’ without having explicit knowledge of the existence of dubs, causal chains or substances. One can later learn of this existence as part of the empirical knowledge one acquires about the world, and then one may finally come to hypothesize how names and natural kind terms refer to things and substances through causal chains and stereotypes. If anything, the mentioned sentences seem to express the consequence of particular conjectures as to the semantics of names and natural kind terms-rather than claims a competent speaker should be able to accept a priori after suitable reflection.

Truth for semantic reasons seems then not sufficient to characterize analyticity. If meaning is what explains the contribution of an expression to the truth conditions of the sentences in which it appears, then there clearly are meanings (semantic regularities) that allow semanticists to conclude the nec-

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essary truth of a sentence-for semantic reasons-but need not allow ordinary speakers to accept the sentence a priori.

Conceptual Meaning To understand this epistemic aspect of analyticity we need to reflect on what is involved in a priori acceptance. What distinguishes our cognitive attitude towards ‘Bachelors are males’ from our cognitive attitude towards ‘Jadeite is jade’? It seems the difference lies on the possibility of exploitation by the speaker in one case, but not in the other, of certain conceptual resources that the speaker is required to possess in order to be a proficient user of the language. Thus, as mentioned earlier, it is a plausible hypothesis that competence in the use of the term ‘bachelor’ consists in mastery of the disposition to apply the term to all and only persons which happen to satisfy the criterion of being unmarried and male. Exploitation of this disposition-together with others associated with the use of, for instance, quantifiers-will lead the competent speaker to the a priori acceptance of statements such as ‘Bachelors are males’. Competence in the use of the term ‘jadeite,’ in contrast, doesn’t seem to require the possession of analogous abilities, which explains why a competent user of this term should not be willing to accept a priori ‘Jadeite is jade.’

The learning of conceptual abilities analogous to the ones mentioned for ‘bachelor’ is associated to competence in the use of any term. It is only when a speaker has acquired these conceptual resources that he is said to know the meaning of a term. Consider, for example, the case of conjunction. Any competent user of the English ‘and’ has to be willing to accept sentences of the form ‘ p and q,’ if he is willing to accept both ‘p’ and ‘q.’ He will also have to be willing to accept ‘p’ and ‘q’ if he is willing to accept sentences with the mentioned form. Or consider indexicals: competence in their use will involve the possession of abilities designed to allow the user to identify the referent of the indexical in each particular context according to the indexical’s semantic rule. For instance, in the case of ‘you,’ these abilities will lead the user to identify the addressee of the particular utterance to which the token of ‘you’ belongs.

The former reflection on the conceptual abilities required for competence allows us to make a distinction between two forms of meaning. We can distinguish them using the labels ‘truth-conditional meaning’ and ‘conceptual meaning.’ Truth-conditional meaning is constituted by the semantic laws that concern the contribution of expressions to truth-conditions: these laws make explicit how the contribution is determined and what this contribution is. Instances of truth-conditional meaning are laws such as the ones mentioned in the previous section; for instance: any utterance of the word ‘I’ in the context of a well-formed English sentence refers to the utterer of the sentence; in the

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context of a well-formed English sentence, any utterance of the word ‘Bill Clinton’ which is suitably linked by a Knpkean causal chain to Bill Clinton refers to Bill Clinton; any utterance of the predicate ‘bachelor’ in the context of a well-formed English sentence contributes the property of being a bachelor to the truth-conditions of the sentences in which it appears. We have seen in the mentioned section that on the basis of only laws such as these the semanticist can prove that certain sentences have to be true, and the proposal was made to analyze true in virtue of meaning as susceptible of being proved true on the basis only of truth-conditional meaning.

On the other hand, conceptual meaning concerns the set of abilities a speaker has to learn to be deemed competent in the use of a term. When we say that ‘bachelor’ means unmarried male, but that 2ade’ does not mean j&- ite or nephrite, we imply that the conceptual meaning of ‘bachelor’ involves the identifying criterion of being unmarried and male, but that the conceptual meaning of ‘jade’ does not involve the criterion of being jadeite or nephrite. In a similar fashion, when we say that ‘water’ is synonymous with the French term ‘eau,’ but not with ‘H,O,’ we mean that the same conceptual resources are involved in the acquisition of competence in the use of the first two terms, while in the case of the third, these resources are different-ven if the three expressions contribute the same entity to truth-conditions. What is the relation between conceptual and truth-conditional meaning? Ideally, the abilities involved in conceptual meaning should determine an extension identical to the one fixed by truth-conditional meaning. Thus, ‘bachelor’ contributes the property of being an unmarried male to truth-conditions, and it is precisely the extension of this property that is singled out by the criteria of application of the term that determine competence in its use.

The acquisition of the conceptual meaning of a term doesn’t usually consist in the explicit learning of conventions, rules or laws of any sort. Rather, it basically involves the acquiring of abilities concerning when to apply the term, in the way one may learn to play a game by observation, without being told which the rules of the game are. Acquiring the conceptual meaning of a term doesn’t consist, in particular, in the explicit learning of semantic rules or laws pertaining to that term. Semantic laws are generally not available to competent speakers in an explicit fashion. Consider, for instance, the semantic law proposed before for ‘bachelor’: this term refers to a complex property that is the logical combination of the properties identified by the criteria of application whose acquiring confers competence in the use of the term; namely, the logically complex property of being wunarried and male. No explicit knowledge Concerning complex properties, conventions, or competence in a language is required for somebody to be a proficient user of the term that is able to conclude a priori that bachelors are males. It is only the disposition to apply ‘bachelor’ to all and only unmarried males that is

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required. Thus, even in cases in which we can formulate semantic laws involving reference to conceptual abilities these laws are not supposed to be explicitly known for someone to be a competent speaker. Competence in the use of names doesn’t require prior explicit knowledge of, say, the idea of convention, or the idea of causal chain. Rather, what seems to happen is that conceptual abilities make the speaker-to use John Perry’s term-uttuned to the rules.12 Even if the conceptual abilities could be attributed some sort of content, it seems clear that there is no need of a mental process that can take any competent speaker from possession of these abilities to the capacity of formulating claims that express their content. That is, if attunement to the conventions is translatable into theoretical claims concerning this attunement, explicit knowledge of these claims is not required for competence.

The idea that competence abilities need not be known in an explicit form by competent speakers allows us to account for the plausible informative character of certain conceptual truths that, nonetheless, should be a priori accepted by competent speakers after suitable reflection: they are informative because the speaker doesn’t need to have explicit knowledge of the conceptual meaning of the terms involved, even though he should be able to use them correctly.

On the other hand, it seems clear that, in certain cases, the conceptual abilities required for competence in the use of an expression determine one semantics for this expression. The cases explored so far are examples of this fact. The conceptual abilities associated with competence in the use of ‘and’ are associated with one truth-table. Similarly, competence in the use of ‘I’ is founded on the ability to identify the referent of the term with the speaker of the utterance, which corresponds to the semantic rule that makes explicit the character of this indexical. As for the case of ‘bachelor,’ if, as proposed, competence in the use of the term is based on the acquisition by the speaker of the criterion of application that bachelors are unmarried males, then the speaker will pick as bachelors precisely the individuals that fall in the extension of the term; namely, unmarried males.

Attunement to a semantic rule doesn’t demand that there be mention, in the rule, of a condition on the abilities the speaker has to possess for competence. There might be a semantic level of explanation at which the laws of semantics involve reference to conceptual abilities, but there are semantic rules that do not involve such reference. In fact, most semantic rules do not have the form: words of type A refer to the extension determined by the conceptual abilities associated to mastery in their use. In any case, it is not whether semantic rules mention conceptual resources that matters. It is whether competence in the use of the term is based on the acquisition of conceptual resources that mirror the semantic rule in an appropriate fashion.

l 2 See Perry (1993~).

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Let me finally mention some caveats. First, the view on concepts as E- ognitional abilities assumed in this paper is inspired by the ones developed by people like Ruth Millikan, John Perry and Mark Crimmins.13 A difference between these proposals and the one developed here lies in the fact that the mentioned authors do not focus on the distinction between conceptual resources ordinarily associated to the acquiring of competence in a language and other criteria of application of terms l m e d with posteriority and such that they do not contribute to a priori reasoning. The view defended in this paper is that competence is a normative feature of language implemented through the acquisition of concrete conceptual resources determined by convention, and that, of course, independently of competence one can acquire other conceptual resources as a result of interaction with the world.

Second, the claims about competence made so far should be taken with a grain of salt. In particular, it seems clear that people who do not share the abilities ordinarily qlured for competence may successfully exchange information by means of language. For instance, blind people successfully refa when they use, for instance, color terms, even if they lack the abilities ordinarily deemed necessary for competence in their use.I4 This may mean that competence is relative to the conceptual capacities available to the speaker. More generally, competence may be a context-dependent and gradual affair.

Knowing the Meaning Following the distinction proposed by Tyler Burge (1993), we can say tenta- tively that competent speakers are entitled to conclude a priori judgments expressed by analytic sentences-in the sense that, being competent speakers, the sentences they a priori accept will, assuming the existence of harmony between conceptual and truth-conditional meaning, have to be true. However, they need not be justified in doing so, in the sense of not needing to have explicit reasons to accept them. Attunement to linguistic conventions per- tains, thus, to a cognitive level of a more basic range than our discursive capacities, and not translatable into them except by theorization. This attunement would only have to reflect the convention in so far as to produce correct linguistic behavior.

The reasoning leading to the a priori acceptance of a sentence is an internal one, not one based on knowledge of semantic facts, external to the agent, but on exploitation of the conceptual abilities that determine competence.” In

See, for instance, Millikan (1984, 1997), Perry (1990); Crimmins and Perry (1989), and Crimmins (1992). See, for instance, Mark Crimmins’ example of the scientist raised in a special set- ting who has never experienced cold, but can successfully use the term, in his “Having Ideas and Having the Concept,” in Crimmins (1989). Reflection on one’s conceptual abilities may provide explicit justification of a rule. For instance, one may argue that one a priori accepts tautologies because one

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contrast, arguments explaining why analytic sentences have to be true-as exemplified in the section on semantic necessity-involve theoretical hypotheses as to the semantic laws pertaining to the expressions in the sentence. Since, meaning, and in particular truth-conditional meaning, is determined by social use, it is only by hypothesizing on social matters that one can explain truth in virtue of semantic laws: which the laws are is a social issue; no amount of a priori reasoning can help solve it. Internal reasoning entitles the competent agent to knowledge, at least in certain cases. But this entitlement doesn’t involve the capacity to determine whether one’s conventions are the correct ones, which is only obtainable after empirical research. This is not meant to deny the possibility of a priori knowledge of a semantic kind, but only to characterize it with more detail. More concretely, the justification for this kind of knowledge would be what Burge calls entitlement, not a justification based on explicit reasons.

We should then distinguish two senses for knowing the meaning. In one sense, one can know the meaning of a term in the sense that one has a theory of what this meaning is that one has empirical reasons for believing is correct, and on the basis of which theory one can prove that a sentence has to be true. Secondly, and closer to the ordinary use of the expression, one can know the meaning of a term in the sense that one is competent in the use of the term, which entitles that person to knowledge of certain conceptual truths. This two senses of knowing the meaning correspond, hence, the two senses of meaning discussed before.

Let me sum up. We have an explanation based on semantic laws of why certain sentences should be said to be true in virtue of meaning. Unfortu- nately this explanation doesn’t account for a priori acceptance of these sentences, as, for instance, co-reference cases show. In order to explain this epistemic feature of analyticity we have resorted to the conceptual routines that have to be mastered by speakers in order to become proficient users of the language. Truth-conditional and conceptual meaning should maintain a certain harmony: roughly, the referent of an expression should coincide with the entity or entities a competent speaker is disposed to apply the expression to. The question now is: up to what point the mirroring between these two varie- ties of meaning is flawless? Up to what point the results of a priori reflection based on conceptual meaning are granted to be true? Only in the cases in which there is harmony between truth-conditional and conceptual meaning

would be otherwise lead to contradictions, and contradictions are to be avoided if one intends to be a competent speaker. But this sort of internal justification can only go so far. An explanation of why, say, acceptance of contradictions should be avoided can only be given in extrinsic terms (contrast with Boghossian (1995)): it should be avoided because it defeats the purpose of the cognitive apparatus of which it is a result; in a word, it makes the agent irrational in the sense that his or her cognitive capacities are poorly adapted for survival.

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can we make full sense of the traditional notion of analyticity-by incorpo- rating both the non-revisable aspect and the a priori aspect we ordinarily associate to analytic statements-and only in such cases conceptual analysis will maintain the incorrigibility feature that backs its privileged access to truth.

Incorrigibility The idea that conceptual meaning should stand in harmony with buth-conditional meaning derives from the more general Wittgensteinean view that meaning is use. Learning a language is becoming attuned to certain conventions for the use of terms-i.e., acquiring certain conceptual resources. It is these resources that are the basis for use and should hence determine what the reference of terms is. Truth-conditional meaning is, therefore, determined by conceptual meaning. To illustrate how this works, consider again the ‘bachelor’ case: how could it happen that ‘bachelor’ doesn’t refer to unmarried males if being unmarried and male is the one and only criterion that determines competence in the use of the term? Or consider the case of conjunction: how could ‘and’ have a different truth-table than it has, provided that competence in its use is based on the inference abilities described before?

However not all terms have conceptual meanings as well-behaved as the ones mentioned. According to Hilary Putnam, competence in the use of natural kind terms is based on the possession by the speaker of the capacity to recognize instances of the kind through some of their stereotypical traits, and of the disposition to defer verdict on which the reference of the term is to experts. There is an aspect of the use of these terms that seems to allow for the formulation of analytic statements, however. Recognition of instances of the kind requires some categorizing; for example, cats are animals with such and such features; roses arepowers with a certain appearance. And in fact, sentences like ‘Cats are animals’ or ‘Roses are flowers’ have customarily been taken to be analytic. Putnam (1975a, 1975b) has taught us, however, that they need not be true: after all, cats might have been robots. This situa- tion is incompatible with the putative analytic claim that cats are animals. The point is not so much that we can conceive of the fact that cats were robots, but that it is in fact compatible with our knowledge of the world, if not that cats might be robots, that other category judgments are false. And in fact, there have been abundant examples in the history of biology of category judgments empirically shown to be incorrect. The case illustrates the possibility of conflict between conceptual and truth-conditional meaning. Part of the conceptual meaning of ‘cat’ would involve the capacity to categorize cats as animals. In spite of that, truth-conditional meaning might determine a reference for the term-plausibly, as mentioned before, in terms of the substance or kind responsible for the stereotypical traits of the associated to the use of the term-that might turn out not to abide by the category ascription

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Other sorts of expressions make the conflict between reference determination and conceptual meaning more conspicuous. There are terms with which we associate a set of recognitional abilities that seems more sophisticated than the stereotypical features and category attributions that usually serve to illustrate natural kind examples. Consider, for instance, terms like ‘pain,’ or ‘belief.’ We recognize the instantiation of pain states, specially other people’s, in part through their functional role. This recognitory ability seems to be a part of the conceptual resources we have to acquire for competence in the use of the term ‘pain.’ Pain is, however, a biological category. If conceptual analysis of the concept of pain is to have non-revisable-i.e., true in virtue of meaning-results, there would better be a proof that all pain instances abide by the typical functional role. But they need not. There are abnormal pain states that do not abide by that role’‘ as much as there are defective hearts that do not pump blood-without failing to be hearts for i t . The functional role of pain states might have to be treated as we treat stereotypical features of kinds: as something that should not be predicated of all instances of the kind. Not all cats have four legs even if cats typically have four legs. And what is more important, neither ‘Typically cats have four legs’ nor, of course, ‘Cats have four legs’ is deemed ana1~tic.l~ But then analysis of functional role cannot be taken to produce results that are non-revisable in the face of empirical evidence. For biological categories such as pain or belief, it is the expert, the biologist or the psychologist, who can tell us what a pain-state and a belief are-just as it is the biologist who tells us what a heart is18-and there is in principle no argument based on the semantics of the corresponding terms ‘pain’ and ‘belief that precludes the possibility that some of the conceptual claims we make about pain or belief turn out to be wrong, just as it might have turned out that cats were robots.”

Let us consider now the case of color terms. Competence in the use of these terms by sighted people involves acquisition of the ability to recognize colors through vision. Aside from that, we do not deem somebody competent in the use of color terms such as ‘red’ and ‘green’ if he doesn’t know a priori that if something is red all over it cannot be green all over. The set of conceptual abilities that lead us to such conclusion seems part of the conceptual repertoire that an ordinary competent speaker of English should have mas-

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Compare David Lewis on mad pain in Lewis (1983). Contrast with ‘Fragile things ordinarily break when hit,’ which seem analytic. This would set ’fragile’ in the group of implicitly defined terms. Thisis not meant to imply acceptance of the reductionist idea that pain, or any other biological category, is identical to a certain physical type of state. Teleological accounts of the matter seem more promising. Criteria of application of a term might actually turn out to be inconsistent in certain cases. ’Knowledge’ might be one such case, and the fact of maintaining different epistemic standards for knowledge might be in the origin of skeptical paradoxes (contrast Schiffer (1996)).

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tered. But it is not clear how this piece of information might have a role in the determination of the reference of ‘red’ and ‘green.’ These terms do not seem implicitly defined terms of whose definition the fact that red things cannot be green forms part. Rather, their reference seems to be determined sim- ply on the basis of paradigmatic instantiations of the corresponding colors. It is these conventionally determined paradigmatic cases, instances of which are used to train language learners in the recognition of colors, that determine which the extension of color terms is. The further knowledge that one thing cannot be doubly colored doesn’t seem to derive in any obvious form from this semantic fact or from semantic facts related to it. It might be derivable from introspection on the perceptual abilities involved in color recognition-we surely cannot picture a doubly colored thing-r maybe just learned as a consequence of the fact that color is a determinable-and that different determinates of the same determinable are never instantiated by the same object-but none of these options seems to make it non-revisable. The reason why red things cannot be green lies in what it is for a thing to be red and what it is for a thing to be green, not in the ordinary concepts of red anl green.

The argument I have been exemplifying with natural kind and related terms can be extended to theoretical terms. There is a referential aspect to the meaning of these latter terms that cannot be exhausted a la Ramsey in terms of the theory in which the expression belongs, on pain of having to endorse that false theories lack terms that genuinely refer and that there is no trans- theoretical preservation of reference.” If aside from this required referential aspect there is a definitional or predicative one, conflict between both may result in false analytic claims as in the case of natural kind terms: an increase of empirical knowledge concerning the subject matter may show that conceptual criteria were incorrect. This has been historically illustrated by the failure of the traditional concepts of, for instance, parallel line, simultaneity or wave to live up to the theoretical demands derived from relativity theory. Thus ‘wave’ could likely be analytically defined in terms of the existence of a certain pattern of movement in a medium before the existence of ether was proved to be false.*’

It could be argued that all that cases such as the ones presented in this section show is that some of the conceptual resources in conflict with truth-conditional meaning are not really constitutive of competence; for instance, category ascriptions to natural kinds would not be part of the conceptual meaning of natural kind terms. Even if it seems to us that competence in the use of ‘rose’ involves knowledge that roses are flowers, it is not really so-witness the fact that we can conceive that they are not flowers. If a certain criterion of

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2’ See, for instance, Putnam (1975~). I thank Josep Taron for this example.

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application associated to the use a term turns out not to apply to the referent of the term, then it cannot be part of what one has to master to become competent in the use of the term, even if it seems so to competent speakers. The problem with this view is that it is not clear why it should be maintained. Consider again what seem commonsensical proposals. There are abilities one has to learn to be deemed competent in the use of a term. These abilities are fairly stan- for a number of terms. Which these abilities are is determined by implicit convention. Some of these abilities concern characteristics of the nature of the referent of the term. But empirical research on this nature may bring out results that show some of the abilities required for competence at a certain point to be misguided. Why should this discount these abilities as part of the old conceptual meaning of the term? What elements constitute competence in the use of a term is an empirical matter. Deciding whether some criterion of application belongs in conceptual meaning or is a piece of genuine knowledge (or misinformation) about the world should be left to empirical linguists. And there is in principle, no reason why some of the criteria of application for a term that are convened to be the ones that confer competence in its use might turn out to be incorrect after suitable empirical research on the nature of the referent of the term. Thinking otherwise implies assigning an infallibility to linguistic practices constituting competence that seems not justified.

The view defended in this paper contrasts then with what seems to be the predominant tradition in semantics, based, as I mentioned earlier, on the assumption that reference is determined on the basis of the conceptual resources shared by competent speakers, and which adopts as method, to determine the meaning of a term, the questioning of speakers as to when they would apply that term to a certain entity. According to this predominant tradition, conceptual meaning not only mirrors truth-conditional meaning, but determines it. There is no possible clash between them. I hope the former examples have contributed to show that this clash is possible, given that it is not always conceptual resources that determine reference, but that historical and causal factors play a role in reference determination.22

In sum, if the examples provided so far are anywhere near the truth, the following general picture emerges. A sentence can be said to be true in virtue of meaning if the semantic rules governing the reference of the terms in the sentence determine that it has to be. Speakers accept certain sentences a priori in virtue of a set of abilities required for competence that I have been calling conceptual meaning. Inferences based only on conceptual meaning will lead to non-revisable results if and only if conceptual meaning accords with semantic laws (i.e., with what I have been calling rrurh-conditional meaning).

22 Ruth Millikan has insisted all through her writings on the possibility of conflict between intension and reference. See, for example, Millikan (1984).

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There are expressions for which this is obviously the case. Implicitly defined terms (for instance, terms whose conceptual meaning is equivalent to a definition), such as perhaps ‘bachelor’ or ‘fragile,’ will have their extension determined by the definition that, on the other hand, has to be learned, at least implicitly, in order to acquire competence in the use of the term. The statement of this definition (and of certain logical consequences of it) will then not only have to be true, but will be a priori acceptable to any competent speaker. There are other expressions for which, in contrast, harmony between conceptual and truth-conditional meaning is a more dubious affair. For instance, claims derivable a priori on the basis of the conceptual meaning of certain terms may conflict with knowledge acquired about the referent of these terms and even turn out to be inconsistent.

Terms that have traditionally been the object of conceptual analysis seem to fall mostly in the latter category (consider, for instance, ‘belief,’ or ‘perception’). If this is the case then the non-revisable character of the results of this mode of theorization should be questioned. As for analyticity, we are left with a terminological choice. Either we stick to the view that analyticity is truth in virtue of meaning and we abandon the idea that all analytic sentences should be acceptable a priori, or we decide that analytic sentences are sentences competent speakers are willing to accept a priori, but given that a priori acceptance is explained in terms of conceptual meaning and this sort of meaning cannot guarantee truth, we accept that analytic sentences are not incorrigible in the face of empirical evidence. The latter alternative seems closer to ordinary discourse concerning analyt i~i ty .~~

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23 Earlier versions of this paper have been read at the VI Coloquio Hispano-Italian0 de Fdosofia Analitica, Granada, 1999; the I1 Hamburg-Barcelona Meeting, Barce- IOM, 2000, and the 9th ESPP Annual Meeting, Salzburg, 2000. I would like to thank John Etchemendy, John Perry, David Israel, Tom Wasow, Ramon Cirera, Lydia Sdnchez, Agustin Arrieta, Paolo Leonardi, Ruth Millikan, Mark Siebel, Josep Macia and William Lycan for their comments. Financial support was provided by the research project PB96-1091-CO3-03, funded by the DGES, Spanish Depart- ment of Education, and by the CUR (1999/SGR/00011), Generalitat de Catalunya.


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