Our planning ahead

Let us systematically describe here what we will actually develop step by step in the next chapters. We will see here what we will discuss in Korsgaard’s systematic discussion of the sources of ethical normativity, and how we will try to transfer it to semantic normativity.

The first thing to consider is how to formulate the question. When we ask about the source of ethical normativity we have to be clear about what we will require a theory of normativity to satisfy. Korsgaard claims that she draws from Kant the following requirements for a theory of ethical normativity:

1. An answer should hold valid when the question arises in a 1st_{–person per-} spective (“Why should I behave morally?”).

2. It has to meet the transparency condition — it should allow epistemic ac- cessibility.

We will reconstruct her arguments supporting these constraints in order to consider later whether the same reasoning holds in the case of semantics.

As we will come to see, the perspective from which it is argued that the normative question should be posed and addressed is a fundamental and debatable issue in the realm of ethics. In semantics, a theory that could explain why someone uses words as they have to be used in a way that is adequate from a 3rd_–person perspective could nevertheless fail to justify the action from the agent’s own, 1st

–person perspective, and so fail to support its normative claims. But is it sufficient to obtain a satisfactory answer when the question arises in a 1st_–person perspective (“Why should I use S to mean f?”)?

Transparency in ethics demands that the source and its reasons should be epistemically accessible for us: if we ought to act in a certain way, we should be able to do so, and to be aware of what is the reason justifying the action. Should a proposed source of reasons for judgments of semantic (in)correctness meet the transparency condition in the same way as in the ethical case? Are the source and the reasons for our linguistic obligations accessible to us via propositional knowledge or by what sort of epistemic access?

Should a theory of semantic normativity appeal to our identity, to our sense of who we are? The fact that reasons should be action-guiding immediately involves in a possible answer in the way each agents’ practical identities interrelate with these motives.

Although a critical appraisal of Korsgaard’s interpretation of Kant is an in- teresting and worthy investigation, we limit the exploration of her work to its possible contribution to how the normative question in semantics could or could not be characterized. Therefore we will not dive into the seas of Kantian erudi- tion and rather concentrate on how the Korsgaard’s conditions fit with respect to meaning and not morality. A thorough consideration of the objections that have been raised against her approach is also beyond the scope of this work. We will only refer to those that will be relevant to our ulterior transposition.

We will next consider the alternative candidate sources that Korsgaard eval- uates. She examines voluntarism, realism and Humean reflective endorsement, and she gives different reasons of why they do not succeed in meeting the condi- tions she sets for sources of ethical normativity. We will present her arguments in order to transport them afterwards as analogous sources, but in this new con- text, of semantic normativity. What kind of authority provides reasons for our judgments of semantic (in)correctness. Could we say that normativity of mean- ing is secured by certain intrinsically normative entities? Can Humean reflective endorsement provide the necessary test? We will not evaluate systematically her picture of these responses, or her objections. Instead we will come to see that these candidates can feature, but without great success, in the case of semantic normativity.

Finally, we will get at Korsgaard’s own candidate for a source of ethical nor- mativity. We will describe as compactly as possible her description of the appeal

to autonomy and how this option is alleged to satisfy the requirements on ethical normativity. This post-Kantian position naturally relies on the author’s appraisal of many Kantian concepts but as the reader could understand we will not devote ourselves to assessing her interpretation. The goal of presenting her view is to take it afterwards to the domain of meaning to see how well it can subsist there. This will depend on how the requirements on normativity can be set up for se- mantics. We hope it will allow us to exclude from our consideration any critical appraisal of the appeal to autonomy in ethics, to instead concentrate on assessing this proposal as it might fit to work as a source of the normativity of meaning.

Ethics and justification

The preceding discussion should have made clear how the need to understand the question about the source of normativity in semantics is motivated by the most recent debate on whether linguistic meaning is normative. It is not evident, however, how one may fruitfully formulate such a question. We know that any answer should accommodate the material and formal constraints we have been presented. Yet the search space still appears too broad; we have noted the number and generality of the antecedents in the conditional conclusions of the discussion. How can we better understand what can be a source of semantic normativity?

When one lacks answers, sometimes it is useful to operate by contrast or ap- proximation. If we try to see what requirements are imposed on sources for justi- fication outside semantics, we might obtain an indication of what is comparable and dissimilar when meaning is at issue. Christine Korsgaard’s Tanner Lectures

published in Korsgaard (1996) with four critics’ objections and her replies to them is a landmark in the systematization of this traditional problem in ethics of: “What can be a source of morality?” In the series of lectures she introduced conditions upon this interrogation, which she technically labels ‘the normative question’ (henceforth NQ). She argued why NQ in ethics should be formulated as a 1st_{–person inquiry that can provide a deliberative agent with the guide to actu-} ally judge her own moral actions. Furthermore, such a guide should involve that agent’s practical, human identity. With these requirements rendered, she pre- sented and evaluated different proposed answers to NQ, and then described and argued for her own, more satisfactory candidate source: the appeal to autonomy. In this chapter we will give a concise exposition of Korsgaard’s systematizaton of NQ: her arguments for the requirements on the question, her objections against voluntarism, realism and Humean reflective endorsement as possible sources for the normativity of meaning, and her own proposal, autonomous reflective success. This will lead us, afterwards, to consider such conditions and proposals with respect to semantic normativity.

3.1

What is NQ for Korsgaard?

Consider any of our daily ethical appreciations of people’s action. Faced with this, we might be perplexed with the contents of our morality and, and we might wonder why we condemn or accept what we are confronted with. A different question — not necessarily of a skeptical tone — probes the source of moral

obligatoriness and permissibility; What can provide reasons in support for our moral judgments? Although Korsgaard does not mention it, we believe it’s worth noting that we don’t always ask this question. We do not request a justification whenever we perform an action which could be morally pondered. However, when we ask NQ as above, we inquire about the source of normative reasons for morality in general: normativity cannot be defined with respect to an isolated action. NQ can be motivated by an ethical consideration in a particular situation or quandary but if it is to be a meaningful question, it should concern actions

beyond the present case.

We first present some general constraints regarding Korsgaard’s stance in particular, and ethical justification in general. As it will turn out, these are echoed by the general conditions discussed in semantics and likewise do not suffice to give a full blown characterization of what can be a source of ethical normativity.

We will see that, according to Korsgaard, when posed (motivated either by a theoretical worry or by an actual practical deliberation) from a 1st_{–person per-} spective NQ asks about the justification and the explanation of our moral con- siderations. This imposes a requirement of transparency to the answer that may be given, since it should both explain to and justify for an actual deliberative agent her own moral actions, which means that she should have some kind of epistemic access to the source of the obligatoriness of the actions she ponders over, and to the reasons it provides. This also necessitates, Korsgaard argues, that the alleged source should appeal to, or at least it should not conflict with our practical identity.