Explaining the Disquotational Principle

Questions about the relationship between thought and language, while central to an understanding of the nature of intentionality, are often obscure. I suggest that such questions be framed by asking whether necessary truths which connect mental and linguistic properties are to be explained in terms of the essence of the mental, or of the linguistic, properties. I argue, first, that the disquotational principle, which connects the contents of the beliefs of agents with the meanings of sentences of their language, is such a necessary truth; second, that its necessity requires explanation; third, that it cannot be explained in terms of the ‘interdependence’ of meaning and belief; and fourth, that it cannot be explained in terms of a theory of meaning which takes the meanings of sentences to be inherited from the beliefs with which they are correlated. I conclude by arguing that the view that social facts about public language meaning are part of the story about what it is to have a belief with a given content is more plausible than is usually thought. 1 Is the disquotational principle a necessary truth? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2 Analyzing sincere acceptance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 3 Interdependence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 4 The mentalist direction of explanation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 5 Communitarianism reconsidered . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Questions about the relative priorities of mind and language suffer from a double obscurity. First, it is often not clear which mental and linguistic facts are in question: we can ask about the relationship between any of the semantic or syntactic properties of public languages and the jugements, intentions, beliefs, or other propositional attitudes of speakers of those languages. Second, there is an obscurity about what ‘priority’ comes to here. We can approach the first problem by way of the second. Often, talk about one class of facts being prior to another is glossed in terms of the claim that we can give an account of the latter in terms of the former. This gloss might seem to be a small advance, since it is not clear what sort of account we want. Intuitively, what is required is an account of the nature or essence of the facts in question — one property is prior to another, in the relevant sense, if the correct account of the essence of the latter includes the former. But what are the criteria by which we can judge the success of accounts of this sort? And why think that there are any such accounts to be had? Recent work has suggested partial answers to these questions: accounts of the essence of some property should explain necessary truths involving that property. This both suggests a 1For an argument that the notion of essence should be regarded as explanatory of, rather than defined by, modal notions, see Fine (1994). This is also related to the sorts of primitive grounding relations invoked in Schaffer (2009), and contrasts with more ‘modal’ ways of understanding priority in terms of supervenience relations. This view of essence is put to work in Setiya (2003), on which the method of the present paper is modeled. For an earlier, less explicit use of this method of using necessary truths to discern the nature of properties, see the discussion of the impossibility of self-blindness in Shoemaker (1994).