Reference and Deference
ANDREW WOODFIELD
Acknowledgements and affiliation as unnumbered footnote :
The first draft was presented on 16th September 1998 at the Karlovy Vary Symposium on the philosophy of Hilary Putnam. I am grateful to the organisers at the Philosophical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and to the participants who gave helpful feedback. Redrafting was done during my tenure of a Mind Association Research Fellowship. Jonathan Berg, Jessica Brown, Adam Morton, François Récanati, and the Mind and Language referee all made helpful comments.
Address for correspondence: Department of Philosophy, 9 Woodland Rd, Bristol BS8 1TB, UK
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Abstract: According to Putnam, meaning and reference depend on acts of structured cooperation between language-users. For example, lay-people defer to experts regarding the conditions under which something may be called ‘gold’. A modest expert may defer to a greater expert. Question: can deference be never-ending? Two theories say no. I expound these, then criticize them. The theories deal with semantic processes bound by a ‘stopping’ constraint which are not cases of ordinary deferring. Deferring is normally done for a reason, and a rational person is always disposed to defer if there is good reason.
1. The Possibility of Endless Deference
When Putnam first wrote about the division of linguistic labour (in ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’ 1975), he gave prominence to cases in which ordinary speakers defer to experts concerning the application of natural kind words. This often happens because laypeople are poor at recognizing members or instances of natural kinds. Putnam argued that the recognitional knowledge is present in the linguistic community taken as a whole. Experts know the recognition criteria associated with a kind-word, and other people defer to their judgements. The extension of the kind-name in the community’s language gets demarcated through a process of structured cooperation.
The idea of semantic deference can be extended in several directions. Firstly, as Putnam noted, deference is practised not only with natural kind words but with many other sorts of words as well.
Secondly, expert recognizers are not the only category of experts. For we sometimes want expert general advice about what the proper criteria are. And sometimes what we seek is a good verbal definition.
Expert recognizers are members of society who are skilled at applying criteria. Depending on the word in question, there may exist subgroups of professionals who know or claim to know more than the average person about which are the right criteria. Other people - including expert recognizers - may defer to their rulings. Also, when trying to define a word explicitly, we often defer to a definition provided by an authoritative linguist or text or academy. Since fixing criteria and verbally defining are different tasks from recognizing instances, there is room for a subdivision of linguistic labour. There can be role-switching: it may be that you are better than me at explicating the sense of some word (so I defer to you on this), while I am better than you at recognizing instances (so you defer to me on that).
Meaning, being multi-dimensional, generates opportunities for social co-operation on a range of different tasks. The three tasks mentioned (identifying the right criteria, applying agreed criteria, and defining) are not the only ones where expertise is recognized. Advertising copywriters are experts at choosing apt forms of expression for a desired message; legal experts decide which definition is the relevant one to employ (e.g. when a term has different definitions within different systems of regulation); and so on.
The third extension of Putnam’s idea is from linguistic semantics to mental semantics. Putnam showed that the meanings of many words are not fully internalized. His work inspired various forms of externalism about the contents of mental states. Externalism about mental contents says that the contents of some thoughts and concepts are individuated by factors external to the thinker. Externalists say, for example, that my having the concept gold requires that I be related in some way to the outside world. There are different externalist theses about which relation has to hold (see Donnellan 1993). Putnam-inspired externalists say the relation consists in my having had direct or indirect causal contact with gold. Social externalists say the crucial relation between me and the concept gold is socio-linguistically mediated. If social externalism is right, other people can play a role in fixing what my thought-content is. There can be a division of conceptual labour consequent upon the division of linguistic labour (see Burge 1979).
Linguistic deference and conceptual deference are widespread phenomena. However, some philosophers say that deferring has to stop at some point, for if everyone were deferential with respect to a given word or concept no one would ever succeed in attaching a definite content to it. That thesis is the stimulus for this paper.
Fodor certainly holds the thesis. In his latest book Concepts, Fodor (1998, p154) says, ‘Adherence to conventions of deference couldn’t be a precondition of conceptual content in general, if only because deference has to stop somewhere; if my ELM concept is deferential, that’s because the botanist’s isn’t’. (cf. Fodor 1994, p33).
Récanati is another philosopher who espouses the thesis that deference must eventually stop. He says that no content is expressed by the utterance of a term if it is a term ‘used deferentially by everybody, in a mutual or circular manner’ (Récanati 1997, p92).
Although the ‘must stop’ thesis seems initially plausible, further reflection suggests that matters are not straightforward. Suppose that three people, a customer A, a jeweller B and a chemist C, are attempting to settle whether a certain brooch belonging to A is made of an especially pure type of gold which is mined only in South Africa. A proposes that it is. The jeweller B performs a test. On the basis of the result, B asserts that the gold is not the special South African type. A defers to B’s judgement. But B is not confident that his crude diagnostic technique was the right one, so he consults the chemist C. C performs tests which invoke different criteria from the jeweller’s. C concludes that the brooch is made of the special type. B defers to C’s judgement. A happily defers to C as well. And there the matter rests; no further investigations are performed. However C’s judgement relied on an assumption. C took it that certain impurities which he found in the gold were sufficient to establish that it was the special South African type. But it later transpires that this set of characteristics is not decisive. When C learns this fact, he realizes that he might have misclassified the gold in the brooch. If another chemist employing better criteria were to test it and pronounce it not of the South African type, then C would probably defer to the other chemist’s opinion.
Empirical testing ends because the parties have no more time or inclination to continue. But in principle the testing could continue, and each interim conclusion could conceivably be undercut. The proponent of a judgement reached at any point would be prepared to defer to another person’s superior contrary judgement. Real-life processes of deferring do stop. But it is not necessarily true that the deferring process had to stop at the point where it did. Nor is it true that the deferring necessarily has to stop somewhere. It could in theory go on indefinitely. The participants are not stuck without a resolution just because the latest judgement is defeasible. On the contrary, they commit themselves to the best judgement available at the time. For example, the owner puts the brooch up for sale at a price which reflects the current assay.
We may readily imagine circles of mutually deferring agents. Take three scientists A, B and C who continually strive to improve their methods of detecting some elusive disease. On Monday, A defers to B’s opinion about whether the disease is present in a particular blood sample. On Tuesday, B revises his opinion in the light of a contrary assessment made by C, on the grounds that C used a superior criterion. Meanwhile, A learns more about the disease and develops a much better diagnostic technique than any so far. On Wednesday, A issues a new verdict on the original blood sample. C defers to A’s new assessment, because he recognizes that A, armed with better criteria, has become more authoritative. Meanwhile, B is working away on an even better method. And so it could go on.
Objection: ‘These scenarios involve people deferring to one another over questions of fact, whereas the kind of deferring practices we ought to be considering are those that hinge on meanings’.
Actually, the above disputes do concern the extensions of words, and extension is an important aspect of meaning. Every time that a participant defers to another’s categorization of an item, he defers (implicitly) to the other’s judgement about whether a certain word applies to the item.
More importantly, non-stopping deferential processes can equally well occur in disputes about intensions. People sometimes defer to experts’ advice about how an expression in a language should be construed. This frequently happens in cases where its sense is popularly misconstrued. Also disputes may arise amongst expert linguists about the best way to specify the meaning of an expression. With any type of semantic issue, there can agreement giving way to disagreement which is resolved by new agreement.
Deferring is not passing the buck. Suppose that UK Customs and Excise decides to employ EU criteria for classifying certain food-products and judges that toffee-apples count as confectionery rather than fruit by those criteria and hence are liable to UK Value Added Tax. The UK authority itself arrives at that judgement. It does not pass the buck. It is not the case that the UK lets the EU decide whether British toffee apples are to be subject to VAT, nor is it that the UK lets the EU decide that they count as confectionery. (That the EU plays no part in taking such national decisions is an aspect of the principle of subsidiarity which governs relations between the Union and its member states.)
A decision to defer may be entered into responsibly and for good reason. Every rational speaker should be disposed to accept semantic corrections from those who are more knowledgeable. Since experts are rational speakers, they too have the same conditional willingness to defer. There is a sense in which the pressure to defer never goes away. Let us look more deeply, then, into the reasons why two philosophers hold that in order for a word or a concept to have a determinate content, deference must eventually stop. I shall suggest that they hold this because they treat A’s deferring to B on the model of A’s borrowing B’s meaning. I shall argue that this model is wrong.
2. Fodor’s Model of Semantic Deference
Fodor writes about ‘deferential concepts’ in The Elm and the Expert (1994, lecture 2), and Concepts (1998, ch 4). (These works will be cited respectively as ‘EE’ and ‘C’.) He says that lots of our concepts are deferential (EE p34).
Fodor holds that a concept is a mental particular, an internal representation belonging to an individual (C p23). A concept possessed by one person D (the Deferrer) is deferential just in case it appropriates or co-opts the content of someone else’s concept. Public language plays a role in mediating the co-opting relation between two people’s concepts in cases where D gains access to the content of E’s concept through E’s verbalisations.
The thesis that deferring equals co-opting someone’s content is offered as a solution to the ‘elm/beech’ problem. Suppose a linguistically competent adult S knows the words ‘elm’ and ‘beech’ but cannot perceptually discriminate elms from beeches. This person is not interested in trees; her stereotype of an elm is qualitatively the same as her stereotype of a beech. But she knows that elms and beeches are different species, so she must be credited with distinct concepts of elm and of beech. Problem: how is it possible for her to have two concepts c1 and c2 such that c1 has the content elm and c2 has the content beech? What makes the contents different if she cannot tell the difference?
This sort of case afflicts practically every theory of content. It is a problem for internalists who believe that conceptual content is in the head, and for externalists who say that for a concept to have the content elm is for it to stand in an external relation to elms. It is a problem for such externalists, because they need to find a mind-world relation that does hold between c1 and elms but does not hold between c1 and beeches.
Fodor says that D can exploit the concepts of an expert in the following way: she selects a botanist who calls a tree ‘elm’ when and only when it really is an elm, and she uses the botanist’s verbal responses as indicators. So D can tell - with the expert’s assistance - when a tree is an elm. Concept c1 can get hooked on to elms by an indirect route, a route that goes through the expert’s concept of elm. Similarly, c2 can co-opt the content beech from the botanist’s concept of beech.
Fodor’s position is epitomised in EE on p36: ‘What philosophers call ‘linguistic deference’ is actually the use of experts as intruments; not Marxist division of labour in semantics but capitalist exploitation in epistemology’.
It is easy to see why Fodor insists that not everyone’s concept of elm can be deferential. On his model, being deferential is a form of dependency. If D’s concept has a content which devolved from someone else’s concept, the donor concept must have already possessed a content. It is possible that the donor concept was deferential. There can be a chain of content-borrowings. But every chain must trace back ultimately to a concept that has non-borrowed content.
The thesis about content-borrowing needs to mesh in with a theory of independent content-fixing. In fact, there are lots of theories in the ring. The one currently favoured by Fodor is ‘Informational Semantics’, which says, roughly, that a concept’s having the content elm consists in its standing in a certain relation of lawlike correlation with elms.
Informational Semantics marries neatly with his view of deference. For Fodor can claim that what constitutively fixes the content of a concept is always the same, whether the concept is deferential or non-deferential. D’s concept of elm picked up its content through E. But the theory of content-fixing is required only to explain the fact that it has the content elm, not how it came to have it. When D’s concept c1 is up and running, its having the content elm consists in the fact that c1 itself is informationally locked on to elmhood.
The relationship between deferrer and expert may be summarised as follows.
(i) E’s concept had the content elm independently, before D’s concept did.
(ii) In the circumstances, if E’s concept had not had the content elm, D’s concept would not have come to have it. The fact that c1 ended up with that content was causally dependent upon E’s provision of an access-route to elms, and also causally dependent upon the fact that E’s concept carried elm-information.
(iii) In alternative circumstances, the same information could have got to D through E even if E had had no concept of elm at all. Suppose that E were not an expert recognizer but an unwitting indicator. Imagine, for instance, that E is specifically allergic to elms. In their presence E’s face always flares up in a red rash, just as some people react whenever they eat peanuts. And suppose D had used E’s allergic reaction as her measuring-instrument. D’s concept would have ended up carrying the same information. Thus although in the actual situation E’s concept played a key role, it was not necessary for D to interpret E’s concept as a concept. The essential role that E’s concept played was that of being a natural sign.
(iv) But it was necessary for D to engage in some interpreting. For example, D needed to understand that the tokenings of E’s concept and the vocalisations were nomically correlated with a certain type of tree, and D had to treat E’s responses as indicators. D had to know what she was aiming for, otherwise she would not have kept up the attention and effort. She intentionally made use of E’s responses in order to get her own concept locked on to a certain kind of tree.
(v) D’s concept obtained its content by tapping the information carried by E’s concept. Not every concept can get its content by tapping in to another, therefore Fodor is right that deference, on this model, must eventually stop.
Now for some comments. The first thing to note is that deference as Fodor conceives it is far removed from the ordinary notion. I shall not list all the dissimilarities; many of them are obvious. But one difference deserves special attention.
If a novice judges at time t1 that a certain tree is an elm, then enters into communication with an expert who tells the novice at t2 that the tree is not an elm, and the novice accepts at t3 that the tree is not an elm, this is a standard case of deferring, as noted by Putnam. At t1, the novice already possesses a concept which he expresses through the word ‘elm’, and this concept already has an intentional content and an extension. At t3, what he accepts is that the tree in question is not in the extension of that concept, given the content that the concept actually had at t1. He now believes that his judgement at t1 was false. In order to make sense of the novice’s change of belief, we need to assume that he took the expert to be correcting a particular application of the concept, with the content that it had at t1, in a situation where both assume they agree on what the content was and is. This form of interaction is not one where a novice’s concept picks up its content from the expert. But in Fodor’s model the deferential relation holds if and only if D’s concept picks up its content from E’s. It is quite clear, then, that whenever ordinary ‘Putnamian’ deference occurs, Fodorian deference does not occur.