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Wright on the judgement-dependence of meaning 29. Crispin Wright has written about the anti-reductionist conception that: [t]his somewhat flat-footed response to Kripke’s Sceptic may seem to provide a good example of loss of problems.' ... In fact, though, and on the contrary, I think the real problem posed by the Sceptical Argument is acute, and is one of Wittgenstein's fundamental concerns. But the problem is not that of answering the Argument. The problem is that of seeing how and why the correct answer given can be correct.71 Wright's intriguing suggestion is that there are important constitutive results to be gleaned from the epistemological question we shelved some pages back: namely, how, if content properties are simply to be taken for granted, without prospect of reconstruction either in experiential or dispositional terms, can they be known? As we saw, Kripke attempted to use this question to embarrass his anti-reductionist opponent. Wright, however, has a more constructive project in mind. Pressing the epistemological question will reveal, so he claims, that facts about content are essentiallyjudgement-dependent’. What does it mean for a class of facts to be judgement-dependent? Wright’s explanation is framed in terms of a failure to pass the order-of-determination test' : The order-of-determination test concerns the relation between best judgementsjudgements made in what are, with respect to their particular subject matter, cognitively ideal conditions of both judger and circumstance-and truth. ... Truth, for judgements which pass the test, is a standard constituted independently of any considerations concerning cognitive pedigree. For judgements which fail the test, by contrast, there is no distance between being true and being best; truth, for such judgements, is constitutively what we judge to be true when we operate under cognitively ideal conditions 72 We may explain the contrast Wright has in mind here by recurring to the idea of an accessible content (see above). An accessible content is one about which subjects are necessarily authoritative under cognitively optimal circumstances. Now, a question may be raised about the correct explanation for this authority: is it that, under those optimal circumstances, subjects are exceptionally well-equipped to track the relevant, independently constituted facts? Or is it, rather, that judgements under those circumstances simply constitute the facts in question? A fact is judgement-independent if the former, judgement-dependent if the latter. The contrast, then, is between facts which are constituted independently of our judgements, however optimal, and facts which are constituted precisely by the judgements we would form under cognitively ideal circumstances. And the claim is that facts about content have to be construed on the latter model. Pace Kripke, the target of the rule-following considerations is not the reality of content facts, but, rather, a judgement-independent (or Platonist, if you think these come to the same thing) conception of their constitution. Best judgements constitutively determine the truthvalue of sentences ascribing content to mental states; they do not track independently constituted states of affairs which confer truth or falsity upon them. Wright argues for thisjudgement-dependent’ conception of content by attacking the epistemologies available on the alternative model. Drawing extensively on Wittgenstein’s actual text, Wright reconstructs an interesting set of considerations against both introspective and inferential conceptions of self-knowledge, thus, presumably, exhausting the epistemologies available to his opponent. So long as facts about our mental states are construed as independent of, and, hence, as tracked by our self-regarding judgements, we can have no satisfactory explanation of our ability to know them. On the assumption, then, that Kripke’s unstable content irrealism is to be avoided at all costs, that leaves the judgement-dependent conception as the only contender. So goes Wright’s argument. Wright’s discussion raises a number of interesting and difficult questions. Is it really true that Wittgenstein’s discussion destroys all cognitive accomplishment' theories of self-knowledge? Supposing it does, does this inevitably drive us to a judgement-dependent conception of content? Are there not other conceptions that would equally accommodate the rejection of a tracking epistemology? Unfortunately, none of these questions can be adequately addressed within the confines of the present paper. Here I have to settle for raising a question about whether a judgementdependent conception of content could ever be the cogent moral of any argument. 30. The suggestion is that we must not construe facts concerning mental content as genuine objects of cognition, and that this is to be accomplished by regarding them as constituted by truths concerning our best judgements about mental content. Well, what does this amount to? For illustrative purposes, Wright offers the case of colour. What would have to be true, if facts about colour are to judgement-dependent? We would need, first and foremost, to secure the accessibility of colour facts, and so a biconditional of the following form: if C: S would judge x to be blue x blue. But not just any biconditional of this form will serve to secure the accessibility of colour. For example, unless restrictions are placed on the permissible specifications of C, every property will turn out to be accessible; just let C be: conditions under which S is infallible about colour. So, it must be further required that C be specified in substantial terms, avoiding awhatever-it-takes’ formulation. Now, what would it take to ground not merely the accessibility of colour, facts, but their judgement-dependence? What is needed, as Wright points out, is that the question whether the C-conditions, so substantially specified, are satisfied in a particular case is logically independent of any truths concerning the details of the extension of colour concepts.73 This seems right. For unless the specification of the C-conditions, or, indeed, of anything else on the left-hand side, is precluded from presupposing facts about the colours of objects, it will remain entirely open whether subjects’ judgements, formed under the relevant C-conditions, really did determine facts about colour. For satisfaction of the conditions described on the left-hand side would always presuppose some antecedently fixed constitution of colour facts, thus undermining the claim that it is precisely truths about best judgement that fix those facts. No doubt, other requirements are in order as well .74 But it is, I trust, already clear that there is a serious difficulty seeing how facts about mental content could conceivably satisfy the stated requirements on judgement-dependence. For it is inconceivable, given what judgementdependence amounts to, that the biconditionals in the case of mental content should satisfy the requirement that their left-hand sides be free of any assumptions about mental content. For, at a minimum, the content of the judgements said to fix the facts about mental content have to be presupposed. And that means that any such biconditional will always presuppose a constitution of mental content quite independent of constitution by best judgement. In a way, an intuitive difficulty should have been clear from the start. A judgement-dependent' conception of a given fact is, by definition, a conception of that fact according to which it is constituted by our judgements. The idea is clearly appropriate in connection with facts about the chic or the fashionable; familiar, though less clearly appropriate, in connection with facts about colour or sound; and, it would appear, impossible as a conception of facts about mental content. For it cannot in general be true that facts about content are constituted by our judgements about content: facts about content, constituted independently of the judgements, are presupposed by the model itself. Conclusion: Robust Realism-Problems and Prospects 31. Let robust realism designate the view that judgements about meaning are factual, irreducible, and judgement-independent. Then the moral of this paper-if it has one-is that the major alternatives to robust realism are beset by very serious difficulties. Irrealism -the view, advocated by Kripke's Wittgenstein, that judgements about meaning are non-factual-appears not even to be a coherent option. (An error-theoretic variant, as promoted, for example, by Paul Churchland, seems no better.) Reductionist versions of realism appear to be false. The proposal that judgements about meaning concern communal dispositions is unsatisfactory not merely because, implausibly, it precludes the possibility of communal error, but because it appears bound to misconstrue the meaning of every expression in the language. The rather more promising (and rather more popular) proposal, that judgements about meaning concern a certain sort of idealized disposition, also appears to confront serious difficulties: it is hard to see how the idealizations are to be specified in a non-question-begging way. And, finally, a judgement-dependent conception of meaning seems not to be a stable option, because the very idea of constitution by best judgement appears to presuppose a judgementindependent conception of meaning. It is sometimes said that an anti-reductionist conception is too facile a response to the problem about meaning. It is hard not to sympathize with this sentiment. But if the considerations canvassed against the alternatives are correct, and if it is true that therule-following’ considerations leave an anti-reductionist conception untouched, it is hard, ultimately, also to agree with it. Meaning properties appear to be neither eliminable, nor reducible. Perhaps it is time that we learned to live with that fact. I do not pretend that this will be easy. Robust realism harbours some unanswered questions, the solutions to which appear not to be trivial. There are three main difficulties. First: what sort of room is left for theorizing about meaning, if reductionist programs are eschewed? Second: how are we to reconcile an anti-reductionism about meaning properties with a satisfying conception of their causal or explanatory efficacy? And, finally: how are we to explain our (first-person) knowledge of them? I cannot, of course, hope to address any of these questions adequately here. A few brief remarks will have to suffice. To begin with the last question first, I cannot see that an anti-reductionist conception of content has a special problem about self-knowledge. As far as I am concerned, no one has a satisfactory explanation of our ability to know our own thoughts.75 But I do not see that the anti-reductionist need feel any special embarrassment about this. If anything, it seems to me, the prospects are better for him than for his opponent. A reductionist would have it that meanings are fixed by certain kinds of dispositional fact, the sort of fact that could hardly be known observationally. It would appear to follow that the reductionist is committed, if he is to have a substantial epistemology of selfknowledge, to an inferential conception-a conception that may be, as I have argued elsewhere, worse than implausible.76 The anti-reductionist labours under no comparable burden. As for the charge that there would be nothing left for a theory of meaning to be, if reductionism is eschewed, it seems to me simply false. Let me here mention just a few of the questions that survive the rejection of reductionist programmes. For one thing, as I have stressed, a nonreductionism about meaning is best understood as a thesis about mental meaning, not about linguistic meaning. So anti-reductionism, as I understand it, is not only consistent with, but positively invites, a theory about the relation between thought and language. How do public language symbols come to acquire meaning and what role does thought play in that process? Secondly, anti-reductionism in my sense is consistent with wanting a general account of the principles by which we interpret other people. The important work of Quine, Davidson, Lewis, Grandy, and others on the theory of radical interpretation neither needs, nor is best understood in terms of, reductionist aspirations. Its proper goal is the articulation of the principles we evidently successfully employ in interpreting the speech and minds of others. And, finally, an antireductionism about mental content is perfectly consistent both with substantive theories of the nature of the propositional attitudes-that is, of what makes a given mental state a belief, as opposed to a wish or a desire; and with the claim that the grasping of certain mental contents depends on the grasping of others, and so with theories of the compositional structure of mental content. There is hardly any fear, then, that we shall run out of things to do, if we forego reductionist programmes in the theory of mental content. Finally, though, there is the question of mental causation: how are we to reconcile an antireductionism about content properties with a satisfying conception of their causal efficacy? It is a view long associated with Wittgenstein himself, of course, that propositional attitude explanations are not causal explanations. But, whether or not the view was Wittgenstein’s, it has justifiably few adherents today. As Davidson showed, if propositional attitude explanations are to rationalize behaviour at all, then they must do so by causing it.77 But propositional attitudes rationalize partly by virtue of their content-it is partly because Neil’s belief is that there is wine in his glass, that he reaches for it; so, propositional attitude explanations commit us to holding that content properties have a genuine causal role in the explanation of intentional action. But, now, how is an antireductionist about content properties to accord them a genuine causal role without committing himself, implausibly, to the essential incompleteness of physics? This is, I believe, the single greatest difficulty for an anti-reductionist conception of content. It may be that it will eventually prove its undoing. But the subject is relatively unexplored, and much interesting work remains to be done.78′ 79