Chapter 8
In: The Lvov-Warsaw School and Contemporary Philosophy of Language
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Abstract
In this paper, I discuss two problems that arise in the context of normativity. The first problem concerns the criteria speakers use to classify utterances as “correct” or “incorrect”. The main difficulty comes from our inability to explain where is the threshold beyond which speakers’ claims stop being “eccentric” or “weird” and start being “incorrect”. The second problem concerns the idea that genuine normativity should guide the behavior of the speakers. I show that a modified version of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s Directival Theory of Meaning provides a solution to both of these problems. I argue that the theory solves the first problem thanks to the titular category of meaning directives as it identifies incorrect utterances with directives violation. The solution to the second problem comes from a Wittgensteinian idea that the identity of a given action (utterances included) depends on the community of interpreters and not on the speaker.