Semantic naturalism and the normativity of meaning

against semantic prescriptivism

Abstract

The slogan “meaning is intrinsically normative” is regarded by several philosophers as capturing an essential feature of linguistic meaning. The normativity of meaning is supposed to constitute a constraint upon theories of meaning. In particular, it has been extensively objected that naturalist theories of meaning are flawed, on the grounds that semantic facts are normative, while natural facts are descriptive. The goal of this paper is to assess two conflicting views on the normativity of meaning – semantic prescriptivism and anti-prescriptivism. First, I show that only the former threatens semantic naturalism. After that, I argue in favour of semantic anti-prescriptivism and show that the main argument for semantic prescriptivism – the simple argument – is flawed. The conclusion is that the viability of semantic naturalism is not touched by the normativity of meaning.