This was the topic of my PhD dissertation and of several connected papers from the same period. The central question was whether linguistic meaning is normative: whether understanding an expression involves being guided by rules that are not merely useful or conventional, but constitutive of what it is to understand the expression in the first place. My dissertation defends a version of this view by focusing on rules of understanding and on the first-person perspective of rule-following.
A major background to this debate is Kripke’s discussion of Wittgenstein on rule-following, which helped to make the normativity of meaning a distinct philosophical problem. I was particularly interested in how the rule-following problem, semantic normativity and the metaphysics of meaning fit together.
My papers
- Review of Anandi Hattiangadi, Oughts and Thoughts: Rule-Following and the Normativity of Content. European Journal of Philosophy 17 (2009), pp. 336–341. DOI · PhilPapers
- “Kripkes Wittgensteins skeptische Lösung und die Metaphysik des Meinens.” In Martin Grajner & Dolf Rami (eds.), Wahrheit, Bedeutung, Existenz. Heusenstamm: Ontos, 2010, pp. 125–180. DOI · PhilPapers · PDF
- Die Normativität sprachlicher Bedeutung: Eine Verteidigung. Dissertation, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, 2010.
- “Normativität der Bedeutung.” In Nikola Kompa (ed.), Handbuch Sprachphilosophie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2015, pp. 351–360.
