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

Email: A.Woodfield@bristol.ac.uk

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.

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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-

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

The sort of situation where Fodorian deference is supposed to occur is when D

acquires a concept through interaction with E. The whole point of the story is that the

novice gains a concept whose content is fixed by facts about the expert. Prior to the

information-tapping, D has no concept of elm because none of her mental

representations is locked on to elmhood. E, the measuring-instrument, is D’s only

channel of semantic access.

The second comment I wish to make is that Fodor’s story misrepresents what

the participants take themselves to be doing. Such considerations belong to what

Fodor calls the ‘epistemology’ of deference (and not to the semantics). He says that if

we view matters his way, the existence of deferential concepts is ‘seen to be of some

interest for epistemology’ (EE p34); but as I see it, his model distorts the

epistemology so drastically that the most charitable interpretation we can put on it is

that it purports to be a revolutionary alternative to common-sense, a denial of the

participants’ manifest image of the process in which they are engaged.

Actually, Fodor does not say what the beliefs and intentions of the deferrer

and the expert are, other than say that the deferrer has to set things up cleverly and

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carefully, pick the right expert, choose a test environment that permits the expert to

manifest his recognitional skill, enlist the expert’s co-operation, etc. Above all, the

deferrer has to be ‘able to pursue policies with respect to another person’s mind’ as

well as his own. Let us probe a little into what these policies might be.

A deferrer D1 who is fully in control and in-the-know might plausibly be

credited with the following strategy. D1 thinks: ‘I am no good at recognising elms. So

I shall employ E, who is an expert recogniser. Under optimal detection conditions,

when presented with trees, E will judge that a tree is an elm if and only if it is an elm.

When optimally co-operative, E will reveal his sincere judgements to me by uttering

a certain sound. I will rig these conditions up, and I will judge that a tree is an elm

just in case E utters the sound under these conditions.’

Although D1 stands a good chance of making correct elm-categorisations if

the conditions hold, a person who initially lacked the concept ELM could not possibly

entertain these thoughts. This man has beliefs and intentions about elms qua elms.

For example, D1 believes: E’s noises indicate the presence of elms. D1 obviously

possesses the concept ELM, even before he has started to defer. Prior possession of a

given concept cannot be an empirical precondition for acquiring it. Fodor does not

want to say that deferrers conceptualize their policy in such terms.

So consider a deferrer D2 who has a conceptually more austere set of beliefs

and intentions, but who is still more or less in control. This man thinks to himself:

‘I’ll use E to help me categorise trees. There is a certain kind of tree which E is very

good at recognising. If I pay him enough, he will always reveal to me his judgement

that a presented tree is of that kind. I’ll take his utterance of a certain sound as a

natural sign. When the optimal conditions of observation and co-operation obtain, I

will judge, of any tree that we both see, that it is that kind of tree, if and only if E

makes the sound.’

D2 can think these thoughts without possessing the concept ELM. But he must

already possess a concept that denotes elms. It’s true that this novice simply treats E’s

utterances of the sound as a reliable natural sign of one kind of tree - which is all that

informational semantics requires. Nevertheless, he has a concept of the kind of tree in

question. For example, he thinks: E’s noises are reliable indicators of that kind of

tree. He employs the concept THAT KIND OF TREE. This concept of his refers to

the kind elm. Fodor 1998, in particular, is committed to saying that its content is elm,

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for he holds that if two concepts are co-referential (as are the concept ELM and D’s

concept THAT KIND OF TREE), they have the same content (see C pp 12-15).

People cannot use measuring-devices profitably unless they know what the

devices measure. Those who exploit an expert as a measuring device need to know

what they are doing; they need some conception of what the expert is responding to.

In the present case, D already has a concept whose content is elm; so it is not true that

D acquires that concept by borrowing the content from E’s concept.

It is very hard to see what the epistemic situation of an acquirer of a

deferential concept could possibly be. To avoid begging any questions, one would

need to attribute to such a person a set of attitudes that was conceptually less rich than

D2’s.

A defender of Fodor might say that I am exaggerating the extent to which a

content-borrower has to be conscious of borrowing. If ‘deferring’ is defined as

something that has to be done deliberately and in full awareness, then indeed the

Fodorian content-borrower does not literally qualify as a ‘deferrer’. But let’s not get

hung up on literal construals. Fodor is using the word metaphorically. (This point was

made by Michael Devitt at the Karlovy Vary conference.)

This seems right, but it does not wholly insulate Fodor from the objection. I

concede that deferring to experts can become automatic; it need not be undertaken

consciously. Nevertheless, a deferrer adopts a policy on how to handle the other

person’s expertise. Having an unconscious policy means having unconscious beliefs

and intentions. Such beliefs and intentions must have contents. The objection was that

D would surely have some attitudes whose contents contained the content elm. If D

did not have any such attitudes, D would not understand what was going on.

I think it is time to invite Fodor to bite the bullet. He should admit that if

anyone ever acquires a concept via the deferential route, such a person is not really in

control of the process. The information-tapper does not know which concept he is

going to get, in fact his beliefs about the informational transactions between himself

and the expert are pretty much irrelevant.

Note also that such a person would be unable knowingly to set up the optimal

test-conditions. To achieve such a feat one would have to select an expert whom one

knew to be a reliable measuring-device of the kind of tree in question, and one would

need to know which sound made by the expert was the sign of that kind of tree. After

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all, the expert might make several different sounds which are correlated with different

kinds of trees. On the whole, I think that if anyone ever did get informationally

locked on to anything as a result of such a set-up, it would either be a matter of luck,

or a consequence of someone else’s design (or Nature’s).

I see signs in Fodor’s latest book that he is moving in this direction. For he

says (in. C p.124) that informational semantics plus conceptual atomism favour the

view that primitive concept-possession is non-cognitive, and atomic concept-

acquisition is a not a cognitive process. Information from the world colonises us and

implants contents in our heads, rather as germs colonise us and give us diseases. The

current position harks back to the causal-historical theory of reference: picking up the

content of a general concept from an expert is like borrowing the reference of a

proper name from another user. If these are the models that Fodor 1998 favours, then

he ought to deny that the epistemology of the receiver is of any interest.

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that there are no such mental particulars

as Fodorian deferential concepts. The processes that he hypothesizes do not exist. But

I shan’t try to defend that view here. It is clear enough, anyway, that his story about

deferential concepts in no way supports the thesis that deferring in the normal sense

must stop.

3. Récanati’s Deferential Operator

In order to appreciate Récanati’s theory of deferential operators, we need to

fix our minds upon quasi-quoting. I’ll give examples of speakers who do this; the

first example is mine, the others are adapted from Récanati 1997. It is important that

in each example we understand that the utterer of the sentence was the person

responsible for putting in the quasi-quotes. We may assume that the speaker signalled

them by a gesture or by vocal emphasis. I highlight quasi-quotation marks by writing

them as asterisks - this helps to distinguish them from ordinary quotation-marks.

Récanati’s paper is a response to certain doctrines about ‘quasi-belief’ that

were proposed by Sperber. In my exposition I shall ignore those aspects of the debate

which are inessential for our purposes and I shall not say anything about Sperber’s

position.

Consider utterance (1) made by a non-Czech speaker while looking at a menu

written in Czech:

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(1) For lunch I shall have *kachna*.

The speaker quotes a Czech word which he does not understand, but at the

same time he uses the word as a syntactically functioning part of an English sentence.

Those in his lunch party who speak English and Czech will be able to work out what

food he will be eating. English monolinguals will not be able to identify the dish,

except perhaps under the description ‘food called “kachna” in Czech’. Note, though,

that the speaker did not explicitly say that the food was called ‘kachna’, nor did he

speak about the Czech language.

Quasi-quoting is one of several functions that scare-quotes can be used to

perform: in general, the speaker who puts an expression in scare-quotes intentionally

signals that he distances himself from the expression in some way and that it is not

functioning normally. Precisely how or why he distances himself from it is to be

pragmatically worked out with the help of contextual information. In this case the

speaker expects the audience to realize that he is quasi-quoting the foreign word

because he does not know how to translate it.

Perhaps (1) is not a well-formed English sentence, in which case it does not

express a determinate proposition. But the speaker intends to communicate some

thought. If we ask ‘Which thought does the speaker intend to communicate?’, there is

a problem. For it is hard to find a satisfactory characterization in indirect speech. He

is thinking of a certain type of food, but under what mode of presentation? Clearly he

is not thinking of it as duck. But it seems equally unwarranted to say that he thinks of

it under the metalinguistic description the referent of the Czech word ‘kachna’. The

thought: I shall be having the referent of the Czech word ‘kachna’ for lunch is more

complex in structure and in content than the thought that he actually entertained.

My second example is a variant of one that Récanati gives. Sally has

overheard conversations between members of a religious sect. The sect-members trot

out a phrase which is used by their guru, taking for granted that the phrase is

meaningful. They trust the guru and believe that everything he says is true. The

phrase in question is ‘alpha-enlightened’. Actually, none of the followers knows what

it means and nor does the guru: the phrase is meaningless. In utterance (2) Sally uses

the phrase in quasi-quotes, intending to allude to those who use it straight.

(2) Jesus Christ and John Lennon are *alpha-enlightened* beings.

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Arguably, utterance (2) is a token of a syntactically well-formed sentence of English.

There is a problem about identifying which proposition, if any, (2) expresses. Also

there is the problem of characterizing what Sally believed.

The third example is of an unconfident speaker who quasi-quotes a

meaningful expression of English, intending that it be construed as having its normal

meaning but also intending to signal that he does not fully understand it. A schoolboy

has heard a teacher say ‘Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches’. The boy is not sure

what synecdoches are. He is able to convey this fact while passing on the teacher’s

message. The boy uses quasi-quotes, saying to his friend:

(3) Cicero’s prose is full of *synecdoches*.

People sometimes do this to hedge against being asked to explain what a term means.

The audience will realize that the speaker may not fully understand the term, so they

do not embarrass him by asking. The quasi-quoting speaker can still play a helpful

role in communication. Once again, however, there is a problem about characterizing

the speaker’s belief.

Récanati offers a solution to these characterization problems. I take him to be

offering two proposals. One is that overt quasi-quotes in public language are

deferential operators. The other is that there exist corresponding deferential operators

in thought. At both levels, he draws upon a distinction between character and

content. Kaplan, the originator of the distinction, invoked it in order to describe the

semantics of indexical expressions. The expression-type is asociated with a general

meaning-rule (its character), and the character specifies how contexts of utterance

combine with particular utterances to fix their semantic values (i.e. their contents).

For instance, the first personal pronoun ‘I’ is governed by the rule that each utterance

of ‘I’ refers to the producer of the utterance. That is its character. If we look at a

particular utterance, say Greta Garbo’s saying on a particular occasion, ‘I want to be

alone’, the content of that occurrence of ‘I’ is Greta Garbo.

Here is Récanati’s definition of a deferential operator (pp91-2):

DEFN: The deferential operator Rx( ) applies to a symbol and yields a complex

expression Rx() whose character is distinct from that of (if has one). The

character of Rx() takes us from a context in which the speaker tacitly refers to a

certain cognitive agent x (which can be an individual or a community of users)

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to a certain content, namely the content which has for x, given the character

which x attaches to .

Let us see how the quasi-quotes in (1), (2) and (3) satisfy this definition. In (1)

the quasi-quotes apply to the Czech word to yield the complex expression ‘*kachna*’.

This expression has a character. The character is a function from the word ‘kachna’,

plus the context in which the speaker tacitly referred to Czech speakers, to the content

which Czech speakers attach to the word ‘kachna’. In fact, the content is duck. So the

speaker of (1) thereby expressed the proposition that he would eat duck for lunch -

though he did not know this. (Récanati does not use this sort of case, so I won’t

mention it again.)

In (2), Sally’s utterance of ‘*alpha-enlightened*’ was a complex expression

formed by a deferential operator. Its meaning or character is a function from tokens

of ‘alpha-enlightened’ and from contexts in which Sally tacitly referred to utterers of

it to the contents which the expression-tokens have for their respective utterers. What

content does it have for the sect-members? It has none. Therefore the complex

expression-token has no content either. Sally’s utterance fails to state a proposition.

In (3) the boy’s complex deferential term ‘*synecdoches*’ has a character

such that its content is identical with the content that ‘synecdoches’ has for the

teacher. So the boy succeeds in asserting that Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches.

No scare-quotes are needed in reporting the proposition expressed.

Récanati’s second proposal is that deferential operators exist inside the mind.

He claims that in the examples the speakers’ thoughts are deferential, and his theory

enables us characterize those thoughts.

To set the theory up Récanati needs a few background assumptions. He

assumes that there is a Language of Thought. When S believes that p, S stands in the

‘believes’ relation to the proposition that p; this may be analysed into two

components: (i) S stands a relation of ‘accepting’ to some sentence of Mentalese, (ii)

the Mentalese sentence means that p.

The words of S’s Mentalese are the vehicles of S’s concepts. Every Mentalese

symbol has a definite character for S: ‘it is hard to think of a symbol being mentally

entertained without being “interpreted” in some fashion or other....if a mental

sentence is well-formed, it must possess a definite meaning - a character - even if it

falls short of expressing a definite content’ (p91).

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He makes the ‘individualistic’assumption that when S utters a sentence in a

public language, the public character of the sentence is irrelevant to the question

‘Which thought did S express?’. For it may be that S did not understand the public

character. What matters is the character that the sentence has for S. This character

must be one that S himself grasps; it will be the character of the Mentalese sentence

which S pairs with it (p91).

At the same time, he embraces some of the insights of externalism. It is

possible for S to have attitudes involving mental representations whose referential

contents are epistemically indeterminate for S. Sometimes people do not know which

proposition it is that they believe. How can this be squared with the individualistic

assumption? By distinguishing between character and content. Character is in the

head, even if content is not.

Having made this distinction for Mentalese, Récanati now explains how to

characterize the speakers’ beliefs, using English as if it were their language of

thought. In uttering (2), Sally accepts this mental representation:

(2 -LOT) Jesus Christ and John Lennon are Rx(‘alpha-enlightened’) beings.

It has a character for her. But the Mentalese term Rx(‘alpha-enlightened’) has no

referent, because the sect-members use a term that has no meaning. Sally’s Mental

sentence fails to express any proposition, hence Sally has no propositionally-

identifiable belief.

The boy who utters (3) accepts a mental representation (3-LOT):

(3-LOT) : Cicero’s prose is full of Rx (‘synecdoches’).

Since the boy is quasi-quoting the teacher, the content of his mental symbol

Rx(‘synecdoches’) is the content that ‘synecdoches’ has for the teacher. Assuming the

teacher knew what the word meant, the content was synecdoches, and so the content

of (3-LOT) is that Cicero’s prose is full of them. This, then, is what the boy believes.

The key feature of a complex symbol bound by a deferential operator is that it

is directly referential. The content is fixed not descriptively but indexically, in virtue

of the fact that the content stands in a contextual relation to the thinker. The complex

deferential symbol is like a demonstrative. When S entertains a demonstrative mode

of presentation of an object O, S thinks OF O under the mp That. Similarly, when the

boy entertains the complex symbol Rx(‘synecdoches’), he thinks directly OF

synecdoches.

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What is it like to think in such a way? When Récanati says (p96), ‘Deferential

representations are meta-representational at the level of character but not at the level

of content’, he does not mean they they present themselves to S as being meta-

representational. Actually, he does not try to describe what it’s like to entertain a

deferential symbol. But he might convey it in the following way. Imagine being in a

situation where you have just heard the teacher say ‘synecdoches’. You are thinking

of the speaker and the sound indexically, under perceptual mps. You then think OF

the sound’s semantic value for the teacher, in thinking: Cicero’s prose is full of those.

I agree that this is a possible psychological state. I think that Récanati has put

his finger on a phenomenon which no one else has previously diagnosed: mental

quasi-quoting. Moreover he is right that if a given symbol is to have a determinate

content, it is not possible that everyone always puts quasi-quotes around it.

Récanati offers an interesting theory that explains a specialized range of

phenomena. Where I want to take issue with him is over his assumption that the

theory has much wider application. He extends mental quasi-quoting far outside the

range illustrated by these examples. For instance, he claims that all of the characters

in Burge’s 1979 thought-experiments employ deferential operators. In fact, he claims

that children, language-learners and other imperfect understanders of picked up words

normally bind such words inside deferential operators. These claims are false. They

systematically generate wrong interpretations of the conversations that take place

between novices and experts, learners and teachers.

The way he reconstructs Burgean cases is instructive. In the best-known

scenario from Burge 1979, the character simply says to the doctor, ‘I have arthritis in

the thigh’ without putting ‘arthritis’ in scare-quotes. It is crucial to Burge’s argument

that the subject should not use quasi-quotes or distance himself from the word, but

should use it as part of his own working vocabulary. As Burge notes, ‘The argument

can get under way in any case where it is intuitively possible to attribute a mental

state or event whose content involves a notion that the subject incompletely

understands’ (1979, p79). Suppose we run Burge’s argument using the ‘synecdoche’

example. We imagine a boy, Alf, who takes over the word from the teacher and uses

it straight. Alf says ‘Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches’. The meaning is different

from that of (3). Alf has assimilated the term into his working vocabulary, and

according to Burge he expresses the concept synecdoche.

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But Récanati offers a revisionary interpretation. He assumes that Alf missed

out the scare-quotes. If you ask Alf whether he was quasi-quoting the teacher, it does

not matter if Alf denies it. You may presume he quasi-quoted the teacher unwittingly.

The important hypothesis is that Alf’s Mentalese sentence contained a deferential

symbol.

That is the first step in the radical reinterpretation. The next step is to

introduce the distinction between Kaplanesque content and character. This is a move

which Burge never even considered. Burge worked with the old, undifferentiated

Fregean notion of conceptual content. Once we make the move, however, we separate

two questions:

(a) Is the character of Alf’s thought socio-linguistically determined?

(b) Is its referential content socio-linguistically determined?

Récanati’s answer to (a) is: No. Character is in the head. It cannot be that the

boy entertains the public concept synecdoche, because it is impossible that anyone

should think with a notion whose character they do not understand.

Concerning (b), the answer is: Yes, sort of. The referential content of Alf’s

belief is identical with that of (3-LOT), the quasi-quotational belief. The relevant

intuitions about twin-earth seem to march in step with Burge, because referential

content is outside the head. Suppose that the quasi-quoting boy has a counterpart on

Twin-Earth, where the language is slightly different from English. Suppose that twin-

boy has a twin-teacher who said ‘synecdoche’, but his word did not mean synecdoche.

Twin-boy defers to twin-teacher’s meaning. It is not the case that twin-boy’s

utterance or belief refers to synecdoches. This seems to fit with the intuitions we have

about Burgean cases.

However, these parallels at the level of referential content cannot conceal the

fundamental differences between Burge’s view and Récanati’s concerning conceptual

content. According to Récanati, the boy who thinks (3-LOT) has a directly referential

belief about synecdoches, which he thinks of, in context, as Those. That is how Alf

thinks of them, if Alf’s mental representation is (3-LOT). But on Burge’s view, this

not how Alf thinks of them. He thinks of them as synecdoches. In the thought-

experiments, the belief-attributions are supposed to be true when construed opaquely,

as specifying the subject’s conceptual mode of presentation. The attributions are not

to be taken de re. Moreover, on Burge’s view, Alf’s thought about synecdoches does

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not depend upon his being in a context in which he tacitly refers to the teacher. Alf’s

mode of presentation is in no way indexical or demonstrative.

Récanati is pushing for an individualistic reinterpretation, albeit one that

makes room for mental indexicals whose referents are determined contextually. Burge

was arguing against individualism, for the view that conceptual content was

sociolinguistically individuated. Note that. for Burge, speakers who utter a word

which they do not understand at all are not credited with the concept expressed by the

word, but partial understanders may be said to possess the concept.

Récanati, on the other hand, assimilates Burgean cases to indexical beliefs.

The contents are externally individuated, but social factors (other people and their

utterances) come in only as elements of the subject’s context of utterance. The

context helps to fix a referent, and the referent itself is a constituent of the content. It

does not matter whether the subject partly understands the word or completely fails to

understand it. The mechanism of reference-fixation is the same in either case.

So much for the geography of the issues. Let us turn now to an evaluation of

Récanati’s theory of deference. I said above that I think the apparatus works for

certain special types of utterances and thoughts, but that he over-extends it. He claims

that children and imperfect understanders entertain quasi-quote representations as a

matter of course; that these representations are the appropriate vehicles for quasi-

beliefs whose characters we know directly, but whose contents we do not know. He

also holds that learners move gradually from a state of quasi-belief to fully

conceptualized belief: ‘ We start by accepting a representation without understanding

it; this attitude of acceptance leads us to use the representation in a certain way; and

by so using the representation we end up understanding it. What makes learning

possible is the use to which the representation is put, and that use itself depends on

the initial attitude of acceptance that motivates it.’ (p89). Moreover: ‘This continuity

suggests that deferentiality is a matter of degree’ (p94).

A great deal more explanation is needed here. It seems impossible that there

could be a gradual process of moving out of quasi-quotes. It’s clearly not a process of

bit-by-bit removal (like taking one’s clothes off), nor is it a process of decay (like

quotation-marks fading away on a page as the ink loses its colour). The learner starts

off using mental symbols like Rx(‘synecdoches’) and Rx (‘kachna’) and ends up using

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completely distinct symbols like synecdoches and duck. Prima facie, there has to be a

saltation - a switch of symbol-type - at some point.

Communication-based learning typically proceeds as follows: somebody tells

you something, you understand what they are saying, you believe them, you add the

knowledge to your store, and if necessary you delete previously held beliefs that are

incompatible. This is also what goes on in ordinary cases of deferring. For the

learning to work, you must already possess the concepts (in order to understand), and

they must be the same concepts that the teacher or expert is employing (otherwise

there is communication-failure).

I want to end this section by showing how Récanati’s theory misrepresents

typical acts of deferring, which play such an important role in learning. Consider a

dialogue between two characters, Alf and L. Alf is the boy who picked up the word

‘synecdoches’ from his schoolteacher and who does not fully understand it. L is an

expert linguist. L knows the dictionary definition. Their conversation is set against an

important background fact, that the schoolteacher misunderstood the word. (He used

it to refer to metonymies.)

The conversation is as follows:

(i) Alf says: ‘Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches.’

(ii) L replies: ‘No it is not. It’s true that his prose is full of figures of speech. But

very few of them are synecdoches.’

(iii) Alf replies: ‘I accept what you say. Cicero’s prose is not full of synecdoches.’

If the belief expressed in the second sentence at (iii) is to count as the negation

of the belief Alf had at (i), both beliefs must involve the same predicative concept.

This point was made in section 2. Admittedly, that does not settle the question of

which concept it was. Note, however, that L is definitely employing the concept

synecdoche. If L’s judgement contradicts Alf’s original belief, then Alf’s belief must

have involved the concept synecdoche too. It’s a typical Burge-type situation. Alf

must have possessed the concept synecdoche right from the start, even though he did

not fully understand what synecdoches were.

How do matters look from Récanati’s point of view? Alf was not using the

concept synecdoche, nor was he referring to synecdoches. He was using a deferential

symbol to refer to what the teacher called ‘synecdoches’. Consequently, in this case

he was unwittingly referring to metonymies. If Récanati’s acount is right, the two

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participants are talking at cross-purposes. At step (ii) the linguist misunderstands

what Alf meant at step (i). He takes himself to be rebutting Alf’s claim. But in fact

his remark is not a denial of the proposition that Cicero’s prose is full of metonymies.

L’s remark is simply irrelevant.

Alf’s response at step (iii) compounds the misunderstanding. For he does not

spot the fact that L’s remark was irrelevant. Récanati can analyse Alf’s response in

two ways, depending on whether or not Alf is still using the same deferential operator

at step (iii). Either way makes the dialogue problematic.

Suppose that Alf at (iii) still defers to the teacher’s meaning. He is referring

unwittingly to metonymies and is now saying that Cicero’s prose is not full of them.

It appears to him that he is deferring to the linguist, but this is an illusion. The linguist

expressed no opinion on whether Cicero’s prose is full of metonymies.

Suppose, on the other hand, Alf at step (iii) is no longer operating with the

teacher’s meaning. Suppose the term now has some other meaning for him. The

question arises whether he is really agreeing with the linguist. He appears to be

agreeing, but that could be an illusion. He cannot really be agreeing unless he

understood what the linguist said at step (ii). If he did understand, he must have

possessed the concept synecdoche, despite the fact that at step (ii) he did not fully

know what synecdoches were. Thus Récanati has to concede that this cognitive

condition is possible, just as Burge said it was. Hence he ought to concede that Alf

could have been in this cognitive condition at step (i). The motivation for introducing

the deferential operator is undercut.

Récanati might object that this argument is unfair because in this conversation

x (the semantic deferee) is not identical with L (the conversational deferee). But why

is this unfair? It is clearly possible for a child to pick up a word from one source and

then use the word when talking to a different person. In the conversation the child

might defer to the new person’s judgement. In later conversations, the child might

defer again to other people’s judgements. This sort of thing happens all the time; it is

the standard process by which a child learns from other people. My criticism is that

the theory misrepresents what is going on in the majority of such conversations.

Normally the child is not quasi-quoting the original source. My argument has the

following form: if incomplete understanders, in converations like this, were normally

quasi-quoters of an original source, then most of the conversations would be riddled

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with misunderstanding; but it is absurd to suppose that there is so much

misunderstanding; therefore, the quasi-quotational construal of normal cases not

right.

4. The Epistemology of Deferring

Does deferring have to stop? The considerations given in this paper do not

prove that deference can be never-ending, either linearly or circularly. The focus has

been on criticizing two theories that say deference must stop. The alleged need for a

‘stopping’ constraint is not established by these theories, because neither of them

gives a correct account of semantic deference. Until the phenomenon is correctly

identified and described, the question will remain unaswered.

Deference is not a relation of content-co-opting, nor is it a relation between

representations. Deferring is an intentional act done by a person for a reason. That to

which the agent defers is a presumed authority’s judgement. In cases where the act of

deferring is part of a social interaction, each party coordinates his actions and

attitudes with the other’s actions and attitudes. A precondition for felicitous deferring

is that both parties understand one another. Through their exchange of utterances the

expert grasps what the issue is (and the deferrer is satisfied that this is so), the

deferrer identifies what the expert’s judgement is, and - optionally - the deferrer lets

the expert know that he agrees. In accepting the expert’s judgement, the deferrer

commits himself to using the expression in accordance with the advice given. Thus

the expert’s judgement has an objective empirical content, but it also treated by D as

having normative force. D accepts that he should speak in the way that E

recommends.

D has to have a good reason for entering into such a commitment. In the

standard case, D’s attitudes to E are set against a background of presumptions shared

by D and E. Both parties take for granted that there are norms which determine the

proper meaning of the word, norms to which they both owe allegiance. D defers to E

on a particular issue because D takes E to be a good guide, given the meaning that the

word already has. D does not take E to be the giver of meaning. No fact about E

constitutes the word’s meaning what it does. D knows that experts are fallible. D

regards E’s judgement as good evidence that the word means such and such, but D

does not suppose that E makes it the case that the word means such and such. The

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same goes for E. Both parties mutually understand that the word has a proper

meaning which it would have had even if E had never existed.

But isn’t it true that when I defer to you, I treat you as my norm? In a sense, it

is true; but we have to be careful about what this amounts to. The word ‘norm’

derives from the Latin word ‘norma’ meaning ‘carpenter’s square’; the dictionary

defines ‘norm’ as standard, pattern, type. If I want to copy your pattern, I will take

your practice as my yardstick. The deferrer does treats the deferee as a yardstick, or

as Fodor says, a measuring instrument.

But that is not the whole story, for no mention has been made of the

background presumptions. I have to want to conform to your pattern for the right

reasons. Semantic deferring is underpinned by the desire to speak in accordance with

the norms that determine objectively correct use. It is to these norms that I ultimately

subscribe. If I defer to you, it is because I trust you as an interpeter of them and I let

their authority devolve to you. Under some circumstances I may revoke this

permission and withdraw my trust. Where no independent standard of right and

wrong exists, there is no deference, only subservience.

Department of Philosophy

University of Bristol

References

Burge, T. 1979: Individualism and the Mental. In P.French, T. Uehling and

H.Wettstein (eds), Midwest Studies in Philosophy Vol IV: Studies in

Metaphysics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Donnellan, K. 1993: There is a Word for That Kind of Thing: an Investigation of

Two Thought Experiments. Philosophical Perspectives 7, 155-71.

Fodor, J. 1994: The Elm and the Expert. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Fodor, J. 1998: Concepts. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Putnam, H. 1975: The Meaning of “Meaning”. In Putnam, Philosophical Papers Vol

II: Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Récanati, F. 1997: Can We Believe What We Do Not Understand? Mind and

Language 12, 84-100.

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