Explaining the Disquotational Principle

Questions about the relative priorities of mind and language suffer from a double obscurity. First, it is often not clear which mental and linguistic facts are in question: we can ask about the relationship between any of the semantic or syntactic properties of public languages and the judgments, intentions, beliefs, or other propositional attitudes of speakers of those languages. Second, there is an obscurity about what 'priority' comes to here.

We can approach the first problem by way of the second. Often, talk about one class of facts being prior to another is glossed in terms of the claim that we can give an account of the latter in terms of the former. This gloss might seem to be a small advance, since it is not clear what sort of account we want. Intuitively, what is required is an account of the nature or essence of the facts in question — one property is prior to another, in the relevant sense, if the correct account of the essence of the latter includes the former. But what are the criteria by which we can judge the success of accounts of this sort? And why think that there are any such accounts to be had?

Recent work has suggested partial answers to these questions: accounts of the essence of some property should explain necessary truths involving that property.¹ This both suggests a justification for the idea that such accounts are possible (since it is plausible that necessary truths require some explanation) and provides a test for the adequacy of such accounts (that they yield explanations of the relevant necessary truths). This suggests a way to raise questions about the priorities of mind and language more sharply: find some necessary truth connecting linguistic and mental facts and ask whether that necessary truth is to be explained in terms of the essence of the linguistic, or of the mental, facts.

An example of such a necessary truth is the following (simplified) disquotational principle, which connects the meanings of expressions in a language with the contents of the beliefs of users of that language:

If S means p and a speaker understands and sincerely accepts S, then the speaker believes p.²

Given the necessity of this principle (about which more below), we can formulate one clear version of the intuitive question about the relationship between linguistic meaning and the content of belief by asking which of the following two explanations of its necessity is correct:³

Explanation 1. The meanings of sentences are explained in terms of the contents of beliefs formed as a result of accepting those sentences: details aside, what it is for a sentence to mean p is for it to be the case that someone who accepted the sentence would thereby believe p. On this view, the disquotational principle is necessary because sentences inherit their meanings from the contents of the beliefs with which they are correlated.

Explanation 2. The contents of beliefs are explained in terms of the meanings of sentences: details aside, what it is for an agent to believe p is for that agent to be disposed to accept a sentence of some public language which means p. On this view, the disquotational principle is necessary because beliefs inherit their contents from the meanings of the sentences the agent of the belief is disposed to accept.

Because the first of these explains meaning in terms of mental content, I shall call it the mentalist direction of explanation; because the second explains thought in terms of social facts about meaning, I shall call it the communitarian direction of explanation.⁴

To most recent philosophers, the view of language and mind corresponding to the mentalist direction of explanation of the disquotational principle has seemed by far the more promising one.⁵ The communitarian direction of explanation faces two apparently decisive objections: (i) many agents (including animals and infants) have beliefs without having dispositions to express those beliefs with sentences of public languages; (ii) accepting a sentence is a kind of intentional action, and intentional actions are themselves to be explained in terms of beliefs and other...