Sense, rule-following, and realism

The results of Andrei Nekhaev’s critical analysis of such areas of modern philosophy of language as semantic dispositionalism and semantic Platonism in the context of solving the skeptical problem of rule-following are discussed in this article. The shortcomings of Nekhaev’s analysis and the shortcomings of Katz’s semantic Platonism itself in the context of the discussion of realism and antirealism are established. In particular, Nekhaev’s interpretation of sense as a syntactic combination is more similar to the early Wittgenstein, who in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus also introduces “Sinn” (sense), than to Katz. A sentence expresses its sense regardless of whether it is true or false. It would seem that this is similar to Frege. But still, according to Wittgenstein, sense is only a structural correlation of syntactic parts of a sentence. This structural correlation of syntactic parts of a sentence can hardly be identified with Frege’s sense of a name or a thought expressed in a sentence. Even if Frege’s thought also consists of integral parts, these parts are senses of signs-parts, and not signs themselves. It seems that Katz’s sense is more like Frege’s sense than like the sense of the early Wittgenstein, despite Katz’s criticism of Frege. Katz’s criticism of Frege is not aimed at the concept of sense itself, but at the relation of sense and reference. Katz does not agree with Frege that there is a relation of strict determination between sense and reference. Instead, Katz introduces a more fluid relation of mediation between sense and reference, but the main characteristics of sense itself in Katz remain Fregean. Sence is an ideal entity, an abstract object, completely distinct from the sign domain in which it is expressed. Signs, their combination, syntax express sense, but are not sense. The article presents the criticism of Katz’s concept as follows. Katz always called his position “realism”. But Katz’s understanding of realism turns out to be unjustifiably narrow. He thinks of realism exclusively in the medieval context of the debate on universals, opposing his position to nominalism. Realism, for Katz, asserts the existence of abstract objects (meanings). But in the context of debates between realism and antirealism in the 20th-21st centuries, realism is still understood as a position asserting the existence of objective reality and the possibility of knowing it. Realism concerns reality. Reality is the area of referents of words and sentences. If the theory of meaning is made completely autonomous from the theory of reference, as the late Katz wanted, then any questions related to the knowledge of objective reality simply turn out to be beyond consideration. To know objective reality means to know referents, not meanings. Meaning provides a fixed way of knowing reality, but it is not yet reality itself. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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