Abstract

This paper concerns Quine's stance on the issue of meaning normativity. I argue that three distinct and not obviously compatible positions on meaning normativity can be extracted from his philosophy of language - eliminative ]naturalism (Quine I), deflationary pragmatism (Quine II), and (restricted) strong normativism (Quine III) - which result from Quine's failure to separate adequately four different questions that surround the issue: the reality, source, sense, and scope of the normative dimension. In addition to the incompatibility of the views taken together, I argue on the basis of considerations due to Wittgenstein, Dummett, and Davidson that each view taken separately has self-standing problems. The first two fail to appreciate the ineliminability of the strong normativity of logic and so face a dilemma: they either smuggle it in illicitly, or insofar as they do not, fail to give an account of anything like a language. The third position's mixture of a universalism about logical concepts with a thorough-going relativism about non-logical concepts can be challenged once a distinction is drawn between the universalist and contextualist readings of strong normativity, a distinction inspired by Wittgenstein's distinction between grammatical and empirical judgements.