Rules and Their Logic
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Perhaps the central theme of my research has been the idea that facts and things are constructed by minds and that this results in facts having meanings.
There is a simple argument to show that all facts are constructed by minds. Every fact is the fact that X (is the case), where X is circumscribed by means of some language. For instance, the fact that it is raining, or the fact that 9 is the sqare of 3. There cannot be facts without language, and there cannot be a language without a mind. Therefore there cannot be facts without minds. By using the categories provided by a language, minds construct facts by imposing structure on what appears to them.
For some the idea that facts and things are constructed by minds may seem preposterous. For sure, there must be some things 'out there' that are not constructed by minds, for instance minds themselves. The existence of minds would then be a fact that is not constructed by a mind. And if minds do not need minds for their existence, why could not there be other things as well that exist without the need of mental construction? I will not try to answer this objection here, but for the answer that I would try to give, I would make use of the idea, developed in connection with coherentism, that those things exist which exist according to a coherent theory of everything.
The idea that facts are constructed by minds and that this results in facts having meanings was introduced in my PhD-thesis Feiten en betekenis (Facts and Meaning; 1987). When I wrote my thesis I was influenced by (neo)Kantianism and Phenomenology, without being aware of it, and consequently without mentioning it. This influence resulted in my view that the World we live in (our Lebenswelt, Husserlians would say), is already meaningful. Meaning is not something that is mentally added to a pre-existing World, but is included in the ingredients from which minds construct the World.
Four things deserve attention in this connection.
Since Feiten en betekenis was written in Dutch and was never officially published, it is not very accessible to the public at large. Therefore I used several later publications to repeat some main topics of the thesis. These publications include:
The meanings of facts are closely related to reasons. Facts with intrinsic meanings exist for (one or more) reasons. That a fact is a fact of some kind is a reason for the existence of the intrinsic meaning of this fact. For instance, the fact that the sun shines is a reason to take a walk, or - depending on the local circumstances - to stay in the shadow.
Both examples illustrate that the meaning of a fact can be behaviour-guiding. In the examples, the behaviour-guiding meaning is merely contingent, and therefore the fact that the sun is shining can exist without it being a reason for action. If a fact has its meaning intrinsically, or - some would say - necessarily, there must be a reason why that fact and its intrinsic meaning exist. Take for instance the fact that John promised Jane to buy her an ice-cream. This fact has the intrinsic (behaviour guiding) meaning that John should buy Jane an ice-cream. Therefore, there must be a reason why the words of John count as a promise. So we have the following facts:
The first fact has no underlying reason. (The reason for John to say what he said does not count as a reason why John's act counts as saying something.) This first fact is a reason why John made a promise (the second fact). And the fact that John made this promise is a reason why John should buy Jane an ice-cream. In other words, the fact that John made this promise is a reason for action.
Confusingly, the notion of a reason can be used in several senses. There are, for instance, reasons for action (behaviour-guiding reasons), reasons to believe, reasons why something is the case, reasons that only count for a single person (personal reasons), reasons which are broadly recognised in a social group (social reasons), and reasons based on rules (rule-based reasons). On top of that, reasons can be subdivided into two main groups:
Both causes and constitutive reasons are products of the mind. They represent two different ways in which minds create connections between facts. Sometimes one fact (or combination of facts) is seen as the cause of some other fact, such as the occurrence of an event. Typically (but not always) the relation between cause and effect is seen as physical. At other times, one fact is seen as bringing about another fact in a non-causal way. It is often (but not always) possible to say that the former fact counts as the other fact. For example, a vehicle on more than two wheels that is propelled by a motor counts as a car.
Even though the counts as-relation is primarily based on a constitutive reason, it is often, but - again - not always, possible to define a counts as-relation in terms of a causal relation. For example, if the members of a social group are disposed to associate the word ' car' with cars (and also some less relevant other conditions), they use the convention that the word ' car' stands for cars. This convention, in turn, makes the fact that this object is a car into a (behaviour-guiding) reason to refer to this object by means of the word ' car'.
Many facts are reason-based. By this I mean that they exist because of the reasons why they exist. For instance, if the Traffic Act defines a car as 'a vehicle on more than two wheels, propelled by a motor' the facts that this is a vehicle, has four wheels, and is propelled by an electro-engine are together the reason why this is a car. For somebody who evaluates the quality of a soccer match on the basis of the number of goals scored, the fact that no goal was scored in the match between teams A and B is the reason why this match was bad.
The existence of reason-based facts depends on the facts that are the reasons for their existence. If our example vehicle would have been propelled by a sail, it would not have been a car. If the soccer match would have had 14 goals, it would have been a good match. This dependence is sometimes expressed by saying that reason-based fact supervene on their underlying reasons. Supervenience is a consequence of the phenomenon that some facts exist for reasons, and therefore supervene on these other facts.
Suppose that the quality of a soccer match supervenes on the number of goals in the match. The goals, or perhaps their existence, are also reason-based. The reason why team A scored a goal against team B is that during the game the ball passed team B's goal line (and some other conditions). All reason-based facts depend on other facts, which are the reasons for their existence. This means that if fact1 depends on fact2, fact2 depends on fact3, fact3 depends on ..., and so on, all the facts seem to hang 'in the air'. In technical terms, the series of reason-based facts would lead to an infinite regress. Somehow, the chain of reason-based facts must end with one or more facts, say fact25 and fact26, that are not reason-based. If that is the case, the facts 25 and 26 are said to ground all the reason-based facts that are directly or indirectly based on them. In the end, all reason-based facts must be grounded in facts that are not reason-based.
Because all facts are mind-dependent, facts cannot be objective in the sense of mind-independent. So, if value-judgments are said not to be objective, this does not distinguish value-judgments from other judgments. There can be value-facts and they do not differ in any essential aspect from other reason-based facts.
This was the point of my article 'The objectivity of value judgments' (1986).
Just as there can be value-facts, there can be modalities, facts the expression of which contains a modal qualifier. Examples of such modalities are the facts that:
Just like value-facts - and many other facts - modalities are reason-based. There must be something - a reason - that makes it certain that the train will be late, or that makes it impossible that Jack is at home. Similarly, there must be a reason why it is not permitted to drive a car without a license.
One kind of modality is that something ought (not) to be the case, or ought to be done. Somehow this kind of modality has attracted much attention in philosophical circles, because of the alleged impossibility to derive (or - if you will - to deduce) ought-conclusion from premises that do not include an ought and which for some unclear reason often represented as is-premises. This impossibility is often presented as the impossibility to derive Ought from Is.
There are at least two ways to interpret this alleged impossibility. The first one is rather innocent. An ought-judgment represents a fact that is different from facts that do not include an ought. This difference makes it impossible to deduce an ought-conclusion from premises that do not include an ought. There is nothing special about this impossibility; it is comparable to the impossibility to derive a conclusion about a table from premises that do not mention tables.
The second interpretation is not so innocent. It assumes that there is a fundamental gap between what is the case and what ought to be the case. This interpretation seems to be based on the underlying assumption that facts deal with what is the case and therefore not with what ought to be the case. If this is the issue at stake in the so-called gap between Is and Ought, the presumed gap is the result of a serious misunderstanding. There are ought-facts and the difference between these facts and other facts that do not deal with an ought is real, but not very fundamental. To the extent that there is a fundamental difference, it is the difference between facts that are reason-based (including, but certainly not limited to, ought-facts) and facts that are not reason-based. Whether this fundamental difference has implications for what can be derived, or deduced, from what else, is still an open question.
A still popular way of looking at the meaning of words, in particular nouns, adjectives and verbs, is to identify this meaning with the conditions, in the sense of reasons, for the word's applicability. Take the meaning of the word 'car'. Suppose that something is a car when it is a vehicle with three or more wheels that is propelled by an engine. On the popular view under discussion, saying that something is a car is saying (has the meaning) that it is a vehicle with three or more wheels, propelled by an engine. Perhaps cars have a meaning in society, for instance as easy means of transport, or as status symbols, but this meaning of cars is irrelevant for the meaning of the word 'car'.
A different way to look at the meaning of a word is to somehow include the meaning of what the word denotes in the meaning of the word. To stick with the example of cars: saying that something is a car does not only mean that it is a vehicle on more than two wheels propelled by an engine, but also that it is an easy means of transport, or - for particular brands of cars - that they can function as status symbols. Knowing what the word ' car' means is then not only knowing what are the constitutive reasons for being a car, but also knowing the meaning of cars in society.
This different way of looking at word meaning can be translated into two different theories of what word-meaning is. The one theory is that words such as 'car' directly refer to things that belong to the kind ' car', without a special role for the reasons that make something into a car. The other theory emphasizes the inferential network in which the word 'car' functions. If we know that something is a car, we also know that it most likely has the characteristics that make something into a car (vehicle, number of wheels, engine), and also what the meaning of that thing in society is (easy means of tranport, status symbol). The latter knowledge legitimizes inferences such as 'Gerald collects status symbols, because he collects cars.'
In Feiten en betekenis I expressed my preference for a theory of direct reference. This was elaborated in De betekenis van juridische statuswoorden (2008), and in The Meaning of Legal Status Words (2009). Only later I realised that the insight that many facts and things have inherent meanings can also lead to the idea that there is a close connection between the inferences that the applicability of a word legitimizes and the meaning of that word (inferentialism a la Brandom).
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