Unconventional Linguistic Normativity: Maybe Not So Deranged After All

This paper argues that Donald Davidson’s infamous denial in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” that there is any such thing as a language, though it may not be fully supported by the arguments given for it in that paper, is nonetheless entailed by his semantic views generally, according to which the literal, linguistic meaning of a speaker’s words on an occasion is determined by how the speaker intended to be understood. In favor of this view, and thus against conventional languages, the paper then argues that this understanding of linguistic meaning promises, in a way the conventional view of meaning does not, to make sense of linguistic normativity.