Propositions and the narrative of winning strategies for

meaning formation: a reflective take on the complementation

between pragmatism and hermeneutics.

Abstract:

This paper has a threefold profile. First off, it is a technical

exposition of the recent history of debate on propositions, understood as
the objective entities of validation and cognition. Second, we shall argue
that the pragmatic approach affords a reflective angle for the semantic
discussion. By making available to the semantic universe a version of the
meaning relations generated dynamically, within specific strategies of
searching for stable grounds for significance, pragmatism opens the
problem to reflection. Third, we will argue that this matches a hermeneutic
discussion about the circular formation of meaning. Technical
formalization of the meaning-practices institutionalizes the collective
conditions of acceptance for winning strategies of argumentation. The
article has a reflective purpose. It is aimed to increase dialogue access
between distant traditions of philosophy and to test the reach of analytical
philosophy to absorb problems about the pre-stages of meaning formation.

Key-words: pragmatism, hermeneutics, semantics, analytical

philosophy, continental philosophy
 Introduction and overall aim:

Propositions are still invoked by respectable philosophers as those

entities which can answer to problems about truth. These authors show
alignment with what A.J. Ayer has said in 1936: “to say that a belief, or a
statement, or a judgment, is true, is always an elliptical way of ascribing true
to a proposition, which is believed, or stated, or judged” (Ayer 1974, p.
117). In search of being fair to the necessary ideality of the truths known
by cognition, the price is that we "shall apparently have to find room in our
Platonic Third Realm for, e.g., subsistent Irish bulls" (Ryle 2009, p. 25). In
this paper we will follow some definite trend. It is a pragmatic and non-
metaphysical understanding of the concept of meaning and of how it has
provided an alternative to the discussion about the nature of propositions.
The argument does not presuppose as a matter of fact that this alternative
has substituted the mentioned discussion. What we argue is that the talk
about meaning and truth in the pragmatic universe has the power to
substitute such talk about propositions, with some earned advantages. The
advantages are not to be judged in terms of better technical devices to
eliminate ambiguity or to track truth in empirical investigations. It is an
advantage in reflective terms.
The first part of the paper deals with the technical argument about
the possibility to reducing what we call the ‘propositional talk’ to the talk
about strategies for avoiding defeating conditions of meaning postulation.
This shift to pragmatism positions gives room to a reflective perspective
about the argumentative scenario and the events of validation that take
place in competitive search for truth and for agreement. That shift of
perspective will allow us to walk into a hermeneutic discussion. The debate
would be about how this opens the reflective doors to think on the forms
of narrative dramatization and institutionalization of meaning disputes,
inviting the theme of meaning formation and its circularity.
Philosophical hermeneutics is known for bringing together most of
the elements of continental philosophy that survived through the twentieth
century. Its trademark is the approaching of meaning problems as linked
to the awareness of its process of historical formation, and the circular
nature of the grasp of knowledge about propositional form and categorial
justification: “In every case interpretation is grounded in something we see
in advance-in afore-sight” (Heidegger 2001, p. 191). This angle of
approach has a linking heritage to the core of the Kantian roots of
continental philosophy1. The dialogue between analytical philosophy,
pragmatism and hermeneutics allows for an awareness of the types of
skeptical dramatization of the rational debate and crises narrated by
various philosophical streams.

The pros and cons of the propositional talk

1.Truth functions and skepticism

Sentences are language-signs that can be designated as correct or

incorrect by a variety of standards. However, we do not usually say we
understand the rule of that correctness unless we know the proposition
which the sentence stands for. This is an indication that the talk about
propositions is entrenched in our intuitive speaking. It is not unimportant
to examine the reasons for this entrenchment. What is rooted is the idea
that there is a knowledge of the proposition. So it is, at first glance, part of
an intuitive anti-skeptical position about what we can know about our
inferential endeavors and truth-assessments. To say we know the
proposition is the regular way of saying we are in control of what the
sentence means. When we explore the theoretical developments of this
first notion, we will also come across the fact that resistance to skepticism
is among the main traits of the notion of proposition. In the tradition we
want to focus on in this first part of the paper, analytical philosophy, the
battle against skepticism took place in an arena of divergence against
psychologism. But since the alliances between the pioneers of this tradition
were not always made by uniform combative needs, including pragmatism
between its enemies, we will focus on the common aspect of the theory.

1
In the words of David Couzens Hoy: “On Heidegger’s theory, hermeneutics is not the
limited, philological enterprise of defining a method to prevent misunderstandings (...).
Rather, it is a fundamental philosophical inquiry into the condition of all understanding”
(Couzens Hoy 1978, p. 162)
And it was the notion of 'function' that compiled the anti-skeptical efforts
of the debate.
We can call nowadays the classical approach of the propositional
problem as that which would report that knowledge to the kind of grasp
one has when is able to represent a function. The theory of truth functions
was the leading thesis of Philosophical takes about the new logic. It was
accepted by thinkers concerned with the representation of biunivocal
relations to operate the reduction of the arithmetic to logic (Frege), by
philosophers concerned with the simplicity of the relationships of logical
dependence (Russell), by those who, like Wittgenstein, were interested in
the ability to show the isomorphic character of the structure of facts and
the form of propositions; and by positivists, who kept their attention
focused on the need for a purely extensional theory of truth conditions.
There is no need to spend too much rhetorical energy on the theory of
truth functions. It proposed, basically, to give a functional interpretation of
the rule of verification of a sentence, and an interpretation of complex
sentences that refer only to the dependence of its components. Its virtue is
simplicity. Its vice is the easy ways to ignore anomalies. It was later rejected
by the same movement that raised them to the condition of official thesis.
The second work of Wittgenstein triggered that reaction
movement. If we assume that the disposition to give a truth assignment is
what is meant to follow a function correctly, we may see ourselves in a
vicious circle of justification. We do not answer any of the problems by
shifting from one to the other. More than that, we could not know how to
correct errors in failure to establish a function of meaning. To cite a more
recent argument that reports on the reasons for the refusal, Kripke's book
(Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language) is a convenient choice.
Discussing the dispositional account of meaning:

The function someone means is to be read off from his

dispositions, It cannot be presupposed in advance which function is
meant. (…). Where common sense holds that the subject means the
same addition function as everyone else but systematically make
computational mistakes, the dispositionalist seems forced to hold
that the subject makes no computational mistakes, but means a non-
standard function (skaddition) (Kripke 2002, p. 37)
 Difficulties about the truth-functional account of propositions
quickly reopened the doors for skepticism and led to new attempts to
determine what is propositional knowledge. To know if some statement is
true, and not just correct or incorrect under a language-criteria, is to work
on to solve the propositional problem the statement conveys. If we try to
repeat that solution, the knowledge we must come to apply is the one about
the ground that makes the sentence true, and not the functional features
of the sentence that distinguish it from false formulas in a language. Using
a more recent terminology, propositions are the knowledge of truthmakers
and sentence-sensibility to truthmakers. Recent definition of propositions
as classes of possible worlds corresponds to the thesis that the
propositional status of a sentence is defined by its sensibility to a class of
truthmakers but not others. This is to give a permanent response to
skeptics. But it's not free of controversy. To call state of affairs of
truthmakers is a hasty way of saying they have this magical correlating-
feature. What would be called knowledge of the "state of affairs" may just
be an elaborate fiction, and it is not at all obvious how it relates in a
justifying character to truth or falsehood. Skepticism remains a ghost
pressuring the conversation about propositions.

2. Entailment, justification and anti-justificationalism

The importance of the study of truthmakers is highlighted when we

must learn the concept of entailment. If there is a relation between two
sentences such that one follows logically from the other, that relation would
be known if we are able to point to the justificational property between
what makes one truth and what makes the other truth. So it is a relation
between two truthmakers. Of course, that places more conditions for
entailment than for logical truth2. We have to know more about two
sentences to grasp the fact that they entail each other, than we would have
to know about their logical implication status. That is the science one can
derive from any generalization of a pattern of argument in order to transfer

2
This point is emphasized by Roderick Chishold (Theory of Knowledge): “If a
proposition entails another, it also logically implies that other; but one, proposition may
logically imply another without entailing that other. The proposition that there are
stones logically implies the proposition that 54 + 42 = 96, but it does not entail that
proposition; you could accept the first without accepting the second” (Chisholm, 1989
p. 52).
his justification techniques to arguments of similar form. Such standard is
not meant to afford an infallible understanding of truth-entailments. It can
be, as David Lewis has said about his take on counterfactuals: “a relation
of comparative similarity” (Lewis 2001, p. 1). The point is not some
idealistic renewal of “difference in identity”. The goal is that we can study
divergences and identities between propositional signs (sentences). And
that is the knowledge of something like the proposition and logical form.
As Ruth Barcan Marcus (Modalities) would say: “belief in the principle of
substitutivity is grounded in the belief that the pursuit of logical form is not
futile” (Marcus 1993, p. 109). This belief has sprouted in the hearts of
philosophers by the most surprising doors, the defended of which has been
done in various styles since first attempts to subject ideas to an
identification criterion. To identify what is common between a group of
forms is to know all the links of justification it can obtain to other forms.
The rationale behind it is that if we do not know what could be substituted
in the sentence without changing its true – the truth-making criteria – it
would be almost an obsolete terminological dodge to say we know the
proposition or state of affairs. And if we do not know how to convert a
successful sentence prediction to a logical form, it seems a gratuitous
factuality to say we know something at all about the semantic features of
that sentence.
In contrast, as we insinuate in the end of last section, the
justificational character of the state of affairs cannot be positively linked to
true or falsity by a simple rule. Skepticism about confirmation and
justification can return to place. Another way to address this question is by
asking: can the propositional property of our arguments be rationally
justified without being reduced to the present and occasional confirmation
conditions? The problem of justification is the direct stream by which
skeptical epistemic problems derived from the line-up of Humean
thinkers would overflow to semantics. Kripke also understood that feature
in Wittgenstein’s second work: “the fact that the skeptic can maintain the
hypothesis that I meant quus [over plus] shows that I have no justification
for answering ‘125’ rather than ‘5’” (Kripke 2002, p. 37). Some
philosophical foundationalism of quite distinct popular character in the
beginning of the twentieth century had an answer for that. And it was a
peculiar one: to sacrifice justification as a criterion for founding knowledge.
Critical rationalists, leaded by Karl Popper work about the logic of
scientific discovery (1934), had the idea that one can preserve objectivity if
he abandons justification. The narration of this answer is worth making.
Let’s start with the question: How to justify the connection between the
proposition and the facts it registers? This can be turn into this question:
how to distinguish the proposition from the occasional facts it records? If
we give out the use of “truthmakers”, the easiest answer is to say one can
learn to grasp different sentence sensibilities either to facts or to objections.
And that would be the degree of compatibility that sentence can have to
any sentence of the same propositional form. One could call that the
falsifiable content of sentences. Perhaps to give up positive justitication is
not the most appealing solution at disposal. It was nevertheless the line of
thought that led Karl Popper to think there are inherent semantic
properties conveyed by the signs of scientific enterprise. His views of the
intellectual world were at the same time fallibilist and platonic3. To define
the line that draws that difference of sensibility to falsifiers is not only a job
of codification, but also a conceptual one: one must learn how to predict
compatibilities between the argumentative value of sentences by their
falsifiable content. This is also a defense of deductivism: it says the
knowledge one can have of the deductive power of their inference is set
only if that inference has the same degree of empirical reach as inferences
falsified by the same objections. Two sentences will have similar
propositional value if they share compatible predictions and are falsifiable
by the same consequences. So, the semantical features of our deductions
are not known by the knowledge of truthmakers. There is no positive
justificatory power in science.
Anti-justificationalists increase the nature of their compelling
rhetoric by mentioning the problems of induction. In fact, unconditional
support for Hume's skeptical results are an objective part of Popper's
premises. The lesson one can learn from Popper's attempt is that in order
to preserve content in argumentative dispute one may be obliged to rely
on the negative features of some entities that make claims of guarantees for
truth. As truth-conditioning for scientific and causal discovery is not easy

3
See Popper, Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject: “We may first distinguish the
following three worlds or universes: first the world of physical objects or physical states;
secondly, the world of states of consciousness, or of mental states, or perhaps of
behavioral dispositions to act; and thirdly, the world of objective contents of thought,
especially the scientific and poetic thoughts and of works of art”. (Popper 1968, in
TOCA, p. 76)
to be inductively grounded or even characterized in terms of actual
truthmakers, so the negative criterion offers an easy solution. Critical
rationalism gets rid of the justificationalist aspect of grounding truth. The
cost of this solution is too high. Susan Haack made a very compelling
critique of Popper’s negativist views, that could serve us as the tip for a
critique of the propositional view:

…if Popper imagines that this stablishes the objectivity of

scientific knowledge, it can only be because he has confused the
objective existence of propositions that make up a scientific theory
(which the three-world theory, if true, would guarantee) with the
objective warrant of the claims made by these propositions (to which
the three-world theory is entirely irrelevant). (Haack, 2013, p. 186)

Popper used that strategy to protect something perennial in

argument: he makes the structural part of deductive knowledge negative,
in order to preserve it from paradoxes and skeptical difficulties related to
the ambitions of confirmation and justification. We can start with this
critique as a provisional mark by adding the suggestion that it corresponds
to a critique of a canonizing view of the sentences. The frame just given is
fit to the naïve picture, portrayed by (the Philosophical Investigations)
Wittgenstein with irony: “'The proposition, a strange thing.' (...). The
tendency to try to purify, sublimate the propositional sign itself'” (PI §91).

3. Truth, justification and meaning from the mere sentence point

of view

Propositional knowledge involves the presupposition that the

argumentative patterns used in real scientific debates can be extracted from
their context and canonized, as reified properties of real things in conflict
with each other. This dramatization can be colored by the image of
correlation relationships that establish compatibility and incompatibility
between concepts. Anyone surprised by the supernatural scenery created
by this image can ask the fair question: we could talk about arguments,
rational stances and normative positions, but how is this to be related to
real things of an independent platonic realm? As these propositional
entities seem to inflate our ontology with those sublimated versions of
sentences, reifying the states of affairs (truth-makers or falsifiers) raised to
ground knowledge about its truth, a new reaction began to be fueled.
Philosophers of a more empiricist variety were gradually drawn to
eliminate propositions in favor of the empirical-semantic-knowledge
provided by mere sentences in a well-formed language. The attempt to
focus on sentences reveals a great deal of energy spent in demystifying the
propositional canon. One of the designs of this line of thinking was to
rescue the worn-out theory of truth functions and make it attractive again
in a background less vulnerable to skeptical protests. The landmark date
for the appearance of this position was the publication of “The Concept of
Truth in Formalized Languages” from Alfred Tarski. Similarities between
first Wittgenstein's theory and Tarski's thesis have always been highlighted.
But there are important dissimilarities. The second defends the elements
of propositional bipolarity in a theoretical background enriched to
correspond to the empiric, extensionalist and positivist taste. The obvious
motivation for the encouragement that this work gave to Carnap's positivist
project can be suggested in the following sequence of reasons. Tarski set
himself to provide the application of the predicate 'truth' to purely
extensional languages, promising a new account for the coincidence
between truhfunctional formulas and the attribution of the predicate 'truth'.
Analytical statements would be described as a property of that language
understood as a formal system behaving ‘normally’ (i.e, non intensionally).
This gives substantial support to positivist reductionism and the premise
that extra-theoretical issues should not enter the assessment of truth:

…a theory, a rule, a definition, or the like is to be called formal when

no reference is made in it either to the meaning of symbols (for
example, the words) or to the sense of the expressions (e.g. the
sentences), but simply and solely to the kinds and order of the
symbols from which the expressions are constructed. (Carnap 1937,
p. 1)

After what we can call the Tarskian-inspired Carnapian semantics,

thinkers were able to build a theory for truth based on the property of a
set of sentences to be mechanically generated as formulas. In a later
advancement, the naturalist party employed that semantic learning to
review even the concept of “necessity”. As different sciences exploit the
resources of language differently to ground their conclusions, even the
concept of analyticity – truth in virtue of meaning – is made disposable by
this approach. What is striking about this Tarski-Carnapian (and then
quinean) tradition is that it inverted the accusation frame of reference.
They changed from the idea that we need propositional knowledge to
understand sentences, to the opposite idea: that propositional problems
aggravate the difficulty of understanding any pattern of meaning. This is so
because the propositional version of meaning complicates the concept of
‘pattern of meaning’. Ideal patterns of meaning are incapable of being
predicted by actual truth-conditions. Thus, they are incapable to fit the
positivist dogma of meaning as truth conditions. Propositions would add
functions to differentiate truth from falsity based not on what is the case,
but on what should be the case for any translation of the sentence to be
truth. It increases the difficulties instead of solving the original ones. D.
Davidson summed up the protest against intensionalism entrenched in the
principles of this school:

Philosophers eventually speak as if ... they were free to introduce

non-verifunctional operators as 'assuming that's the case' or 'should
be the case'. But in fact that decision is crucial. When we distance
ourselves from languages that can be accommodated in a definition
of truth, we relapse (or create) a language for which we do not have
a coherent semantic conception. (Davidson 2001, p. 32)

We know the rules of extensional correspondence are valid for

contextually restricted conditions of meaning. Those contexts will be
deemed as the “language” in which the meaning acquire its functionality.
We do not need to go far to see the limits of that solution. It pretends to
get rid of the “sublimated” aspect of propositions, but it insists situating the
whole challenging part of the issue in the obscure notion of a “well-formed”
language. What is a well-formed extensional language but the sublimated
or even platonic version of a language? And for all that matters, one could
also ask: Can extensionalists be as platonic as intensionalists? Wouldn’t
their actual conditions for truth be mixed with ideal conditions, based on
how they imagine the simplicity of the correspondence line that links
sentences to truth-value assignments? We shall argue that it is just an
ungrounded prejudice the image of extensionalists as empirical workers
against platonic-intensionalists.
 4. The critique of extensionalism from the point of view of an
empirical and revisable theory of intension

Once we have agreed that extensionalists are not immune to

platonism, we can exploit this late suggestion for the propositional-case:
that intensionalism is not necessarily platonic. The usual talk against
propositions claims that in a Tarskian framework about truth and meaning
one do not depend on a priori knowledge about form or structure of
language. We will claim, in response, that intensionalists do not depend
on that either. In another words, extensionalists do not get any more
competitive in this discussion by claiming they do not depend on a priori
knowledge. That trade-off is not calculated in this game, because
counterfactual intensional content does not necessarily rely on the a priori
as well. Advocates of propositional knowledge have no dependency on the
orthodox link between a priori truths and non-contingent truths. Some
sentence can be deemed intensionally necessary and discovered a
posteriori. As Saul Kripke demonstrated, if one is to fix the reference of
the term ‘one meter’ as the length of certain stick (S) at the time t, her/his
knowledge of the proposition ‘S is a meter long in t” is a priori, despite the
content of the proposition being contingent. Correspondently, one could
recognize the necessity of some sentence or even its structural character
without having to know it a priori.
That assumption settled, then the critique to extensionalists would
be given in those lines: one could protest about the inability of that
semantic-naturalistic approach to generate knowledge about the
counterfactual content of proofs, adding that this feat is not even paid off
by some advantage over intensionalists. Even if one knows how to prove a
sentence under an incredibly special circumstance, like using a rule, an
algorithm or (why not?) a meter-pattern to derive the extensional
correlation, s/he can still fail to extend that knowledge to a similar but not
identical circumstance. What s/he knows is the truth condition of the
sentence for a particular correlation or localized circumstance. To produce
that extended rule for alternative circumstances, a priori rules will not help.
They need to learn how to ground their assertive conditions, and that, as
we will see in the next section, is not possible by any use of formulas. What
we can say already is it is inevitable that one searches for devices to identify
a posteriori intensional things like propositions or analytical truths, or, in
Kripke terms, one has to bring to light the problem of rigidity, which is, for
the sentence (I): “given this fixed understanding of (I), the question of
rigidity is: Is the correctness of (I), thus understood, determined with
respect to each counterfactual situation by whether a certain single person
would have liked dogs (had that situation obtained)?”(Kripke 2001, p. 9).
This last argument pro-proposition opted for a characterization in
terms of possible worlds, transworld identity and rigidity. They share the
same ambition of characterizing semantic knowledge as possible in stable
grounds. The latter knowledge of truthmakers are brought to a new
understanding by this devices, and a new answer to skepticism is provided.
Those questions can be matched as well with philosophical problems of
analysis and categories. The important thing about them in the new
framework of answers to extensionalism is that those problems can be dealt
with in an a posteriori and even empirical approach. None of that would
risk the return of the skepticism. The important thing is that they believe
that meaning problems can be solved and decided, and one should not
surrender to relativism solely because a priori structural knowledge is not
within reach. They are not dynamic approaches of the problem of knowing
meaning though, and therefore, in our view, these last defense of
propositional knowledge is not yet pragmatic.

Summary conclusion of the last section and foreword the next

section

We have reached a point on the discussion where we cannot use

the traditional objection that propositional builders are advocates of old
Philosophical myths, like the epistemic a priori knowledge dependency
and the innate nature (for a proposition) of being incompatible to its
contradictory. Then we can still say that the "problem" of proposition
resists. We can't ignore that problem, since we are not able to reach real
knowledge of our sentence meanings without some or other of those
options: fixing rigid references, assuming the existence of transworld
entities4 or even taking part on some metalogical work of classifying

4
According to Platinga: “we might define existence in a proposition
analogously to existence in a state of affairs. (...) then, clearly enough, both Quine
and Royal Robbins exist in the proposition: (5) Quine is America’s foremost rock-
theoretical constructions into those that prove a sentence and those who
don’t. All of this justify our hopes of grasping something as the identity
between arguments of the same truth-content (verified by the same
truthmakers), and therefore, it would justify our hopes of having a grasp of
the justificatory nature of the relation between arguments.
We may see in this chapter that the problem is how to approach a
complex question without giving up what is rich about it. It is not
consensual what we are prepared to give up in an anti-propositional frame
of philosophy. But some authors think we can abandon such talk with little
damage. Dummet (The Logical Basis of Metaphysics) announced this line
of approach: “the word ‘propositon’ is treacherous. What (…) two
unmodalized sentences share is its assertoric content” (Dummet 1991, p.
48). We took for granted that the conversion of the problem of proposition
to the problem of the assertoric content do not lost any of the richness of
the first question. But there is an advantage: in interrogating the position
for assertoric success, we may be able to assess the problem of “grounding”
more precisely. To ground the alternation of possible truth-interpretation
and to plan a position for assertoric success are the same discursive action.
We argue that all those knowledges are takes on the pragmatic
problem of planning the grounds to enter in disputes about truth and
inference. That planning is the acts of interpretation that pressures the
conceptualization of the problems to fit some categorial ground. As
Heidegger said in Time and Being:

In such an interpretation, the way in which the entity we are

interpreting is to be conceived can be drawn from the entity itself,
or the interpretation can force the entity into concepts to which it is
opposed in its manner of Being. In either case, the interpretation
has already decided for a definite way of conceiving it, either with
finality or with reservations; it is grounded in something we grasp in
advance-in a fore-conception. (Heidegger, 2001 p. 191)

This will turn into an argument about the options of philosophical

narrative of those disputes, creating either a moral dramatization of

climber and Royal Robbins is America’s most distinguish philosopher’” (Platinga

1982, p. 97).
deserved wins, or stable institutionalization of winning strategies, in the
form of categories or semantic structure. In that picture, the propositional
talk correspondence to the last phase of that dramatization and
institutionalization: when we can reify the strategies of assertoric validation
as reified creatures of cognition.

Deep problems in meaning validation: how to dramatize

indetermination of meaning.

Undoubtedly, unsuccessful strategies of communication or

agreement will be reflected in losses in interpretation or translation.
Indeterminacy and inscrutability can be seeing as philosophical awareness
of those failures. Quine in Word and Object uses this challenge to spread
a skeptic and relativism challenge: “From the point of view of a theory of
translational meaning the most notable thing about the analytical
hypotheses is that they exceed anything implicit in any native’s dispositions
to speech behavior” (1960, p 70). This quotation displays Quine’s uptake
on the problems of theorizing meaning. He American logician reflection
is known for the work of bringing the problem about meaning to an
understanding of the circular nature of the intensional foundation (Sense)
of meaning. In declaring that a sentence is analytical, the meaning of that
sentence depends on the definition of the terms; but this is the same as
saying that knowing what an analytical sentence is, amounts to knowing the
inferences or relationships of compatibility and incompatibility of that
sentence. One knowledge is not tested by the other; they are the same
intensional knowledge, defined by different visions or choices. We are
drawn into a circle governed by the criterion of sustainability, and we can
only justify it holistically. For a theory of meaning this can be fatal, because
it robs the theorist what would make him professional: to be able to correct
mistakes of meaning without incurring in a circle.
What can we legitimately learn from this? Is there any knowledge
of those failures we can code or represent? A more impatient pragmatist
could say this is a philosophical waste of time. But this is a moralist view
itself. It is not a sin to bring unsuccessful strategies to philosophical
awareness. What can count as a technical sin is to use this as evidence for
the existence of some private reign of pure metaphysical illusion. We call
those metaphysical representation the dramatization of meaning disputes.
But they can of course happen outside the metaphysical field. The moral
representation of it is the most common in the every-day life: unsuccessful
communication and interpretation are deemed as political drama or
hermetic codes, which, in subjective language would be like secrecy (non-
universalistic moral behavior).
So, the question remains: may we be able to learn something from
meaning-predicting failure? This question invokes what can be called the
translator's misery: "there is a special myseria of translation, a melancholy
after babel" (Steiner 1975, p. 269). As we seen though, this is a drama that
is constructed by philosophy. The translator, as much as the regular guy,
is not automatically sensitive to those hermeneutic problems. And if he is,
he is not automatically sensitive to metaphysical, moral and even
semantical characterizations of the challenge. Skepticism, despair and
paradox are philosophers’ creations. They are useful because they inspire
reflection. Then, the question of technical learning must be redirected to
the philosopher: what reflective gain can one have by dramatizing meaning
questions?
According to the interpretation of Quine made by George Steiner,
the intensional circularity is the symptom of something more about the
behavior of signs and symbols:

The epistemological and formal grounds for the treatment

of ‘meaning’ as dissociable from and augmentative of ‘word’ are
shaky at best. The underpinning argument is not analytic but circular
or, in the precise sense, circumlocutionary. (Steiner 1975, p. 277)

It is this inflationary tendency of meaning that we should reflect

upon. The pragmatic take is naturally inclined to accept reflection of the
circular behavior of meaning structures. Like Peirce in his semioticist
pragmatism, signs are seeing as perpetually sensitive to new interpretations,
like interpretants of other signs, in a circular journey inside the circle of
signification5. The degree of understanding of the relation of sign to the
object, or the semantic knowledge, is not given by a static rule. It is
dynamic. And it is constructed inside the intensional circularity. What is
gained from the pragmatic point of view is inserted in another line of
thought: the reflective one. As we learn to ground our sentence meaning
predictions, we do not arrive in immune and eternal models for meanings;

5 See Peirce, 1958, Vol. 8. 315 (1909).

but we can still strengthen our competence to set a margin of loss for a
sentence interpretation. This is not to be confused with a science of
propositions, or a complete science of winning strategies of meaning. It is
just the learning of setting margins for prediction and prevention of
defeating conditions for meaning prediction. It sets margins of error for
our models (our signs and symbolical strategies); and it makes failure
tolerable (not predictable). This is the pragmatic rationale of translators
when they need to lose minimum in translation. So, it is the rationale
behind propositional search: this is but the attempt to devise tracking
instruments to search for and to fix the sentence assertoric ground of
validation.
Predictably, the propositional talk would rather hide losing-
strategies in order to hold the mystique behind the existence of
propositional-things. Losing-strategies are usually deemed as pseudo-
propositions or paradoxes. In the strategic-pragmatic talk this is not a
matter of pressing concern. There is no mystique or dramatic-universe to
hold. Losing-strategies that cannot be represented by regular
contradictions are possible antinomies or intensional contradictions, i.e.,
possible contradictions (routes of conceptual collision); and one has only
to make risky decisions about what part of the conceptual system to reform
in order to scape cycles of argumentative defeat. The pragmatic stance is
set forth to provide a non-formal nor abstract representation of solving
practices of scientific paradigmatic crisis and communicational disputes.
The pressure of the conceptual system for one proposition to be
preferable to other marks a normative energy that can be expressed as a
requirement. We may report to R. Chisholm here and remark that "the
distinguishing feature of moral duty is that it is a requirement that is not
defeated by any other requirement. An epistemic requirement, therefore,
may become a moral duty" (1989, p. 60). The message of this quotation is
that moral conscience is yet a way to sublimate our sentential strategies. If
the acquisition of a moral consciousness is made reflexively, it would make
our sentences sensitive to deontic requirements as to what ought to be
truth. The question a pragmatist must ask is: is this reflexive element
strategic? Is it worth in cash-value terms? Richard Rorty, in the context of
the exegesis of philosophical arguments, have said that: “the cash-value of
a philosophical conclusion is the pattern of argument around it” (Rorty
1981, p. 584). This is a very enlightening way of describing how the pattern
or standard used to identify the value of the conclusion, and to classify it
with similar conclusions, is not detached from practical interest. In our
argumentative dispute practices, the reflexive ability to distinguish the
pressures that favor from those that defeat a decision or conclusion is an
important part of what usually characterizes the classification of truth and
falsehood. This is the dynamic approach to find logical structures of
compatibility which most idealistic philosophers will later call a
'proposition’ – or a stable possible-truth-content.

Hermeneutic consequences following the pragmatist diagnosis of

meaning-disputes

Pragmatism can perhaps help to closure meaning-disputes by

bringing awareness about the non-immutable aspect of the stable-
categories one uses to ground strategies of communication and
interpretation. The dynamic nature of the search for logical relations and
semantic knowledge is, indeed, a step forward for any theory of meaning.
This is not, however, essential, we argue. Even if pragmatism did not
introduce any technical innovation to the evaluation of cognitive elements,
it would still function at the reflective level. This reflective level is the one
that bring an awareness of a second level of importance. It is awareness of
the types of dramatization and narratives that consolidates the
propositional talk as the reified structures of validation. That reflective
awareness can be null, however if it is not combined with a hermeneutic
approach. Because mere pragmatism can also turn into the mere
awareness of the practical dimension of the meaning disputes, without any
critical awareness of the process of formation of those rational institutions
for filtering the meaningful against the pseudo-meaningful. Heidegger talks
about the act of appropriation that unveils the pre-propositional grounds
of understanding: “When something is understood but is still veiled, it
becomes unveiled by an act of appropriation, and this is always done under
the guidance of a point of view” (Heidegger 2001, p. 191). Given that line
of thought, hermeneutics is the link of pragmatism with the type of
historical awareness that continental philosophy emphasized, more than
American or Anglo-phone traditions.
The hermeneutic point of view can be successfully added to the
semantic rationale to be allied to pragmatism, in the following sense: it
shows the sentence is searching for grounds in assertoric conditions by
being put to confront the situation of debate and communication. That
situation is, however, historically formed and built as a rational controlled
environment. That environment is built on the traditions of pre-conceived
tendencies of literary reading, interpretation and creation. The very
dimension of the exchange pressures the positions to their respective
ground, creating the illusion of “meaning” as the objective unit of validation
that can be extracted from each subject and their respective hermeneutic
baggage. So, the hermeneutic effort of the involved members of dialogue
creates the conditions to stabilize zones of exchange of meaning, that can
evolve to become historical traditions of interpretation and
communication. Finally, the symbolic categorial-core of those strategies of
communication can be set as “language” in the social sense.
This is not merely the rationale to avoid paradox. We must take
note that paradoxes are nothing but the philosophical dramatic
representations of the challenges that take place in the competitive
conditions of communication. Challenges of communication, translation
and scientific conflict are real. They shape real conditions for changes in
the scientific paradigmatic scene, and historical evolution of meaning. The
representation of them as formal inconsistencies are only the abstract
mode of diagnosis. They share this abstract feature with moral
representations of misunderstandings. A crisis of communication can be
represented by the holding of immoral secrets, attempts to misguide, as
much as by axiomatic inconsistencies. And in both cases the photograph
of the conflict is abstracted from its mediating course. Then the technical
representation of the inconsistency is aligned with the moral dramatization
of the meaning dispute. Both are aimed to produce abstract and a-
historical photographs of the reality of that dispute.
This last digression aims to supplement the philosophical
approach of deep misunderstandings and paradoxes with a realistic angle.
It argues that crises in communication and indetermination in
interpretation are irreducible to the treatment of correction formulas,
whether scientific or religious. Naturally, formal and moral representations
of conflicts are technically necessary. They are nonetheless useless without
reflective awareness.

Conclusion and the questions invited by this approach:

Our article aims to contribute to the contemporary project of

bringing a problem, traditionally relegated to a tradition of thought, to the
philosophical awareness of another tradition of thought. It is a
transportation of the approach of what is conventionally called ‘continental
philosophy’ to the problems usually dealt with by analytical philosophy and
American pragmatism. The continental problem is that of meaning
formation. By that we understand the whole complex of questions linked
to the condition in which meaning can pass through the pre-stage of
theoretical awareness, reaching the maturity of its propositional
expression. The culmination of this tradition can be discussed, but it is
beyond negotiation that philosophical hermeneutics is among the most
respected expressions of the continental tradition in the twentieth century.

What philosophical hermeneutics brings without prejudice to

possible inter-tradition dialogue is that the construction of meaning is not
done in neutral a-historical conditions, and that there is a hermeneutic
circle involved in the ability to know cognitive units and validation entities
as propositions. According to Heidegger: “In interpretation,
understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself”
(Heidegger 2001, p. 188). This indicates that the possible derivations of
meaning made by the dynamics of interpretation activity clarify the circular
force that substantiates the interpretative stable line and its future history;
When semantics arrive, the formation was long done. The circle is the
statement that no propositional knowledge can escape a circularity in its
justification, and that its justification is the self-discovery made by means of
the acts of its interpretation throughout history. The dangers and threats
associated with the lack of awareness of this circularity (self-deception, bad-
faith, mysticism, silence, etc) are deeper themes of this tradition, which
lead to its more isolated identity. This last identity profile is situated further
away from analytical philosophy, dealing with themes such as
psychoanalytical and sociological issues, and related to structures of
strengthening or weakening of that circular justification. We did not
deepen these issues in this article. But we chose to make the clues available
for the investigation of the behavior of the philosophical dramatizations of
meaning disputes, such as the creation of favoritism for winning strategy
narratives. Moral narratives and technical narratives are the two main ways
of avoiding hermeneutic awareness of the processes of meaning formation.
Then, a thesis that is postulated by the article is that the ‘proposition’ is the
reification of social institutions for collective validation of meaning-
disputes. As it stands, the proposition is an entity that combines a technical
and moral-deontological identity. The more it approximates the first, more
it is considered as a mere “sentence” or a well-formed formula of a system
or language. The more it approximates the second, more it is considered
as a metaphysical projection of possible worlds, i.e, the circular fusion
between what is imagined as "right" (good, according to the will of God)
and the possible cases of true.

The philosophical supposition behind our argument is that the talk

of such things such as propositions is a reification of the categories of
winning strategic plans of arguing and inferring. It is the version of the
consolidation of the “narrative of the winner” in semantic study. One of
the costs of this institutional reification of argumentative wins is, first, that
failures in endeavors of meaning are stigmatized as pseudopropositions,
and second, risky grounding strategies for meaning are unfairly excluded
from the philosophical universe. Once excluded, their reflective options
for expression are also trapped in the marginal parts of discursive practices.
This is to be taken as a sign of the controlling behavior of the hermeneutic
field of validation. So, we are presenting an argument in favor of a
pragmatic-hermeneutic position about meaning, together with clues for a
critique of the consequences of the illusions behind the premise that there
are stable meaning strategies of success, like a priori categories for truth
judgments. This first argument evolves to subsequent reflective
alternatives. Our argument develops to create reflective room to think the
aspects of the dispute about meaning involved with the social conditions
of its acceptance and the dramatic-narrative representations of its crises.
This puts formal semantics as one of the categorial abstractions that was
systematically opted to institutionalize and stabilize the terrain of rational
disputes. For last, it invites the question about the ways in which those
conflicts on meaning are dramatized by moral narratives of secrecy and
conspiracy, along with other philosophical skepticism positions linked to
indeterminacy (or systematic axiomatic inconsistencies).

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