Reference and Deference

ANDREW WOODFIELD
Abstract: According to Putnam, meaning and reference depend on acts of structured
cooperation between language-users. For example, laypeople defer to experts regarding
the conditions under which something may be called ‘gold’. A modest expert may
defer to a greater expert. Question: can deference be never-ending? Two theories say
no. I expound these, then criticize them. The theories deal with semantic processes
bound by a ‘stopping’ constraint which are not cases of ordinary deferring. Deferring
is normally done for a reason, and a rational person is always disposed to defer if there
is good reason.

1. The Possibility of Endless Deference

When Putnam first wrote about the division of linguistic labour (in ‘The
Meaning of “Meaning”’, 1975), he gave prominence to cases in which ordi-
nary speakers defer to experts concerning the application of natural kind words.
This often happens because laypeople are poor at recognizing members or
instances of natural kinds. Putnam argued that the recognitional knowledge is
present in the linguistic community taken as a whole. Experts know the recog-
nition criteria associated with a kind-word, and other people defer to their
judgements. The extension of the kind-name in the community’s language
gets demarcated through a process of structured cooperation.
The idea of semantic deference can be extended in several directions.
Firstly, as Putnam noted, deference is practised not only with natural kind
words but with many other sorts of words as well.
Secondly, expert recognizers are not the only category of experts. For we
sometimes want expert general advice about what the proper criteria are. And
sometimes what we seek is a good verbal definition.
Expert recognizers are members of society who are skilled at applying cri-
teria. Depending on the word in question, there may exist subgroups of pro-
fessionals who know or claim to know more than the average person about
which are the right criteria. Other people—including expert recognizers—may

The first draft was presented on 16th September 1998 at the Karlovy Vary Symposium on the
philosophy of Hilary Putnam. I am grateful to the organisers at the Philosophical Institute of
the Czech Academy of Sciences, and to the participants who gave helpful feedback. Redrafting
was done during my tenure of a Mind Association Research Fellowship. Jonathan Berg, Jessica
Brown, Adam Morton, François Recanati, and the Mind and Language referee all made helpful
comments.
Address for correspondence: Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, 9 Woodland
Road, Bristol BS8 1TB, UK.

Mind & Language, Vol. 15 No. 4 September 2000, pp. 433–451.

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434 A. Woodfield

defer to their rulings. Also, when trying to define a word explicitly, we often
defer to a definition provided by an authoritative linguist or text or academy.
Since fixing criteria and verbally defining are different tasks from recognizing
instances, there is room for a subdivision of linguistic labour. There can be
role-switching: it may be that you are better than me at explicating the sense
of some word (so I defer to you on this), while I am better than you at
recognizing instances (so you defer to me on that).
Meaning, being multidimensional, generates opportunities for social
cooperation on a range of different tasks. The three tasks mentioned
(identifying the right criteria, applying agreed criteria, and defining) are not the
only ones where expertise is recognized. Advertising copywriters are experts at
choosing apt forms of expression for a desired message; legal experts decide which
definition is the relevant one to employ (e.g. when a term has different defi-
nitions within different systems of regulation); and so on.
The third extension of Putnam’s idea is from linguistic semantics to mental
semantics. Putnam showed that the meanings of many words are not fully
internalized. His work inspired various forms of externalism about the contents
of mental states. Externalism about mental contents says that the contents of
some thoughts and concepts are individuated by factors external to the thinker.
Externalists say, for example, that my having the concept gold requires that I
be related in some way to the outside world. There are different externalist
theses about which relation has to hold (see Donnellan, 1993). Putnam-
inspired externalists say the relation consists in my having had direct or indirect
causal contact with gold. Social externalists say the crucial relation between
me and the concept gold is socio-linguistically mediated. If social externalism
is right, other people can play a role in fixing what my thought-content is.
There can be a division of conceptual labour consequent upon the division
of linguistic labour (see Burge, 1979).
Linguistic deference and conceptual deference are widespread phenomena.
However, some philosophers say that deferring has to stop at some point, for
if everyone were deferential with respect to a given word or concept no one
would ever succeed in attaching a definite content to it. That thesis is the
stimulus for this paper.
Fodor certainly holds the thesis. In his latest book, Concepts, Fodor (1998,
p. 154) says, ‘Adherence to conventions of deference couldn’t be a precon-
dition of conceptual content in general, if only because deference has to stop
somewhere; if my ELM concept is deferential, that’s because the botanist’s
isn’t’. (cf. Fodor, 1994, p. 33).
Recanati is another philosopher who espouses the thesis that deference must
eventually stop. He says that no content is expressed by the utterance of a
term if it is a term ‘used deferentially by everybody, in a mutual or circular
manner’ (Recanati, 1997, p. 92).
Although the ‘must stop’ thesis seems initially plausible, further reflection
suggests that matters are not straightforward. Suppose that three people, a cus-
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tomer A, a jeweller B and a chemist C, are attempting to settle whether a

certain brooch belonging to A is made of an especially pure type of gold which
is mined only in South Africa. A proposes that it is. The jeweller B performs
a test. On the basis of the result, B asserts that the gold is not the special South
African type. A defers to B’s judgement. But B is not confident that his crude
diagnostic technique was the right one, so he consults the chemist C. C per-
forms tests which invoke different criteria from the jeweller’s. C concludes
that the brooch is made of the special type. B defers to C’s judgement. A
happily defers to C as well. And there the matter rests; no further investigations
are performed. However, C’s judgement relied on an assumption. C took it
that certain impurities which he found in the gold were sufficient to establish
that it was the special South African type. But it later transpires that this set
of characteristics is not decisive. When C learns this fact, he realizes that he
might have misclassified the gold in the brooch. If another chemist employing
better criteria were to test it and pronounce it not of the South African type,
then C would probably defer to the other chemist’s opinion.
Empirical testing ends because the parties have no more time or inclination
to continue. But in principle the testing could continue, and each interim
conclusion could conceivably be undercut. The proponent of a judgement
reached at any point would be prepared to defer to another person’s superior
contrary judgement. Real-life processes of deferring do stop. But it is not
necessarily true that the deferring process had to stop at the point where it
did. Nor is it true that the deferring necessarily has to stop somewhere. It could
in theory go on indefinitely. The participants are not stuck without a resolution
just because the latest judgement is defeasible. On the contrary, they commit
themselves to the best judgement available at the time. For example, the owner
puts the brooch up for sale at a price which reflects the current assay.
We may readily imagine circles of mutually deferring agents. Take three
scientists, A, B and C, who continually strive to improve their methods of
detecting some elusive disease. On Monday, A defers to B’s opinion about
whether the disease is present in a particular blood sample. On Tuesday, B
revises his opinion in the light of a contrary assessment made by C, on the
grounds that C used a superior criterion. Meanwhile, A learns more about the
disease and develops a much better diagnostic technique than any so far. On
Wednesday, A issues a new verdict on the original blood sample. C defers to
A’s new assessment, because he recognizes that A, armed with better criteria,
has become more authoritative. Meanwhile, B is working away on an even
better method. And so it could go on.
Objection: ‘these scenarios involve people deferring to one another over
questions of fact, whereas the kind of deferring practices we ought to be con-
sidering are those that hinge on meanings’.
Actually, the above disputes do concern the extensions of words, and exten-
sion is an important aspect of meaning. Every time that a participant defers to
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436 A. Woodfield

another’s categorization of an item, he defers (implicitly) to the other’s judge-

ment about whether a certain word applies to the item.
More importantly, non-stopping deferential processes can equally well
occur in disputes about intensions. People sometimes defer to experts’ advice
about how an expression in a language should be construed. This frequently
happens in cases where its sense is popularly misconstrued. Also disputes may
arise amongst expert linguists about the best way to specify the meaning of an
expression. With any type of semantic issue, there can agreement giving way
to disagreement which is resolved by new agreement.
Deferring is not passing the buck. Suppose that UK Customs and Excise
decides to employ EU criteria for classifying certain food-products and judges
that toffee-apples count as confectionery rather than fruit by those criteria and
hence are liable to UK Value Added Tax. The UK authority itself arrives at
that judgement. It does not pass the buck. It is not the case that the UK lets
the EU decide whether British toffee-apples are to be subject to VAT, nor is
it that the UK lets the EU decide that they count as confectionery. (That the
EU plays no part in taking such national decisions is an aspect of the principle
of subsidiarity which governs relations between the Union and its member
states.)
A decision to defer may be entered into responsibly and for good reason.
Every rational speaker should be disposed to accept semantic corrections from
those who are more knowledgeable. Since experts are rational speakers, they
too have the same conditional willingness to defer. There is a sense in which
the pressure to defer never goes away. Let us look more deeply, then, into
the reasons why two philosophers hold that in order for a word or a concept
to have a determinate content, deference must eventually stop. I shall suggest
that they hold this because they treat A’s deferring to B on the model of A’s
borrowing B’s meaning. I shall argue that this model is wrong.

2. Fodor’s Model of Semantic Deference

Fodor writes about ‘deferential concepts’ in The Elm and the Expert (1994,
lecture 2), and Concepts (1998, ch. 4). (These works will be cited respectively
as ‘EE’ and ‘C’.) He says that lots of our concepts are deferential (EE, p. 34).
Fodor holds that a concept is a mental particular, an internal representation
belonging to an individual (C, p. 23). A concept possessed by one person D
(the Deferrer) is deferential just in case it appropriates or co-opts the content of
someone else’s concept. Public language plays a role in mediating the co-
opting relation between two people’s concepts in cases where D gains access
to the content of E’s concept through E’s verbalizations.
The thesis that deferring equals co-opting someone’s content is offered as a sol-
ution to the ‘elm/beech’ problem. Suppose a linguistically competent adult S
knows the words ‘elm’ and ‘beech’ but cannot perceptually discriminate elms
from beeches. This person is not interested in trees; her stereotype of an elm
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is qualitatively the same as her stereotype of a beech. But she knows that elms
and beeches are different species, so she must be credited with distinct concepts
of elm and of beech. Problem: how is it possible for her to have two concepts
c1 and c2 such that c1 has the content elm and c2 has the content beech? What
makes the contents different if she cannot tell the difference?
This sort of case afflicts practically every theory of content. It is a problem
for internalists who believe that conceptual content is in the head, and for
externalists who say that for a concept to have the content elm is for it to stand
in an external relation to elms. It is a problem for such externalists, because
they need to find a mind–world relation that does hold between c1 and elms
but does not hold between c1 and beeches.
Fodor says that D can exploit the concepts of an expert in the following
way: she selects a botanist who calls a tree ‘elm’ when and only when it really
is an elm, and she uses the botanist’s verbal responses as indicators. So D can
tell—with the expert’s assistance—when a tree is an elm. Concept c1 can get
hooked on to elms by an indirect route, a route that goes through the expert’s
concept of elm. Similarly, c2 can co-opt the content beech from the botanist’s
concept of beech.
Fodor’s position is epitomized in EE on p. 36: ‘What philosophers call
“linguistic deference” is actually the use of experts as intruments; not Marxist
division of labour in semantics but capitalist exploitation in epistemology’.
It is easy to see why Fodor insists that not everyone’s concept of elm can
be deferential. On his model, being deferential is a form of dependency. If
D’s concept has a content which devolved from someone else’s concept, the
donor concept must have already possessed a content. It is possible that the
donor concept was deferential. There can be a chain of content-borrowings.
But every chain must trace back ultimately to a concept that has non-
borrowed content.
The thesis about content-borrowing needs to mesh in with a theory of
independent content-fixing. In fact, there are lots of theories in the ring. The
one currently favoured by Fodor is ‘Informational Semantics’, which says,
roughly, that a concept’s having the content elm consists in its standing in a
certain relation of lawlike correlation with elms.
Informational Semantics marries neatly with his view of deference. For
Fodor can claim that what constitutively fixes the content of a concept is
always the same, whether the concept is deferential or non-deferential. D’s
concept of elm picked up its content through E. But the theory of content-
fixing is required only to explain the fact that it has the content elm, not how
it came to have it. When D’s concept c1 is up and running, its having the
content elm consists in the fact that c1 itself is informationally locked on to elm-
hood.
The relationship between deferrer and expert may be summarized as fol-
lows.
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438 A. Woodfield

(i) E’s concept had the content elm independently, before D’s con-
cept did.
(ii) In the circumstances, if E’s concept had not had the content elm,
D’s concept would not have come to have it. The fact that c1 ended
up with that content was causally dependent upon E’s provision of
an access-route to elms, and also causally dependent upon the fact
that E’s concept carried elm-information.
(iii) In alternative circumstances, the same information could have got
to D through E even if E had had no concept of elm at all. Suppose
that E were not an expert recognizer but an unwitting indicator.
Imagine, for instance, that E is specifically allergic to elms. In their
presence E’s face always flares up in a red rash, just as some people
react whenever they eat peanuts. And suppose D had used E’s
allergic reaction as her measuring instrument. D’s concept would
have ended up carrying the same information. Thus although in
the actual situation E’s concept played a key role, it was not neces-
sary for D to interpret E’s concept as a concept. The essential role
that E’s concept played was that of being a natural sign.
(iv) But it was necessary for D to engage in some interpreting. For
example, D needed to understand that the tokenings of E’s concept
and the vocalizations were nomically correlated with a certain type
of tree, and D had to treat E’s responses as indicators. D had to
know what she was aiming for, otherwise she would not have kept
up the attention and effort. She intentionally made use of E’s
responses in order to get her own concept locked on to a certain
kind of tree.
(v) D’s concept obtained its content by tapping the information carried
by E’s concept. Not every concept can get its content by tapping
in to another, therefore Fodor is right that deference, on this model,
must eventually stop.

Now for some comments. The first thing to note is that deference as Fodor
conceives it is far removed from the ordinary notion. I shall not list all the
dissimilarities; many of them are obvious. But one difference deserves spe-
cial attention.
If a novice judges at time t1 that a certain tree is an elm, then enters into
communication with an expert who tells the novice at t2 that the tree is not
an elm, and the novice accepts at t3 that the tree is not an elm, this is a standard
case of deferring, as noted by Putnam. At t1, the novice already possesses a
concept which he expresses through the word ‘elm’, and this concept already
has an intentional content. At t3, what he accepts is that the tree in question
is not in the extension of that concept, given the content that the concept
actually had at t1. He now believes that his judgement at t1 was false. In order
to make sense of the novice’s change of belief, we need to assume that he
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took the expert to be correcting a particular application of the concept, with

the content that it had at t1, in a situation where both assume they agree on
what the content was and is. This form of interaction is not one where a
novice’s concept picks up its content from the expert. But in Fodor’s model
the deferential relation holds if and only if D’s concept picks up its content
from E’s. It is quite clear, then, that whenever ordinary ‘Putnamian’ deference
occurs, Fodorian deference does not occur.
The sort of situation where Fodorian deference is supposed to occur is
when D acquires a concept through interaction with E. The whole point of
the story is that the novice gains a concept whose content is fixed by facts
about the expert. Prior to the information-tapping, D has no concept of elm
because none of her mental representations is locked on to elmhood. E, the
measuring instrument, is D’s only channel of semantic access.
The second comment I wish to make is that Fodor’s story misrepresents
what the participants take themselves to be doing. Such considerations belong
to what Fodor calls the ‘epistemology’ of deference (and not to the semantics).
He says that if we view matters his way, the existence of deferential concepts
is ‘seen to be of some interest for epistemology’ (EE, p. 34); but, as I see
it, his model distorts the epistemology so drastically that the most charitable
interpretation we can put on it is that it purports to be a revolutionary alterna-
tive to commonsense, a denial of the participants’ manifest image of the process
in which they are engaged.
Actually, Fodor does not say what the beliefs and intentions of the deferrer
and the expert are, other than that the deferrer has to set things up cleverly
and carefully, pick the right expert, choose a test environment that permits
the expert to manifest his recognitional skill, enlist the expert’s cooperation,
etc. Above all, the deferrer has to be ‘able to pursue policies with respect to
another person’s mind’ as well as his own. Let us probe a little into what these
policies might be.
A deferrer D1 who is fully in control and in-the-know might plausibly be
credited with the following strategy. D1 thinks: ‘I am no good at recognizing
elms. So I shall employ E, who is an expert recognizer. Under optimal detec-
tion conditions, when presented with trees, E will judge that a tree is an elm
if and only if it is an elm. When optimally cooperative, E will reveal his sincere
judgements to me by uttering a certain sound. I will rig these conditions up,
and I will judge that a tree is an elm just in case E utters the sound under
these conditions.’
Although D1 stands a good chance of making correct elm-categorizations
if the conditions hold, a person who initially lacked the concept ELM could
not possibly entertain these thoughts. This man has beliefs and intentions about
elms qua elms. For example, D1 believes: E’s noises indicate the presence of elms.
D1 obviously possesses the concept ELM, even before he has started to defer.
Prior possession of a given concept cannot be an empirical precondition for
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440 A. Woodfield

acquiring it. Fodor does not want to say that deferrers conceptualize their
policy in such terms.
So consider a deferrer D2 who has a conceptually more austere set of beliefs
and intentions, but who is still more or less in control. This man thinks to
himself: ‘I’ll use E to help me categorize trees. There is a certain kind of tree
which E is very good at recognizing. If I pay him enough, he will always
reveal to me his judgement that a presented tree is of that kind. I’ll take his
utterance of a certain sound as a natural sign. When the optimal conditions
of observation and cooperation obtain, I will judge, of any tree that we both
see, that it is that kind of tree, if and only if E makes the sound.’
D2 can think these thoughts without possessing the concept ELM. But he
must already possess a concept that denotes elms. It’s true that this novice
simply treats E’s utterances of the sound as a reliable natural sign of one kind
of tree—which is all that informational semantics requires. Nevertheless, he
has a concept of the kind of tree in question. For example, he thinks: E’s
noises are reliable indicators of that kind of tree. He employs the concept THAT
KIND OF TREE. This concept of his refers to the kind elm. Fodor (1998),
in particular, is committed to saying that its content is elm, for he holds that
if two concepts are co-referential (as are the concept ELM and D’s concept
THAT KIND OF TREE), they have the same content (see C, pp. 12–15).
People cannot use measuring devices profitably unless they know what the
devices measure. Those who exploit an expert as a measuring device need to
know what they are doing; they need some conception of what the expert is
responding to. In the present case, D already has a concept whose content is
elm; so it is not true that D acquires that concept by borrowing the content
from E’s concept.
It is very hard to see what the epistemic situation of an acquirer of a defer-
ential concept could possibly be. To avoid begging any questions, one would
need to attribute to such a person a set of attitudes that was conceptually less
rich than D2’s.
A defender of Fodor might say that I am exaggerating the extent to which
a content-borrower has to be conscious of borrowing. If ‘deferring’ is defined
as something that has to be done deliberately and in full awareness, then indeed
the Fodorian content-borrower does not literally qualify as a ‘deferrer’. But
let’s not get hung up on literal construals. Fodor is using the word metaphor-
ically. (This point was made by Michael Devitt at the Karlovy Vary
conference.)
This seems right, but it does not wholly insulate Fodor from the objection.
I concede that deferring to experts can become automatic; it need not be
undertaken consciously. Nevertheless, a deferrer adopts a policy on how to
handle the other person’s expertise. Having an unconscious policy means hav-
ing unconscious beliefs and intentions. Such beliefs and intentions must have
contents. The objection was that D would surely have some attitudes whose
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 Reference and Deference 441

contents contained the content elm. If D did not have any such attitudes, D
would not understand what was going on.
I think it is time to invite Fodor to bite the bullet. He should admit that
if anyone ever acquires a concept via the deferential route, such a person is
not really in control of the process. The information-tapper does not know
which concept he is going to get, in fact his beliefs about the informational
transactions between himself and the expert are pretty much irrelevant.
Note also that such a person would be unable knowingly to set up the
optimal test-conditions. To achieve such a feat one would have to select an
expert whom one knew to be a reliable measuring device of the kind of tree
in question, and one would need to know which sound made by the expert
was the sign of that kind of tree. After all, the expert might make several
different sounds which are correlated with different kinds of trees. On the
whole, I think that if anyone ever did get informationally locked on to any-
thing as a result of such a set-up, it would either be a matter of luck, or a
consequence of someone else’s design (or Nature’s).
I see signs in Fodor’s latest book that he is moving in this direction. For
he says (in C, p. 124) that informational semantics plus conceptual atomism
favour the view that primitive concept-possession is non-cognitive, and atomic
concept-acquisition is a not a cognitive process. Information from the world
colonizes us and implants contents in our heads, rather as germs colonize us
and give us diseases. The current position harks back to the causal-historical
theory of reference: picking up the content of a general concept from an expert
is like borrowing the reference of a proper name from another user. If these
are the models that Fodor (1998) favours, then he ought to deny that the
epistemology of the receiver is of any interest.
My own view, for what it’s worth, is that there are no such mental parti-
culars as Fodorian deferential concepts. The processes that he hypothesizes do
not exist. But I shan’t try to defend that view here. It is clear enough, anyway,
that his story about deferential concepts in no way supports the thesis that
deferring in the normal sense must stop.

3. Recanati’s Deferential Operator

In order to appreciate Recanati’s theory of deferential operators, we need to fix
our minds upon quasi-quoting. I’ll give examples of speakers who do this; the
first example is mine, the others are adapted from Recanati (1997). It is
important that in each example we understand that the utterer of the sentence
was the person responsible for putting in the quasi-quotes. We may assume that the
speaker signalled them by a gesture or by vocal emphasis. I highlight quasi-
quotation marks by writing them as asterisks—this helps to distinguish them
from ordinary quotation marks.
Recanati’s paper is a response to certain doctrines about ‘quasi-belief’ that
were proposed by Sperber. In my exposition I shall ignore those aspects of
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the debate which are inessential for our purposes and I shall not say anything
about Sperber’s position.
Consider utterance (1) made by a non-Czech speaker while looking at a
menu written in Czech:

(1) For lunch I shall have *kachna*.

The speaker quotes a Czech word which he does not understand, but at
the same time he uses the word as a syntactically functioning part of an English
sentence. Those in his lunch party who speak English and Czech will be able
to work out what food he will be eating. English monolinguals will not be
able to identify the dish, except perhaps under the description ‘food called
“kachna” in Czech’. Note, though, that the speaker did not explicitly say that
the food was called ‘kachna’, nor did he speak about the Czech language.
Quasi-quoting is one of several functions that scare-quotes can be used
to perform: in general, the speaker who puts an expression in scare-quotes
intentionally signals that he distances himself from the expression in some way
and that it is not functioning normally. Precisely how or why he distances
himself from it is to be pragmatically worked out with the help of contextual
information. In this case the speaker expects the audience to realize that he is
quasi-quoting the foreign word because he does not know how to translate it.
Perhaps (1) is not a well-formed English sentence, in which case it does
not express a determinate proposition. But the speaker intends to communicate
some thought. If we ask ‘Which thought does the speaker intend to
communicate? , there is a problem. For it is hard to find a satisfactory charac-
terization in indirect speech. He is thinking of a certain type of food, but
under what mode of presentation? Clearly he is not thinking of it as duck. But
it seems equally unwarranted to say that he thinks of it under the metalinguistic
description the referent of the Czech word ‘kachna’. The thought: I shall be having
the referent of the Czech word ‘kachna’ for lunch is more complex in structure and
in content than the thought that he actually entertained.
My second example is a variant of one that Recanati gives. Sally has over-
heard conversations between members of a religious sect. The sect-members
trot out a phrase which is used by their guru, taking for granted that the phrase
is meaningful. They trust the guru and believe that everything he says is true.
The phrase in question is ‘alpha-enlightened’. Actually, none of the followers
knows what it means and nor does the guru: the phrase is meaningless. In
utterance (2) Sally uses the phrase in quasi-quotes, intending to allude to those
who use it straight.

(2) Jesus Christ and John Lennon are *alpha-enlightened* beings.

Arguably, utterance (2) is a token of a syntactically well-formed sentence of
English. There is a problem about identifying which proposition, if any, (2)
expresses. Also there is the problem of characterizing what Sally believed.
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 Reference and Deference 443

The third example is of an unconfident speaker who quasi-quotes a mean-

ingful expression of English, intending that it be construed as having its normal
meaning but also intending to signal that he does not fully understand it. A
schoolboy has heard a teacher say ‘Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches’. The
boy is not sure what synecdoches are. He is able to convey this fact while
passing on the teacher’s message. The boy uses quasi-quotes, saying to his fri-
end:

(3) Cicero’s prose is full of *synecdoches*.

People sometimes do this to hedge against being asked to explain what a term
means. The audience will realize that the speaker may not fully understand
the term, so they do not embarrass him by asking. The quasi-quoting speaker
can still play a helpful role in communication. Once again, however, there is
a problem about characterizing the speaker’s belief.
Recanati offers a solution to these characterization problems. I take him to
be offering two proposals. One is that overt quasi-quotes in public language
are deferential operators. The other is that there exist corresponding deferential
operators in thought. At both levels, he draws upon a distinction between
character and content. Kaplan, the originator of the distinction, invoked it in
order to describe the semantics of indexical expressions. The expression-type
is associated with a general meaning-rule (its character), and the character
specifies how contexts of utterance combine with particular utterances to fix
their semantic values (i.e. their contents). For instance, the first personal pro-
noun ‘I’ is governed by the rule that each utterance of ‘I’ refers to the producer
of the utterance. That is its character. If we look at a particular utterance, say
Greta Garbo’s saying on a particular occasion, ‘I want to be alone’, the content
of that occurrence of ‘I’ is Greta Garbo.
Here is Recanati’s definition of a deferential operator (pp. 91–2):

DEFN: The deferential operator Rx( ) applies to a symbol ␴ and yields a

complex expression Rx(␴) whose character is distinct from that of ␴
(if ␴ has one). The character of Rx(␴) takes us from a context in
which the speaker tacitly refers to a certain cognitive agent x (which
can be an individual or a community of users) to a certain content,
namely the content which ␴ has for x, given the character which x
attaches to ␴.

Let us see how the quasi-quotes in (1), (2) and (3) satisfy this definition. In
(1) the quasi-quotes apply to the Czech word to yield the complex expression
‘*kachna*’. This expression has a character. The character is a function from
the word ‘kachna’, plus the context in which the speaker tacitly referred to
Czech speakers, to the content which Czech speakers attach to the word ‘kach-
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444 A. Woodfield

na’. In fact, the content is duck. So the speaker of (1) thereby expressed the
proposition that he would eat duck for lunch—though he did not know this.
(Recanati does not use this sort of case, so I won’t mention it again.)
In (2), Sally’s utterance of ‘*alpha-enlightened*’ was a complex expression
formed by a deferential operator. Its meaning or character is a function from
tokens of ‘alpha-enlightened’ and from contexts in which Sally tacitly referred
to utterers of it to the contents which the expression-tokens have for their
respective utterers. What content does it have for the sect-members? It has
none. Therefore the complex expression-token has no content either. Sally’s
utterance fails to state a proposition.
In (3) the boy’s complex deferential term ‘*synecdoches*’ has a character
such that its content is identical with the content that ‘synecdoches’ has for
the teacher. So the boy succeeds in asserting that Cicero’s prose is full of
synecdoches. No scare-quotes are needed in reporting the proposition expressed.
Recanati’s second proposal is that deferential operators exist inside the
mind. He claims that in the examples the speakers’ thoughts are deferential,
and his theory enables us to characterize those thoughts.
To set the theory up Recanati needs a few background assumptions. He
assumes that there is a Language of Thought. When S believes that p, S stands
in the ‘believes’ relation to the proposition that p; this may be analysed into
two components: (i) S stands a relation of ‘accepting’ to some sentence of
Mentalese, (ii) the Mentalese sentence means that p.
The words of S’s Mentalese are the vehicles of S’s concepts. Every Menta-
lese symbol has a definite character for S: ‘it is hard to think of a symbol being
mentally entertained without being “interpreted” in some fashion or other
. . . if a mental sentence is well-formed, it must possess a definite meaning—
a character—even if it falls short of expressing a definite content’ (p. 91).
He makes the ‘individualistic’assumption that when S utters a sentence in
a public language, the public character of the sentence is irrelevant to the
question ‘Which thought did S express?’ For it may be that S did not under-
stand the public character. What matters is the character that the sentence has
for S. This character must be one that S himself grasps; it will be the character
of the Mentalese sentence which S pairs with it (p. 91).
At the same time, he embraces some of the insights of externalism. It is
possible for S to have attitudes involving mental representations whose referen-
tial contents are epistemically indeterminate for S. Sometimes people do not
know which proposition it is that they believe. How can this be squared with
the individualistic assumption? By distinguishing between character and con-
tent. Character is in the head, even if content is not.
Having made this distinction for Mentalese, Recanati now explains how
to characterize the speakers’ beliefs, using English as if it were their language
of thought. In uttering (2), Sally accepts this mental representation:

(2 -LOT) Jesus Christ and John Lennon are Rx(‘alpha-enlightened’) beings.

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 Reference and Deference 445

It has a character for her. But the Mentalese term Rx(‘alpha-enlightened’) has
no referent, because the sect-members use a term that has no meaning. Sally’s
Mental sentence fails to express any proposition, hence Sally has no prop-
ositionally identifiable belief.
The boy who utters (3) accepts a mental representation (3-LOT):

(3-LOT): Cicero’s prose is full of Rx(‘synecdoches’).

Since the boy is quasi-quoting the teacher, the content of his mental symbol
Rx(‘synecdoches’) is the content that ‘synecdoches’ has for the teacher. Assuming
the teacher knew what the word meant, the content was synecdoches, and so
the content of (3-LOT) is that Cicero’s prose is full of them. This, then, is
what the boy believes.
The key feature of a complex symbol bound by a deferential operator is
that it is directly referential. The content is fixed not descriptively but indexically,
in virtue of the fact that the content stands in a contextual relation to the
thinker. The complex deferential symbol is like a demonstrative. When S
entertains a demonstrative mode of presentation of an object O, S thinks OF
O under the mp That. Similarly, when the boy entertains the complex symbol
Rx(‘synecdoches’), he thinks directly OF synecdoches.
What is it like to think in such a way? When Recanati says (p. 96), ‘Defer-
ential representations are meta-representational at the level of character but
not at the level of content’, he does not mean that they present themselves to S
as being meta-representational. Actually, he does not try to describe what it’s
like to entertain a deferential symbol. But he might convey it in the following
way. Imagine being in a situation where you have just heard the teacher say
‘synecdoches’. You are thinking of the speaker and the sound indexically,
under perceptual mps. You then think OF the sound’s semantic value for the
teacher, in thinking: Cicero’s prose is full of those.
I agree that this is a possible psychological state. I think that Recanati has
put his finger on a phenomenon which no one else has previously diagnosed:
mental quasi-quoting. Moreover he is right that if a given symbol is to have
a determinate content, it is not possible that everyone always puts quasi-quotes
around it.
Recanati offers an interesting theory that explains a specialized range of
phenomena. Where I want to take issue with him is over his assumption that
the theory has much wider application. He extends mental quasi-quoting far
outside the range illustrated by these examples. For instance, he claims that
all of the characters in Burge’s 1979 thought-experiments employ deferential
operators. In fact, he claims that children, language-learners and other imper-
fect understanders of picked up words normally bind such words inside deferen-
tial operators. These claims are false. They systematically generate wrong
interpretations of the conversations that take place between novices and
experts, learners and teachers.
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446 A. Woodfield

The way he reconstructs Burgean cases is instructive. In the best-known

scenario from Burge (1979), the character simply says to the doctor, ‘I have
arthritis in the thigh’ without putting ‘arthritis’ in scare-quotes. It is crucial to
Burge’s argument that the subject should not use quasi-quotes or distance him-
self from the word, but should use it as part of his own working vocabulary.
As Burge notes, ‘The argument can get under way in any case where it is
intuitively possible to attribute a mental state or event whose content involves
a notion that the subject incompletely understands’ (1979, p. 79). Suppose we
run Burge’s argument using the ‘synecdoche’ example. We imagine a boy,
Alf, who takes over the word from the teacher and uses it straight. Alf says
‘Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches’. The meaning is different from that of
(3). Alf has assimilated the term into his working vocabulary, and according
to Burge he expresses the concept synecdoche.
But Recanati offers a revisionary interpretation. He assumes that Alf missed
out the scare-quotes. If you ask Alf whether he was quasi-quoting the teacher,
it does not matter if Alf denies it. You may presume he quasi-quoted the
teacher unwittingly. The important hypothesis is that Alf’s Mentalese sentence
contained a deferential symbol.
That is the first step in the radical reinterpretation. The next step is to
introduce the distinction between Kaplanesque content and character. This is
a move which Burge never even considered. Burge worked with the old,
undifferentiated Fregean notion of conceptual content. Once we make the
move, however, we separate two questions:

(a) Is the character of Alf’s thought socio-linguistically determined?

(b) Is its referential content socio-linguistically determined?

Recanati’s answer to (a) is: No. Character is in the head. It cannot be that
the boy entertains the public concept synecdoche, because it is impossible that
anyone should think with a notion whose character they do not understand.
Concerning (b), the answer is: Yes, sort of. The referential content of Alf’s
belief is identical with that of (3-LOT), the quasi-quotational belief. The rel-
evant intuitions about Twin Earth seem to march in step with Burge, because
referential content is outside the head. Suppose that the quasi-quoting boy has
a counterpart on Twin-Earth, where the language is slightly different from
English. Suppose that twin-boy has a twin-teacher who said ‘synecdoche’, but
his word did not mean synecdoche. Twin-boy defers to twin-teacher’s meaning.
It is not the case that twin-boy’s utterance or belief refers to synecdoches. This
seems to fit with the intuitions we have about Burgean cases.
However, these parallels at the level of referential content cannot conceal
the fundamental differences between Burge’s view and Recanati’s concerning
conceptual content. According to Recanati, the boy who thinks (3-LOT) has
a directly referential belief about synecdoches, which he thinks of, in context,
as Those. That is how Alf thinks of them, if Alf’s mental representation is (3-
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 Reference and Deference 447

LOT). But on Burge’s view, this is not how Alf thinks of them. He thinks
of them as synecdoches. In the thought-experiments, the belief-attributions are
supposed to be true when construed opaquely, as specifying the subject’s con-
ceptual mode of presentation. The attributions are not to be taken de re. More-
over, on Burge’s view, Alf’s thought about synecdoches does not depend upon
his being in a context in which he tacitly refers to the teacher. Alf’s mode of
presentation is in no way indexical or demonstrative.
Recanati is pushing for an individualistic reinterpretation, albeit one that
makes room for mental indexicals whose referents are determined contextually.
Burge was arguing against individualism, for the view that conceptual content
was socio-linguistically individuated. Note that, for Burge, speakers who utter
a word which they do not understand at all are not credited with the concept
expressed by the word, but partial understanders may be said to possess the con-
cept.
Recanati, on the other hand, assimilates Burgean cases to indexical beliefs.
The contents are externally individuated, but social factors (other people and
their utterances) come in only as elements of the subject’s context of utterance.
The context helps to fix a referent, and the referent itself is a constituent of
the content. It does not matter whether the subject partly understands the
word or completely fails to understand it. The mechanism of reference-fixation
is the same in either case.
So much for the geography of the issues. Let us turn now to an evaluation
of Recanati’s theory of deference. I said above that I think the apparatus works
for certain special types of utterances and thoughts, but that he over-extends
it. He claims that children and imperfect understanders entertain quasi-quote
representations as a matter of course; that these representations are the appro-
priate vehicles for quasi-beliefs whose characters we know directly, but whose
contents we do not know. He also holds that learners move gradually from a
state of quasi-belief to fully conceptualized belief: ‘We start by accepting a
representation without understanding it; this attitude of acceptance leads us to
use the representation in a certain way; and by so using the representation we
end up understanding it. What makes learning possible is the use to which
the representation is put, and that use itself depends on the initial attitude of
acceptance that motivates it.’ (p. 89). Moreover: ‘This continuity suggests that
deferentiality is a matter of degree’ (p. 94).
A great deal more explanation is needed here. It seems impossible that there
could be a gradual process of moving out of quasi-quotes. It’s clearly not a
process of bit-by-bit removal (like taking one’s clothes off), nor is it a process
of decay (like quotation marks fading away on a page as the ink loses its colour).
The learner starts off using mental symbols like Rx(‘synecdoches’) and Rx
(‘kachna’) and ends up using completely distinct symbols like synecdoches and
duck. Prima facie, there has to be a saltation—a switch of symbol-type—at
some point.
Communication-based learning typically proceeds as follows: somebody
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tells you something, you understand what they are saying, you believe them,
you add the knowledge to your store, and if necessary you delete previously
held beliefs that are incompatible. This is also what goes on in ordinary cases
of deferring. For the learning to work, you must already possess the concepts
(in order to understand), and they must be the same concepts that the teacher
or expert is employing (otherwise there is communication-failure).
I want to end this section by showing how Recanati’s theory misrepresents
typical acts of deferring, which play such an important role in learning. Con-
sider a dialogue between two characters, Alf and L. Alf is the boy who picked
up the word ‘synecdoches’ from his schoolteacher and who does not fully
understand it. L is an expert linguist. L knows the dictionary definition. Their
conversation is set against an important background fact, that the schoolteacher
misunderstood the word. (He used it to refer to metonymies.)
The conversation is as follows:

(i) Alf says: ‘Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches.’

(ii) L replies: ‘No it is not. It’s true that his prose is full of figures of
speech. But very few of them are synecdoches.’
(iii) Alf replies: ‘I accept what you say. Cicero’s prose is not full of syn-
ecdoches.’

If the belief expressed in the second sentence at (iii) is to count as the

negation of the belief Alf had at (i), both beliefs must involve the same predi-
cative concept. This point was made in section 2. Admittedly, that does not
settle the question of which concept it was. Note, however, that L is definitely
employing the concept synecdoche. If L’s judgement contradicts Alf’s original
belief, then Alf’s belief must have involved the concept synecdoche too. It’s a
typical Burge-type situation. Alf must have possessed the concept synecdoche
right from the start, even though he did not fully understand what synec-
doches were.
How do matters look from Recanati’s point of view? Alf was not using
the concept synecdoche, nor was he referring to synecdoches. He was using a
deferential symbol to refer to what the teacher called ‘synecdoches’. Conse-
quently, in this case he was unwittingly referring to metonymies. If Recanati’s
account is right, the two participants are talking at cross-purposes. At step (ii)
the linguist misunderstands what Alf meant at step (i). He takes himself to be
rebutting Alf’s claim. But in fact his remark is not a denial of the proposition
that Cicero’s prose is full of metonymies. L’s remark is simply irrelevant.
Alf’s response at step (iii) compounds the misunderstanding. For he does
not spot the fact that L’s remark was irrelevant. Recanati can analyse Alf’s
response in two ways, depending on whether or not Alf is still using the same
deferential operator at step (iii). Either way makes the dialogue problematic.
Suppose that Alf at (iii) still defers to the teacher’s meaning. He is referring
unwittingly to metonymies and is now saying that Cicero’s prose is not full of
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 Reference and Deference 449

them. It appears to him that he is deferring to the linguist, but this is an

illusion. The linguist expressed no opinion on whether Cicero’s prose is full
of metonymies.
Suppose, on the other hand, Alf at step (iii) is no longer operating with
the teacher’s meaning. Suppose the term now has some other meaning for
him. The question arises whether he is really agreeing with the linguist. He
appears to be agreeing, but that could be an illusion. He cannot really be
agreeing unless he understood what the linguist said at step (ii). If he did
understand, he must have possessed the concept synecdoche, despite the fact that
at step (ii) he did not fully know what synecdoches were. Thus Recanati has
to concede that this cognitive condition is possible, just as Burge said it was.
Hence he ought to concede that Alf could have been in this cognitive con-
dition at step (i). The motivation for introducing the deferential operator is
undercut.
Recanati might object that this argument is unfair because in this conver-
sation x (the semantic deferee) is not identical with L (the conversational
deferee). But why is this unfair? It is clearly possible for a child to pick up a
word from one source and then use the word when talking to a different
person. In the conversation, the child might defer to the new person’s judge-
ment. In later conversations, the child might defer again to other people’s
judgements. This sort of thing happens all the time; it is the standard process
by which a child learns from other people. My criticism is that the theory
misrepresents what is going on in the majority of such conversations. Normally
the child is not quasi-quoting the original source. My argument has the follow-
ing form: if incomplete understanders, in converations like this, were normally
quasi-quoters of an original source, then most of the conversations would be
riddled with misunderstanding; but it is absurd to suppose that there is so much
misunderstanding; therefore, the quasi-quotational construal of normal cases is
not right.

4. The Epistemology of Deferring

Does deferring have to stop? The considerations given in this paper do not
prove that deference can be never-ending, either linearly or circularly. The
focus has been on criticizing two theories that say deference must stop. The
alleged need for a ‘stopping’ constraint is not established by these theories,
because neither of them gives a correct account of semantic deference. Until
the phenomenon is correctly identified and described, the question will
remain unaswered.
Deference is not a relation of content-co-opting, nor is it a relation between
representations. Deferring is an intentional act done by a person for a reason.
That to which the agent defers is a presumed authority’s judgement. In cases
where the act of deferring is part of a social interaction, each party coordinates
his actions and attitudes with the other’s actions and attitudes. A precondition
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450 A. Woodfield

for felicitous deferring is that both parties understand one another. Through
their exchange of utterances the expert grasps what the issue is (and the deferrer
is satisfied that this is so), the deferrer identifies what the expert’s judgement
is, and—optionally—the deferrer lets the expert know that he agrees. In
accepting the expert’s judgement, the deferrer commits himself to using the
expression in accordance with the advice given. Thus the expert’s judgement
has an objective empirical content, but it is also treated by D as having norma-
tive force. D accepts that he should speak in the way that E recommends.
D has to have a good reason for entering into such a commitment. In the
standard case, D’s attitudes to E are set against a background of presumptions
shared by D and E. Both parties take for granted that there are norms which
determine the proper meaning of the word, norms to which they both owe
allegiance. D defers to E on a particular issue because D takes E to be a good
guide, given the meaning that the word already has. D does not take E to be
the giver of meaning. No fact about E constitutes the word’s meaning what it
does. D knows that experts are fallible. D regards E’s judgement as good evi-
dence that the word means such and such, but D does not suppose that E
makes it the case that the word means such and such. The same goes for E.
Both parties mutually understand that the word has a proper meaning which
it would have had even if E had never existed.
But isn’t it true that when I defer to you, I treat you as my norm? In a
sense, it is true; but we have to be careful about what this amounts to. The
word ‘norm’ derives from the Latin word ‘norma’ meaning ‘carpenter’s squa-
re’; the dictionary defines ‘norm’ as standard, pattern, type. If I want to copy
your pattern, I will take your practice as my yardstick. The deferrer does treat
the deferee as a yardstick, or, as Fodor says, a measuring instrument.
But that is not the whole story, for no mention has been made of the
background presumptions. I have to want to conform to your pattern for the
right reasons. Semantic deferring is underpinned by the desire to speak in
accordance with the norms that determine objectively correct use. It is to these
norms that I ultimately subscribe. If I defer to you, it is because I trust you
as an interpeter of them and I let their authority devolve to you. Under some
circumstances I may revoke this permission and withdraw my trust. Where
no independent standard of right and wrong exists, there is no deference,
only subservience.

Department of Philosophy
University of Bristol

References
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Wettstein (eds), Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. IV: Studies in Metaphysics. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Donnellan, K. 1993: There is a word for that kind of thing: an investigation of two
thought experiments. Philosophical Perspectives, 7, 155–71.
Fodor, J. 1994: The Elm and the Expert. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. 1998: Concepts. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Putnam, H. 1975: The meaning of ‘meaning’. In Putnam, Philosophical Papers, vol. II:
Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Recanati, F. 1997: Can we believe what we do not understand? Mind and Language,
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