That being said, this changing nature of language is probably a part of normativity. It just felt implicit in your post.
This is true. I wasn’t thinking about this. My initial reaction to your point was to think, no, even if we froze English usage today, we’d still have a “normativity” phenomenon, where we (1) can’t perfectly represent the rules via statistical occurrence, (2) can say more about the rules, but can’t state all of them, and can make mistatkes, (3) can say more about what good reasoning-about-the-rules would look like, … etc.
But if we apply all the meta-meta-meta reasoning, what we ultimately get is evolution of the language at least in a very straightforward sense of a changing object-level usage and changing first-meta-level opinions about proper usage (and so on), even if we think of it as merely correcting imperfections rather than really changing. And, the meta-meta-meta consensus would probably include provisions that the language should be adaptive!
This is true. I wasn’t thinking about this. My initial reaction to your point was to think, no, even if we froze English usage today, we’d still have a “normativity” phenomenon, where we (1) can’t perfectly represent the rules via statistical occurrence, (2) can say more about the rules, but can’t state all of them, and can make mistatkes, (3) can say more about what good reasoning-about-the-rules would look like, … etc.
But if we apply all the meta-meta-meta reasoning, what we ultimately get is evolution of the language at least in a very straightforward sense of a changing object-level usage and changing first-meta-level opinions about proper usage (and so on), even if we think of it as merely correcting imperfections rather than really changing. And, the meta-meta-meta consensus would probably include provisions that the language should be adaptive!