Language

Meaning and Language

What gives a word or utterance meaning?

• Descriptive Meaning Questions: what meaning the word actually has (as found in dictionaries).
• Foundational Meaning Questions: what determines the meaning of a word.

Foundational Meaning Questions

Two ways to answer:

• Internalist: mental or psychological states determine meaning.
• Externalist: meaning is determined somewhere out - on natural features of the world or on the expertise of others in society.

Speaker Intentions

Herbert Paul Grice argued that speaker intentions determine meaning. Intentions are purposes or goals we have in acting. Intentions of a specific sort can account for certain sounds and marks on a page or computer screen being meaningful. He developed the theory on which a sentence has a particular meaning given a speaker’s or writer’s intentions.

According to Grice an utterance of a sentence means P if, and only if:

1. You come to believe P
2. My audience recognizes that I want you to believe P
3. You come to believe P given your recognition that I wanted you to come to believe P

Utterances of sentences mean the same thing eternally:

Grice lived in Oxford.

What does this utterance mean?

Its meaning depends on the way speakers and writers see it. If speakers tend to use the sentence above to mean that a particular person resided in some town in England, then that’s is what it means. So in this way, certain sounds and marks are meaningful due to intentions. Intentions are represented psychologically in individuals, so it’s an internalist theory.

What makes our words or utterances meaningful in an externalist way?

Externalists hold that meaning is determined by what is external to a language user. The philosopher Hilary Putnam famously argued that meanings just ain’t in the head. He started his argument by explaining two conditions many philosophers have accepted:

1. Knowing the meaning of a term is just being in a psycological state
2. The meaning of an expression determines what things the expression applies to

For example, the meaning of the expression below determines a certain group of things that are mammals. You’re one of those things, I’m one of those things, my cat is one of those things. Any expression with the same meaning as mammal creature will apply to all those same things.

Creature is a mammal.

Putnam accepts the second condition, but argues that the first must be rejected. Meanings, he concludes, are not psychological states. “Meanings just ain’t in the head!”.

Thought Experiments

Hypothetical situations that philosophers use to help determine what would make something true and what the conditions for accurately applying the concept are. Psychological duplicates can report their feelings in ways that sound identical nevertheless, Putnan argues, they’re different. Since they are psychologically identical but mean different things when they make the same sound, meanings cannot be wholly internal.

What external things are relevant to meaning?

• the natural physical environment
• the external social environment

Causal and historical connections with our natural and social environment work to determine what our expressions and utterances mean. Meanings cannot be wholly internal.