Meaning, Thought, and Thought Ascription

This chapter continues the discussion of propositions and propositional attitudes begun in Chapters 3 and 4. Section 1 sketches a view of attitudes and attitude ascription. Section 2 addresses how truth conditions and linguistic meaning do and do not help to individuate ‘the objects of the attitudes’. Section 3 returns to the last chapter’s discussion of how the reference of another’s words or concepts bears on the truth of an ascription of saying or thought to her.

What Are Meanings, That We Might Share Them?

The goal of this chapter is to sketch an account of meaning as the anchor of linguistic competence—that with which one must be in cognitive contact to qualify as a competent speaker. Meanings supervene on mutual presuppositions among speakers about how people understand one another. When someone uses a word, they can expect others to have these assumptions for making sense of the sentence in which the word is used. The core of this chapter lays out this picture of meaning, discusses how it is related to linguistic competence, and relates meaning in this sense to meaning in the sense of that which a use of a sentence conventionally says. The chapter is bookended with a discussion of philosophical analysis, because a motivation for thinking about meaning in this way is that it makes a case for the importance of something much like philosophical analysis traditionally conceived.

Quine and the Species Problem

The goal of this and subsequent chapters is to convince the reader that there is a significant analogy between biological entities like species, clades, and population lineages and linguistic and semantic ones such as words, meanings, concepts, and languages. This chapter’s first sections review some obvious facts about language communities and speakers and some elementary facts about the ways biology thinks about species, and points out that there is indeed a prima facie case for thinking that things like word meanings are analogous to species. The chapter’s later sections argue that if we take the analogy at face value, we can embrace Quine’s conclusion in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’—that there is no theoretically interesting notion of analytic truth, no sort of synonymy that can do epistemological work—while still thinking that the notion of meaning can carry a real theoretical load.

Coda

One kind of meaning is constituted by what we need to grasp about usage in order to be competent participants in the linguistic practices of a community. What we need to grasp first and foremost is how those with whom we communicate normally expect us to understand them, and how those interlocutors assume we are normally to be understood. I’ve argued that we should think of this sort of meaning as a population-level, process-like phenomenon. It’s population-level since what needs to be grasped is determined by a rough equilibrium of assumptions across speakers: the competent speaker needs to track certain bits of ...

Introduction

I start with what for me is a puzzle. An analytic sentence is a sentence one can see to be true simply by understanding it (and, perhaps, using a little logic). The hoary example is the sentence ‘all bachelors are unmarried’: to understand the sentence one must understand the word ‘bachelor’, knowing that it means unmarried man; so to understand the sentence is not just to know that it says that all bachelors are unmarried but to know that it says something that comes to no more and no less than that all unmarried men are unmarried. But any rational animal who can think the thought that all unmarried men are unmarried knows it....

Sex and Conversation

Recognizing that meanings are species-like suggests a range of questions. Meanings seem relatively static in the short to medium term. When meanings change, that is sometimes driven by relatively simple learning processes. In other cases such change looks to be Darwinian: one can see the individuals constituting a meaning as reproducing, with change in the distribution of meaning-relevant properties in succeeding generations determined by the advantages of one’s lexicon embedding one such property instead of an alternative. Whether the processes of meaning change are Darwinian or not, one can ask to what extent they are essentially arational, and to what extent conscious intervention in conceptual change could be an effective way to change what words mean. This chapter discusses these questions. Its goal is not to definitely answer them but to examine ways we might think about sharpening them enough to have interesting questions to which we might find answers.

Internalism to the Rescue?

If meanings are interestingly like species, meanings are multitudes and what our words mean isn’t up to us. This chapter doesn’t deny that one finds things that can reasonably be labeled ‘meanings’ at the level of the individual, or that these are of theoretical interest. It does deny that internalist theorizing about meaning provides a way to resuscitate the notion of analyticity. It also argues that meanings turn out to be much like diachronic ensembles of mental states related by analogs of descent—i.e. analogous to species. The first half of this chapter discusses a popular response to ‘Two Dogmas’ and demonstrates that this response requires an untenable picture of meaning. The second half takes up an internalist response to Quine due to David Chalmers, who suggests we think of conceptual constancy only in the intrapersonal case, identifying it with constancy of conditional credence. Chalmers’ proposal is worth serious consideration. But even from an internalist perspective, it’s unacceptable.

Conceptual Evolution and Reference

A word’s meaning, according to the argument of Chapter 3, is constituted by certain presuppositions that it is common ground speakers associate with uses of the word. Presumably there can be changes in the things that constitute a word’s meaning from one time to another, without there being change of its meaning—without the word’s coming to have a meaning distinct from that it used to have. This chapter discusses a number of accounts of what might be necessary, sufficient, or necessary and sufficient for change of meaning, though it does not endorse a particular account. Much of the chapter discusses relations between changes in reference and truth conditions and change in meaning, as well as relations among referential indeterminacy, meaning change, and ‘what is said’ by a sentence.