What an individual means by a word sometimes, if not always, is dependent on the individual, on what he believes, and on his memories; and so on what kind of life he has lived and what kind of experiences he has had, the manner in which he learned the word, and so forth. For instance, someone who lives in a hot climate will surely mean the word ʻcoldʼ in a different way than someone who comes from a cold one. Indeed (...) the same individual sometimes, if not usually or always, means the same word in different ways. After all, his memory and experiences will change, even if a little, between uses. For instance, a person who lives in a hot climate and them moves to a cold climate, will surely mean the word ʻcoldʼ in a different way, because he has learned something and has had new experiences. Still, it would be incorrect to identify the meaning of the word with any of these parameters, because even two people, with exactly the same lives and experiences, could, or indeed would, mean different things by the same word, just because they are different individuals to begin with, and so have been influenced by their experiences in different ways. (shrink)

In this paper I shall deal with the role of "understanding a thought" in the debate on the definition of the content of an assertion. I shall present a well known tension in Frege's writings, between a cognitive and semantic notion of sense. This tension is at the source of some of the major contemporary discussions, mainly because of the negative influence of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which did not give in-depth consideration to the tension found in Frege. However many contemporary authors, (...) after the first attempt by Carnap himself, have tried to make room both for a cognitive and semantic aspect of meaning. I claim that at least some of these attempts (Dummett, Perry and Chalmers) are seriously flawed, mainly due to the difficulty in making a proper connection between the two different conceptions of sense. I shall outline an alternative project, which takes into consideration Frege's requirements on antipsychologism and of the objectivity of thought, while maintaining a close connection between the two aspects of sense. (shrink)

The most widely accepted and well worked out approaches to the foundations of meaning take facts about the meanings of linguistic expressions at a time to be derivative from the propositional attitudes of speakers of the language at that time. This mentalist strategy takes two principal forms, one which traces meaning to belief, and one which analyzes it in terms of communicative intentions. I argue that either form of mentalism fails, and conclude by suggesting that we can do better by (...) focusing on connections between linguistic meaning and the contents of perceptions (rather than beliefs or intentions), and by (following Kripke's approach to reference) replacing questions about the nature of meaning with questions about the nature of term introduction and meaning transmission. (shrink)