Online research in philosophy

What property does a word have which enables us, when we hear an appropriately produced string of words, to come to an understanding of what is being said? A natural response is to claim that a word has a meaning, and that what we understand is in part composed from the meanings of the words used. But the attempt to handle meanings directly is problematic, and various speculations point in an alternative direction. I describe one such alternative.

Nearly everyone shares the intuition that sarcasm or verbal irony1 is a use of language in which speaker meaning and sentence meaning come apart. Two millennia ago, Quintilian defined irony as speech in which “we understand something which is the opposite of what is actually said.”2 More recently, Josef Stern sharply distinguishes metaphor, which he argues is semantic, from irony: in the latter case, he says, we are not “even tempted to posit an ironic meaning in the utterance in addition to the ordinary literal meanings of the words used.”3 Indeed, sarcasm is frequently cited as a paradigm case of pragmatic meaning.

Semantics is the investigation of meaning, and semantic theories, including semantic theories about moral language, come in two very different kinds. Descriptive semantic theories are theories about what words mean. So descriptive moral semantic theories are theories about what moral words mean: words like ‘good’, ‘better’, ‘right’, ‘must’, ‘ought’, ‘reason’, and ‘rational’. In contrast, foundational semantic theories are theories about why words mean what they do, or more specifically, about what makes it the case that words mean what they do. So foundational moral semantic theories are theories about what makes it the case that moral words mean what they do: words like ‘good’, ‘better’, and so on. Since both kinds of theory are sometimes referred to as varieties of ‘moral semantics’, this article will cover both. Just as semantic theories themselves come in two kinds, descriptive semantics raises two very different kinds of issues. Some issues in descriptive semantics turn on the question of what kind of theory is required, in order to be able to account for the meanings of words – including of moral words, in particular. Such questions are questions about the nature of semantic theorizing. So, for example, according to truth-conditional theories, an adequate descriptive semantic theory needs to provide a recursive and compositional characterization of values for sentences which determine the truth conditions of each sentence. Whereas according to expressivist theories, an adequate descriptive semantic theory does not need to determine truth conditions at all, but does need to recursively and compositionally associate each sentence ‘P’ with a mental state – intuitively, with the state which constitutes what it is to think that P. Truth-conditional and expressivist theories involve very different conceptions of the nature of linguistic meaning, but their contrast is one of the most important issues in moral semantics, and they are not even the only live competitors. In contrast, other issues in descriptive semantics, rather than turning on what kind of theory is required, raise questions about specific properties of the meanings of particular words..

In his 1982 book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke develops a famous argument that purports to show that there are no facts about what we mean by the expressions of our language: ascriptions of meaning, such as “Jones means addition by ‘+’” or Smith means green by ‘green’”, are according to Kripke’s Wittgenstein neither true nor false. Kripke’s Wittgenstein thus argues for a form of non-factualism about ascriptions of meaning: ascriptions of meaning do not purport to state facts. Define semantic realism to be the view that ascriptions of meaning are apt to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity, and are, at least in some instances, true. Semantic realism, thus defined, is a form of cognitivism about semantic judgement, according to which judgements ascribing meaning express beliefs, states apt for assessment in terms of truth and falsity. Kripke’s Wittgenstein thus argues against semantic realism, and in favour of a form of semantic non-cognitivism.1 En route to semantic non-cognitivism, Kripke’s Wittgenstein argues against dispositionalist theories of meaning, which hold something roughly along the lines of the following: Jones means magpie by “magpie” if and only if Jones is disposed to apply “magpie” to magpies in ideal conditions (where the ideal conditions can be specified in terms that don’t presuppose the notion of meaning, and are such that in those conditions Jones applies “magpie” to a thing if and only if that thing is a magpie).

Philosophers sometimes approach meaning metaphorically, for example, by speaking of “grasping” meanings, as if understanding consists in getting mental hands around something.1 Philosophers say that a theory of meaning should be a theory about the meanings that people assign to expressions in their language, that to understand other people requires identifying the meanings they associate with what they are saying, and that to translate an expression of another language into your own is to find an expression in your language with the same meaning as the expression in the other language.

Philosophers take a great deal of interest in the study of meaning, reference, truth and other semantic properties, but remarkably little attention has been paid to the entities that have semantic properties. The view that’s typically taken for granted has two closely related components.

According to Horwich’s use theory of meaning, the meaning of a word W is engendered by the underived acceptance of certain sentences containing W. Horwich applies this theory to provide an account of semantic stipulation: Semantic stipulation proceeds by deciding to accept sentences containing an as yet meaningless word W. Thereby one brings it about that W gets an underived acceptance property. Since a word’s meaning is constituted by its (basic) underived acceptance property, this decision endows the word with a meaning. The use-theoretic account of semantic stipulation contrasts with the standard view that semantic stipulation proceeds by assigning the meaning (reference) to W that makes a certain set of sentences express true propositions. In this paper I will argue that the use-theoretic account does not work. I take Frege to have already made the crucial point: "a definition does not assert anything but lays down something ["etwas festsetzt"]” (Frege 1899, 36). A semantic stipulation for W cannot be the decision to accept a sentence containing W or be explained in terms of such an acceptance. Semantic stipulation constitutes a problem for Horwich's use theory of meaning, especially his basic notion of acceptance.

Meaning in philosophy, by K. Lehrer.--Meaning in linguistics, by A. Lehrer.--Theories of meaning, by W. Alston.--Of names, by J. S. Mill.--Of words, by J. Locke.--Of language, by G. Berkeley.--Signs and behavior situations, by C. Morris.--Meaning and verification, by M. Schlick.--Meaning and use, by R. Wells.--The meaning of a word, by J. Austin.--Meaning and speech acts, by J. R. Searle.--Meaning and linguistic analysis, by C. C. Fries.--The semantic compound of a linguistic description, by J. J. Katz.--Componential analysis and universal semantics, by J. Lyons.--Bibliographical essay (p. 213-216).

Jackendoff (2002) argues that grammatically relevant and irrelevant components of meaning do not occupy distinct levels of the semantic system. However, neuropsychological studies have found that the two components doubly dissociate in brain-damaged subjects, suggesting that they are in fact segregated. Neural regionalization of these multidimensional semantic subsystems might take place during language development.

Machine generated contents note: Part I. Meaning and the Lexicon: 1. The lexicon - some preliminaries; 2. What do we mean by meaning?; 3. Components and prototypes; 4. Modern componential approaches - and some alternatives; Part II. Relations Among Words and Senses: 5. Meaning variation: polysemy, homonymy and vagueness; 6. Lexical and semantic relations; Part III. Word Classes and Semantic Types: 7. Ontological categories and word classes; 8. Nouns and countability; 9. Predication: verbs, events, and states; 10. Verbs and time; 11. Adjectives and properties.