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- Carleton B. Christensen (1997). Meaning Things and Meaning Others. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (3):495-522.At least phenomenologically the way communicative acts reveal intentions is different from the way non-communicative acts do this: the former have an "addressed" character which the latter do not. The paper argues that this difference is a real one, reflecting the irreducibly "conventional" character of human communication. It attempts to show this through a critical analysis of the Gricean programme and its methodologically individualist attempt to explain the "conventional" as derivative from the "non-conventional". It is shown how in order to eliminate certain counterexamples the Gricean analysis of utterer's meaning must be made self-referential. It is then shown how this in turn admits an "ontological difference" which undercuts all methodological individualism: meaning something by an utterance must then have a certain intrinsic, irreducible "conventionality" and "intersubjectivity". Objections to this claim are raised and dealt with. It is suggested that any problem of origin might be resolvable by rejecting the semantic reductionism of Grice's programme. An internal relation between self-consciousness, intersubjectivity and language is suggested. The paper ends by speculating that the self-conscious subject is intrinsically embodied and related to other subjects in that for it its body is essentially a medium of signs with which to express its "inner states" to others.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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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.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Abstract: In this paper I argue that there is a very important, though often neglected, dissimilarity between the two Gricean conceptions of ‘what is said’: the one presented in his William James Lectures and the one sketched in the ‘Retrospective Epilogue’ to his book Studies in the Way of Words. The main problem lies with the idea of speakers' commitment to what they say and how this is to be related to the conventional, or standard, meaning of the sentences uttered in the act of saying. Since the later notion of ‘what is said’, or ‘dictiveness’, is claimed to be logically independent from ‘formality’ (roughly, conventional meaning), Grice seems to maintain that there are cases in which content that is not expressed by a sentence in a context may nevertheless count as what is said. I propose an account of what is said that brings together the two apparently irreconcilable approaches. The price to be paid for a Gricean, however, is to accept a duality of behaviour between (natural language counterparts of) logical constants and logical variables.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... What are the prospects for a cognitive science of meaning? As stated, we think this
question is ill posed, for it invites the conflation of several importantly different semantic
concepts. In this paper, we want to distinguish the sort of meaning that is an
explanandum for cognitive science—something we are going to call meaning—from the
sort of meaning that is an explanans in cognitive science—something we are not going to
call meaning at all, but rather content. What we are going to call meaning is
paradigmatically a property of linguistic expressions or acts: what one’s utterance or
sentence means, and what one means by it. What we are going to call content is a
property of, among other things, mental representations and indicator signals. We will
argue that it is a mistake to identify meaning with content, and that, once this is
appreciated, some serious problems emerge for grounding meaning in the sorts of content
that cognitive science is likely to provide.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Grice’s ideas of what it is to mean something by doing something, conceptually condensed in various analyses of ‘utterer’s (or speaker’s) meaning’, are today mostly disputed in the context of the question of how niucheif any—semantics can be based on that concept. In this paper, I shall say nothing about this topic, but rather discuss some aspects of the analysis of ‘utterer’s meaning” itself. Since Schiffer’s book Meaning, its details seem to be regarded as more or less settled, further scrutiny being disdained as sheer fussing over trifles and philo-.
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| | Scholar | More options ... After Meaning, 1972, and The Remnants of Meaning , 1987, The Things We Mean is Stephen Schiffer's third major work on the foundations of the theory of linguistic meaning. In simplest possible outline, the development started with a positive attempt to base a meaning theory on a modified Gricean account of utterance meaning, but took a negative turn, with the problems of belief sentences as a major reason for thinking that a systematic (compositional) semantic theory for natural language was not possible at all. In the recent book, things have again taken a more positive turn, but now constructive and destructive elements are mixed in complex ways in a complex account, rich in ideas and in detail, and a great challenge to the reader. It is not always obviously free of inner conflict. Nor can one always easily see how things hang together. I shall here try to accurately present the main ideas. Where my comments are not relegated to separate paragraphs, I mark the transition with a dash ( -).
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... 1.Competition between philosophical theories of linguistic meaning is sometimes specious. For example, suppose Ned believes that an utterance’s meaning is its truth-condition, while Ted insists that the utterance’s meaning is constituted by the speaker’s communicative intentions à la Grice.Here one wants to distinguish explananda:What Ned is after is really the utterance’s (“timeless”) sentence-meaning; Ted is focusing on speaker-meaning, which is not the same, and the two theories are perfectly compatible, indeed mutually complementary, accounts of distinct phenomena.
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| | Scholar | More options ... 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).
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Malapropisms and slips of tongue represent ways in which expression meaning can come apart from speaker meaning. Another way is when a speaker engages in some form of implicit communication, conveying a meaning other than the meaning of the words or sentences she utters. Such implicit meaning can be intended either in addition to or instead of the explicit meaning. Some regard utterance meaning as a species of speaker meaning; others regard it as a distinct level of meaning. According to the speech-act centred conception of meaning, speaker meaning has priority over expression meaning. In contrast, the expression-centred conception regards semantic properties as intrinsic to expressions. This latter view is disputed by those who (like Grice) wish to reduce expression meaning to speaker meaning or who (like Searle) regard expression meaning as depending on a Background of human practices.
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| | Other links: cla.sc.edu | Scholar | More options ... This paper argues that the literal meaning of words in a natural language is less conventional than usually assumed. Conventionality is defined in terms that are relative to reasons; norms that are determined by reasons are not conventions. The paper argues that in most cases, the literal meaning of words—as it applies to their definite extension—is not conventional. Conventional variations of meaning are typically present in borderline cases, of what I call the extension-range of literal meaning. Finally, some putative and one or two genuine exceptions are discussed.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Literal meaning is often identified with conventional meaning. In A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs Donald Davidson argues (1) that literal meaning is distinct from conventional meaning, and (2) that literal meaning is identical to what he calls first meaning. In this paper it is argued that Davidson has established (1) but not (2), that he has succeeded in showing that there is a distinction between literal meaning and conventional meaning but has failed to see that literal meaning and first meaning are also distinct. This failure is somewhat surprising, since it is through a consideration of Davidson's notion of radical interpretation that the distinction between literal meaning and first meaning becomes apparent.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Carleton B. Christensen, Meaning things and meaning others
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