Online research in philosophy

Within the philosophy of language, pragmatics has tended to be seen as an adjunct to, and a means of solving problems in, semantics. A cognitive-scientific conception of pragmatics as a mental processing system responsible for interpreting ostensive communicative stimuli (specifically, verbal utterances) has effected a transformation in the pragmatic issues pursued and the kinds of explanation offered. Taking this latter perspective, I compare two distinct proposals on the kinds of processes, and the architecture of the system(s), responsible for the recovery of speaker meaning (both explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning).

A very plausible and common view of meaning supposes that linguistic meaning is to be understood in terms of speakers' intentions. This program proposes to analyse the meaning of a sentence in terms of what speakers mean by or in uttering it; and this speaker meaning in turn is to be analysed in terms of the speaker's intentions. This essay argues that intention-based semantics cannot provide an adequate analysis of linguistic meaning: not because of contrived counterexamples, nor because it conflicts with scruples about intentionality which we do or should have. It fails because research in psychology shows that children do not attribute beliefs to others in the way demanded by the theory. Empirical evidence is provided for the claim that two- and three-year-old children do not satisfy the conditions for speaker meaning, and thus cannot be said to mean anything by their utterances. It seems to me that children both mean something by their utterances and that their utterances have linguistic meaning. Hence the intention-based analysis does not provide necessary conditions for meaning.

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.

Semantic externalism in contemporary philosophy of language typically – and often tacitly – combines two supervenience claims about idiolectical meaning (i.e., meaning in the language system of an individual speaker). The first claim is that the meaning of a word in a speaker’s idiolect may vary without any variation in her intrinsic, physical properties. The second is that the meaning of a word in a speaker’s idiolect may vary without any variation in her understanding of its use. I here show that a conception of idiolectical meaning is possible that accepts the “anti-internalism” of the first claim while rejecting (what I shall refer to as) the “anti-individualism” of the second. According to this conception, externally constituted idiolectical meaning supervenes on idiolectical understanding.

In this paper we want to reconcile two apparently conflicting intuitions: the first is that what a speaker means is just a function of his or her communicative intentions, independently of what the hearer understands, and even of the actual existence of a hearer; the second is that when communication is carried out successfully, the resulting meaning is, in some important sense, jointly construed by the speaker and the hearer. Our strategy is to distinguish between speaker’s meaning, understood as a personal communicative intention, and joint meaning, understood as a joint construal of the speaker and the hearer. We define joint meaning as a type of propositional joint commitment, more precisely as the joint commitment of a speaker and a hearer to the extent that a specific communicative act has been performed by the speaker. Joint meaning is therefore regarded as a deontic concept, which entails obligations, rights, and entitlements, and cannot be reduced to epistemic and volitional mental states like personal belief, common belief, personal intention, and communicative intention.

This philosophical treatise on the foundations of semantics is a systematic effort to clarify, deepen, and defend the classical doctrine that words are conventional signs of mental states, principally thoughts and ideas, and that meaning consists in their expression. This expression theory of meaning is developed by carrying out the Gricean program, explaining what it is for words to have meaning in terms of speaker meaning, and what it is for a speaker to mean something in terms of intention. But Grice's own formulations are rejected and alternatives developed. The foundations of the expression theory are explored at length, and the author develops the theory of thought as a fundamental cognitive phenomenon distinct from belief and desire, argues for the thesis that thoughts have parts, and identifies ideas or concepts with parts of thoughts. This book will appeal to students and professionals interested in the philosophy of language.

A speaker can say something without meaning it, by meaning something else or perhaps nothing at all. A speaker can mean something without saying it, by merely implicating it. These two truisms are reason enough to distinguish saying, meaning, and implicating. And that’s what we’ll do here, looking into what each involves and how they interconnect. The aim of this chapter is to clarify the notions of saying, meaning, and implicating and, with the help of some other distinctions, to dispel certain common misunderstandings.

MEANING: centrally, the feature(s) of an expression (over and above its form) that determine its contribution to what a speaker says in using it; also, the content of the communicative intention of the speaker in using an expression (even if that use departs from the expression's meaning). Accordingly, any discussion of meaning should distinguish speaker's meaning from linguistic meaning.

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.