William G. Lycan
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.
Or
the dispute may prove to be verbal.Jed
and Red agree that a sentence-token has both a truth-condition and an illocutionary
force, but they disagree over which of those two features constitutes the
sentence’s meaning (italics original): Jed says the meaning
is the truth-condition, force being important but merely pragmatic, while
Red says the meaning is the force, truth-condition being important
but merely the feature that determines the speech act’s locutionary
content.It would be hard to show
that that disagreement is more than a schoolyard scuffle over who gets
to keep the term.In such a dispute,
each combatant tries valiantly to reserve and protect the buzzword “meaning”
as attaching to what s/he feels is the more interesting and striking of
the two features.Lycan
(1984) offers the “Double Indexical” theory of meaning as the term is used
in altercations of this kind:
meaning=defWhatever
aspect of linguistic activity happens to interest me now.[p.
272]
Or
a compatibility may simply go unnoticed.The
classic Verificationism of the Positivists
is universally thought of as a rival of the Truth-Condition theory.Yet??though
I have never seen this so much as noted in print??the Verification theory
is not only compatible with the Truth-Condition theory but entails it.For
a Verificationist, a sentence’s verification
condition, besides being its meaning, is its truth-condition.To
see this, consider a sentence to which theVerificationist
would assign a meaning other than its face-value or ostensible meaning,
such as a sentence about electrons; e.g., theVerificationist
says, “An electron has just passed through the cloud chamber” means that
having squeezed the bulb, one sees a trail of grey specks in the chamber,
etc.Now, if a sentence means that
P, then that sentence is true iff P.So
on the Verificationist analysis, “An electron
has just passed through the cloud chamber” would be true iff
having squeezed the bulb, one sees a trail of grey specks in the chamber,
etc.; thus the Verificationist theory assigns
to that sentence, and to every other sentence to which it applies, a truth-condition,
and in particular a truth-condition that according to the theory is the
sentence’s meaning.So, to put it
provocatively:Verificationism
= the Truth-Condition theory plus some distinctive advice about how to
determine what a given sentence’s truth-condition is (viz., by asking how
the sentence is verified); the pure Truth-Condition theorist’s complaint
against the Verificationist is, at worst,
that the advice is bad and that the Verificationist
gets the truth-conditions wrong.[2]
Yet of course competition between theories of meaning is often real and substantive.Suppose, rather, that Ted does join Ned in pursuing timeless sentence-meaning, but that he follows Grice (1968) in arguing that sentence-meaning is not truth-condition but a complex function of possible speaker intentions; then there is genuine disagreement.Or suppose that while Jed holds that illocutionary force is merely a pragmatic, psychological appendage to sentence-meaning (= truth-condition), Red insists that the truth-condition properly characterizes, not the sentence, but only the underlying propositional-attitude content that partly constitutes the force; genuine disagreement again, because Red and Jed have conflicting views of which feature is conceptually and/or explanatorily prior.
2.My
concern in this paper is with sentence-meaning, and with a certain sort
of argument for the Truth-Condition theory of sentence-meaning.The
argument is intended to establish that sentence-meaning is at least
truth-condition, whether or not other features such as force (or “conceptual
role” or implicatures) also deserve to be
included as part of “meaning.”In
particular, I shall confront the argument with some objections suggested
by recent “use” theories.
A
very compressed version of the argument in question is presented by David
Lewis (1972):
In
order to say what a meaning is, we may first ask what a meaning
does, and then find something that does that.
A
meaning for a sentence is something that determines the conditions under
which the sentence is true or false.It
determines the truth-value of the sentence in various possible states of
affairs, at various times, at various places, for various speakers, and
so on.(p. 173)
Considered
as a defense of the Truth-Condition theory, this passage is sketchy.Indeed,
it seems more a flat assertion than an argument, or at least to beg the
question.But now look carefully at
its concluding sentence, and note that that sentence does not simply presuppose
its predecessor.I read the concluding
sentence as freestanding and as the argument’s main premise.Let
us reformulate it, concentrating on Lewis’ notion of a “possible state
of affairs.”
He
makes it clear that the possible states of affairs that chiefly concern
him are whole possible worlds.
Contingent
sentences depend for their truth value on facts about the world, and so
are true at some possible worlds and false at others.A
possible world corresponds to a possible totality of facts, determinate
in all respects.(p. 175)
Lewis
construes the idea of a meaning’s determining a sentence’s truth-value
in set-theoretic terms, and concludes that a meaning is (in part[3])
a function from possible worlds to truth-values.
Lewis’
conception of a truth-condition is of course that which derives from Carnapianintensional
logic.But not all truth-condition
theorists work within that format.Some
eschew the idea of a multiplicity of possible worlds.For
example, Davidson (1965, 1967, 1973) exhibits a sentence’s truth-condition
merely as the right-hand side of the Tarskibiconditional
directed upon that sentence (e.g., “‘Platypuses have webbed feet’ is true iff
platypuses have webbed feet”), the biconditional
having been derived from a Tarskian truth
theory for the containing language, and he keeps his treatment strictly
extensional.I shall remain neutral
both as between these two ways of representing truth-conditions and also
as between metaphysicians who think there is only one world and those who
contend that there are many merely possible worlds as well as our actual
one; so I shall pick up Lewis’ phrase “a totality of fact,” meaning roughly
an entire world, and use it as neutrally as is convenient, though
it will usually be most convenient to talk of multiple worlds.[4]
My
argument’s first premise is, then,
(1)A
sentence’s meaning taken together with a totality of fact determines the
sentence’s truth-value.
(One-worlders
may substitute “the” for “a” in “a totality of fact.”)
The
argument then proceeds as follows.
\(2)A
sentence-meaning is at least a function from possible worlds to
truth-values.[5][1]
(3)Such
a function is a truth-condition.[As
conceived in intensional logic]
\(4)A
sentence-meaning is at least a truth-condition.[2,3]qed
This
argument has an epistemological version, given by Field (1977) and Lycan
(1984), that is perhaps more intuitive:
(1-E)If
you know a sentence’s meaning and you are omniscient as regards fact, then
you know the sentence’s truth-value.[Seems
obvious]
\(2-E)Knowing
a sentence’s meaning is at least knowing enough to assign the sentence
a truth-value given a totality of fact.[1?E]
(3-E)To
know enough to assign the sentence a truth-value given a totality of fact
is to know a truth-condition.[Intensional
logic again]
\(4-E)Knowing
a meaning is at least knowing a truth-condition.[2?E,3-E]
I
must emphasize again that our conclusions (4) and (4-E) are compatible
with “meaning”’s comprising more than
truth-condition, say force as well.My
quarrel will be only with those theorists who hold that meaning does not
include truth-condition.
3.Let
us consider some objections to these two arguments.A
first problem is that, if taken quite literally, (1-E) is trivially true
and too weak to support (2-E): So long as “fact” includes linguistic
fact, of course an omniscient being knows all sentences’ meanings along
with all the nonlinguistic facts.One
of the facts that an omniscient being would know is that the sentence “Platypuses
have webbed feet” means that platypuses have webbed feet, and another is
that sentence’s truth-value; so of course the omniscient being can “assign”
the sentence a truth-value.But that
does nothing to show that an ordinary person’s knowledge of meaning requires
the ability to assign truth-values, or that a meaning is the thing on
the basis of which the truth-values are ordinarily assigned.Indeed,
the same problem afflicts (1) in the original argument; a totality of all
fact already includes both the sentence’s meaning and the sentence’s truth-value,
which (without question-begging) does nothing to show that the meaning
is a function from worlds to truth-values.
One’s
first instinct is to qualify (1) and (1-E) by restricting “fact” to nonlinguistic
fact; that is what I tacitly meant in first uttering (1) and (1-E), and
most philosophers would not have thought of the present objection very
soon.But such a restriction would
falsify both those premises, since they would then not hold for metalinguistic
sentences.One might know the meaning
of “‘Die’ is both a noun and a verb” and also know all the nonlinguistic
facts, and still not know whether “die” is both a noun and a verb.
One’s
natural response to that problem is to go hierarchical, and supplement
the restricted (1) and (1-E) with meta-metalinguistic
clauses that do apply to metalinguistic
sentences.But then, for just the
same reason as before, one would have to restrict those clauses as applying
only to first-order metalinguistic sentences,
and so on up.Indeed, it looks as
though a type theory is needed.We
can amend (1) and (1-E) by implicitly quantifying over levels of the hierarchy,
as in “For any sentence of level n, ...totality of facts of all
levels lower than n, ....”I
see no paradox or other objection to the potential regress suggested by
this, and I shall say no more of the present issue.
A
second objection is that the arguments seem to apply only to declarative
sentences.Imperatives and interrogatives,
it is widely thought, do not have truth-values at all, yet (as the Positivists
seem to have missed) they are every bit as meaningful as declaratives.
To
this I reply that imperatives and interrogatives do have bipolar semantic
values which might just as well have been called truth-values even though
they normally are not.An imperative
is obeyed or not (depending on whether its propositional complement
turns out to be true or false) and a question has the correct answer “yes”
or “no” (depending on whether its corresponding declarative is true or
false).[6]The
custom of not calling nondeclaratives true
and false is only that, a custom, and is expendable; without detriment
to the language, we could have called imperatives “true” or “false” depending
on their being obeyed, and questions “true” or “false” depending on their
correct answers.
A
third and more trenchant objection calls our attention to deixis:(1-E)
is false, because if the sentence in question contains indexicals
or other deictic items, one certainly can know its meaning, and be factually
omniscient, and yet not know the sentence’s truth-value.If
we come into an empty classroom and find written on the blackboard, “I
will be out of town tomorrow; class is postponed until Tuesday during your
normal lab hour,” even (nonlinguistic) factual omniscience will not deliver
that sentence’s truth-value; we would need to find out who had written
it and when and to whom.The same
point can be made against (1).
This
is just the same complication for truth-conditional semantics as was noted
by Kaplan (1977), following Frege, and it
should yield to his strategy of distinguishing a sentence’s “character”
from the sentence’s “content.”Content
is what we have heretofore been calling “meaning,” on the truth-conditional
view a set of worlds or a function from worlds to truth-values.Actual
content is what is left undetermined by the anonymous sentence in our example.Character
is what does determine content given all the relevant features of a context
of utterance: Faced with our indexical sentence and once given utterer,
hearer, date, andand time, a competent speaker
of English would immediately work out its content.Thus,
character is a function from contexts to contents.
Kaplan
argues that the “m”-word should be reserved for character rather than for
content, on the entirely reasonable ground that ordinary English speakers
surely know the meanings of everyday indexical sentences even when they
do not know the values of the contextual parameters that fix the contents
of those sentences’ particular tokens.In
this sense, then, (1) and (1-E) are still false, for “meaning” in the sense
of character.[7]
I
would contend that (1) and (1-E) are not entirely wrong.Despite
Kaplan’s argument, content in his sense is still a perfectly good thing
to mean by “meaning.”Note that although
in the one way we know the meaning of the sentence on the blackboard, in
another way we do not: We do not know what its utterer
actually said.In traditional terms,
we do not know what proposition the token expresses.And
in this sense, so far as has been shown, (1) and (1-E) are still true,
and the original arguments stand.
Moreover,
“meaning” in the sense of character is still closely tied to truth-condition,
for a character is simply a function from utterance context to “meaning”
in the sense originally intended.And,
so to speak, its whole point is to be that: Until character has done its
job by having a full set of contextual features plugged into it, no assertion
can be made and no communication can take place.[8]
Nonetheless,
recognizing the naturalness of Kaplan’s preferred usage, I concede the
following modifications for the case of “meaning” in his sense:
(1+)A
sentence’s meaning taken together with a context of utterance and a totality
of fact determines truth-value.
\(2+)A
meaning is at least a function from contexts of utterance to functions
from possible worlds to truth-values.
(3)A
function from worlds to truth-values is a truth-condition.
\(4)A
sentence-meaning is at least a function from contexts of utterance to truth-conditions.[2+,3]
(1-E+)If
you know a sentence’s meaning and you know all the truth-relevant features
of the sentence’s context of utterance and you are omniscient as regards
fact, then you know the sentence’s truth-value in the context.
\(2-E+)Knowing
a sentence’s meaning is at least knowing enough to assign the sentence
a truth-value given a context and a totality of fact.
(3-E+)To
know enough to assign the sentence a truth-value given a context and a
totality of fact is to know (at least) a truth-condition for an utterance
of that sentence in that context.
\(4-E+)Knowing
a meaning is at least knowing (at least) a truth-condition in a context.[2-E+,3-E+]
For
all the objection has shown, this treatment is adequate.
4.Against
what rivals does the Truth-Condition theory need defending, in the early
twenty-first century?Few philosophers
of language currently champion a verificationist
theory of sentence-meaning, or illocutionary theories like Alston’s (1963),
or Grice’s (1968) program based on speaker-meaning.[9]Currently
vital competitors seem to be “use” theories of various kinds: “Conceptual
role” accounts as advocated by Harman (1974, 1975, 1982),[10]
the more radical inferentialist program
of Brandom (1983, 1994, 2000), and the
more primitive view taken by Horwich (1990,
1999).There is a variety of ideas
clustered in this region.For convenience
I shall lump them together and call them just, crudely, “Use” theories.
The
general idea of “Use” theories is that linguistic expressions are like
chess pieces or other game tokens, in that they are deployed in obedience
to certain distinctive social norms.A
given expression is appropriately tokened
in response to this or that circumstance (linguistic or nonlinguistic);
its tokening demands or at least licenses
further utterances by the speaker and/or the audience; some utterances
require or license nonlinguistic acts.The
norms governing all this activity are of course conventional, since any
word could have been used to mean something other than what it does mean.(But
they are not merely, or capriciously or frivolously, conventional.The
whole gigantic system of conventions that is a human natural language has
evolved and refined itself over centuries, in response to pragmatic pressures
of many sorts, and no doubt has features that are indispensable given the
ways in which we are situated in the world and what Wittgenstein called
our “forms of life.”
So
far, of course, the Truth-Condition theorist need raise no objection.(Indeed,
s/he had better not, for what we have so far attributed to “Use” theories
are obvious truths.)Rather, the
dispute comes when the “Use” theorist adds that a linguistic expression’s
meaning is simply and exhaustively constituted by the expression’s normative
role in the giant game-like social practice that is the shared language
of a speech community, and that in particular there is no need to advert
to truth-conditions or (on some views) even to word-world reference in
order to explain the things that theories of meaning are charged with explaining.As
I have said, our Truth-Condition theorist does not insist that truth-condition
suffices for “meaning,” but s/he does insist that truth-condition is necessary,
and that is what the “Use” theorist denies.
This
means that in particular, the “Use” theorist must resist our Lewisian
argument in both its original and its epistemological versions.It
is far from obvious how s/he might do that.Which
of the premises would naturally be denied by someone taking the “Use” point
of view?A radical Wittgensteinian
who recognized only such primitive types of use as in his opening builders’
game (“Slab!”) might deny the argument’s opening premise, (1+) or (1-E+)
as it might be, contending that meaning in this merely behavioristic
sense has nothing to do with the checking of sentences against facts.Compare
examples of purely ritual utterances:“Hello,”
“Damn,” “Ouch,” “Haha,” “‘Scuse
me,” “Ssshh!,” “Thanks,” “Shame!,” “Fore!” and
the like.These are the Wittgensteinian’s
paradigm.
It
is tempting for the Truth-Condition theorist to reply that that is the
trouble with Wittgensteinian “Use” theories.Such
ritualistic utterances are rare exceptions in real discourse and should
not be taken as paradigmatic; grammatically, they are not even complete
sentences.
The
grammatical slur is unpersuasive, for arguably some such expressions are
complete sentences in that they have understood, ellipsized
subjects and predicates—”[God/I] damn [this/that],” “(Please would) [you]
excuse me?,” “[I] thank [you],” etc.I
think the critical point is better made in Austinian
terms of illocutionary force and locutionary
content:The vast majority of utterances
have both force and content.Granted,
there are exceptions on each side.An
English sentence shouted across a canyon to test the echo may have a content
but no force; it is not being used to perform any illocutionary act.Purely
ritual expressions such as those listed above have (obvious) forces but
no locutionary contents.[11]But
Truth-Condition theories of meaning are really theories of locutionary
content, and do not purport to be theories of force; so it is no embarrassment
to them that there are a few types of utterance that have forces but no
contents.
Thus,
(1+) and (1-E+) are safe from the radical Wittgensteinian.But
what about forces other than the assertive?[12]Must
not (1+) and (1-E+) be modified to accommodate those?No,
because in response to the second objection considered in section 3,
I have already verbally expanded the notion of “truth-value” to cover the
bipolar values we attach to speech acts of kinds other than the assertive.
In
any case, current “Use” theorists such as those listed above are not radical Wittgensteinians,
precisely because they do deal primarily and squarely with normal utterances
that have locutionary contents.But
they thereby incur a greater difficulty in resisting the Lewisian
argument.
5.To
appreciate the problem, consider:Suppose
a certain community agrees to use certain words??or at any rate sounds
and marks??in a peculiar way; e.g., they decide to put only “words” with
the same number of syllables next to each other in threes, or they utter
“sentences” only in rhyming pairs, where each string begins with a one-letter
grapheme and adds one letter successively to each ensuing item.(This
might be a sort of community-wide parlor game.)If
someone happened upon this whimsical society and knew nothing of the arrangement,
s/he would not understand what was going on.S/he
might, in time, if s/he were an acute observer, make out all the rules
according to which the various tokens were being used, and yet the sense
of the whole arrangement might remain entirely obscure to her/him; s/he
might might have no notion what, if anything,
was being said.S/he might then suspect
that s/he has only been watching a game.
In
fact, let us cast this sort of thought-experiment in a more refined form.Our
general question is that of how the “Use” theorist might go about distinguishing
genuine language use from other, but nonlinguistic, rule-governed social
practices such as games in the ordinary sense.Now,
suppose we have a bunch of colored placards, some of which have various
designs on them, squiggles of various characteristic shapes.[13]Nothing
very elaborate; perhaps each of us has been issued a set of ten placards.Suppose
further that we just make up some simple, stupid little rules for manipulating
these squiggles.For example, when
the leader holds up the red placard with the thing that looks like the
Greek letter p
on it, everyone is to shout out the sound “froop”
and pass one placard to the left.(After
a short while, what with that rule and others, we will not all have just
the same cards.)And when anyone spontaneously
holds up any yellow card, the player directly opposite must hold up any
of the blue ones.When an even number
of people are holding up cards bearing hexagons, anyone on the side of
the room opposite the leader who has any yellow card must pass it to the
right.But if one receives a yellow
card with the squiggle that looks like a snake on it, s/he must shout out
“crabgrass” and bang the table twice, and anyone whose surname has at least
seven letters should say “septosieben” and either
raise a red card or run down the hall and back again.And
so on.Though it sounds like Twenty-Three-Man Squamish
or some other Mad magazine fantasy, we could quite feasibly play
the game, according to the set of conventional rules that we have all agreed
to for manipulating the placards.
Now
of course the point is that so far, the placard game is just a game.There
are the tokens and our conventional rules for manipulating them, but as
yet, none of this looks at all like a genuine language.One
clear sense in which a social practice qualifies as an actual language
is that, according to it, one can make noises or inscribe marks and thereby
say that P for some suitable sentence replacing ‘P’.And
one of the things that is essential to language is that we can say things
in it.(More on this below.)
The
point can be made using far less fanciful examples, indeed examples of
real games such as chess and tennis.To
move N-Q3, or to return a serve to the server’s backhand, is not (literally)
to say that anything or to ask whether anything or to advise anyone
to do anything.Similarly, my point
about the placard game is that so far as I can see, no indirect discourse
is licensed just in virtue of some people’s playing the game; no one has
said or asked or requested or suggested...that anything at all.It
seems there is something missing.We
are playing a game, and using tokens according to a set of conventional
rules, and engaging in a social practice that may not only be fun but have
some larger point; it might even be in some way vital to our way of life.Yet
nobody has said anything.The things
the players in these various games have done may have significance in some
sense, but nobody has made any assertions or performed speech acts of any
other kinds.The moves in these games
do not have meanings in the linguistic sense.(Contrast
the case where spies are using chess moves as an actual secret code; e.g.,
N-Q3 may have conventionally been stipulated to mean “Take the zircon to Foppa
and tell him we move tonight.”)
At
this point we must distinguish two possibilities, and turn the present
argument into a dilemma.The placard
game is importantly underdescribed, with
respect to the vital concern of truth-conditions.For
someone might argue that if its rules are rich enough and advert often
enough to ambient conditions, reference and predication will
be recoverable from the game description.E.g.,
suppose there is a rule that whenever the waiter comes in, each player
holding a card inscribed with a martini-glass shape shouts “Here, waiter,”
and is given a martini; whenever anyone sees a robin out the window, s/he
says “Look, nobir!” and everyone else exclaims
“Ahhh”; whenever a player says “Mix please,”
s/he is passed the bowl of snacks by whomever is nearest it; and more in
this vein.One would then be tempted
to conclude that the glass shape stands for martinis, “waiter” refers to
the waiter, “nobir” means robin or at any rate
bird, and “mix” means snack food.In
that case, the placards and vocal utterances specified by the game rules
would have meanings, and (I would say, in virtue of) truth-conditions.
In
order to set up our dilemma we need not linger over the theory of reference
and decide what exactly it would take for the placards or utterances to
have referential truth-conditions.I
require only the disjunction: Either the game moves do have truth-conditions
or (by stipulation) they do not.Call
the first scenario the “Impure Placard Game” and the second the “Pure Placard
Game.”Then I argue as follows.Moves
in the Impure Game are meaningful linguistic utterances, but only because
they have truth-conditions.Moves
in the Pure Game are not meaningful linguistic utterances.
The
latter assertion should be obvious, once we have stipulatively
removed the natural temptation to read reference and truth into the game
moves.[14]Once
carefully distinguished from the Impure Game, the Pure Game does not seem
to be even the beginning of an actual language, in particular because it
does not exemplify a crucial aspect of language: reportability
in indirect discourse.So we have
a counterexample to “Use” theories.The
“Use” theorist’s conditions are not sufficient for something’s being a
language.
Now,
then, consider a theory of meaning, T,
that ostensibly competes with the Truth-Condition theory.
(B1)Either T
tacitly incorporates truth-condition and adds something else [“conceptual
role,” force, verification-condition, implicatures,...]
or T
does not.
(B2)If T
does incorporate truth-condition, then T
is not after all a competitor of the Truth-Condition theory; further dispute
is verbal.
(B3)To
be correct, T
must rule out the Pure Placard Game.
(B4)If T
does not incorporate truth-condition, then T
must rule out the Pure Game in some other way.
(B5)It
is hard to think of any other adequate way of ruling out the Pure Game.
\(B6)For
any competitor of the Truth-Condition theory, it is hard to think how that
competitor could be correct.[C1-C5]
Moreover,
(C1)To
rule out the Pure Placard Game, one must provide means whereby a speaker
can produce a token meaning that so-and-so (thereby asserting that
so-and-so or asking whether such-and-such or...).
(C2)Any
token (structured or unstructured) that means that P, for any P, is a sentence.
(C3)A
sentence means that P only if the sentence is true iff
P.[15]
(C4)A
sentence that is true iff P has a truth-condition.
\(C5)To
rule out the Pure Game, one must provide means for endowing a speaker’s
utterances with truth-conditions.[C1?C4]
6.The
anti-Verificationist argument of section 1
may seem to generalize fast:“If a
sentence means that P, then that sentence is true iff
P.So on the Blah-Blah theory of meaning,
‘An electron has just passed through the cloud chamber’ would be true iff
[whatever the Blah-Blah-ist theory says that
sentence means]; thus the Blah-Blah-ist theory
assigns to that sentence, and to every other sentence to which it applies,
a truth-condition, and in particular a truth-condition that according to
the theory is the sentence’s meaning.So,
to put it provocatively, Blah-Blah-ism = the Truth-Condition theory plus
some distinctive advice about how to determine what a given sentence’s
truth-condition is (though that advice may be bad, as we complained against
the Verificationist).”
Now,
the Verification theory has been a somewhat special case in this discussion,
because that theory triggers my assumption (C3) that if a sentence means
that P, then the sentence is true iff P.That
in turn is because the Verification theory delivers meaning specifications
for particular sentences that are couched in terms of “that”-clauses; a
verification condition can itself be so complementized.[16]Other
theories lack the latter virtue; they do not show how to get from a specification
of a sentence’s “use” (or whatever) to a “means that” clause??and so those
theories fall afoul of argument (C1)-(C5).
So
the Verification theory is adequate only because it does deliver “means
that” clauses, and no theory that fails to do the same is adequate.What
the relevantly adequate theories have distinctively in common is that they
do trigger (C3).And that encourages
Davidson’s famous semi-rhetorical question: What does “means that” add
to “is true iff” in the latter’s stronger-than-truth-functional
sense?Absent a convincing answer,
we should conclude that it is after all the sentence’s truth-condition
that is doing the work of being the sentence’s meaning; that the truth-condition
might also be the verification condition is incidental.
But
might there not be a convincing nonrhetoricalVerificationist
answer?(I continue to discuss Verificationism
here rather than “Use” theories because it does without question deliver
“means that” clauses.If a particular
“Use” theory also delivers them, then what follows should apply to it as
well.)Such an answer, so far as
I can see, would have to take one of three forms: (i)
to show that verification has a specifically meaning-explanatory role to
play, which role is not fulfilled by truth alone; (ii) to show that truth
is problematic in a way that verification is not; or (iii) to show that
truth-conditions themselves are philosophically reducible to verification
conditions.Let us consider each
of these options briefly in turn.
(i):It
is sometimes complained against Truth-Condition theories that they divorce
meaning from epistemology.No such
complaint could be made against the Verificationist,
whose theory reduces meaning precisely to epistemology.
But
what legitimizes the complaint in the first place?What
did the epistemologizing of meaning explain
that Truth-Condition theories do not?There
is no obvious candidate.(One putative explanandum
would be the allegednormativity of meaning: if
meaning is normative, the Verification theory is well positioned to explain
that, by reference to the underlying epistemic norms.But
(a) it is hardly obvious that meaning is at all normative; those who contend
that meaning is normative tend to be those who already hold an epistemic
theory of meaning.And (b) I suspect
that for any argument purporting to show that meaning is normative, a parallel
argument would show that truth is normative also, thus depriving
the Verificationist of the advantage there.[17])
(ii):I know of two attempts to argue that truth is problematic in a way that verification is not: Michael Dummett’s (1959, 1975, 1976) well-known case against the idea of allowing verification-transcendent truth-conditions into one’s theory of meaning; and objections arising from recent deflationism about truth (e.g., Brandom (1983, 1994); Horwich (1990, 1999)).
I
balk at the assumption that the transitivity of reduction renders the first
stage of a two-stage reduction uninteresting or unimportant.Suppose,
e.g., that knowledge is reduced to a causal relation of a certain kind.If
causality is then reduced to something else, say to counterfactual relations,
or to transfer of energy, that does nothing to diminish the epistemologist’s
achievement in having reduced knowing to causality.Similarly,
should truth-conditions prove reducible to verification conditions, that
would take nothing away from the accomplishments of the Truth-Condition
theory of meaning.
I
conclude that our refined version of Lewis’ argument succeeds, and accordingly
that linguistic meaning is at least truth-condition; any theory of meaning
that rejects truth-conditions must itself be rejected.
Alston,
W. (1963), “Meaning and Use,”
Philosophical Quarterly 51:107-24.
Bar-On,
D., C. Horisk and W.G. Lycan
(2000), “Deflationism and the Truth-Condition
Theory of Meaning,” Philosophical Studies 101, 1-28.Reprinted
with substantive “Postscripts” in Beall
and Armour-Garb (forthcoming 2003).
Beall,
JC, and B. Armour-Garb (eds.) (forthcoming
2003), Deflationary Truth (
Brandom,
R. (1983), “Asserting,” Noûs
17: 637–650.
Brandom,
R. (1994), Making It Explicit.
Brandom,
R. (2000), Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism.(
Carnap,
R. (1947), Meaning and Necessity.
Cohen,
L.J. (1964)
“Do Illocutionary Forces Exist?”,Philosophical
Quarterly 14:118-37.
Cresswell,
M.J. (1972), “The World Is Everything That is the Case,” Australasian
Journal of Philosophy 50, 1-13.
Cresswell,
M.J. (1973)Logics and Languages.(
Cresswell,
M.J. (1985)Structured Meanings.(
Cresswell,
M.J. (1988), Semantical Essays: Possible
Worlds and Their Rivals.(
Cresswell,
M.J. (1990)Entities and Indices.(
Cresswell,
M.J. (1996), Semantic Indexicality.(
Davidson,
D. (1965) , “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages,” in Y. Bar-Hillel
(ed.), Proceedings of the 1964 International Congress for Logic, Methodology,
and Philosophy of Science.
Davidson,
D. (1967), “Truth and Meaning,” Synthese
17: 304-23.
Davidson,
D. (1973), “In Defense of Convention T,” in H. LeBlanc (ed.), Truth,
Syntax and Modality.
Dummett,
M. (1959), “Truth,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59:
141-62.
Dummett,
M. (1975), “What Is a theory of Meaning?.” in
Dummett,
M. (1976), “What Is a theory of Meaning, II.” in Evans, G., and J. McDowell,
(eds) (1976)Truth
and Meaning,
Field,
H. (1977), “Logic, Meaning, and Conceptual Role,” Journal of Philosophy
74: 379-409.
Grice,
H.P. (1968),“Utterer’s
Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning”,Foundations
of Language 4:225-42.
Harman,
G. (1974), “Meaning and Semantics” in M. Munitz
and P. Unger (eds), Semantics and Philosophy,
Harman,
G. (1975), “Language, Thought, and Communication”in
Gunderson (ed) (1975).
Harman,
G. (1982), “Conceptual Role Semantics”,Notre
Dame Journal of Formal Logic 23:242-256.
Horwich,
P. (1990), Truth.
Horwich,
P. (1999), Meaning.
Kaplan,
D. (1977) , “On the Logic of Demonstratives,” in P. French, T.E. Uehling
and H. Wettstein (eds.), Contemporary
Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language.
Lewis,
D. (1972) , “General Semantics,” in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics
of Natural Language.
Lycan,
W.G. (1984), Logical Form in Natural Language.
Lycan,
W.G. (1991), Review of Anita Avramides’
Meaning and Mind,Mind and
Language 6, 83-86.
Lycan,
W.G. (1994), Modality and Meaning.(
Lycan,
W.G. (2000), Philosophy of Language.(
Montague,
R. (1968), “Pragmatics,” in R. Klibansky
(ed.), Contemporary Philosophy: A Survey.
Scott,
D. (1970), “Advice on Modal Logic,” in K. Lambert (ed.), Philosophical
Problems in Logic.
Searle,
J. (1979), “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts,” in Expression and Meaning
(
Sellars,
W. (1963), “Some Reflections on Language Games,” in Science, Perception,
and Reality.(
Sellars,
W. (1967), Science and Metaphysics.(
Sellars,
W. (1969), “Language as Thought and as Communication,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 29: 506-27.
Stalnaker,
R. (1968), “Pragmatics,” in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics
of Natural Language.
Strawson,
P.F. (1970), Meaning and Truth.(