Familiar objections to each type of theory

1 Theories of the first sort, which take meaning to be specified by inferential and observational evidential considerations, are accused of ignoring the social aspect of language. Such theories, it is said, admit the possibility of a private language in which one might express thoughts without being able to communicate them to another; and this possibility is held to be absurd. More generally it can be argued that, even if meaning depends on considerations of evidential connection, the relevant notion of evidence involves intersubjective objectivity, which requires the possibility of communication among several people. Therefore it can be argued that one could not account for meaning via the notion of evidence without also discussion of meaning in communication.

Furthermore, there are many uses of language to which the notion of evidence has no application. If one asks a question or gives an order, it is not appropriate to look for the evidence for what has been said. But if there can be no evidence for a question, in the way that there can be evidence of a conclusion, differences in meaning of different questions cannot be explicated by means of differences in what evidence can be relevant to such questions. So theories of the first sort seem vulnerable in several respects.

Work on this paper was supported in part by the National Endowment in the Humanities (grant No. H-67-0-28) and in part by the National Science Foundation (grant No. NSF-GS-2210)

2 On the other hand, theories of the second sort seem threatened by circularity from at least two directions. According to Katz, one understands the words someone else says by decoding them into the corresponding thought or idea.¹ But a person ordinarily thinks in words, often the same words he communicates with and the same words others use when they communicate with him. Surely the words mean the same thing when used in these different ways; but to apply Katz’s account of meaning to the words one thinks with would seem at best to take us in a circle.

Similarly, consider Grice’s theory of meaning. According to Grice, one means that p by one’s words (in communication) if and only if one uses them with the intention of getting one’s listener to think one thinks that p.² But what is it to think that p ? On one plausible view it is to think certain words (or some other representations) by which one means that p. If so, Grice’s analysis would seem to be circular: one means that p by one’s words if and only if one uses them with the intention of getting one’s listener to think one has done something by which one means that p.

Circularity and worse also threatens from another side, if the second type of approach is intended to explain what it is to promise to do something or if it is supposed to be adequate to exhibit the difference between asking someone to do something and telling him to do it, etc. The fact that saying something in a particular context constitutes one or another speech act cannot be represented simply as the speaker’s communicating certain thoughts. For example, promising to do something is not simply communicating that you intend to do it, nor is asking (or telling) someone to do something simply a matter of communicating your desire that he do it. At the very least, to perform one or another speech act, one must communicate that one is intending to be performing that act; so at the very least, to treat all speech acts as cases of communication would involve the same sort of circularity already mentioned. Furthermore, communication of one’s intention to be performing a given speech act is not in general sufficient for success. The speaker may not be in a position to promise or to tell someone to do something, no matter what his intentions and desires.

3 On the other hand, theories of the third sort, which treat meaning as speech-act potential, are also subject to familiar objections. For example, Chomsky³ (following Humboldt) argues that this third approach (and probably the second as well) ignores the ‘ creative aspect of language use ’. Language exists primarily for the free expression of thought. Communication and other social uses of language are, according to Chomsky, of only secondary importance. Proponents of the first approach will surely agree with Chomsky on this point.

In line with this, it can be argued that one of the most important characteristics of human language is its unbounded character. Almost anything that one says has never been said by anyone before. Surely this unboundedness reflects the unbounded creative character of thought and is not simply a reflection of the more or less practical uses to which language can be put in a social context.

Furthermore, approaches of the third sort seem to be at least as afflicted with circularity as are approaches of the second sort. For example, Alston suggests defining sameness of meaning as sameness of illocutionary-act potential, where illocutionary acts are the relevant subclass of speech acts. He claims that two expressions have the same meaning if and only if they can be used to perform the same illocutionary acts.⁴ Now, suppose we ask whether the expressions ‘ water ’ and ‘ H₂0 ’ have the same meaning. They do only if, e.g., in saying ‘Please pass the water’ one performs the same illocutionary act as one does in saying ‘ Please pass the H₂0 ’. But it can be argued that we are able to decide whether these acts are the same only by first deciding whether the expressions ‘ water ’ and ‘ H₂0 ’ have the same meaning. If so, Alston’s proposal is circular.

¹ ‘ Roughly, linguistic communication consists in the production of some external, publicly observable, acoustic phenomenon whose phonetic and syntactic structure encodes a speaker’s inner private thoughts or ideas and the decoding of the phonetic and syntactic structure exhibited in such a physical phenomenon by other speakers in the form of an inner private experience of the same thoughts or ideas.’ J. J. Katz, The Philosophy of Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 98.

² H. P. Grice, ‘Meaning’,Philosophical Review, LXVI, 3 (July 1957), reprinted in this volume, pp. 53-9, and ‘ Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions’, Philosophical Review, LXXVIII, 2 (April 1969): 147-77.

³ For example, Noam Chomsky, ‘Current Issues in Linguistic Theory’, in Fodor and Katz, eds., The Structure of Language (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 57- 61. See also Cartesian Linguistics (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

⁴ William P. Alston, The Philosophy of Language (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), PP- 3fi-7.