The Idea Theory of Meaning
Outline
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2.
3.
4.
5.
Metasemantics
The Conformal Theory
The Idea Theory
Problems for the Idea Theory
Summary
1. METASEMANTICS
The Meaningless World
Most things in the world don’t have meanings.
Rivers and lakes and trees and rocks and planets
and black holes and electrons… none of these
things have meanings.
There’s nothing that a river is about, there is
nothing that a lake represents, a tree can’t be
true or false.
Meaningful Artifacts
A very small number of things, however, do have
meanings/ are about or represent other things.
Many of these meaningful things are human
artifacts, like maps, diagrams, paintings, icons,
etc.
In addition, there are linguistic and mental
representations.
Language
All normal human beings, and most abnormal
human beings, speak a language. First languages
don’t need to be taught; they come naturally to
us.
A sentence like “The cat is on the mat” has a
meaning; it is about a certain cat and a certain
mat; and it is true if the cat it’s about is on the
mat it’s about, and false otherwise.
Mental Representation
Thoughts too are representational. I can think
about cats, and I can think that a cat is on a mat.
Unlike language, it’s plausible that a large
number of non-human animals have
representational thoughts. Almost certainly
dolphins and dogs, and maybe even bees and
ants.
Metasemantics
Since most things aren’t meaningful, and only a
few things are, it’s reasonable to ask: why do
things like maps, sentences, and thoughts have
meanings and rivers, lakes, and trees have no
meanings? And why, for example, is a map of
Hong Kong a map of Hong Kong, rather than
(say) a map of Kuala Lumpur? Why do
meaningful things have the meanings they do
rather than some other meaning?
Metasemantics
“Metasemantics” (metaphysical semantics, the
metaphysics of meanings) is the part of
philosophy of language that tries to answer the
question:
“Why [in virtue of what] do meaningful things
have the meanings they do, rather than some
other meaning, or no meaning at all?”
Original vs. Derived Intentionality
A historically popular strategy for approaching
this question has been to draw a distinction
between original and derived intentionality
(representation).
Original vs. Derived Intentionality
Minds (more accurately: thoughts) have original
intentionality. We have to have a real story for
them to answer the metasemantic question
(why they mean what they do).
Other non-mental representations on the other
hand, like diagrams and sentences, have derived
intentionality. They mean what they do because
they inherit their meanings from our thoughts.
2. THE CONFORMAL THEORY
Aristotle on Hylomorphism
According to Aristotle, substances are composed
of matter + form.
Example: a house is a substance. The matter of
the house is the bricks, cement, plaster, wood,
and so forth. But the house is not just the bricks
and cement, etc. It is those bricks, cement,
plaster, etc. arranged in a certain way: with a
certain form.
The Conformal Theory of
Representation
Aristotle held an obscure doctrine of the identity
of the knower with the known. The basic idea
seems to be this. When I think of a house, for
instance, my soul (i.e. my matter) takes on the
form of a house. Thus, even though I (me, my
soul, my matter) am distinct from a house (its
matter), I represent the house because it and
my soul have literally the same form (the form
of a house).
Aristotle on Linguistic Representation
Furthermore, Aristotle thought that spoken
language was an outward sign of the state of
one’s soul. So the (spoken) word ‘horse’ was a
sign of my soul having the form of a horse. So
we can say that ‘horse’ represents horses,
because it is a sign of a state of my soul that
represents horses (by identity of form with
them).
Problem for the Conformal Theory
Aristotle’s greatest medieval follower, St.
Thomas Aquinas, tried to deal with a problem in
the conformal theory. I represent a rock by
having the same form as a rock. So why doesn’t
the rock represent me, since it and I have the
same form, and representation = sameness of
form?
Intentional Presence
The solution was that the rock-form was not
“really” present in me, it was only “spiritually”
present. Spiritually present forms represent
really present ones, but not vice versa.
(Incidentally, this is also the explanation for why
even though I have the form of a rock, I don’t
look anything like a rock.)
The New Science
The 17th Century saw the rise of
corpuscularianism. It was a lot like Greek
atomism, except whereas atoms are essentially
indivisible, corpuscles could theoretically be
divided. Notable corpuscularians were Robert
Boyle, Isaac Netwon, Thomas Hobbes, and John
Locke.
Corpuscularianism
The view was that everything is made out of
corpuscles– microscopic little bits that had a
certain shape, size, and momentum. However,
the corpuscles did not have color, taste, smell,
sound, or warmth. These other qualities were
explained as the effects of the corpuscles on our
sensory organs. For example, heat is just the
motion of corpuscles, but this motion causes us
to experience the sensation of warmth.
The Unreality of Tastes, Colors, etc.
“I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are
no more than mere names so far as the object in
which we place them is concerned, and that
they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if
the living creature were removed, all these
qualities would be wiped away and annihilated”
(Galileo, The Assayer).
Problems for the Conformal Theory
But if colors, for example, exist only in the mind,
then it cannot be true that when I represent a
white horse, my soul has the same form as a
white horse. There are no white horses. There
are horses that cause me to experience
whiteness when light bounces off of them. But
the whiteness itself depends on me, the
observer. Whiteness exists only in minds.
3. THE IDEA THEORY
The Idea Theory
The new scientific developments called for a
new theory of representation.
Many philosophers, including Descartes,
Hobbes, and Locke adopted an “idea theory” to
account for representation.
Locke on The Idea Theory
“Words are sensible signs, necessary for
communication of ideas. Man, though he have
great variety of thoughts, and such from which
others as well as himself might receive profit and
delight; yet they are all within his own breast,
invisible and hidden from others, nor can of
themselves be made to appear. The comfort and
advantage of society not being to be had without
communication of thoughts, it was necessary that
man should find out some external sensible signs,
whereof those invisible ideas, which his thoughts
are made up of, might be made known to others.”
Comparison with the Conformal
Theory
For Aristotle and Aquinas, a mind/ soul
represents an object by sharing its form.
Language represents by indicating the state of
the soul.
The idea theory introduces a new element. The
mind represents a thing by having an idea that
represents that thing. A word represents by
indicating an idea present in the mind.
The Nature of Ideas
What are these ideas then? According to Locke,
ideas are “the pictures drawn in our minds”
(Essay, II.x.5).
An idea of a horse, then, is very much like a
picture, image, or painting of a horse. Compare
Hume: “By ideas I mean the faint images of
[perceptions] in thinking and reasoning”
(Treatise, I.i.1).
Resemblance Theory of
Representation
Importantly, ideas don’t represent by sharing
forms with their intentional objects (as we’ve
seen, science doesn’t allow this).
Instead, just like paintings, ideas represent by
resembling their intentional objects. An idea of a
horse is like a picture of a horse, and it
represents a horse as a picture does: by
resembling it.
Resemblance Theory
The resemblance theory is really the important
part of the idea theory, because it does all the
explaining. Why does word W mean X? Because
W is associated with idea I and I means X. But
why does I mean X? Because I resembles X.
Corpuscularianism Redux
The idea theory can’t exactly escape the
problem the conformal theory faced. A painting
of a red wall resembles a red wall in the sense
that if you looked at both, the appearances they
generate in you would be the same, because
both share a feature– they reflect light at a
wavelength between 630 and 700nm. But surely
(a) you don’t look at your mental states and (b)
your mental states don’t reflect light!
Primary vs. Secondary Qualities
Locke famously draws a distinction between
primary and secondary qualities, where the
primary qualities of an object are those ascribed
to it by corpuscularianism (shape, size,
momentum, and what Locke calls ‘solidity’), and
the secondary qualities are propensities of the
object to cause certain appearances in us (like
the feeling of warmth).
Primary vs. Secondary Qualities
Locke thought that ideas of primary qualities
really did resemble those primary qualities, but
the resemblance theory was false for secondary
qualities. Ideas of primary qualities represent by
resembling; ideas of secondary qualities
represent in some other way. (Locke identified
this way as causal– an idea of a secondary
quality represents the idea that quality has a
propensity to cause. This doesn’t work.)
Only Ideas Can Resemble Ideas
Berkeley, however, argued that no idea
resembled anything physical or material; ideas
only resembled ideas. Ideas aren’t spatial and
thus they don’t have shapes, sizes or momenta.
Is your idea of a big elephant bigger than your
idea of a small elephant? Ideas don’t even
resemble the primary qualities, like shape, size,
and momentum.
Idealism
For Berkeley, this wasn’t a bad thing, and it
didn’t show that the idea theory or the
resemblance theory were false. What it showed,
instead, was that our thoughts were not about a
physical world, but of a world made of ideas. My
idea of a table was an idea of an idea, because
tables are ideas. (This is how we are able to
represent them, because ideas can resemble
other ideas.)
Locke on General Terms
“It is not enough for the perfection of language,
that sounds can be made signs of ideas, unless
those signs can be so made use of as to
comprehend several particular things: for the
multiplication of words would have perplexed their
use, had every particular thing need of a distinct
name to be signified by. To remedy this
inconvenience, language had yet a further
improvement in the use of general terms, whereby
one word was made to mark a multitude of
particular existences.”
Abstract Ideas
Locke’s picture here is that there are terms for
particular things (names) and terms that don’t
apply to any one particular thing, but apply
equally to groups of things (terms like ‘dog’ or
‘house’– these aren’t names of a particular dog
or a particular house). If we accept the idea
theory, then, we have to accept that there are
“abstract ideas”– not mental pictures of a
particular person, but mental pictures that
resemble equally a group of things.
Berkeley vs. Abstract Ideas
Berkeley, however, argues that abstract ideas
are impossible. The abstract idea of a man is
supposed to apply equally to a tall man and a
short man; a black man and a white man; a
skinny man and a fat man; well-dressed man
and a pauper, etc. But no picture resembles
equally all such men, as any picture of a man
depicts him as either skinny or fat, but not both
and not neither.
Berkeley
Again, this didn’t lead Berkeley to reject the idea
theory, only to (once again) place a severe limit
on what we can have ideas of.
Just as we can’t have ideas of non-ideas
(because non-ideas can’t resemble ideas) we
can’t have ideas of abstract things, because
mental pictures are always determinate and
never abstract (like regular pictures).
Hume: Impressions and Ideas
David Hume took Berkeley’s style of austere
empiricism to its logical extreme.
Hume makes a distinction that wasn’t made by
Locke and Berkeley between impressions and
ideas. Impressions are sensations or perceptions
or sense experiences. Things like seeing red or
feeling pain. The idea of red is not the same
thing as seeing red though: for Hume, all
(simple) ideas are “copies” of impressions.
The Tribunal of Experience
Hume then proposes the tribunal of experience.
For each supposed idea, we ask:
(a) Is it copied from an impression? If so, which
one? [No answer? Go to (d).]
(b) If not, is it a complex idea, built out of
simpler ones?
(c) If so, repeat (a) and (b) for each of its parts.
(d) If not, it’s not really an idea at all!
Hume vs. Causation
Hume notoriously targeted causation for the
tribunal of experience. Imagine the following
sequence of events (that is, have the following
sequence of ideas in your head): first you have
an idea of ball A headed toward ball B. Then A
hits B and causes B to move away. Got it? OK,
now imagine this other sequence of events: A is
moving toward B, A and B touch, and B moves
away on its own (not because A caused it).
Hume vs. Causation
What’s the difference here? Hume argued that
there wasn’t one. You couldn’t see one event
causing another, and since all ideas were copies
of impressions (for Hume), you couldn’t have an
idea of one event causing another.
Other Imperceptibles
There were some other problems with the idea
theory involving unobservables. How is your
idea of a black hole or an electron anything like
those things? Even more straightforwardly, how
is your idea of (for example) Moses anything like
Moses (there’s no ancient statues or other
representations of him)? But it seems we do
have an idea of Moses, at least in the sense that
we can think about him.
4. PROBLEMS FOR THE IDEA
THEORY
Concepts vs. Propositions
We can draw a distinction between concepts
and propositions. Concepts are representations
of things or qualities: so I can have a concept of
Obama, or a concept of red, or a concept of a
horse, or a concept of a concept.
Importantly, concepts are not truth-evaluable.
My concept of red isn’t true, and it isn’t false
either. It might be more or less accurate.
Propositions
We can say that when I think of a thing, or think
about a thing, then I am entertaining a concept.
However, when I think that such-and-such, I am
entertaining a proposition. For example, I can
think that Obama is the US president, or think
that grass is red, or think that the concept of a
horse is not a concept. Propositions are truthevaluable: when I think that grass is red, my
thought is false. (Not so when I just think of
red.)
The idea theory seems to have trouble
distinguishing concepts and propositions.
According to the idea theory, thought is having
ideas, and ideas are like mental pictures. Are
mental pictures truth-evaluable? If they are,
then concepts aren’t ideas. If they aren’t, then
Resemblance as an Equivalence
Relation
Resemblance, like identity, is an equivalence
relation, meaning it’s reflexive, symmetric, and
transitive:
Reflexive: for all X, X resembles X. (Everything
resembles itself.)
Symmetric: for all X and Y, if X resembles Y, then
Y resembles X.
Transitive: for all X, Y, and Z, if X resembles Y and
Y resembles Z, then X resembles Z.
Representation is Not Reflexive
Unfortunately, representation is not an identity
relation:
It’s not reflexive: you can have a representation
that represents itself (for example, a map of
Hong Kong that includes the map’s location), but
most representations don’t represent
themselves. You can have a painting of a horse,
that is not a painting of a painting of a horse
(not a painting of itself).
Representation is Not Symmetric
Representation is typically not symmetric, as
most of what gets represented is not
representational. My thoughts represent lakes
and rivers and trees, but lakes and rivers and
trees don’t represent my thoughts (because
they don’t represent anything). And even when I
do represent representations (when I think
about a painting, say), usually they don’t
represent me or my thoughts (most painters
have never even heard of me).
Representation is not Transitive
Finally, representation isn’t transitive. The
directory at the museum might represent the
location of a certain Picasso painting. That
painting could represent a horse. But the
directory doesn’t represent any horses, it only
represents paintings.
We could try a strategy similar to Aquinas’ in
dealing with the reflexivity problem for the
conformal theory. [Does that work?]
Indeterminacy and Error
Another class of problems for resemblance
theories of representation involve
indeterminacy and error.
The Man on the Hill
Wittgenstein remarked that “A picture which
corresponds to a man walking up a hill forward
corresponds equally, and in the same way, to a
man sliding down the hill backward.”
[Philosophical Investigations]
Still, there can be a picture that is a picture of a
man going up a hill and not sliding down it.
Representation can be more determinate than
resemblance.
Twins
Or suppose you met a woman last night and I
met her twin. You and I both have memories
(mental representations) of the women we met,
and let’s suppose those mental images are
identical in every respect (because the twins
look exactly alike and were wearing identical
clothing). However, my memory is of the twin
that I met, and not the one that you met, and
vice versa.
Indeterminacy of Resemblance
In both the man-on-the-hill case and the twin
case, what we have is one representation that
exactly resembles two distinct things (man going
up vs. man going down, twin #1 vs. twin #2). If
representation = resemblance, then my memory
(for example) should represent both twins
equally. But I only have a memory of one of
them; my memory represents only one of them.
Error
Consider a revised version of the twins case: you
and I separately meet each of two twins. They
are exactly alike except that the twin you meet
has a scar on her left cheek and mine has no
scar. However, the next day I falsely remember
my twin as having a scar on her left cheek. Then
the resemblance theory says my memory is
about the twin you met (someone I’ve never
met in my entire life).
Massive Error
Imagine that I have a pen pal whom I’ve never
met, or seen a picture of. Over the course of our
correspondence, I develop an elaborate mental
image of her: what color her hair is, how big her
nose is, etc. Suppose that my mental image is
completely wrong and doesn’t resemble my pen
pal at all. On the resemblance view, it would
seem that I was incapable of thinking about her,
for example, I couldn’t think: “Oh, here’s
another letter from my pen pal!”
Conceptual Competence
One direction for a solution to the problem of
error is to say that my idea of my twin or my pen
pal is only a “partial” idea or is an “incompletely
grasped” idea or something like that.
That may be true, but this doesn’t really resolve
the problem. Why is the idea– partial or
incomplete as it is– an idea of my pen pal, rather
than of someone else whom it more closely
resembles, or of a mere fiction?
Fodor vs. the Image Theory
Fodor holds that thought happens in a language
(“the language of thought”) rather than in
images– the ideas of the idea theorist. One
argument goes like this: you can see a Necker
cube in two different ways. There’s one picture
that corresponds to two ideas. But if ideas are
just mental pictures, what two different mental
pictures correspond to the two different ways
you can see the one physical picture?
Seeing vs. Seeing-as
What the Necker cube example suggests is a
more general problem. You can look at the
Fischer cow and not see that it is a cow. When
you see the picture as a cow, your perception
changes. But if your idea of the picture is just a
copy of that picture in your head, what about it
changes such that once it was just squiggles and
then it’s a cow?
Fodor vs. the Image Theory
Another argument is that the idea theorist
doesn’t have a good story about my thought
that I am NOT wearing a red shirt. Is it a picture
of me wearing a blue shirt? Or a green one?
What if I’m just thinking that I’m NOT wearing a
red one, but not thinking of what color shirt I
am wearing? Notice how “No smoking” signs
have to resort to non-pictorial symbols. You
can’t just have a sign where someone isn’t
smoking.
Perhaps the biggest problem for the idea theory
is that in most cases where x resembles y, x does
not represent y.
Two cows for instance might resemble each
other much more than our ideas, paintings, or
photographs resemble them. Yet we have no
inclination to say that the cows represent each
other.
Hilary Putnam points out an interesting case.
Imagine two lines in the sand. One has been
drawn by a human with the intention of tracing
the figure of Winston Churchill, and it resembles
him (or his figure) a lot. The other has been
traced by an ant just wandering aimlessly in the
sand. But imagine that the ant’s line is identical
to the human’s. We think the human-drawing
represents Churchill, but the ant-line doesn’t.
This suggests that drawings, paintings, and so
forth don’t represent things by resembling
them. They represent things on the basis of our
intentions.
But the entire motivation of the idea theory was
to model ideas on drawings and paintings. Those
things represent by resembling, and that’s how
ideas were supposed to work as well.
SUMMARY
The Idea Theory
The idea theory is an attempt to answer the
question: why do words mean what they do,
rather than something else, or nothing at all. It’s
a “metasemantic” theory.
According to the theory, words are associated
arbitrarily and conventionally with ideas, which
are construed as something like little colored
pictures in the mind.
Representation as Resemblance
This is not the whole story, because it doesn’t
explain why the word ‘dog’ is true of dogs. This
is a question about meaning (“is true of” is a
semantic relation).
So the idea theory further says that ‘dog’ is true
of dogs, because the idea associated with ‘dog’
most closely resembles dogs (as opposed to
cats, or nothing at all).
The Idea Theory in History
The idea theory was influential, especially
among the British Empiricists of the 17th and
18th Centuries. Philosophers were willing to
abandon abstract ideas, ideas about cause and
effect, and some even maintained that thought
about an external world was impossible– that
since only ideas resemble ideas, what we think
about when we think about tables and chairs
and mountains are ideas.
Problems
Eventually, however, the idea theory came into
ill-repute. There were lots of reasons, and we
discussed a few:
• There’s a distinction between concepts and
propositions that is blurred on the idea
theory.
• Resemblance is an equivalence relation,
representation is not. So representation can’t
be identical to resemblance.
Problems
• Representation can be more determinate than
resemblance: we can think of a man going up
a hill, even if the image equally applies to a
man sliding down; we can think of a Necker
cube with one side to us, even if the image
equally applies to a cube with the other side
to us.
• In general, resembling things simply don’t
represent one another.