THE PAST & FUTURE
OF MEANING
Jaroslav Peregrin
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague
& University of Hradec Králové
Czech Republic
http://jarda.peregrin.cz
Formal Semantics & Pragmatics
19.-21.11.2010, Riga
Peregrin: P & F of Meaning
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The past of meaning:
res cogitans infiltrated into the world of res extensa
Locke: "The meaning of words being only the ideas they are made to
stand for by him that uses them, the meaning of any term is then showed,
or the word is defined, when by other words the idea it is made the sign of,
and annexed to, in the mind of the speaker, is as it were represented, or
set before the view of another; and thus its signification ascertained."
 meaning = a chunk of a mind-stuff glued to a word and animating it
 Cartesian idea that it is only some otherwordly stuff, res cogitans, which
is capable of animating the mechanical, spiritless res extensa of the world
through which we steer our bodies.
Formal Semantics & Pragmatics
19.-21.11.2010, Riga
Peregrin: P & F of Meaning
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Intentionality as an unexplained explainer?
"We must attach some meaning to the words we use, if we are to
speak significantly and not utter mere noise; and the meaning we
attach to our words must be something with which we are acquainted."
Russell (1912, Chapter V)
"Meaning exists only where there is a distinction between Intentional
content and the form of its externalization and to ask for the meaning is
to ask for an Intentional content that goes with the form of
externalization." Searle (1983, 28)
"The philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of mind. In
its most general form it amounts to the view that certain fundamental
semantic notions such as meaning are analyzable in terms of more
fundamental psychological notions such as belief, desire, and
intention." (ibid., 160-1)
Formal Semantics & Pragmatics
19.-21.11.2010, Riga
Peregrin: P & F of Meaning
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Wittgenstein’s beetle
Wittgenstein (1953, §293):
"Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a 'beetle'.
No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows
what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here it would be quite
possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might
even imagine such a thing constantly changing. – But suppose the word
'beetle' had a use in these people's language? – If so it would not be
used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the
language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even
be empty. – No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it
cancels out, whatever it is."
(However, what, if not our minds, animates our signs??)
Fregean – intermediary - solution: meanings are ideal objects of a "third
realm"
Formal Semantics & Pragmatics
19.-21.11.2010, Riga
Peregrin: P & F of Meaning
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What animates our signs?
Wittgenstein (1958, 4) :
"Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that
the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the
important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say, mathematics does not
treat of dashes on a bit of paper. Frege's idea could be expressed thus:
the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes,
would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a
kind of life. ... And further it seems clear that no adding of inorganic signs
can make the proposition live. And the conclusion which one draws from
this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live
proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all
mere signs. But, if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign,
we should have to say that it was its use. ... The mistake we are liable to
make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but
we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign."
Formal Semantics & Pragmatics
19.-21.11.2010, Riga
Peregrin: P & F of Meaning
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From revealing meaning
to describing language games
That people attach something to a word within their minds is a fact of their
individual psychologies not capable of establishing the fact that the word
means something within their language – in order for it to mean something,
it is not enough that each of them individually makes the association,
he/she must also know that the others do the same, that he/she can use
the word to intelligibly express it in various public circumstances etc. Hence
what is needed aside of the private associations are some public
practices that make the link public and shared. (And given the public
practices, the private associations become the idle beetle in the box.)
"[For Wittgenstein,] the ultimate explanatory level in semantics is not
given by references to unsaturation or to the form of objects or meanings,
but by reference to the meaning-giving activity of human beings, of
activity embodied in their endorsement of rules." (Coffa, 1991, 267)
Formal Semantics & Pragmatics
19.-21.11.2010, Riga
Peregrin: P & F of Meaning
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'Nothing in meaning that was not in behavior before'
Quine (1969, p. 28): "each of us, as he learns his language, is a student of his
neighbor's behavior" and "the learner has no data to work with, but the overt
behavior of other speakers".
Quine (ibid., p. 29): "There are no meanings, nor likenesses or distinctions in
meaning beyond what are implicit in people's dispositions to overt behavior".
Quine (1960, p. 221):
"One may accept the Brentano thesis [of the irreducibility of intentional idioms]
either as showing the indispensability of intentional idioms and the importance
of an autonomous science of intention, or as showing the baselessness of
intentional idioms and the emptiness of the science of intention. My attitude,
unlike Brentano’s, is the second. To accept intentional usage at face value is,
we saw, to postulate translation relations as somehow objectively valid though
indeterminate in principle relative to the totality of speech dispositions. Such
postulation promises little gain in scientific insight if there is no better ground
for it than that the supposed translation relations are presupposed by the
vernacular of semantics and intention."
Formal Semantics & Pragmatics
19.-21.11.2010, Riga
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Wither meanings?
 natural sciences do sucessfully describe a great deal of 'what there
is'. It seems reasonable to be very careful in deviating from them and
engaging any 'supernatural' concepts
 behaviorism, abolishment of meanings?
Devitt (1994, 545): “Semantics is an empirical science like any other.”
Quine (1992, 56): “I would not seek a scientific rehabilitation of something
like the old notion of separate and distinct meanings; that notion is better
seen as a stumbling block cleared away.”
Chomsky (1993, 21), “comunication does not require shared 'public
meanings' ... Nor need we assume that the 'meanings' of one participant be
discoverable by the other."
Formal Semantics & Pragmatics
19.-21.11.2010, Riga
Peregrin: P & F of Meaning
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Our linguistic practices
Moral: If we want to study meanings, we must see language as an institution.
Do our, human language games characteristically differ from the games
of our non-human pals or from the clatter of inanimate things? Do we
need some specific irreducible concepts to acount for them (such as that
of intension of Searle, that of truth of Davidson, etc.)?
Wittgenstein (1953): Our language games are characteristically
governed by rules, moreover by rules which are mostly implicit.
(Why implicit? The rules of language cannot be all explicit – in pain of a
vicious circle. We do have explicit rules of chess; we can take a book and
read them there. However, to do this, we must know how to interpret the
signs in the book – we must know the rules of their interpretation.
Perhaps also these rules are somewhere written, but it is clear that the
regress must come to an end and at some point we must be able to
follow the rules of interpretation without their being explicit.)
Formal Semantics & Pragmatics
19.-21.11.2010, Riga
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Rules vs. naturalism
To account for rules and rule-governed practices we do not need any
concepts over and above those employed by natural sciences; we need
a specific mode of speech, not merely the indicative one, but also the
normative one: 'this ought to be done thus and so'
(How would we explain to somebody what football is? Would we
dream to do it without speaking about the rules of footbal, i.e. what the
players ought to and ought not to do? And would this make our
explanation somehow 'supernatural'?)
 The concept of rule makes it possible to account for the specificity
of human language, meaning, and reason, without invoking any
'supernatural' concepts
Sellars (1949, 311): "To say that man is a rational animal is to say that
man is a creature not of habits, but of rules."
Formal Semantics & Pragmatics
19.-21.11.2010, Riga
Peregrin: P & F of Meaning
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What kind of rules?
Is meaning of and the truth function we learn in elementary logic courses?
Not in the sense that this function would be something which would have
baptized by the word.
Yes in the sense that the function recapitulates the rules governing the word.
To understand and (with a certain oversimplification) is to know that A and B is
correctly assertible if both A and B are; hence to master the rules
A and B ├─ A
A and B ├─ B
A, B ├─ A and B
 it is rules of inference that play semantically crucial role
Perhaps and; but dog?
Does not the empirical vocabulary, to become meaningful, have to represent
something?
What makes the difference between a person looking into the sky and saying The
sky is blue and a parrot repeating the same sounds? Is it that the former is
thinking and hence can furnish his sounds with a chunk of mental stuff?
Rather than explain language in terms of thinking, we go the other way around.
To talk meaningfully is to be able to take part within certain language games;
especially within what Brandom (1994) calls the game of giving and asking for
reasons.
 there is no meaning without inference (see Peregrin, 2008; to appear)
Pattern-governed behavior
Sellars (1954): besides the "merely conforming to rules" and "rule obeying"
there is a specific kind of behavior, characteristic of language games, which he
called pattern governed: "an organism may come to play a language game –
that is to move from position to position in a system of moves and positions
and to do it 'because of the system' without having to obey rules and hence
without having to be playing a metalanguage game"
The pattern is something we were taught by our tutors ought to be, and hence
we take it that we ought to do what would bring this ought-to-be about. Thus
we reinforce the kind of behavior of others, and especially of our tutees, which
conforms to the ought-to-be and we disapprove of that which does not conform
to it. This creates a circle which tends to promulgate the pattern of behavior
from generation to generation.
Human linguistic behavior requires a society with the mutual 'pressure' of its
members on each other. The relevant patterns are forced on us not (directly)
by natural selection, but by the ongoing demands of our peers. A rule is a
lever needed to put the exclusively human kind of forming and maintaining
patterns to work.
Formal Semantics & Pragmatics
19.-21.11.2010, Riga
Peregrin: P & F of Meaning
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The future of meaning (as I see it):
our means of representing rule-governed practices
Meanings are reasonably seen as creatures of our activity of setting up certain
systems of rules, thus opening up new kinds of spaces which we can "enter".
(Think about the exciting and inexhaustible space of football games which
opens up for us when we agree to follow the rules of football.) Meaning is what
emerges within the intricately orchestrated (arch)space that we have
somehow managed to bring into being by means of accepting the rules which
are in charge of our language games (especially the game of giving and
asking for reasons). To study meanings is – ultimately – to study inferential
(and other) rules implicit to our linguistic practices.
Formal Semantics & Pragmatics
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The future of formal semantics?
Formal semantics has been often understood as revealing the meanings
which our expressions stand for – be they mental or other kinds of entities.
From this viewpoint, the future I foresee for the theory of meaning may seem
to lead to its decline. But this is wrong. What we need is not an abolishment of
formal semantics, but rather a more appropriate way of understanding it. As I
see it, we need to see the set-theoretical (or other) explications of meanings it
brings about as encapsulations of the expressions' inferential roles (see
Peregrin, 2001; 2004).
In fact, in this way, as I believe, we only return to the roots of formal
semantics. Frege, who introduced functions as the principal tool of
explicating meanings, did so on the basis of considering functioning of
corresponding expressions: the fact that he accounts for the word blue as
denoting the function mapping blue objects on T and non-blue on F is not a
result of an attempt at portraying its pre-formal meaning, but rather of
considering with which names it forms true sentences.
Formal Semantics & Pragmatics
19.-21.11.2010, Riga
Peregrin: P & F of Meaning
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References
Brandom, R. (1994): Making It Explicit, Cambridge (Mass.).
Chomsky, N. (1993): Language and Thought, Wakefield.
Coffa, A. (1991): The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap, Cambridge.
Devitt, M. (1994): 'The Methodology of Naturalistic Semantics', J Phil 91, 545-572.
Peregrin, J. (2001): Meaning and Structure, Aldershot.
Peregrin, J. (2004): 'Pragmatismus und Semantik', in A. Fuhrmann and E. J. Olsson
(eds.): Pragmatisch denken, Frankfurt a M., 89-108.
Peregrin, J. (2008): 'Inferentialist Approach to Semantics', Phil Compass 3, 1208-1223.
Peregrin, J. (to appear): 'The Normative Dimension of Discourse', in K. Allan and K.
Jasczolt (eds.): Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, Cambridge.
Quine, V.W.O. (1992): Pursuit of Truth, Cambridge.
Quine, W.V.O. (1969): Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, New York.
Russell, B. (1912): The Problems of Philosophy, Home University Library.
Searle, J. (1983): Intentionality, Cambridge.
Sellars, W. (1949): ‘Language, Rules and Behavior,’ in S. Hook (ed.): John Dewey:
Philosopher of Science and Freedom, New York, 289-315.
Sellars, W. (1954): 'Some Reflections on Language Games', Phil of Sci 21, 204-228.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958): The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953): Philosophische Untersuchungen, Oxford.
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