Historical and contemporary theories of meaning

Ideational semantics

The 17th-century British empiricist John Locke held that linguistic meaning is mental: words are used to encode and convey thoughts, or ideas. Successful communication requires that the hearer correctly decode the speaker’s words into their associated ideas. So construed, the meaning of an expression, according to Locke, is the idea associated with it in the mind of anyone who knows and understands that expression.

But the ideational account of meaning, as Locke’s view is sometimes called, is vulnerable to several objections. Suppose, for example, that a person’s idea of grass is associated in his mind with the idea of warm weather. It would follow that part of the meaning of grass, for this person, is warm weather. If so, then the meaning of grass or any other word may be different for each person. And in that case, how does anyone fully understand anyone else? Similarly, suppose that a person mistakenly associates the word beech with the idea of an elm tree. Would it follow that, for this person, beech means elm? If so, how is it possible to say that anyone misunderstands the meaning of a word or uses a word incorrectly?

As such examples show, the ideational account ignores the “public” nature of meaning. Whatever meanings are, they must be things that different speakers can learn from and share with one another.

A further objection concerns compositionality. Suppose that a person associates the complex expression brown cow with the idea of fear, though he is not fearful of all brown things or of all cows—only brown cows. Thus, the meaning of brown cow, for this person, is not determined by or predictable from the meanings of brown and cow. Because the example can be generalized (anyone can associate any idea with any complex expression), it follows that the ideational account is unable to explain the compositionality of natural languages.

Behaviourist semantics

In an effort to render linguistic meaning public and the study of linguistic meaning more “scientific,” the American psychologist B.F. Skinner (1904–90) proposed that the correct semantics for a natural language is behaviouristic: the meaning of an expression, as uttered on a particular occasion, is either (1) the behavioral stimulus that produces the utterance, (2) the behavioral response that the utterance produces, or (3) a combination of both. Thus, the meaning of fire! as uttered on a particular occasion might include running or calling for help. But even on a single occasion it is possible that not everyone who hears fire! will respond by running or calling for help. Suppose, for example, that the hearers of the utterance include a firefighter, a pyromaniac, and a person who happens to know that the speaker is a pathological liar. The behaviourist account seems committed to the implausible view that the meaning of fire! for those people is different from the meaning of fire! for others who run or call for help.

The behaviourist account, like the ideational one, is also vulnerable to the objection based on compositionality. Suppose that a person’s body recoils when he hears brown cow but not when he hears either brown or cow alone. The meaning of brown cow, which includes recoiling, is therefore not determined by or predictable from the meanings of brown and cow.

Referential semantics

As noted above, reference is an apparent relation between a word and the world. Russell, following the 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, pursued the intuition that linguistic expressions are signs of something other than themselves. He suggested that the meaning of an expression is whatever that expression applies to, thus removing meaning from the minds of its users and placing it squarely in the world. According to a referential semantics, all that one learns when one learns the meaning of tomato is that it applies to tomatoes and to nothing else. One advantage of a referential semantics is that it respects compositionality: the meaning of red tomato is a function of the meanings of red and tomato, because red tomato will apply to anything that is both red and a tomato.

But what about expressions that apparently refer to nothing at all, such as unicorn? A referential semantics would appear to be committed to the view that expressions such as unicorn, Santa Claus, and Sherlock Holmes are meaningless. Another problem, first pointed out by Frege, is that two expressions may have the same referent without having the same meaning. The morning star and the evening star, for example, refer to the same object, the planet Venus, but they are not synonymous. As Frege noted, it is possible to believe that the morning star and the evening star are not identical without being irrational (indeed, the identity of the morning star and the evening star was a scientific discovery).

Such examples have led some philosophers, including Mill himself and Saul Kripke, to conclude that proper names lack meaning. But the problem also affects common nouns, including definite descriptions. The descriptions the first president of the United States and the husband of Martha Washington apply to the same individual but are not synonymous. It is possible to understand both without recognizing that they refer to the same person. It follows that meaning cannot be the same as reference.

Possible-world semantics

Perhaps unicorn is meaningful because of what it would apply to in certain circumstances, though in actuality it does not apply to anything. And perhaps the descriptions the first president of the United States and the husband of Martha Washington are not synonymous because one can imagine circumstances in which the former would apply and the latter would not, and vice versa. George Washington might not have become the first president, or Martha might not have married him. Suppose that the meaning of an expression is determined not only by what it applies to in the actual world but also by what it would apply to in different “possible worlds.” According to possible-world semantics, the meaning of a proper or common noun is a function from possible worlds (including the actual world) to individuals or things: given a possible world as input, the meaning returns as output the individual or thing that the noun applies to in that world. The meaning of the first president of the United States determines that the expression applies to George Washington in the actual world but to other individuals in other possible worlds. Such a refinement of referential semantics does not compromise compositionality, because the meaning of the first president of the United States is still a function of the meanings of its constituent expressions in any possible world. The proposal also seems to account for the difference in meaning between descriptions whose referents are the same, and it seems to explain how an expression can fail to refer to anything and still be meaningful.

Yet there are important problems with possible-world semantics. Chief among them is the notion of a possible world itself, which is not well understood. In addition, it turns out that possible-world semantics does not entirely dispose of objections based on coreferential but nonsynonymous expressions and nonreferential but meaningful expressions. The expressions triangular and trilateral, for example, are not synonymous, but there is no possible world in which they do not apply to exactly the same things. And the expression round square appears to be meaningful, but there is no possible world in which it applies to anything at all. Such examples are easy to multiply.

Fregean semantics

According to Frege, the meaning of an expression consists of two elements: a referent and what he called a “sense.” Both the referent and the sense of an expression contribute systematically to the truth or falsehood (the “truth value”) of the sentences in which the expression occurs.

As noted above, Frege pointed out that the substitution of coreferring expressions in a sentence does not always preserve truth value: if Smith does not know that George Washington was the first president of the United States, then Smith believes that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree can be true while Smith believes that the first president of the United States chopped down a cherry tree is false. Frege’s explanation of the phenomenon was that, in such sentences, truth value is determined not only by reference but also by sense. The sense of an expression, roughly speaking, is not the thing the expression refers to but the way in which it refers to that thing. The sense of an expression determines what the expression refers to. Although each sense determines a single referent, a single referent may be determined by more than one sense. Thus, George Washington and the first president of the United States have the same referent but different senses. The two belief sentences can differ in truth value because, although both are about the same individual, the expressions referring to that individual pick him out in different ways.

Verificationist semantics

Frege did not address the problem of how linguistic expressions come to have the meanings they do. A natural, albeit vague, answer is that expressions mean what they do because of what speakers do with them. An example of that approach is provided by the school of logical positivism, which was developed by members of the Vienna Circle discussion group in the 1920s and ’30s. According to the logical positivists, the meaning of a sentence is given by an account of the experiences on the basis of which the sentence could be verified. Sentences that are unverifiable through any possible experience (including many ethical, religious, and metaphysical sentences) are literally meaningless.

The basic idea underlying verificationism is that meaning results from links between language and experience: some sentences have meaning because they are definable in terms of other sentences, but ultimately there must be certain basic sentences, what the logical positivists called “observation sentences,” whose meaning derives from their direct connection with experience and specifically from the fact that they are reports of experience. The meaning of an expression smaller than a sentence is similarly dependent on experience. Roughly speaking, the meaning of an expression is given by an account of the experiences on the basis of which one could verify that the expression applies to one thing or another. Although the circumstances in which triangular and trilateral apply are the same, speakers go about verifying those applications in different ways.

The case against verificationism was most ardently pressed in the 1950s by the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. He argued that experience cannot be used to verify individual observation sentences, because any experience can be taken to verify a given observation sentence provided that sufficient adjustments are made in the truth values of the other sentences that make up the scientific theory in which the sentence is embedded. In the case of word meaning, Quine asked: What experience, or empirical evidence, could determine what a word means? He contended that the only acceptable evidence is behavioral, given the necessity that meanings be public. But behavioral evidence cannot determine whether a person’s words mean one thing or another; alternative interpretations, each compatible with all the behavioral evidence, will always be available. (For example, what possible behavioral evidence could determine that by gavagai a speaker means “rabbit” rather than “undetached rabbit part” or “time-slice of a rabbit”?) From the underdetermination of meaning by empirical evidence, Quine inferred that there is no “fact of the matter” regarding what a word means.

Truth-conditional semantics

Confronted with the skepticism of Quine, his student Donald Davidson made a significant effort in the 1960s and ’70s to resuscitate meaning. Davidson attempted to account for meaning not in terms of behaviour but on the basis of truth, which by then had become more logically tractable than meaning because of work in the 1930s by the Polish logician Alfred Tarski. Tarski defined truth for formal (logical or mathematical) languages in terms of a relation of “satisfaction” between the constituents of a sentence and sequences of objects. Truth is thereby determined systematically by the satisfaction of sentential constituents. Tarski showed how to derive, from axioms and rules, certain statements that specify the conditions under which any sentence of a given formal language is true.

Davidson’s innovation was to employ a Tarskian theory of truth as a theory of meaning. Adopting Tarksi’s distinction between an “object language” (an ordinary language used to talk about things in the world) and a “metalanguage” (an artificial language used to analyze or describe an object language), Davidson proposed that a semantic theory of a natural language is adequate just in case, for each sentence in the object language, the theory entails a statement of the form ‘S’ is true just in case p, where S is a sentence in the object language and p is a translation of that sentence in the metalanguage. For the sentence snow is white, for example, the theory should entail a statement of the form ‘snow is white’ is true just in case snow is white. Tarski had already shown how to derive such statements. Davidson’s appropriation of Tarski’s theory of truth thus rendered substantive the rough but venerable idea that to give the meaning of a sentence is to give its truth conditions.

But how can such a truth-conditional semantics explain the phenomena for which Frege invoked the notion of sense? The sentences George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and the first president of the United States chopped down a cherry tree share truth conditions: both are true just in case the individual who happens to be picked out by George Washington and the first president of the United States chopped down a cherry tree. But the sentences are not synonymous. Davidson suggested that the problem could be solved by constructing a semantic theory for the language of any given speaker who uses those sentences. In order to do so, one must observe the constraints of “radical interpretation”—in particular, the “principle of charity,” which states that a speaker’s sentences should be interpreted in such a way that most of them are counted as truthful. Interpretation proceeds as follows: collect the sentences that a speaker “holds true,” then construct a semantic theory that entails for each of those sentences a statement of the circumstances in which the speaker would hold that sentence true. According to Davidson, any such theory will entail ‘George Washington chopped down a cherry tree’ is true just in case George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and ‘the first president of the United States chopped down a cherry tree’ is true just in case the first president of the United States chopped down a cherry tree but not ‘George Washington chopped down a cherry tree’ is true just in case the first president of the United States chopped down a cherry tree or ‘the first president of the United States chopped down a cherry tree’ is true just in case George Washington chopped down a cherry tree. The fact that the circumstances in which the speaker would hold true George Washington chopped down a cherry tree are different from the circumstances in which he would hold true the first president of the United States chopped down a cherry tree accounts for their difference in meaning, thus solving Frege’s problem.

Although Davidson’s program was influential, most philosophers have remained skeptical of the idea that a theory of truth can serve as a theory of meaning, in part because of objections such as the following. Suppose that two speakers, A and B, are identical psychological twins, so that their psychological states are essentially undistinguishable. Each speaker utters the sentence I am 30 years old. Although they utter the same sentence, the referent of I as uttered by A is different from the referent of I as uttered by B. The truth conditions of the two utterances, therefore, will be different. According to the truth-conditional account, the meanings of the two utterances must accordingly be different. It follows that A and B do not understand, or mentally grasp, the meanings of their utterances. If they did, the fact that the meanings are different would entail that A’s psychological state is different from B’s. But by hypothesis their psychological states are the same. The advocate of the truth-conditional account thus faces a dilemma: either meaning is not the same as truth conditions, or speakers do not understand their utterances of sentences such as I am 30 years old.

The American philosophers Hilary Putnam and David Kaplan independently proposed the same solution to the problem. According to them, the truth conditions of the two utterances are different, and so are their meanings. And yet both speakers understand the meanings of their utterances, despite the fact that their psychological states are the same. In particular, both speakers understand their utterances of I. But what understanding an utterance of I consists of is mentally grasping the “character” (or “stereotype”) of I, which is the same in both utterances. The character of I is simply a function that associates an utterance of I in a particular context with the individual who makes that utterance in that context. Thus, both speakers understand the meanings of their utterances, which are different, by virtue of their grasping the same character. Similar examples can be generated on the basis of other so-called “deictic” expressions, whose referents are essentially tied to the context in which they are used (e.g., you, this, that, here, and now).

Conceptual-role semantics

In order to avoid having to distinguish between meaning and character, some philosophers, including Gilbert Harman and Ned Block, have recommended supplementing a theory of truth with what is called a conceptual-role semantics (also known as cognitive-role, computational-role, or inferential-role semantics). According to that approach, the meaning of an expression for a speaker is the same as its conceptual role in the speaker’s mental life. Roughly speaking, the conceptual role of an expression is the sum of its contributions to inferences that involve sentences containing that expression. Because the conceptual role played by I is the same for both A and B, the meanings of the two utterances of I am 30 years old are the same, even though the referent of I in each case is distinct. In contrast, the meanings of George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and the first president of the United States chopped down a cherry tree are different, even though they have the same truth conditions, because the conceptual role of George Washington is different from that of the first president of the United States for any speaker. Because the meanings of the two sentences are different, the corresponding beliefs are different, and this explains how it is possible for a person to affirm one and deny the other without being irrational.

Although the notion of conceptual role is not new, what exactly a conceptual role is and what form a theory of conceptual roles should take remain far from clear. In addition, some implications of conceptual-role semantics are strongly counterintuitive. For example, in order to explain how the meaning of tomato can be the same for two speakers, conceptual-role semantics must claim that the word plays the same conceptual role in the two speakers’ mental lives. But this is extremely unlikely (unless the speakers happen to be psychological identical twins). As long as there is the slightest difference between them with respect to the inferences they are prepared to draw using sentences containing tomato, the conceptual roles of that word will differ. But then it is difficult to see how any sense could be made of communication. If each speaker assigns a different meaning to tomato and presumably to most other words, there is no common meaning to be communicated, and it is a mystery how speakers understand one another. If, on the other hand, the same words have the same meanings, it must follow that the words play the same conceptual roles, in which case there would be no need for communication; each speaker would understand and believe exactly what every other speaker does. In addition, conceptual-role semantics seems unable to account for compositionality, since the conceptual role of the complex expression brown cow, in the speaker who fears brown cows but not all brown things or all cows, is not determined by nor predictable from the conceptual roles of brown and cow.

Gricean semantics

The British philosopher Paul Grice (1913–88) and his followers hoped to explain meaning solely in terms of beliefs and other mental states. Grice’s suggestion was that the meaning of a sentence can be understood in terms of a speaker’s intention to induce a belief in the hearer by means of the hearer’s recognition of that intention.

Grice’s analysis is based on the notion of “speaker meaning,” which he defines as follows: a speaker S means something by an utterance U just in case S intends U to produce a certain effect in a hearer H by means of H’s recognition of that intention. The speaker meaning of U in such a case is the effect that S intends to produce in H by means of H’s recognition of that intention. Suppose, for example, that S utters the sky is falling to H, and, as a result, H forms the belief that the sky is falling. In such a case, according to Grice, S had several specific intentions: first, he intended to utter the sky is falling; second, he intended that H should recognize that he (S) uttered the sky is falling; third, he intended that H should recognize his (S’s) intention to utter the sky is falling; and fourth, he intended that H should recognize that he (S) intended H to form the belief that the sky is falling. In those circumstances, according to Grice, the sky is falling has the speaker meaning that the sky is falling. The place of conventional meaning in Grice’s conception of language appears to be that it constitutes a feature of words that speakers can exploit in realizing the intentions referred to in his analysis of speaker meaning.

Although Grice’s approach is not as popular as it once was, the general goal of reducing meaning to the psychological states of speakers is now widely accepted. In that sense, both Gricean semantics and conceptual-role semantics represent a return to the 17th century’s emphasis on inner or mental aspects of meaning over outer or worldly aspects. To what extent semantic properties can be attributed to features of the human mind remains a deep problem for further study.