Mark Richard
Harvard
"Words and Meanings as Species"
Suppose we accept what I take to be Quine’s view in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, that there are no analyticities, that no statement is immune from revision, that no statement is a fixed point in inquiry. Does that mean, as Grice and Strawson and many others suggest, that we must reject talk of sameness of meaning, or that the notion of meaning has no explanatory power?
Not at all. Quine’s claims are best understood, I think, as suggesting that we need to think of word and phrase meaning as a dynamic phenomenon: meanings are population level entities, in many ways like species. A phrase’s meaning in a population is constituted by those presuppositions of speakers that are, as we might call it, interpretive common ground: roughly those presuppositions that it is common knowledge that users of the phrase expect auditors to recognize that they make in use and expect auditors to employ in interpretation. Just as the genomic and phenotypical profile of a species changes over time without the species ceasing to exist –there can be changes in the species a population lineage realizes without there being a change of the species it realizes –so there can be changes in what constitutes the meaning, the interpretive common ground, of a word in a population without a change of what the word means. Quine’s remarks on analyticity are a straightforward consequence.
In this talk I will develop a view of meaning that reflects this biological analogy. I’ll discuss how we should understand linguistic competence, the relations between this notion of meaning and reference, truth, and the notion of a proposition. And I will say some (not altogether satisfactory) things about the issue linguistic version of the species problem –the problem, that is, of giving tolerably illuminating criteria for when changes in what constitutes a word’s meaning are not just changes in but changes of meaning.
Harvard
"Words and Meanings as Species"
Suppose we accept what I take to be Quine’s view in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, that there are no analyticities, that no statement is immune from revision, that no statement is a fixed point in inquiry. Does that mean, as Grice and Strawson and many others suggest, that we must reject talk of sameness of meaning, or that the notion of meaning has no explanatory power?
Not at all. Quine’s claims are best understood, I think, as suggesting that we need to think of word and phrase meaning as a dynamic phenomenon: meanings are population level entities, in many ways like species. A phrase’s meaning in a population is constituted by those presuppositions of speakers that are, as we might call it, interpretive common ground: roughly those presuppositions that it is common knowledge that users of the phrase expect auditors to recognize that they make in use and expect auditors to employ in interpretation. Just as the genomic and phenotypical profile of a species changes over time without the species ceasing to exist –there can be changes in the species a population lineage realizes without there being a change of the species it realizes –so there can be changes in what constitutes the meaning, the interpretive common ground, of a word in a population without a change of what the word means. Quine’s remarks on analyticity are a straightforward consequence.
In this talk I will develop a view of meaning that reflects this biological analogy. I’ll discuss how we should understand linguistic competence, the relations between this notion of meaning and reference, truth, and the notion of a proposition. And I will say some (not altogether satisfactory) things about the issue linguistic version of the species problem –the problem, that is, of giving tolerably illuminating criteria for when changes in what constitutes a word’s meaning are not just changes in but changes of meaning.