Meaning

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this work is to demystify linguistic meaning—to characterize the underlying nature of this phenomenon in such a way that its familiar attributes become intelligible. To that end, one must consider whether a word's meaning derives from what it refers to, from the way it was defined, from some associated mental image, from its evolutionary function, from a prototype structure, from an inferential role, or from something else. The basic strategy adopted here for answering this question is to scrutinize a range of general features of meaning that have often been thought to provide clues to its origin—facts concerning the relationships between meaning and understanding, truth, a priori knowledge, complex expressions, what ought to be said, and actual word usage. It is a striking result, however, that only the last of these characteristics proves to be capable of guiding us towards a theory of how meaning arises: namely, that all our particular applications of a given word result, in part, from what we mean by it. This characteristic is explained—and can only be explained—by the theory presented here, whereby meaning properties are reduced to law‐like regularities of word use. More specifically, the theory is that each word means what it does in virtue of the fact that a certain ‘acceptance property’ of the word is explanatorily fundamental vis‐à‐vis its overall deployment (where an ’acceptance property’ specifies conditions in which designated sentences containing the word are held true). This proposal is forced to confront a formidable barrage of objections; but in each case an adequate reply is shown to be available.