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Meanings as Species

Mark RichardDraft of August 2018

Odilon Redon, Cover of Les Origines.

© Mark Richard 2018. Do not reproduce or cite without written permission.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Quine and the Species Problem.

1. Private language, public language.

2. Species and meanings.

3. Quine's argument in 'Two Dogmas'.

4. Of what interest is the notion of analyticity?

2. Internalism to the Rescue?

1. Inter-speaker synonymy.

2. Synonymy in an idiolect.

3. Truth by convention.

4. Stipulating synonymy.

5. What constitutes what my words mean?

6. A digression on logical truth.

7. Grice, Strawson, and varieties of synonymy.

8. Conditional credence and connotation.

9. How credence relates to meaning.

10. The rational fixation of belief.

3. What Are Meanings, that We Might Share Them?


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1. Intuitions.

2. Conceptual analysis.

3. Linguistic competence and concepts.

4. Interpretive common ground.

5. Ways of being a competent speaker.

6. Illocution and meaning.

7. "What is said" and literal meaning.

8. Epithets and assertion.

9. Compositionality.

10. Competence and abilities.

11. Conceptual analysis again.

12. The role of intuitions in philosophy.

4. Conceptual Evolution.

1. The linguistic and the biological.

2. Lexical co-ordination.

3. Changes in and changes of meaning.

4. Referential indeterminacy and reported speech.

5. Paradox lost.

6. Referential relativism?

7. Referentialism.

8. Meaning (sort of) divorced from reference.

9. Referentialism and indeterminacy.


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10. Conceptual evolution.

11. Deflationism about reference.

5. Meaning, Thought, and its Ascription.

1. Attitudes and their ascription.

2. Conventional meaning, belief, and assertion.

3. A puzzle about speech reports.

6. Sex and Conversation.

1. A simple model of meaning change.

2. Meaning change and evolution via natural selection.

3. Semantic ecology.

4. Contested meanings and competition.

5. Meanings, memes, and species.

6. Conceptual engineering.

Coda

Bibliography

Index


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Acknowledgments

The beginning and end of Chapter 3 appear in slightly different

form as 'Analysis, Concepts, and Intuitions' in Analytic Philosophy 55 (2014); some of the material in the middle of that chapter appears as 'How do Slurs Mean?' in David Sosa, editor, Bad Words (Oxford University Press, 2018). Sections of 4 and 6 of Chapter 6 appear, again in different form, as 'The A-Project and The B-Project' in Burgess, Cappelen, and Plunkett, editors, Conceptual Engineering (Oxford University Press, 2019). Early bits of Chapter 5 are adapted from the Introduction to my Meaning in Context Volume I (Oxford University Press, 2013). I thank the copyright holders for permission to use this material.

I've read bits of what follows in many venues in the last few years. Thanks for questions, comments and good natured skepticism from audiences at the University of London, the University of Bonn, the University of St. Andrews, Tufts University, the University of Konstanz, the University of Groningen, Dartmouth University, Rutgers University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Palamero, the University of Oslo, Cambridge University, the University of Leeds, the Argentine Society for Analytic Philosophy, and the University of Miami. Members of these audiences who asked particularly useful questions are mentioned in notes. I'm indebted to Herman Cappelen for inviting me many times to Oslo to present early versions of this material. Three readers for the Press gave me detailed and useful comments; thanks to them as well.

My debt in what follows to the writings of Dan Dennett, Hilary Putnam, W.V. Quine, and Bob Stalnaker is too obvious not to mention.


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Finally and as always, thanks to Max, Eleanor, Anneliese, and Michael for being such great kids-who-are-now-adults. And, of course, to my muse, Nancy.


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Introduction

I start with what for me is a puzzle. An analytic sentence is a sentence one can see to be true simply by understanding it (and, perhaps, using a little logic). The hoary example is the sentence 'all bachelors are unmarried': to understand the sentence one must understand the word 'bachelor', knowing that it means unmarried man; so to understand the sentence is not just to know that it says that all bachelors are unmarried but to know that it says something that comes to no more and no less than that all unmarried men are unmarried. But any rational animal who can think the thought that all unmarried men are unmarried knows it.

I accept Quine’s observation in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ that no sentence, not even 'all bachelors are unmarried' is beyond rational revision. I take it to imply that there are not and could not be analytic sentences. But I take seriously the worry Paul Grice and Peter Strawson expressed about Quine’s position. Quine’s view, they pointed out, seems to lead to the conclusion that there is no sense to be made of the idea that expressions can be synonymous, which in turn suggests that talk of meaning is senseless. Thus the puzzle: Can we agree with Quine that there are no analyticites without saying that talk about the meaning of the word ‘bachelor’ is senseless?

Quine’s remarks at the end of ‘Two Dogmas’ suggest a certain picture of our way of being in the linguistic world. At any time, the way we use our words gives them a particular role in inference: for example, our current way of using 'bachelor' gives a double thumbs up to the inference Paul is married; so Paul is not a bachelor. Our linguistic activity also embodies presuppositions about the world and


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assumptions about how others will use their words when they speak. The inferential role and presuppositions accompanying our words determine how we use our language as a tool for inquiry and communication. But the inferential roles and presuppositions that determine use are fluid and dynamic. How we should proceed in the face of “recalcitrant experience” isn’t determined at the outset, and we can change course --change the presuppositions and inferential role that accompany our words -- when it seems apt. So there are no epistemically fixed points in the history of inquiry. Quine’s fundamental worry about analyticity, I think, was that whatever an analytic sentence is supposed to be, it would have to be a fixed point in inquiry.

Now in this picture there is something that plays the role of the meaning of a term --its inferential role and the firmly held presuppositions about use and the world that are associated with it. But this meaning is inherently dynamic. It’s not a fixed Fregean sense or Platonic universal, but a constantly evolving set of hypotheses, inferential dispositions, and expectations about the world and the speech of others. There is also something that potentially functions as a criterion of “sameness of meaning”. Changes in inferential role or in presuppositions that result in fluid conversation being stymied or in the role of a sentence in inquiry being radically revised can be sensibly called changes in meaning. If of a sudden the noun ‘duck’ takes on the role of the noun ‘cookie’ –well, that would be a change of meaning. But the statement sized alterations that Quine had in mind in ‘Two Dogmas’ –dropping, say, the belief that ducks are birds while preserving the thought that ducks are fuzzy feeling aquatic things given to airborne migration –those sorts of changes needn’t upset the apple carts of inquiry and conversation. On this picture, “meaning identity” is not unlike artifact identity. A change in a few of the planks


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and nails that constitute Theseus’ ship doesn’t make the ship disappear; a sudden, wholesale replacement of the wooden parts with aluminum ones does.

Returning to the puzzle we began with: There are no analyticites because nothing plays the role in inquiry and communication that something would have to play to count as analytic. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a phenomenon that deserves to be called ‘meaning’. But it’s an inherently dynamic one, and sameness of meaning is a lot like sameness of ship. At the end of the day, many of our ordinary and theoretical judgments of sameness of meaning --both diachronic and synchronic --are judgments of similarity that we frame in the language of identity. Nothing wrong with a little idealization so long as we are aware that we are idealizing.

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For the moment, let us not quibble with those who are internalists about language. Let us, that is, allow that languages are (in part, at least) psychological structures which, molded by the idiosyncratic histories of speakers in acquiring their tongues, invariably vary in details of pronunciation, syntax, and meaning; each speaker thus speaks her own language. That granted, when speakers are in actual and potential communication there is typically an enormous amount of similarity in their languages. Communication and language acquisition conspire to insure this: enough evidence that others use a word in ways different than I tends ceteris paribus to reproduce the others’ usage in my idiolect. The linguistic sins of the father tend to be visited on the dialect of the daughter.

Speakers in actual and potential communication have similar idiolects; they tend to associate very similar inferential roles and presuppositions with their words. Of course for all the similarity there


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is diversity, not only in presuppositions but in phonology, morphology, syntax and so on. Linguistic individuals interact, and these interactions produce changes in the idiolects of the interactors. These changes are typically ones in which the language of one speaker comes more or less permanently to resemble the language of those with whom he interacts. These changes --that is, the properties acquired because of linguistic interaction --can be and often are transmitted down the road to others. Some such changes spread aggressively across a population whose members communicate with one another; others fizzle or even disappear; yet others (think of slang) persist in a minority equilibrium. Over time enough changes in the linguistic behavior of a linguistic lineage may lead to linguistic behavior that is radically different than the behavior from which it descended.

To me --and, I hasten to say, to many linguists, as my analogy is hardly novel --it is striking how much this resembles the biological world. There we find populations of individuals who are very similar --they have similar genomes. The members of a population interact with another --I believe ‘hook up’ is the biological term --with the interactions resulting in individuals who tend to resemble the interactors. Over time individuals who make up a population lineage may, as changes in transmitted properties become fixed in the population, become so different from their ancestors that we say they are of a different species.

What follows investigates whether linguistic entities –in particular word meanings –are well understood when we think of them as being like those segments of population lineages that we label species. I think we gain a certain amount of illumination if we combine the idea that meanings are species-like with the picture of meaning that a little while back I ascribed to Quine.

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If meanings are species-like, what exactly are they? What, for example, is the meaning of ‘cousin’?

When a speaker speaks, she makes presuppositions that she expects her audience will recognize as made, ones she expects the audience will have ready for use in making sense of what she says. Some such presuppositions are tied to particular words and accompany their use. When we speak of cousins using ‘cousin’, we expect to be recognized as talking about parents’ siblings’ progeny; we expect the audience can access the idea, that this is what cousins are, in interpretation. For some such presuppositions, it will be common ground in a linguistic community that speakers make them and expect that to be recognized by their audience. I call these sorts of presuppositions interpretive common ground, ICG for short. It is for example ICG among English speakers that: ‘cousin’ is a term for cousins, and cousins are parents’ siblings’ progeny; speakers presuppose this and expect the presupposition to be recognized and used in interpretation; everybody is cognizant of this. I say the meaning of lexical items is, to a first approximation, interpretive common ground in the sense just sketched.

You should say: What do you mean by ‘meaning’? I could mean something like the determinant of reference and truth conditions, something like what David Kaplan calls character. Or I could mean something that can be asserted, believed, and so on, something associated with a sentence’s use by convention and context, or more idiosyncratically by a speaker. Or I could mean meaning in the sense of that with which one must be in cognitive contact in order to qualify as a competent speaker in a population.

I mean the last. ICG is relevant to reference and truth, but reference and truth can’t be read off it, if only because what’s common ground is often erroneous. There is, I think, a sense of ‘what is said’ in


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which what is said by a sentence is determined by the ICG of its phrases and their referential semantic values; there are other senses of ‘what is said’ in which ICG (and reference) does not determine what is said. ICG is meaning as the anchor of linguistic competence; it is what knits us together as beings who share a language and thus can communicate.

ICG is pretty clearly a species-like phenomenon. Pick a herd of individuals in actual and potential communication with each other, a herd whose communication is intuitively a matter of their sharing a common tongue. Pick a word –that is, a particular morphology and phonology married to a syntactic role –that is part of the common tongue. Let's say we picked the English speakers of Newton Highlands MA in 1962 and the word 'marry'. Members of the herd assume that everyone knows that when people use 'marry', they make certain presuppositions which they expect their audience to recognize as being made and to invoke if necessary in interpretation. Members of the herd, for example, assume it's commonly known that when a speaker uses 'marry' she assumes that the word picks out a relation that can only hold between a man and a woman; the herd knows that (all know that) speakers expect the audience to recognize this. Each member of the herd has a "lexical entry" for 'marry' that is in part constituted by those presuppositions she takes to be commonly made by users of the word. There will be a good deal of similarity from one entry to another, as speakers tend to cotton on pretty quickly to what all assume all assume. But just as there is variation among the genomes of individual speakers, so will there be variation across the flock about what is commonly presupposed by users of 'marry': Just as some of us have green eyes and others blue, some of us think that people think marriage between second cousins is forbidden. while others think this is not what people think. Just as genomes in a population lineage display allelic variation, so do lexical entries. And


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over time the contours of such variation may shift as a result of speakers' interactions with one another and with the social environment, as the usefulness of an assumption about a word for understanding its use shifts. The presupposition that people think that (people think that) same gendered marriage is impossible, for example, has gone by the wayside.

*

The task of the first three chapters of this essay is to set out in some detail the two ideas I've been pointing at. Those chapters argue that we should honor Quine's insights about analyticity and synonymy, not by abandoning the notion of meaning, but by seeing meaning as a dynamic, population-level phenomenon. And they set out the idea that what I've called interpretive common ground is an important kind of meaning: it has some call to be said what we are trying to articulate when we engage in philosophical analysis; it is meaning in the sense of what anchors linguistic competence. To be a competent speaker of a group's language, I argue, is in part to 'have the right relation' to the ICG of the words the group shares.

Chapter 1 shows how Quine's remarks about meaning and analyticity strongly suggest a picture of meaning on which the biological analogy is apt. There has been and continues to be pertinacious resistance among philosophers to Quine's conclusions in 'Two Dogmas', and Chapter 2 discusses some notable responses to Quine –for example, the complaint that Quine couldn't be right because, well, obviously we could simply stipulate that a novel expression is to mean what an existent phrase does, as well as the idea that broadly Bayesean accounts of rational credence supply all we need to define what it is for a speaker's uses of an expression to mean the same thing from one time to another. Chapter 3 begins with a


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discussion of the idea that much of what's called philosophical analysis is a sort of conceptual (or meaning) analysis. Developing this idea quickly leads to a picture of (one kind of) linguistic meaning as ICG. It takes a fair amount of work –all of it great fun, I assure you –to develop this picture; if you are skeptical of the theoretical utility of the idea of meaning cum ICG on the basis of the five paragraphs devoted to it above, I pray you hold your skepticism in abeyance until you've finished Chapter 3.

Species can and usually do evolve without ceasing to be. But evolution can and does lead to the existence of new species, the death of old. It is a nice question as to what the conditions, interestingly necessary or sufficient, are for a species to come or cease to be. If meanings are species-like, there is a question aussi belle as to when linguistic evolution leads to a linguistic form's having a new meaning. Chapter 4 takes up, but doesn't pretend to solve, this question. It makes a proposal about the sorts of synchronic relations speakers need to stand in order for it to be apt to say that they share a language, and thus for their words to share a meaning. But answering the question, What makes my contemporaries speakers of my tongue?, isn't answering the question, What makes future speakers who use the sentences of my tongue mean what I mean with those sentences?

One approach to this question asks under what conditions it is apt to say that in five (or ten or ten to ten to the ten) minutes, a use of a sentence will say the same as its current use. The not unreasonable thought behind this approach is that since a sentence's meaning is an important determinant of what it can be used to say, switches is saying power tend to indicate mutation of meaning. Since it's natural to think that what an utterance says is in part determined by the reference of its parts and the truth conditions of the whole, this thought leads to the thought that preservation of reference is necessary for sameness of meaning. Chapter 4's midsection is devoted to developing the


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beginnings of an account of the conditions under which one can reasonably ascribe same saying across days, decades or centuries. It takes seriously the idea that there is a certain amount of indeterminacy in what we use our words to talk about –not the wild indeterminacy that says that 'sad' and 'silly' might reasonably be said to have sets of numbers as extensions, but a more tempered indeterminacy thesis that acknowledges that, absent interpretive interests and intent, there is just no saying whether 'water' as used by George II was true of samples of D2O. This means that same saying is to a certain extent a matter of interpretation. And so in so far as a sentence's continuing to mean what it does is tied to its continuing to be a vehicle for saying what it presently does, whether a word preserves its meaning across time is to some extent a matter of interpretation.

I said that it was not unreasonable to think that because sentence meaning is coupled with what sentences say, shifts is saying power are indicators of changes of meaning. As I noted, one might go on to say that since what is said determines truth conditions, shifts in truth conditions must produce shifts in meaning. It is a short road from this conclusion to what Chapter 4 calls referentialism, the view that that within a linguistic community, diachronic constancy of a sentence's character is necessary and sufficient for it to preserve its meaning. If by 'meaning' one means something like 'determinant of reference and truth', referentialism is obvious enough. But if one means something along the lines of 'cognitive anchor of linguistic competence', referentialism is much less obvious. Chapter 4 ends with a frankly skeptical of discussion of referentialism about meaning cum anchor of comptence.

I observed above that it's natural to think that there must be a close connection between what a sentence means, what it is used to say, and the cognitive structures which realize a belief ascribable with


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the sentence. But just as I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all-theoretical-needs notion of sentence meaning, so I don't think there is a distinguished notion of what is ('strictly and literally') said by a sentence.

It is reasonable to think that if we fix a group of speakers in actual and potential communication –be it all the English speakers in zip code 79104, the students in and teacher of this year's iteration of Philosophy 147, or me and my wife –that a sentence will have a "default interpretation" relative to the group, one constructed from its semantic values and the interpretive common ground of its words in the group. Such a default interpretation is the starting point for interpretation, a reification of what someone from the group will have in mind when she begins interpreting the sentence's use.0 Chapter 3 argues that this is one thing that might be identified as 'what is said' by a sentence S's use. But there are many other candidates for this role. There is, for example, what the clause that S contributes to determining the truth conditions of things like Jill said that S or Jack's pretty sure that T. It strikes me as wildly implausible that in making such ascriptions we are very often to be understood as saying that Jack or Jill stands in an interesting relationship to a default interpretation of S as we and our audience use it. When I say, for example, that the Sumerians thought that Venus is a star, I am not suggesting that they made the sorts of presuppositions we make about the Venus and the stars.

Chapter 5 spells out in some detail what I think is going on we ascribe beliefs, sayings, and the like. It seems to me that what we do is to use our words as a representation –a 'translation', if you will –of a state or an utterance of the subject of the ascription. The correctness of an ascription like Jill thought Jack was at the top of the hill turns on 0 This way of putting things ignores contextual variability due to such things as

demonstratives, gradable adjectives, and so on.


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whether its content sentence –the bit after 'that' –is an adequate representation of one of Jill's belief states, with standards of adequacy varying with the interests and intent of the speaker. I argue that, contrary to what you might think, thinking of ascription of belief and the like in this way doesn't make it difficult to understand how computers or non-human animals like wolves and wildebeests can have beliefs and make presuppositions (and so are in principle and practice able to mean things by behavior in the same sense in which our linguistic behavior does). The chapter argues against the idea that there is a close tie between some sort of (not merely referential) meaning of a sentence S and what we are saying about someone when we say that she said or believes or only just realized that S. It closes by using the account of attitudes and attitude ascription it sets out to defend some of the conclusions of Chapter 4 about meaning persistence.

My thought in this book is that we gain a certain amount of insight into language if we think of meaning as analogous to the population level processes studied by biologists. But just how much is meaning change like biological evolution? Is it really a matter of something well described in terms of fitness and selection? This is the topic of Chapter 6, which suggests that some but not all of the processes that drive meaning change look to be like evolution via natural selection. That chapter ends with some discussion of interventions in the process of linguistic evolution, focused on Sally Haslanger's idea of ameliorative philosophical analysis. One of the conclusions of this discussion is that thinking of meaning in the way developed in previous chapters makes the project of ameliorative analysis –as well as many of the projects clustered under the title 'conceptual engineering –appear much more sensible than it is otherwise likely to seem.


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