Use Theory

1. Use Theory

2. Use theory: history & motivation

3. The Causal-Historical Theory Last time we learned about the causal-historical theory of reference.

4. The Causal-Historical Theory Let’s call that baby ‘Feynman’ Feynman Feynman Feynman Feynman

5. The Causal-Historical Theory Let’s call that baby ‘Feynman’ Feynman Feynman Feynman Feynman Historical Chain of Transmission

6. The Causal-Historical Theory Feynman Feynman Feynman Feynman Denotation

7. Causal Theories We didn’t have time to look at other causal theories of reference/ meaning. The general motivation, though, was that causal interaction with the referent was far more determinate than mere description.

8. The Mirror Universe

9. Ignorance: Feynman What people know: • He’s a physicist • He’s famous • He’s dead • He worked on quantum mechanics

10. Ignorance: Feynman But Bohr: • He’s a physicist • He’s famous • He’s dead • He worked on quantum mechanics

11. Earth Twin Earth

12. Causal Isolation However, it’s widely recognized that causation can’t be essential to all meaning, because some things that are meant can’t be causes or effects.

13. Causal Isolation Consider words like ‘and,’ ‘or,’ and ‘not.’ Conjunction can’t cause or be caused by anything. There’s nothing to point to and say “let that be the meaning of ‘and.’”

14. Use to the Rescue However, people who have mastered the meaning of ‘and’ are inclined to use the word ‘and’ in the following ways: If they believe ‘A and B’: • Then they would be willing to believe ‘A’ • And they would be willing to believe ‘B’

15. Use to the Rescue However, people who have mastered the meaning of ‘and’ are inclined to use the word ‘and’ in the following ways: If they believe ‘A’ And they believe ‘B’: • Then they would be willing to believe ‘A and B’

16. Suggestion So maybe ‘and’ means what it does because of how people use it in inference. If you didn’t use ‘and’ in those ways, you wouldn’t mean what everyone else means by ‘and,’ and if you use ‘or’ in those ways, then by ‘or’ you mean what everyone else means by ‘and.’ Their meaning is their use.

17. Further Suggestion And maybe, just maybe, we were wrong to become causal theorists in the first place. Maybe the meaning of ‘Richard Feynman’ and the meaning of ‘water’ is also how we use those words.

18. Careful! But be careful. It’s not enough to say that the meaning of the words is “determined by how they’re used.” That’s in a way accepted by everyone. According to a causal theorist, the meaning of ‘water’ is determined by the fact that your uses of the word ‘water’ are caused by a certain substance (namely, water).

19. Careful! A real “use theory” doesn’t say use merely plays a role in meaning– it says that use is meaning!

20. The Denial of Denotation One of the big reasons people have had for adopting use theories is that they have come to deny that words (or all words, or many words) have denotations. They don’t think names refer to things, or that common nouns and verbs apply to things, or that sentences can be true or false.

21. Denotation Relations Why do I connect these ideas: refer to, apply to, and truth/ falsity? Because truth/ falsity can be defined in terms of the former: A sentence “Michael is hungry” is true := “hungry” applies to the referent of “Michael.”

22. Denotation Difficulties Why would anyone want to give up on these relations? Usually, it’s out of an endless parade of historical failures in accounting for denotation.

23. Denotation Difficulties The idea theory can’t explain why ‘dog’ applies to dogs, because resemblance is indeterminate. Many non-dogs resemble the idea associated with ‘dog.’

24. Denotation Difficulties The verification theory won’t work, for similar reasons. Many non-dogs (e.g. fake dogs) confirm ‘dog’ more than some dogs do (e.g. abnormal dogs).

25. Denotation Difficulties And the causal theory won’t work, for similar reasons. Dogs often cause me to say ‘dog’ or think DOG. But so do fake dogs, and marsupial “dogs” and pictures of dogs, and so on.

26. The Denial of Connotation The use theory thus denies that denotations even exist. But it does not thus identify meanings with any of the classical connotations.

27. The Denial of Connotation Remember that ideas (mental images) and verification conditions (possible experiences) were posited as meanings (connotations) solely to explain why words had the denotations that they did. If you deny the existence of denotations, why do you think mental images are meanings? What’s special about them?

28. The Middle Way Instead, the use theorist maintains that meaning is non-mental (not connotation). It’s out there in the world. But it’s not the stuff out there in the world we think of as denotation either.

29. The Middle Way ‘Michael’ doesn’t, for instance, mean me. The meaning of an expression = how it is used. Sure, use is out there in the world. But the (relevant) use of ‘Michael’ need not involve me at all.

30. Horwich and the use theory

31. Paul Horwich Professor of Philosophy at New York University.

32. Meanings are Concepts Horwich’s first thesis is that meanings are concepts.

33. Meanings are Concepts “Concepts” are what psychologists and philosophers turned to after the whole idea theory didn’t work out. Concepts are mental entities, but they are not little pictures in the mind.

34. Meanings are Concepts Horwich, influenced by the Computational Theory of Mind, takes them to be expressions in the “language of thought” a.k.a. “Mentalese.”

35. Metasemantics Remember that a theory of meaning is not a theory that tells you what meanings are (though often it does that as well)– It’s one that tells you why words have the meanings they do, rather than different meanings, or no meanings at all.

36. Metasemantics So what’s Horwich’s story of how words get their meanings (why do they mean the concepts they do, rather than other concepts or none at all?)? To understand this, we’ll have to look at Grice’s distinction between natural and non-natural meaning.

37. Natural Meaning One meaning of the word ‘meaning’ is indication.

38. Indication Smoke means (indicates the presence of) fire.

39. Indication These Koplik’s spots mean your child has measles.

40. Indication The fact that there’s 16 rings on this tree stump means that the tree was 26 years old when it was cut down.

41. Features of Natural Meaning • We can’t say “these spots mean the child has measles, but the child doesn’t have measles.” • We can’t say “these spots mean ‘the child has measles.’” • It can’t be true that someone means the child has measles by these spots.

42. Non-Natural Meaning • We can say “John’s utterance ‘l’enfant a la rougeole’ means the child has measles, but the child doesn’t have measles. • We can say “This sentence (‘l’enfant a la rougeole’) means ‘the child has measles.’” • It can be true that someone means the child has measles by “l’enfant a la rougeole.”

43. ‘Meaning’ is Ambiguous Grice thus concludes that there are two English verbs ‘to mean.’ One just expresses natural meaning, roughly: “A means B = Whenever A is true, it’s a fact of nature that B is true as well.”

44. ‘Meaning’ is Ambiguous The other is non-natural meaning, and it’s what we’re trying to analyze when we do metasemantic theorizing.

45. The Univocality of Meaning Horwich, however, claims that there’s only one sense of ‘meaning,’ the natural one.

46. The Univocality of Meaning The way he understands natural meaning is: ‘smoke means fire = smoke gives us a good reason to believe there’s fire.’ So he says ‘cat’ means the concept CAT = (utterances of) ‘cat’ give us a good reason to believe there’s (in the speaker’s mind) CAT.

47. Univocality as Virtuous “It is a virtue of this account that it respects the relational appearance of meaning attributions and that it calls for no special, ad hoc assumption about the meaning of ‘means’ in semantic contexts.”

48. Virtue? Horwich, in his ‘ad hoc’ remark, seems to forget that there were principled reasons for denying the univocality of ‘meaning.’

49. Natural Meaning is Transitive Furthermore, natural meaning is transitive: • Thunder means there’s lightning. • Lightning means there’s unbalanced electric charges in the clouds. • Therefore, thunder means there’s unbalanced electric charges in the clouds.

50. Non-Natural Meaning is Not Transitive If all meaning were natural meaning we’d expect: • ‘salt’ means there’s SALT • SALT means there’s PEPPER • Therefore ‘salt’ means PEPPER