Making Knowledge of Meaning Explicit

Abstract

In Michael Dummett’s bold view the philosophical project is the analysis of thought; moreover, he argues, the distinctive contribution made by analytic philosophy to this project is to take the analysis of language to be the route to the analysis of thought. The theory of meaning thus becomes for him the foundation of all philosophy. To be sure this is an audacious, but, to some,¹ enchanting, vision of philosophy. It is not a vision that I will go far in defending here; rather I want to begin by noticing a presumption buried — I don’t claim it to be buried at all deeply — in this conception. A theory of meaning — what Dummett also calls ‘a meaning-theory’ — is a specification of the meaning of every expression in some natural language. The question thus forces itself on us: what justifies favouring one such theory over rivals? We need an answer to this question because, without an interesting answer, we might satisfy ourselves with a theory of meaning which fails to discern structure and, indeed, which is trivial in its specification of the meanings of expressions. Analytical Philosophy’s momentous step, that step which Dummett hails Frege for having been the first to take, would then be anything but that. Dummett’s answer to this question is apparently clear and again obviously bold: the theory ought to articulate or to make explicit speakers’ knowledge of their own language.