Abstract
According to a well-established tradition in the philosophy of language, we can understand what makes an arbitrary sound, gesture, or marking into a meaningful linguistic expression only by appealing to mental states, such as beliefs and intentions. In this paper, I explore the contrasting possibility of understanding the meaningfulness of linguistic expressions just in terms of observable linguistic behavior. Specifically, I explore the view that a type of sound (or other item) becomes a meaningful linguistic expression within a group in virtue of the production of that type of item becoming that group’s widespread, copied way of getting others to involve an object or relation in their activity. After discussing a preliminary version of the view, I develop it in response to some key concerns about whether it really does, as a matter of fact, eschew mental states, and about its adequacy as an account of linguistic meaning.
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Notes
For more on the notion of a foundational theory of meaning and its differences from other semantic projects, see Kaplan (1989, pp. 573–574), Stalnaker (2003, pp. 166–167), Williams (2007, p. 361), García-Carpintero (2012a, p. 397), Burgess and Sherman (2014, pp. 1–2), Speaks (2015), and Simchen (2017, p. 175). Many of these authors also (or exclusively) use the term ‘metasemantics’ for the project of giving a foundational theory of meaning. I prefer the term ‘foundational theory of meaning’ because metasemantics can also be thought of as a broader enterprise that includes other work that is in some sense prior to semantic theory, such as, for instance, work on the metaphysics of propositions (cf. Burgess and Sherman 2014).
For example, Stephen Schiffer (1972) and Jonathan Bennett (1976) build on work by Paul Grice (1989) to argue for foundational theories of meaning that appeal to speakers’ intentions. Other foundational theories of meaning that appeal to mental states have been suggested by David Lewis (1975), Brian Loar (1976), Donald Davidson (1973) [at least as Manuel García-Carpintero (2012a) interprets him (pp. 403–404)], Michael Dummett (1996), Paul Horwich (1998, 2004), Wayne Davis (2003, 2005), John Hawthorne (2007), García-Carpintero (2012b), and Josh Armstrong (2016b).
For more on this kind of approach to the broader phenomenon of linguistic communication, see Stotts (forthcoming).
Thus, the BTM’s aim of giving an entirely behavioral, non-mental story about the facts in virtue of which linguistic expressions are meaningful does not preclude it from capturing the fact that some words have mental objects as their meanings.
I use reversed angle brackets (> <) to designate the type of sound that corresponds to the spelling within the brackets. The issue of how to individuate sound types will receive discussion below.
Here I am inspired by Ruth Millikan (2005), who divides words into types by their copying lineages (pp. 33–34, 60–62).
I should note that if, as a matter of fact, >candle< and >candid< did come from >candere< by means of a simple shift in pronunciation (as with the variant pronunciations of >bagel <) rather than through the influence of two other chains of copying, then >candle< and >candid< would be the same sound, pronounced differently. We might operate under the belief that they are two different sounds, but we would just be wrong about that feature of our language.
I should note that here I am assuming a broadly externalist notion of mental content according to which actual objects and relations in the world are included in the content of one’s mental states.
This means that the BTM is a productivist (rather than interpretationist) foundational theory of meaning, in Ori Simchen’s (2017) terminology.
See Stotts (2017) for more on these notions of accessibility and arbitrariness.
Millikan’s (2005) definition includes a counterfactual component: “For one thing to be ‘reproduced’ from another, all that is required is that there be a mechanism that produces the second on the model of the first, such that had the first been different in specifiable respects, that would have caused the second to differ accordingly” (p. 31, my italics). Millikan’s counterfactual component is too strong. I might, for instance, copy someone’s dance moves without it being the case that I would still have copied her if she had engaged in different dance moves. All that’s needed is an actual causal connection between the way the original dancer moves, and the way I move. I should also note that Millikan (2005) uses the term ‘direct copying’ for just one particular kind of reproduction, in which one individual directly observes and imitates another (pp. 4–5). My notion of copying is broader than this—it encompasses any situation in which the right causal connection obtains between two instances of behavior. However, I do emphasize the role of direct copying more than Millikan does, which makes the terminological shift apt.
I am grateful to Monique Wonderly for this point.
My use of the ‘as a way of’ locution is inspired by Israel et al. (1993).
The BTM’s emphasis on the behavioral aspect of use also differentiates it from other use theories that emphasize a mental aspect of use, such as Dummett’s (1996) view that it is not just use itself but the knowledge guiding speakers’ use that gives rise to expression meaning (pp. 104–105), and Horwich’s (2004) view that what gives rise to expression meaning is the underived use of sentences containing that expression in drawing inferences (pp. 352, 360). While we’re comparing the BTM to other work on meaning, it’s worthwhile to consider its relationship to work on meaning that in some way shares, or seems to share, the BTM’s emphasis on behavior. W.V.O. Quine (1960/2013) treats a key kind of meaning (namely, stimulus meaning) as a matter of dispositions to engage in the behavior of assenting and dissenting to a given sentence in various contexts (pp. 29–30). This differs from the BTM in incorporating actual behavior only as “evidence” for the existence of a disposition, where it is the disposition and not the behavior that actually gives rise to meaning (Quine 1960/2013, p. 37). Bertrand Russell (1980) emphasizes behavior when discussing meaning, but his focus is on a learned tendency to produce a sound when a certain object is present (on the speaker’s side) and a tendency to behave as if the object is present when one encounters that sound (on the hearer’s side), rather than on effect-sensitive behavior (pp. 14, 61, 66–68). Millikan (2005) offers a foundational theory of meaning that uses her notion of copying (and conventions), but her theory is not entirely behavioral. What is copied to give rise to meaning is a pattern that includes not just the speaker’s utterance, but also (in the case of sentences in the indicative mood) the hearer’s mental activity of forming a belief (Millikan 2005, pp. 58–59). Brian Skyrms’s (2010) work on meaning and the BTM are mutually complementary. The projects are different—Skyrms’s (2010) primary aim is not to give a foundational account of the facts in virtue of which items become meaningful expressions, but rather, he investigates the kinds of behavioral mechanisms that could allow expression meaning to spontaneously emerge (p. 1). Building on Skyrms’s work, Kevin Zollman (2005) and Elliott Wagner (2009, 2015) have focused on the mechanism of imitation in particular (cf. Skyrms 2010, pp. 101–103). This work suggests that the kind of copying behavior which the BTM treats as partially constitutive of expression meaning is also plausible as a mechanism by means of which expression meaning actually emerged. Michael Johnson and Jennifer Nado (2014) offer what appears to be a behavioral foundational theory of meaning, but their view shares Quine’s focus on dispositions toward linguistic behavior rather than behavior itself (though the particular dispositions to which they appeal are different) (pp. 81–82). Furthermore, Johnson and Nado aim to explain meaning only within the idiolects of particular speakers, so their target is not actually the public notion of expression meaning that the BTM aims to capture.
I am grateful to the participants in the Fall 2013 New York Philosophy of Language Workshop for pressing similar objections.
Ben Lennertz helped me recognize this problem. I used a platitude as my example here, because platitudes are the only sentences that typically get copied directly. In the case of other sentences, the syntactic form and individual words are copied, but generally not the sentence as a whole (cf. Millikan 2005, p. 3). This means that non-platitudinous sentences do not satisfy condition (1) of (BTM 1).
An anonymous referee made me aware of a problem about gerrymandered disjunctive effects that is worth mentioning here. When I produce >Disneyland<, I am not only likely to cause my audience to involve the Anaheim theme park in activity, but I am also likely to cause them to involve the Anaheim theme park or the Rosetta stone in their activity. The larger disjunctive effect might seem to restrict the smaller one. Clause (1b) in the definition of restriction precludes this result: if the effect of the audience involving the theme park or the Rosetta Stone in their activity occurs, it will occur only in virtue of the occurrence of the audience involving the theme park in their activity. This contrasts notably with the example about Rome, in which the audience involving the state of affairs in which Rome was not built in a day in their activity would not occur just in virtue of the audience involving Rome in their activity.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for bringing this concern to my attention.
In fact, there are cases that suggest that conditions (1) and (2), as stated in this paper, are not necessary: expression meaning could arise among beings that have evolved to have an entirely innate communication system (Peacocke 1976, pp. 168–169), or among beings that are endowed by a chance event (such as radiation exposure) with a single communication system from which they are then unable to deviate (Armstrong 2016a, p. 103). I am grateful to Daniel Harris for discussion of these issues.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following people for helpful conversations related to this paper: Peter Graham, Daniel Harris, Ruth Millikan, Michael Nelson, John Perry, John Ramsey, Indrek Reiland, Howard Wettstein, Larry Wright, and members of a work-in-progress group at the University of California, Riverside. I’m also grateful for feedback from several anonymous referees and from participants in the Fall 2013 New York Philosophy of Language Workshop, 2014 Midsouth Philosophy Conference, 2014 SoCal Philosophy Conference, 2015 Central APA Meeting, and the 2018 Topoi Conference on Foundational Issues in Philosophical Semantics. This paper contains and builds on material from my dissertation, Conventions and Expression Meaning (University of California, Riverside, 2016).
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Stotts, M.H. Behavioral Foundations for Expression Meaning. Topoi 40, 27–42 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09675-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09675-0