Abstract
The main theses to be elaborated and supported in what follows are, roughly speaking: (i) that, besides communal languages (such as Swahili, Hindi, Mandarin, and Arabic), we should acknowledge the existence of idiolects – the different, idiosyncratic, personal versions of languages that are deployed by the individual members of linguistic communities; (ii) that the meaning of a word in a communal language is constructed from the somewhat different meanings it has within the different idiolects of the speakers of that language; and (iii) that the word’s meaning in a given person’s idiolect is grounded in the particular implicitly followed rule for its use that explains the particular collection of sentences containing the word that this person accepts.
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Notes
- 1.
To the extent (which appears to be considerable) that people think in a mental version of their overt languages, a person’s idiolect should be taken to include the mental correlates of her overt words, together with their meanings. These are the same as the overt-word-meanings; but those sounds (and corresponding inscriptions) meaning what they do is explained by the more fundamental fact that her mental terms have those meanings.
To the extent, however, that everyone deploys the same language of thought, whose words and meanings are innate and universal, then there can be no distinction between a person’s mentalese idiolect and communal mentalese.
- 2.
The relevant respects of similarity are outlined in thesis (5) below.
- 3.
For what explains someone’s acceptance of a given sentence containing w can be discovered only relative to assumptions about the many other relevant explanatory factors, besides how w’s meaning is constituted – assumptions that include, for example, the way the meanings of all the other words in the sentence are constituted. See my Meaning (1998) and Reflections on Meaning (2005) for details.
And see my “Obligations of Meaning” (forthcoming) for why I take an account of idiolectal meaning in terms of rule-following to be somewhat preferable to one in terms of dispositions (which I advocated in those earlier works).
- 4.
It’s worth noting that many technical terms are derived from everyday words. In such a case the ordinary word retains it’s ordinary communal meaning, but is given an additional one by the experts, a technical meaning; so the word becomes ambiguous. And, at the idiolectal level too, both the experts and any non-experts who venture into technical territory, will give the word-sound two meanings.
- 5.
This is not to deny that it’s controversial, even amongst those philosophers who countenance something like Fregean meanings (= senses), what sort of fact about a person’s words constitutes their having the meanings they do. Nor is it to deny that there’s disagreement over the content of the particular answer I’m now proposing, i.e. over what it is to implicitly follow a rule. This is philosophy, after all!
My own position on the latter issue, following Wittgenstein, is that S implicitly follows the rule, “To conform with regularity R”, just in case S is disposed to conform to R, and is prone to immediately correct his failures to conform. (See my response below to Objection F).
In earlier work I have taken the basis for a word’s idiolectal meaning to be merely the basic acceptance-disposition governing it overall use. So the account offered here – in which this basis is instead said to be a matter of implicit rule following (analyzed as that disposition plus a proneness to self-correction) is a slight modification of my earlier view. However, it has no bearing at all on the main project of this paper – to show how communal meanings are grounded in idiolectal meanings.
- 6.
In an early brief discussion of these issues (1998: 86) I made the mistake of suggesting that in order for a non-expert to use a technical term with its communal meaning she must defer to what the experts say with the help of that term. And as Devitt and Sterelny rightly pointed out (see Devitt and Sterelny 1999: 3 and Devitt 2002: 118–119), this is highly implausible. For many non-experts will never meet an expert, or will not recognize that they are in the presence of an expert, or will be too stubborn or overconfident to defer. But they might nonetheless mean (communally) what the experts mean, providing they heard the word from someone who heard the word from someone who heard the word from … word from someone who’s an expert.
So my present proposal involves no such claim about deference. The only role now given to this notion is in roughly explaining the notion of the ‘acknowledged experts’ as ‘those to whose opinions there is a tendency to defer’.
- 7.
See Kripke (1979).
- 8.
Devitt (1996: ch. 5) argues that some of the things that we feel should be explained by what S’s words mean can be well explained only if those meanings are externalistic (i.e. if they are constituted not merely by S’s intrinsic states, but also by her relations to the outside world). But this gives us no reason to think that S’s acceptance of such-and-such sentences is amongst those things that can only be explained in that way. Nor does it relieve the difficulty of seeing how the particular externalistic form of Devitt’s word-meanings – namely, types of causal-chain between words and their referents – could conceivably have the particular role in explaining sentence-acceptance that word-meaning clearly have.
- 9.
For elaboration of this view of nominal reference see ch. 5 (“Reference”) of my Meaning.
- 10.
Although Devitt acknowledges the existence of phenomena that might well be called “individualistic languages” or “idiolects”, they are crucially different from the phenomena whose theoretical importance I have been advocating using those terms. For Devitt, S’s “idiolect” consists primarily in her vocabulary-items together with the meanings they possess – where the latter are their communal meanings. So any differences between the so-called “idiolects” of two members of a linguistic community can derive only from the fact that each person uses words that the other doesn’t use. He does not recognize a kind of meaning (which I’m calling “idiolectal meaning”) that’s distinct from communal meaning, that varies from one individual to another, and that’s the causal basis of each individual’s distinctive overall usage of words. So he doesn’t acknowledge idiolects in my sense of the term.
I believe that this explains his puzzlement (Devitt 2011: 206–208) over how I could have written both that the members of a community don’t mean the same thing and that they do mean the same thing. His failure to see that this “incoherence” is dissolved by the distinction between my idiolects and ordinary languages suggests that he thinks of the former as completely beyond the pale.
- 11.
Along roughly these Wittgensteinian lines, I suggested (in footnote 5 above) that person S implicitly follows the rule , “To conform with regularity R”, if and only if S’s activity is governed by the disposition to conform with R, and there is some tendency for S to correct instances of his non-conformity (i.e. to react against his initial inclinations).
- 12.
- 13.
My thanks to Michael Devitt for the stimulus of his great contributions to the philosophy of language, for the extraordinary clarity with which he always expresses himself, and for the incisive, constructive, generous comments he gave me on the penultimate draft of the present paper.
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Horwich, P. (2020). Languages and Idiolects. In: Bianchi, A. (eds) Language and Reality from a Naturalistic Perspective. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 142. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47641-0_14
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