Summary of The Discursive Foundations of Meaning

In virtue of what do words and sentences have the particular meanings they do? How do mere noises and squiggles (like the ones you are reading right now) come to possess any semantic properties at all? These can be identified as the questions of metasemantics. The ambitious goal of my dissertation is to answer the metasemantic questions—to explain how semantic facts arise from more fundamental and less mysterious facts about the world.

A leading idea of the theory I develop is that meaning is determined by use. In one sense, virtually everyone agrees with this. God did not establish by divine decree that ‘lamp’ should mean lamp. The same linguistic form could just as easily have meant mango. Somehow or other, contingent facts about how the expression is instantiated in the world—its “use”, in a broad sense—have endowed it with the one meaning rather than the other. However, that is not yet to say anything very interesting. I understand ‘use’ in a narrower way, and so take the suggestion that use determines meaning as a more substantive hypothesis. Specifically, I develop a version of the view that a speaker’s linguistic dispositions with respect to their utterances are ultimately responsible for investing their words with semantic content.

Typically, proposals in this spirit talk about dispositions to “apply” a predicate to an object, to “utter” or “assent to” a sentence when presented with certain stimuli, or to “infer” one sentence from another. One of the basic ideas behind my metasemantic approach is that these pre-theoretic concepts for describing usage in non-semantic terms are ultimately inadequate for the task at hand. The path for grounding meaning in use will only become visible once we have the right framework in place for describing the metasemantically relevant aspects of use. Developing such a framework is, in my view, a substantial theoretical task—so substantial, in fact, that it occupies the entire first half of the dissertation. Semantic concepts only officially enter the story in Part II, after a great deal of groundwork has been laid.

What, then, are the metasemantically relevant aspects of use? The short answer is that we have to look to how words and sentences are caught up in our discursive practices. In Chapter 2, I focus on assertion and argumentation. Drawing some inspiration from Robert Brandom (1994), I propose that both activities revolve around the dynamics of discursive commitments. When a speaker asserts a sentence, they commit to accepting that sentence within the bounds of the discourse at hand. When a speaker argues for a claim, they exploit the ways these discursive commitments propagate inferentially. For example, if I argue from ‘p’ to ‘q’, I rely on the possibility of my audience becoming committed to accepting ‘q’ on the basis of a prior commitment to ‘p’.

In Chapter 3, I develop the commitment-centric perspective on discourse further, focusing on the way discursive participants attribute commitments to themselves and their interlocutors in the course of conversation. Again with echoes of Brandom, this can be thought of as a practice of “scorekeeping”. A scorekeeper keeps a tally of each speaker’s commitments, and this tally is continuously updated—both in response to conversational performances and through the application of inferential rules that dictate how existing commitments generate new ones. A central idea developed here is that cooperative interlocutors tend to coordinate which inferential rules they use to keep score. This is a way for interlocutors to stay on the same page about the current state of conversation, as well as the rules for arbitrating disputes within the discourse.

In Chapter 4, I correct two significant simplifications made in the preceding chapters. First, the scorekeeping framework is revised to allow that a single sentence may have variable significance across different occasions of utterance. This is of course key if the metasemantics is to properly accommodate context-sensitivity. Then, in the second half of the chapter, the scorekeeping framework is extended to incorporate a role for extralinguistic empirical circumstances.

As the start to Part II, Chapter 5 marks the transition from the domain of mere use to the domain of meaning. Here, the concept of disagreement plays an important bridging role. On the one hand, disagreement is connected with synonymy: when one speaker asserts a sentence and their interlocutor denies it, whether the speakers are thereby genuinely disagreeing depends on whether they are using the disputed sentence with the same meaning. On the other hand, disagreement is fundamentally a discursive phenomenon, one that I argue can be understood in terms of the scorekeeping model of discourse developed in Part I. The basic idea is that for speakers to genuinely disagree, they must be able to coordinate on a shared set of inferential rules for arbitrating their dispute. If that kind of meta-dialectical coordination proves impossible, then the disputants are merely speaking past each other. Because of the link between disagreement and synonymy, this account of the conditions under which speakers genuinely disagree goes hand in hand with an account of the conditions under which they use sentences synonymously.

Chapter 6 extends the account of synonymy into an account of meaning. I start by considering the “sententialist” proposal to analyze meaning ascriptions like

(M)  a means that p

as shorthand for synonymy claims like

(S)   a is synonymous with ‘p’ (as I’m actually currently using it)

I argue against this analysis, but develop a related view that preserves its advantages. Meaning ascriptions like (M) should be taken at face value, as referring to extralinguistic propositions rather than sentences. However, propositions can be understood as abstractions from sentences, induced by the synonymy relation. The result is that (M) turns out to be logically equivalent to (S), even though not strictly semantically equivalent. The same treatment can be extended to subsentential meanings, and to the meanings of singular terms in particular. This sets the stage for a simple account of reference as an extensional coarse-graining of meaning.

The theory elaborated up to this point has focused on one central kind of semantic meaning relation. However, there are others that equally require explanation; this is the task of Chapter 7. Here, I show that resources already on the table allow us to make sense of a wider variety of meaning relations, differing in whether they are structured or unstructured and fine-grained or coarse-grained. In the second part of the chapter, I turn to the notion of meaning in a language. The foundational metasemantics I develop is one in which semantic properties first come on the scene with occasion meanings—i.e., meanings of expressions as used on particular occasions. The meaning of a word or sentence in a language like English is then explained derivatively, in terms of social conventions governing occasion meanings. I argue that this explanatory order allows us to capture the conventionality of linguistic meaning in a far less problematic way than the traditional conventionalist approach associated with Grice (1957) and Lewis (1969, 1975).

Finally, in Chapter 8, I consider how the theory developed over the course of the dissertation relates to the externalist orthodoxy in metasemantics, which holds that meaning is determined partially by environmental factors external to the speaker. I show that the theory presented accommodates the classic externalist insights of Putnam (1975), Burge (1979), and Kripke (1980), and it allows us to capture what is right, but incomplete, in the causal theory of reference. At the same time, though, the theory is in tension with some popular doctrines associated with externalism. Contrary to prevailing trends in metasemantics, I argue that individual speakers retain ultimate authority over the meanings of their words.


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