Book

Linguistic Meaning


This book provides a novel development and defense of the view that for an expression to have a linguistic meaning in a public language is for it to be governed by a conventionally accepted rule of use. This Wittgenstein-inspired idea was orthodox in analytic philosophy the 1950s and 1960s but was supplanted by David Lewis’s watered-down and seemingly more scientifically respectable version in terms of conventional regularities in use on the brink of the 1970s. Both views were subjected to a sustained attack by Donald Davidson in the 1980s who argued against the communal picture of language with its notion of linguistic meaning of expression-types in favor of an individualist picture which focuses on the „first meaning“ of utterances on an occasion of use. It is argued here that the original picture in terms of rules, fully and properly developed, is superior to the Lewisian picture in being able to solve its distinctive problems and can easily accommodate the Davidsonian insights. It is further shown that it leads to better applications in semantics and can help us explain why we linguistically police each other’s language use and yearn for formal regulation. 


Table of Contents: