Notes on Lycan,
Philosophy of Language, Chapter 5
"Traditional Theories of Meaning"

Curtis Brown

So what is meaning? What must a theory of meaning account for? The word "meaning" seems to get used for two things that may or may not go together: (1) something that determines reference; (2) something that must be in the mind of a person who understands an expression.

Data: "the meaning facts"

1. Meaningfulness. There's a difference (to be explained) between things with meaning and things without.

2. Synonymy. Some pairs of expressions are synonymous (i.e. mean the same thing).

3. Ambiguity. Some expressions mean more than one thing.

4. Containment, entailment. Some meanings seem to "contain" other meanings, e.g. the meaning of "bachelor" contains or includes the meaning of "male."

Ideational theories

Locke: (a) meanings are ideas; (b) ideas are images. Problems:

1. Images are too specific and detailed to be meanings for most expressions. Any image of a dog will be of a specific breed; any image of a triangle will have specific angles; etc. (Why Berkeley denied that there are abstract ideas.)

2. No images associated with some words.

3. Meanings must be public, shared; images are private, may differ from one person to the next.

4. Some meanings do not correspond to any actual mental entity. (This is perhaps Lycan's most obscure objection. The idea is that there are lots of sentences that never have been or will be actually expressed or thought of. Therefore no actual idea or image corresponds to them. But those sentences have meanings too. (So it can't be necessary that meanings are actual ideas. They could still be merely possible ideas. And that leads to the next account, the propositional theory.)

Propositional theories

Sentence meanings are propositions. These are abstract entities. (An analogy: numbers are abstract entities which are useful for measuring things. Similarly, propositions are abstract entities which are useful for "measuring" states of people's minds and contents of what they say.) They have internal structure: propositions are composed of abstract parts, concepts, which are the meanings of subsentential expressions. Problems:

1. weird entities. (not in space and time, no causal properties, etc.) (But maybe not weirder than necessary? And of course one could raise the same objections to numbers, which seem very useful.)

2. "alien to our experience." Reply: not at all! Whenever you understand what an expression means, you have the experience of grasping a concept or proposition.

3. Not really explanatory; just presents the data in a different terminology. Reply [not exactly Lycan's reply]: we should probably just admit that as so far presented, this is true; as so far presented there isn't really a theory here. We need to elaborate and refine the theory before it will actually explain anything. Chapters 9 and 10 essentially give more developed versions of the proposition account.

4. Meanings have causal powers, but abstract entities like propositions don't.  Reply [not exactly Lycan's reply]: It's not propositions themselves that have causal powers; rather, it is people believing, communicating, desiring, etc. those propositions. In this regard they're just like numbers: numbers don't cause anything, but lots of things are caused by things having a certain temperature, or a certain pressure, or a certain atomic mass, or whatever. Abstract entities (propositions or numbers) don't directly cause anything, but we use them to measure states that do cause things (like beliefs or temperatures).