Wolfgang Schwarz

Knowing the Meaning

On one of our many conceptions of meaning, the meaning of an expression is what you know when you know the meaning of the expression. I don't think this is a particularly useful conception. Besides, it violates some commonplace truths about meaning, like that expressions of different languages can have the same meaning. For suppose the meaning of the German "schwarz" is identical to the meaning of the English "black". Then by the above rule anyone who knows the meaning of "black" should know the meaning of "schwarz", which isn't so.

Now for why I don't find the proposed conception very useful. What do people know when they know the meaning of an expression? First of all, they typically have certain abilities. If you know the meaning of "black", you are able to use that word appropriately. But these abilities probably require propositional knowledge, and anyway they are neither necessary not sufficient for knowing the meaning.

Perhaps the relevant knowledge is acquaintance knowledge, like the knowledge you have when you know Paris. Knowing the meaning of "bachelor" then is being acquainted with a certain entity, viz. with the meaning of "bachelor". That doesn't seem right. If somebody has the right propositional knowledge, and the right abilities, then she knows the meaning of "bachelor", whether or not she is acquainted with whatever the meaning might be. Knowing the meaning of "bachelor" is more like knowing the Peano Axioms. That doesn't require being acquainted with the axioms, but only knowledge that such-and-such are the Peano Axioms.

What propositional knowledge do you need to have in order to know the meaning of "black"? Note that it doesn't suffice to have knowledge of propositions whose expression contains "black", e.g. that black things are not white. Every German knows that, but many Germans don't know the meaning of "black". The relevant propositions must be propositions involving "'black'", not merely "black": Perhaps you need to know that the things of which "black" is true are not white, and so on -- more simply, you need to know that "black" is true of something iff that something is black. Applying this idea to sentences, we get the familiar idea that knowing the meaning is knowing truth-conditions: You know the meaning of "it's raining" if you know under what conditions "it's raining" is true; i.e. if you know that "it's raining" is true iff it's raining.

So suppose that what you know when you know the meaning of "it's raining" is the proposition that "it's raining" is true iff it's raining. (I think that's too simple in some ways, but it's on the right track.) Then on the initial proposal on which the meaning of "it's raining" is what you know when you know the meaning of "it's raining", it follows that the meaning of "it's raining" is the proposition that "it's raining" is true iff it's raining. That doesn't look like a very useful notion of meaning to me.

I think it's better at this stage to identify sentence meaning with the relevant truth conditions, and similarly predicate meaning with the satisfaction conditions. What is a condition? Something that divides possibilities into those that meet the condition and those that don't. It might be a linguistic description (under a fixed interpretation), or a function from possibilities to truth values, or simply a set of possibilities.

Some people complain that you don't know a set of possibilities when you know a meaning. True, but that only shows that sets of possibilities are not meanings on the not very useful conception of meaning with which I began. If meanings are sets of possibilities then knowing the meaning of "it's raining" isn't knowing the relevant set, but rather knowing something like that the sentence is true iff one of the elements of the set is actual, that is, iff it's actually raining.

What does it take to know that? Perhaps it takes having certain mental items ('concepts') arranged in a certain way and connected to some mental representation of "it's raining". Or maybe, and similarly, it takes knowing a purely qualitative description in some basic vocabulary that picks out just the situations in which it's raining, and somehow connecting that description with "it's raining". Maybe this is so, but I don't think we make any such assumptions when we say of somebody that she knows that "it's raining" is true (in English) iff it's raining. Rather, what we mean is that she (truely and justifiedly) believes things like that a sincere speaker of English will utter "it's raining" only when it's raining, or at any rate only when she believes that it's raining. This is an ordinary belief with non-semantic content, and people have that belief in the same way in which they have other beliefs, perhaps by means of Mentalese tokens, or perhaps by some other means.