Anatomy of a Linguist
Anatomy of a Linguist
What Keeps Us Up at Night
What Words Mean Our in-house rambler on linguistics for The Anatomy of a Linguist, T. R. Williamson, presents an overview of the past and present philosophical, cognitive, and computational approaches to the central linguistic question of what the meanings of linguistic expressions actually are.
W
hen I write or speak or gesture something to you, how do you know what it means? How is it that I am able to act, with my hands or mouth or body, in a way that encodes some significance that you are able to grasp and interpret and understand? More to the point, what even is this thing we call meaning? Is it something mystical, with magical properties? Is it deducible logically or mathematically, neatly lining up with formal proofs? Is it psychological, akin to any other kind of knowledge we have of the world? It is these kinds of questions, about what meaning is and how we can understand it, that fascinate those who research meaning in language. In this piece, I will paint a simple picture of this work and then set out some promising future directions for understanding meaning. To someone trying to get to grips with the wealth of work on meaning, there are several key approaches that comprise an oligopoly of sorts over the production of academic research on the topic. Let us familiarise ourselves with these by a rough chronology of their popularisation.
synonymous despite being coreferential[3]. From Frege, we can chart a course through Bertrand Russell[4], Alfred Tarski[5], and Richard Montague[6], who bring us to our first school of thought on meaning: truth-conditionality. It is their suggestion that the meanings of (specifically) sentences consist in the conditions under which a particular proposition would be true. In other words, what sentences mean are references to possible worlds within which the conditions prescribed by a sentence are true. Their methods consist primarily of drawing upon tools from formal logic and mathematics to provide complex representations of how sentences convey their truth conditions.
As a result of the tools they use, a lot of their problems revolve around how to resolve ambiguities arising from the interpretation of specific words to fit into their formal representations. Let us look at an example from a recent paper[7], which tries to understand whether an epistemic modal ‘must’ in sentences like (2) is unintuitively weak in modal strength (i.e., ‘must’ seems normally quite assertive, but in (2) it is As most of academia has done, the study of meaning started within not) in comparison to what might be considered otherwise neutral (1): philosophy. We can trace discussions of meaning in language all the (1) It is raining. way back to Plato’s Cratylus, which suggests that there was some (2) It must be raining. reliable yet arbitrary sound-meaning link that composed word mean- [1] ings , and Aristotle’s syllogisms within, for example, De Interpretatione, which sets out reliable methods to treat the logic underlying One definition they give for ‘must’ to prove it still carries modal premises in an argument[2]. The more recent work of Gottlob Frege strength is the following: makes a famous distinction between what a word refers to (its reference) and that feeling we share (its sense) about individual words’ meanings that guide intuitions about how the terms ‘football’ and ‘soccer’, for example, are not
44