Meaning and Reality

Meaning and Reality

I am going to drill right into the heart of twentieth-century analytical philosophy, which includes its antecedents going back at least to the seventeenth century. This will be a major operation: the body of philosophy will be laid open on the operating table. I will not be pussyfooting around. The question is what the relation between meaning and reality is: is meaning a reliable guide to reality? If we knew the nature of meaning, would we know the nature of reality? Would a theory of meaning be a metaphysics? Would semantics give us ontology? Would the “inner world” of meaning disclose the “outer world” of reality? Does what you mean determine what is? Are speakers the measure of reality?

It might be thought that this could not be, simply because language is one thing and the world is another: how can the nature of A tell you the nature of B when A and B are totally different things? How can words tell you about worlds? That would be like chalk telling you about cheese, or biscuits telling you about numbers, or minds telling you about bodies. But this objection ignores an important point: language is about the world. It is trained on it, the object of its interest. As we like to say, language represents reality; it isn’t concerned just with itself. All talk is talk of. And language works: we can use language to guide our lives, precisely because it doesn’t get everything wrong. Meaning is practical, successful; meaning gets it done. It isn’t some giant illusion or hopeless balls-up. It can’t be disconnected from reality; it must track reality somehow. We could say that language is veridical, like perception. Short of radical skepticism, meaning is knowing: to mean is to know—fundamentally, by and large. Whatever confers meaning on words is known about, even if unconsciously. This is an axiom of analytical philosophy: meaning and knowing are inseparable—hence, whatever reality is, meaning has it in its sights. So, if we just knew the nature of meaning, we would know the nature of reality—it is whatever words mean. Sentences are a guide to facts. Meaning and metaphysics cannot come apart, on pain of convicting language of gross malfeasance. Or else we face a radical form of metaphysical nihilism (we will come back to this possibility).

We are concerned with the general nature of reality not particular facts: meaning won’t tell you whether the mail has been delivered, but it can tell you what, broadly, there is. It can tell you what kind of thing reality is, granted its veridicality. Here we enter familiar territory. We might say that meaning consists of objective truth conditions: a sentence means that such and such if and only if it is made true by such and such. That is, a sentence’s meaning consists in its being true in certain conditions, these conditions being (generally) such as to exist independently of language and indeed speakers. Meanings are constituted by objective states of affairs to which sentences (or their parts) refer. These states of affairs may obtain whether or not they can be verified to obtain (this is an aspect of their objectivity). Hence, bivalence holds: the sentence is true or false whether or not it can be determined as true of false. Accordingly, the nature of meaning entails metaphysical realism, granted veridicality. If sentences have a certain type of meaning, then reality mirrors that meaning—so, realism is the correct theory of reality given a truth conditions theory of meaning. The world is mind-independent. Since we knew that already, meaning is telling us the right thing. Still, it is good to know that we can derive realism from the theory of meaning. On the other hand, if meaning is constituted by verification conditions, we get a different result, namely: anti-realism is true, bivalence doesn’t hold, the world is fundamentally mind-dependent, and idealism is the indicated metaphysics. Sentences are about the methods and results of verification procedures not objective facts; these are inherently mind-dependent. Thus, we get a very different metaphysics from this semantic theory. The hope is that we can arrive at the correct metaphysics by investigating language, this being a more accessible and tractable domain (like looking at a train schedule to find out when the trains will come). Whereas truth conditions theory rests on objective facts, verification conditions theory rests on subject-centered facts. The metaphysics falls out of the semantics (imagine if we could do semantics by means of brain scans!).

What if we are enamored of Tarski-style truth theories? What kind of metaphysics would that suggest? One might think it to be neutral metaphysically, but there are certain natural metaphysical conclusions to draw from it. First, we will need to recognize sequences as constituents of reality (truth is satisfaction by all sequences). Second, we will not have to recognize properties or universals as real, since they are not referred to in the satisfaction axioms. Third, there will have to be sectors of reality corresponding to both the object language and the metalanguage, equipped with suitable ontologies. Fourth, we will be restricted to the resources of standard formal languages, which presuppose a subject-predicate structure, i.e., things and their attributes. Also, we will have to face the possibility that people can only make statements (no irreducibly imperative speech acts, etc.). What about the picture theory of meaning? That will tell us that the world is picturable: it is intelligible, compositional, geometric. There are no realities that can’t be rendered in pictorial form; everything can be seen with the eye (inner or outer). The picture theory is opposed to mysteries and the invisible. It is ontologically restrictive. The world must be either mathematical or artistic, depending on what kind of pictures we envisage.

Then we have sense-datum theories, image theories, use theories, and syntactic theories. According to sense-datum theories, meanings consist of collocations of sense-data; consequently, the world consists of sense-data in so far as it is meant. Neutral monism will be the indicated metaphysics; everything real is a construction from sense-data. So, the world (our world) is both mental and constructed, not physical and pre-formed. This is a world of mental creations. Image theories imagine meanings as sensory images hovering before the mind’s eye (not sense-data); this is what words are fundamentally about. Occam’s razor will recommend dispensing with anything else (such as external material objects); thus, reality consists of a sea of images. Nothing else can be deduced from meaning as such, and meaning is our guide in metaphysics. Why postulate anything else? This will be a form of idealism that recognizes only mental images (not actual percepts): imagist idealism. Even further out we reach use theories; here the metaphysical consequences are a lot stranger than has been generally acknowledged. For use is spread out in time, so meaning is too; but then, so is reality. Reality is always, so to speak, under construction. What words refer to is indeterminate until use has come to an end, which it may never do. Addition, say, is never a fully realized mathematical function, since “add” has a meaning that is continually unfolding over time. Use-in-time theories of meaning lead to a temporally extended metaphysics: nothing can be said to exist fully at any given time. Meaning is forever indeterminate, and so is reality. They are growing things, like organisms. Even more dramatically, pure syntactic theories will yield complete metaphysical nihilism: since there is no meaning, but only syntax, there is no reality. If words are meaningless, then reality is empty—reality-less. Language is about nothing, but language works, so there is nothing for it to be about. If language is veridical, i.e., not false and misleading, then its nature does not presuppose anything as what it is about; the correct metaphysics is therefore null and void, according to the basic axiom of analytical philosophy. Language tells the metaphysical truth, but it tells us that there is no meaning, i.e., it is not about anything; so, there is nothing out there for it to inform us about. Anti-meaning theories of language imply anti-reality theories of reality. No meaning, no world. Such is the methodology of analytical philosophy.

Is there any theory of meaning that is more metaphysically neutral? If there is, it won’t be much use as a road to a specific metaphysics. The best prospect here is a causal theory: meaning is fixed by whatever causes linguistic use. If external material objects cause it, then those objects must exist; if states of the nervous system cause it, then they are real; if God causes it, then theism is correct. But how do we know what causes linguistic use? It doesn’t look as if we can detect it introspectively or a priori. We don’t see the true causal story. We need a theory of it; but then, we need a prior theory of reality, i.e., a metaphysics. The one we naturally gravitate towards is the one suggested by perception, notably vision. This is the ontology of substances and accidents—discrete physical objects in all their glory. But then, the metaphysics doesn’t derive from a study of meaning but from our perception-based ontological commitments. We may as well look thereto arrive at our metaphysics and cut out the detour through language. The methodology of twentieth century philosophy is thereby abandoned. Our view of meaning is shaped by our prior metaphysical beliefs; not wholly, to be sure, but partially. We can’t simply read the metaphysics off the semantics, as if the latter was uncontaminated by the former. Nice try, then, but no cigar. The nature of meaning can’t be apprehended independently of the nature of reality. The two are interdependent, if anything. In a slogan: the nature of meaning is a function of grammar and reality.[1]

[1] I have not given references to the various philosophers alluded to in this paper, but old hands will know who I have in mind: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, Dummett, Kripke, the logical positivists, the empiricists, the pragmatists, the ordinary language philosophers.