Page 172 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
everyone else's conformity gives each person a good reason for conforming themselves. It turns out to fol- low from this that, where a system of signals is employed as a conventional means of coordinating signals and beliefs, those who produce the signals satisfy Grice's conditions for speaker-meaning; so the thesis that sentence s means that p just where there is a convention that s is used to signal that p is a natural development of Grice's proposal. It does not follow from this, however, that human language is a system of Lewis-type conventions; and, indeed, the thesis that it is has been criticized by Davidson on the grounds that human uses of language are too varied and trivial to meet Lewis's requirements. But Lewis allows that basic communicative conventions can be qualified by higher-order conventions that permit violations of the original convention, so Davidson's point is not fatal. Yet, more needs to be said, in response to the above question of what is required in supposing that con-
ditions (a-d) are satisfied, as to how a radical interpreter could verify that native linguistic behavior is conventional. Nonetheless, it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that an infant learning a language is, among other things, being inducted into a system of communicative conventions.
The Grice-Lewis account of meaning will only deliver a reduction of semantics if it is supplemented by an account of the nature of psychological states (such as the Gricean conditions (a-d)) which does not draw on semantic facts. There are two approaches to this: one aims to articulate and justify a physicalist theory which can be applied directly to all relevant psychological states; the other allows that soph- isticated beliefs and intentions presuppose semantic facts, but aims to provide a noncircular developmental account (both for the species and the individual) based on a physicalist account of simple beliefs and inten- tions. Even this latter enterprise is contentious, although, unreflectively, people seem content to ascribe quite complex beliefs and intentions to higher mammals without reference to language. But issues here remain cloudy because of difficulties in finding satisfactory accounts of the content of even simple psychological states. Most theorists favor an approach which takes account both of the causation
and of the functional role of such states, and manywill add that mental representation requires a 'language of thought'—a system of physical structures in the sub- ject which somehow matches the content of the sub- ject's thoughts (Fodor 1987). However, it is not yet possible to present any consensus on these issues, and to that extent philosophical debates concerning mean- ing remain inconclusive. Nonetheless, the importance of the debate shows that an adequate understanding of the concept of meaning is of absolutely fundamental importance not only for theorizing about language but also for an understanding of human beings and their place in nature.
See also: Convention; Holism; Indeterminacy of Translation; Radical Interpretation.
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Meaning postulates provide a method used in model- theoretic semantics to restrict the possible interpret- ations of an object language L by describing lexical
meanings in terms of analytically true sentences in L. The method was formulated by Carnap (1947: 222- 29) and is called for as lexical meanings tend to escape
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Meaning Postulate T. M. V. Janssen