The Social Foundations of Meaning

An empirical case study is used here to analyze linguistic meaning as it is embedded in complex social behavior. The whole of a natural signalling system - its nonlinguistic conventions, pragmatics and semantics - is considered. Three sections analyze: the relevant conventional facts; conventional utterance meaning in terms of conventional facts; and, finally, sentence meaning in terms of conventional utterance meaning. Linguistic meaning is seen to be derived from meaningful social behavior rather than from goal-directed behavior of individuals. A number of new results on pragmatic and semantic meaning are reached.

Inhalt
Introductory summary.- I Conventional meaning: The pretheoretical intuition.- § 1 Conventional meaning vs. natural meaning.- § 2 Conventional meaning vs. speaker's meaning.- § 3 Conventional meaning and correct understanding.- § 4 Correct understanding: The conventional result principle.- § 5 Conventional systems evolving into languages.- § 6 Communication: Redistributing situational roles.- § 7 The strategy of language description.- II Compliance with rules.- § 8 The weak Hart analysis of rule guided behavior.- § 9 Why dismiss the 'internal aspect'?.- § 10 Hart attacks repelled.- § 11 An attractive alternative: Lewis conventions.- § 12 No rigid problem solving.- § 13 Choice rules.- § 14 Knowledge of conventions.- § 15 Can meaning sneak in via common knowledge?.- § 16 Conventional make ups and how to detect them.- III A case for utterance meaning: NIVEAU zero.- § 17 A plea for case studies.- § 18 The first utterance meaning rules.- § 19 Background conventions and suspected signals.- § 20 Strengthening the description.- § 21 The meaning of circumstances.- § 22 Theoretical fruitfulness.- IV Conventional utterance meaning.- § 23 Language use: Conventional behavior calling for a special kind of description.- § 24 Conventional utterance meaning defined.- § 25 Neptune: Conventional perturbations and their best explanation.- § 26 Expressions and expressive power.- § 27 The diversity of language.- § 28 The theoretical character of the speech act of reference.- V Against intentionalism.- § 29 Preliminaries.- § 30 Ignored motives for making constative utterances.- § 31 Gricean intentions: Irrelevant and unlikely.- § 32 Speakers' meaning and conventional meaning: Empirically connected.- § 33 The Thomistic fallacy.- § 34Genitives subjectivus and genitives objectivus.- § 35 Declarations of meaning.- VI The same case for sentence meaning: NIVEAU.- § 36 The new problem.- § 37 Grouping signs by positing new entities.- § 38 Some semantic features: Ambiguity, negation, anaphora.- VII Some results for sentence meaning.- § 39 The point of having sentence meanings.- § 40 Sentence meaning defined.- § 41 Two different tasks in the study of sentence meaning.- § 42 The theoretical character of sentence meaning.- § 43 Sentence meaning is conceptually irreducible.- Epilogue.- § 44 Rules of language.- Appendix I: Complete description of NIVEAU zero.- Appendix II: Complete description of NIVEAU.