the conventional, common, or standard sense of an expression, construction, or sentence in a given language, or of a non-linguistic signal or symbol. Literal meaning is the non-figurative, strict meaning an expression or sentence has in a language by virtue of the dictionary meaning of its words and the import of its syntactic constructions. Synonymy is sameness of literal meaning: ‘prestidigitator’ means ‘expert at sleight of hand’. It is said that meaning is what a good translation preserves, and this may or may not be literal: in French ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan?’ literally means ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ and figuratively means ‘nothing lasts’. Signal-types and symbols have non-linguistic conventional meaning: the white flag means truce; the lion means St. Mark.
In another sense, meaning is what a person intends to communicate by a particular utterance – utterer’s meaning, as Grice called it, or speaker’s meaning, in Stephen Schiffer’s term. A speaker’s meaning may or may not coincide with the literal meaning of what is uttered, and it may be non-linguistic. Non-literal: in saying ‘we will soon be in our tropical paradise,’ Jane meant that they would soon be in Antarctica. Literal: in saying ‘that’s deciduous,’ she meant that the tree loses its leaves every year. Non-linguistic: by shrugging, she meant that she agreed. The literal meaning of a sentence typically does not determine exactly what a speaker says in making a literal utterance: the meaning of ‘she is praising me’ leaves open what John says in uttering it, e.g. that Jane praises John at 12:00 p.m., Dec. 21, 1991. A not uncommon – but theoretically loaded – way of accommodating this is to count the context-specific things that speakers say as propositions, entities that can be expressed in different languages and that are (on certain theories) the content of what is said, believed, desired, and so on. On that assumption, a sentence’s literal meaning is a context-independent rule, or function, that determines a certain proposition (the content of what the speaker says) given the context of utterance. David Kaplan has called such a rule or function a sentence’s ‘character.’ A sentence’s literal meaning also includes its potential for performing certain illocutionary acts, in J. L. Austin’s term. The meaning of an imperative sentence determines what orders, requests, and the like can literally be expressed: ‘sit down there’ can be uttered literally by Jane to request (or order or urge) John to sit down at 11:59 a.m. on a certain bench in Santa Monica. Thus a sentence’s literal meaning involves both its character and a constraint on illocutionary acts: it maps contexts onto illocutionary acts that have (something like) determinate propositional contents. A context includes the identity of speaker, hearer, time of utterance, and also aspects of the speaker’s intentions. In ethics the distinction has flourished between the expressive or emotive meaning of a word or sentence and its cognitive meaning. The emotive meaning of an utterance or a term is the attitude it expresses, the pejorative meaning of ‘chiseler’, say. An emotivist in ethics, e.g. C. L. Stevenson (1908–79), holds that the literal meaning of ‘it is good’ is identical with its emotive meaning, the positive attitude it expresses. On Hare’s theory, the literal meaning of ‘ought’ is its prescriptive meaning, the imperative force it gives to certain sentences that contain it. Such ‘noncognitivist’ theories can allow that a term like ‘good’ also has non-literal descriptive meaning, implying nonevaluative properties of an object. By contrast, cognitivists take the literal meaning of an ethical term to be its cognitive meaning: ‘good’ stands for an objective property, and in asserting ‘it is good’ one literally expresses, not an attitude, but a true or false judgment. ‘Cognitive meaning’ serves as well as any other term to capture what has been central in the theory of meaning beyond ethics, the ‘factual’ element in meaning that remains when we abstract from its illocutionary and emotive aspects. It is what is shared by ‘there will be an eclipse tomorrow’ and ‘will there be an eclipse tomorrow?’. This common element is often identified with a proposition (or a ‘character’), but, once again, that is theoretically loaded. Although cognitive meaning has been the preoccupation of the theory of meaning in the twentieth century, it is difficult to define precisely in non-theoretical terms. Suppose we say that the cognitive meaning of a sentence is ‘that aspect of its meaning which is capable of being true or false’: there are non-truth-conditional theories of meaning (see below) on which this would not capture the essentials. Suppose we say it is ‘what is capable of being asserted’: an emotivist might allow that one can assert that a thing is good. Still many philosophers have taken for granted that they know cognitive meaning (under that name or not) well enough to theorize about what it consists in, and it is the focus of what follows.
The oldest theories of meaning in modern philosophy are the seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century idea theory (also called the ideational theory) and image theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of words in public language derives from the ideas or mental images that words are used to express. As for what constitutes the representational properties of ideas, Descartes held it to be a basic property of the mind, inexplicable, and Locke a matter of resemblance (in some sense) between ideas and things. Contemporary analytic philosophy speaks more of propositional attitudes – thoughts, beliefs, intentions – than of ideas and images; and it speaks of the contents of such attitudes: if Jane believes that there are lions in Africa, that belief has as its content that there are lions in Africa. Virtually all philosophers agree that propositional attitudes have some crucial connection with meaning.
A fundamental element of a theory of meaning is where it locates the basis of meaning, in thought, in individual speech, or in social practices. (i) Meaning may be held to derive entirely from the content of thoughts or propositional attitudes, that mental content itself being constituted independently of public linguistic meaning. (‘Constituted independently of’ does not imply ‘unshaped by’.) (ii) It may be held that the contents of beliefs and communicative intentions themselves derive in part from the meaning of overt speech, or even from social practices. Then meaning would be jointly constituted by both individual psychological and social linguistic facts. Theories of the first sort include those in the style of Grice, according to which sentences’ meanings are determined by practices or implicit conventions that govern what speakers mean when they use the relevant words and constructions. A speaker’s meaning is explained in terms of certain propositional attitudes, namely the speaker’s intentions to produce certain effects in hearers. To mean that it is raining is to utter or to do something (not necessarily linguistic) with the intention (very roughly) of getting one’s hearer to believe that it is raining. Theories of speaker’s meaning have been elaborated by Grice and by Schiffer. David Lewis has proposed that linguistic meaning is constituted by implicit conventions that systematically associate sentences with speakers’ beliefs rather than with communicative intentions. The contents of thought might be held to be constitutive of linguistic meaning independently of communication. Russell, and Wittgenstein in his early writings, wrote about meaning as if the key thing is the propositional content of the belief or thought that a sentence (somehow) expresses; they apparently regarded this as holding on an individual basis and not essentially as deriving from communication intentions or social practices. And Chomsky speaks of the point of language as being ‘the free expression of thought.’ Such views suggest that ‘linguistic meaning’ may stand for two properties, one involving communication intentions and practices, the other more intimately related to thinking and conceiving. By contrast, the content of propositional attitudes and the meaning of overt speech might be regarded as coordinate facts neither of which can obtain independently: to interpret other people one must assign both content to their beliefs/intentions and meaning to their utterances. This is explicit in Davidson’s truth-conditional theory (see below); perhaps it is present also in the post-Wittgensteinian notion of meaning as assertability conditions – e.g., in the writings of Dummett. On still other accounts, linguistic meaning is essentially social. Wittgenstein is interpreted by Kripke as holding in his later writings that social rules are essential to meaning, on the grounds that they alone explain the normative aspect of meaning, explain the fact that an expression’s meaning determines that some uses are correct or others incorrect. Another way in which meaning may be essentially social is Putnam’s ‘division of linguistic labor’: the meanings of some terms, say in botany or cabinetmaking, are set for the rest of us by specialists. The point might extend to quite non-technical words, like ‘red’: a person’s use of it may be socially deferential, in that the rule which determines what ‘red’ means in his mouth is determined, not by his individual usage, but by the usage of some social group to which he semantically defers. This has been argued by Tyler Burge to imply that the contents of thoughts themselves are in part a matter of social facts.
Let us suppose there is a language L that contains no indexical terms, such as ‘now’, ‘I’, or demonstrative pronouns, but contains only proper names, common nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, logical words. (No natural language is like this; but the supposition simplifies what follows.) Theories of meaning differ considerably in how they would specify the meaning of a sentence S of L. Here are the main contenders. (i) Specify S’s truth conditions: S is true