'a transference', signifies, in its
technical use, any diversion of words from their literal or central meanings.
[p. 165]<46>
Chapter 2
The Theory of Meaning in the Twentieth Century
2.1 Introduction
I am sympathetic to this more radical criticism, though I am aware that the point is controversial.<2>
Since the criticism that Grice refers to here is really a statement of the program that his paper champions, it seems that Grice, in saying that he is "aware that the point is controversial" - and not just, for example, that it may appear to be controversial -, is implying that the program, or, at least, some important aspect of it, has already been discussed somewhere. But where?
2.2 Victoria Welby
...it is rather a hope for the future, that one of the most practically serviceable of subjects, that of Meaning, its conditions and changes - shall be seriously taken up. [Welby (1893), p. 512]
Indeed, one of her most important publications is her book What is Meaning? which was published in 1903. This book is praised by C. S. Peirce in a review he wrote of both it and Russell's The Principles of Mathematics. The review begins:
Two really important works on logic are these; or, at any rate, they deserve to become so, if readers will only do their part towards it.<3>
Peirce estimates the general importance of the book in the following way:
The greatest service the book can render is that of bringing home the question which forms its title, a very fundamental question of logic, which has commonly received superficial, formalistic replies. [Welby (1977), p. 159]
The fact is, that we have been postulating an absolute Plain Meaning to be thought of, as it were, in capital letters. We have been virtually assuming that our hearers and readers all share the same mental background and atmosphere. We have practically supposed that they all look through the same inferential eyes, that their attention waxes and wanes at the same points, that their associations, their halos of memory and circumstance, their congenital tendencies to symbolise or picture, are all on one pattern. [Welby (1893), pp. 512-513]
The very phrases which are our only shorthand for the vast oratory of nature and experience betray us in the using. We have taken them as though they were like numerals invariable in meaning, thus supposing them subject to a permanent uniformity....
But the suggestion now made is that this is precisely one of the most dangerous of presuppositions. [Welby (1893), pp. 513-514]
Since no two circumstances in which an utterance is produced can ever be exactly identical with respect to the utterer's psychological states, no two utterances, Welby argues, could ever mean the same thing.
It is perhaps not necessary that "there should be an identical element of meaning pervading all the applications of a word. Moreover, this common element, in so far as it does exist, cannot be called a meaning of the word in the same sense as the occasional signification." And "the'usual' or 'general' signification is not in itself one of the significations borne by a word. It is a condition which circumscribes within more or less vague and shifting limits the divergence of occasional meanings." Would not this repay more extended treatment? E.g., if a general and usual signification is not a meaning, is it ever a sense? "In order to fix the occasional meaning of words" we need a cue; but permanent change of meaning arises from a gradual shifting of limits. [Welby (1983), pp. 256-257]<6>
Thus, Welby weighs the motivations for supposing that expressions have central meanings against the phenomenon of meaning change. She sees the force of the thought that without something like core meanings it is hard to explain how one figures out what another means in producing sounds: sounds as linguistic expressions must somehow have some properties which give a listener some clue about what a speaker wants to get across in using them. But Welby does not accept that such properties of linguistic expressions allow for an ultimately useful notion of invariant meanings across contexts. For Welby there cannot be a useful notion of invariant meaning across contexts since meaning change does, in fact, occur, and since such change must be due to the uses made of expressions in particular contexts. Her idea, I believe, is that even though we only notice "permanent" meaning changes after long periods of time, such changes must be taking place in ordinary contexts by way of subtle "shifting of limits", that is, subtle differences in the applications of terms; thus, appearances of stability should be taken with a grain of salt: there really cannot be stable central meanings which expressions carry from one context to another.<7>
At present we have not even attained to an adequate conception of what an ideal language should be: we think of it, if at all, as...a formalised dialect of culture with its phrases "rendered according to the genuine and natural importance of words," as if this were anything but what their speakers intended by them! Or we try to invent an artificial 'Volapük.' It is surely time that the fetish of a possible Plain Meaning, the same at all times and places and to all, were thoroughly exposed, and students more explicitly warned against anything approaching it, accept on the narrowest basis of technical notation. [Welby (1896), p. 192]<8>
The child must therefore learn to gauge context by context, and to hunt with unerring scent for some else unnoticed peculiarity of apparently chance expression or form of expression which gives a clue to the writer's (or speaker's) real sense, and therefore to the true order of sentences. In this work he must even in the interests of detection ignore grammar. He must learn to become a sense-detective, detecting his own as well as others' more subtle blunders, more hidden flaws in that significance which it is the object of articulate expression to convey. The accomplished Significian is at least a Sherlock Holmes, and more, a Helmholtz. [Welby (1983), p. 225]<10>
'Words are conventional signs. They mean what they are intended to mean by the speaker and understood to mean by the hearer. There is no other sense in which language can be properly said to signify anything' (p. 220 [of Greenough and Kittredge's book, Words and their Ways in English Speech (published in 1902)]). Therefore it is plain that if we chose we could acquire complete control over language which now makes a mock of our helplessness and leaves us dumb where we most need expressiveness. [Welby (1983), pp. 283-284]
And in Significs and Language, published just a year before her death, she discusses this theme once again:
...great and wise and beautiful things are conveyed to us, and we rise in response beyond the self of commonplace with which we have no right to be content. Only, that response is unconsciously impoverished and even distorted by quite avoidable drawbacks, which we not only complacently tolerate but teach to our children, thus ensuring their permanence and stifling the instinct of right expression which, though in quaint forms, shows itself clearly in the normal child until successfully suppressed. And though we do now and then recoil from a glaring misuse of term in the 'rising generation,' and lament such a lapse from our good ways, we never see that the fatal seed has been sown, the fatal tradition of a far more extensive misuse has been handed on, by us; that in scores and hundreds of instances we have carefully habituated the child, trained it, to say one thing when it means another, or to be content to leave much of language in rags or else cramped by antique armour. [Welby (1911), pp. 62-63]<11>
The fact that Meaning includes Intention and End seems to indicate that it is the most general term we have for the value of a sign, symbol, or mark. [Welby (1896), p. 28]
In What is Meaning? Welby clearly identifies meaning with the speaker's intention and she uses this conception of meaning to once again oppose the idea that expressions have standard meanings apart from their contexts of use:
There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the Sense of a word, but only the sense in which it is used - the circumstances, state of mind, reference, 'universe of discourse' belonging to it. The Meaning of a word is the intent which it is desired to convey - the intention of the user. [Welby (1983), p. 5]
She repeats something like this formulation in her 1911 article "Significs" for The Encyclopedia Britannica:
..."Sense" is not in itself purposive; whereas that is the main character of the word "Meaning," which is properly reserved for the specific sense which it is intended to convey.<12>
When, in youth, I learned what was called "philosophy"..., no one ever mentioned to me the question of "meaning". Later, I became aware of Lady Welby's work on the subject, but failed to take it seriously. I imagined that logic could be pursued by taking it for granted that symbols were always, so to speak, transparent, and in no way distorted the objects they were supposed to "mean". Purely logical problems have gradually led me further and further from this point of view. [Russell (1926), p. 138]<16>
It is not completely clear from this remark what Russell's assessment of Welby's work was when he wrote the review. But it seems, at any rate, he understood her to be a fundamental figure in the history of the subject. And it is interesting to note that in the same short review he presents as "truisms" about language a few theses that are reminiscent of views we have seen to be Welby's:
The natural function of words is to have affects upon hearers which the speaker desires. [Russell (1926), p. 139]
And again, just below this in the review:
Words are means of producing effects on others. I once canvassed a retired Colonel in the Liberal interest during an election, and he said: "Get out, or I'll set the dogs upon you." These words had, and were intended to have, the same effect as the dogs would have had. [Russell (1926), p. 139]
Indeed, these are truisms, but not everybody has felt the need to stress them. I will talk about Russell's own contribution to the history I am sketching later. These truisms which are at least thematically traceable to Welby are very important to Russell's own theory of meaning.
I confess I had not realized before reading it [Welby's Encyclopedia Britannica article "Significs"], how fundamental your trichotomy of Sense, Meaning, and Significance really is. ...I now find that my division [of three kinds of Interpretant] nearly corresponds with yours, as it ought to do exactly, if both are correct. I am not in the least conscious of having been at all influenced by your book in settling my trichotomy, as nearly as it is settled; and I don't believe there was any such influence; though of course, there may have been without my being aware of it. In reading your book my mind may, quite well have absorbed the ideas without my remembering it; and when I came to search for a division of the Interpretant, those ideas may have seemed to me to have been struck out by processes of thought that I thought then were presenting themselves to me for the first time, when the fact was that they were due to a bent of my thoughts which the perusal of your book had made. However, as I do not believe this did happen, I feel some exultation in finding that my thought and yours nearly agree, for I think it is because we were both trying to get at the truth; and I should not wonder if you have the same feeling. But as far as the public goes, I can only point out the agreement, and confess to having read your book. [Welby (1977), p. 109]
This passage is particularly interesting since, in spite of Peirce's many disclaimers of influence by Welby, Peirce clearly acknowledges that Welby's work on meaning is earlier than his own. There is no question raised about Peirce's possible influence on Welby.
Let us see how well we do agree. The greatest discrepancy appears to lie in my Dynamical Interpretant as compared with your "Meaning." If I understand the latter, it consists in the affect upon the mind of the Interpreter that the utterer (whether vocally or by writing) of the sign intends to produce. My Dynamical Interpretant consists in direct effect actually produced by a Sign upon an Interpreter of it. [Welby (1977), pp. 109-110]
Whatever the story actually is with respect to Welby's influence on Peirce, it is clear that he felt her work significantly like his own to wonder about the question. But perhaps themost important thing about these passages is that the first of them in part and the second of them wholly were published in a section devoted to Peirce in an appendix of Ogden and Richards (1923), The Meaning of Meaning.<17>
2.3 Ferdinand de Saussure
[Language] is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and sound-images, and in which both parts of the sign are psychological. [p. 15]<25>
A meaning for Saussure is a concept or an idea:
The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. [p. 66]
But for Saussure concepts are not entities, either platonic or psychological, that exist prior to language:
Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language. [p. 112]
And the establishment of a pairing of a sound-image with a concept can only be done holistically, that is, in conjunction with the pairing of many other sound-images and concepts. This holism, as I am calling it, is what motivates Saussure to speak of language as a system and not merely a set of pairs, of signs. Setting up such a system is something that requires a linguistic community:
...the social fact alone can create a linguistic system. The community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value. [p. 113]
Language is concrete, no less so than speaking; and this is a help in our study of it. Linguistic signs, though basically psychological, are not abstractions; associations which bear the stamp of collective approval - and which added together constitute language - are realities that have their seat in the brain. [p. 15]
Language is a well-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts. [p. 14]
And more strongly, he says that
speaking is necessary for the establishment of language, and historically its actuality always comes first. [p. 18]
Language is radically powerless to defend itself against the forces which from one moment to the next are shifting the relationship between the signified [meaning] and the signifier [sound-image]. [p. 75]
Thus, language changes constantly and these changes are brought about by the behavior of language users:
...in language...everyone participates at all times, and that is why it is constantly being influenced by all. [p. 74]
the faculty of articulating words...is exercised only with the help of the instrument created by a collectivity and provided for its use.... [p. 11]
...language is necessary if speaking is to be intelligible and produce its effects.... [p. 18]
And he also seems to hold at times that language is not susceptible to the affects of speech, that is, that language change cannot result from what people do in speech:
The signifier [sound-image], though to all appearances freely chosen with respect to the idea that it represents, is fixed, not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it. The masses have no voice in the matter, and the signifier chosen by language could be replaced by no other. ...No individual, even if he willed it, could modify in any way at all the choice that has been made; and what is more, the community itself cannot control so much as a single word; it is bound to the existing language. [p. 71]
Saussure, in holding apparently contradictory views about language change, is concerned to respect a certain fact about the relation between language and other social institutions. For, language is often understood to be a matter of convention, a certain sort of social institution, among language users. And Saussure often avails himself of this sort of conception of language. For example he tells us in one place that "language is a convention...." [p. 10], and in another that it "exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community" [p. 14]. But he clearly sees this as a limited conception of what is going on with language.<32> For Saussure thinks that while individuals and groups of individuals might effectively make changes, by agreeing among themselves, to what are properly understood as social institutions, this is not really possible with language. The idea is that while, for example, a congress might meet of the American Scrabble Players and by agreement rule that in official games two letter words will not be allowed, with language there really cannot be an analogous such congress and ruling. This is the sort of thing that I think he means when he says, in the quote just above, that the "signifier [sound-image] ... is fixed, not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it" and that "the community itself cannot control so muchas a single word; it is bound to the existing language". Read this way, what Saussure means is not so much that a group is bound to the existing language and that it can't change, but rather, the group is bound to the language and whatever changes it should undergo.<33>
It might look like there is still something of a contradiction left over here, even when we read Saussure as I have just suggested. For when he says that "...in language...everyone participates at all times, and that is why it is constantly being influenced by all" [p. 74], he really does seem to have it that language changes rest on changes in speech behavior, but on the reading I just suggested he seems to be saying that neither individuals nor communities can willfully change a language. Why couldn't each individual in a group decide to speak a certain way agreed on by all and thereby change a language? The answer is that Saussure seems to see that such a decision wouldn't be enough, on its own, to institute a language change: the only thing that could actually bring about a change is an actual change of behavior of each member. It is always the actual practices of the community that determines the language that is being spoken in that community. Of course, if the decision of a group is followed by an actual change in practice in accordance with the decision, then in some sense, the group changed their language by agreement. I don't think that Saussure really wants to exclude such a scenario as a logical possibility. But I think that as he sees things, any such decisions, if they should actually be attempted in actual speech communities would not, in fact, end up resulting in the intended change in language. Linguistic practice for Saussure has too many unconscious influences for conscious decisions about it to ever be effective ultimately. This is not an implausible view and it seems to resolve this last apparent contradiction in his views about language change. That Saussure has this view is nicely illustrated by the following passage about the possibility of instituting artificial languages:
Whoever creates a language controls it only so long as it is not in circulation; from the moment when it fulfills its mission and becomes the property of everyone, control is lost. Take Esperanto as an example; if it succeeds, will it escape the inexorable law? Once launched, it is quite likely that Esperanto will enter upon a fully semiological life; it will be transmitted according to laws which have nothing in common with those of its logical creation, and there will be no turning backwards. A man proposing a fixed language that posterity would have to accept for what it is would be like a hen hatching a duck's egg: the language created by him would be borne along, willy-nilly, by the current that engulfs all languages. [p. 76]
...language is necessary if speaking is to be intelligible and produce its effects; but speaking is necessary for the establishment of language, and historically its actuality always comes first. [p. 18]
If language is necessary for speech to work, then how can speech have come "historically" before language? If speech could somehow come before language, then language-less speech should be possible. But here too, the contradiction is only apparent.
...the question of the origin of speech is not so important as it is generally assumed to be. The question is not even worth asking; the only real object of linguistics is the normal, regular life of an existing idiom. [pp. 71 - 72]
Saussure's idea that speech is prior historically to language, then, cannot be understood in terms of the absolute origin of language. In fact, the apparent contradiction now under discussion, gets resolved only in noting Saussure's views of language change again. Most notable here is Saussure's view that
...everything diachronic in language is diachronic only by virtue of speaking. It is in speaking that the germ of all change is found. Each change is launched by a certain number of individuals before it is accepted for general use. ...But not all innovations of speaking have the same success, and so long as they remain individual, they may be ignored, for we are studying language; they do not enter into our field of observation until the community of speakers has adopted them. [p. 98]
Thus, in speech, an innovation is introduced and if adopted by the speech community generally, it becomes part of language. In this sense speech always precedes language. But in this sense, there is no implication that speech is possible without language.
2.4 Alan Henderson Gardiner
I am, of course, well aware that there are important aspects of speech and language which I have as good as completely ignored. My interest being primarily semasiological, i.e. concerned with the function of speech as an instrument for conveying meaning, I have paid but small attention to either its sounds or its aesthetic bearings. [p. 13]<35>
As a first approximation let us define speech as the use, between man and man, of articulate sound-signs for the communication of their wishes and their views about things. [p. 18]
And he suggests straight away a certain conception of the origins of speech and language:
We are often warned, and wisely, against basing far-reaching conclusions on theories of origin. These are bound to be conjectural in a high degree, and nowhere more so than in the cases of language and speech. Still, the philologist can barely escape from some working hypothesis regarding the genesis of speech, and it may be well here to point out that its origin cannot be conceived of otherwise than as the result of social conditions. True, the ultimate basis must be the involuntary cry of the individual animal. This was, I suppose, at the outset, little more than the audible result of muscular movements due to the incidence of some external stimulus. The squeal of the trapped rabbit provides the type. But such emotional monologue is very far removed from speech, nor could any amount of variety either in the stimuli or in the reactions ever have given rise to anything resembling a real language. For the development of a language we are bound to assume a purposeful use of articulate utterances in order to influence the conduct of others. [pp. 18-19]
Here he has not yet actually sharply distinguished between speech and language, but these early passages display nicely how his conceptions of speech and language are both founded in notions of communication and purposiveness. He takes pains to criticize the view that speech can be rightly understood as the expression of thought.<36> For Gardiner, the primary source of speech is the desire to affect the behavior or beliefs of another. We don't merely express thought in speech, for Gardiner, but we always, or fundamentally, express thought in order to affect the behavior or attitudes of others. Thus, speech can be seen as an expression of thought only insofar as it is first seen as a species of purposive behavior, as a means of communication of one type or another. The notions of puroposive behavior and communication will be discussed more below, but for now, it is helpful in understanding Gardiner's distinction between speech and language to note that he takes the development of language to be the development of tools for use in speech and that he takes speech essentially to be a matter of one person trying to affect the beliefs and/or behaviors of another.
We shall see that the impulse to speech, at least in its more fundamental forms, arises in the intention of some member of the community to influence one or more of his fellows in reference to some particular thing. Speech is thus a universally exerted activity, having at first definitely utilitarian aims. In describing this activity, we shall discover that it consists in the application of a universally possessed science, namely the science which we call language. ...These two human attributes, language the science and speech its active application, have too often been confused with one another or regarded as identical.... [p. 62]
By characterizing language as a "science", of course, Gardiner is saying that language is a certain body of knowledge:
Language is a collective term, and embraces in its compass all those items of knowledge which enable a speaker to make effective use of word-signs. [p. 88]
Gardiner took the speaker's knowledge as the basis of linguistic theory:
It is my conviction that every adult human being is the living repository of a profound knowledge of language. ...Here, then, existent in the consciousness of everyone, is an immense treasure of evidence available for the construction of a solid fabric of linguistic theory. [p. 5]
...a physical substitute has to be found whenever anything intellectual or emotional is to be imparted. Such physical substitutes are called signs, and are subject to the conditions (1) that they should have a pre-arranged 'meaning', or associated mental equivalence, and (2) that they should be handy objects of sense transferable at will. Any material thing which conforms to these two conditions will serve as a 'sign', and any system of signs is a kind of language. [p. 67]<37>
Thus for both Saussure and Gardiner, language is a system of signs. If the two differ in their understanding of language it is with respect to the notion of the meanings of signs,<38> and to Gardiner's view of meaning I will return presently. It is important to note though that Gardiner augments the above characterization of language elsewhere in his book and tells us that in addition to words, syntactic rules as well must be considered parts of language:
Words, as the most important constituents of language, may fairly well be regarded as its units, though it must be borne in mind that the rules for combining words (syntactic rules, as they are called), and the specific types of intonation employed in pronouncing words, are constituents of language as well. [p. 88]
For Gardiner words and syntactic rules, along with their meanings, constitute language. Sentences have a special status. They are composed of words arranged according to syntactic rules, but they are, for Gardiner, more properly regarded as phenomena of speech than of language. He ends the passage just quoted with the following dictum:
The sentence is the unit of speech, and the word is the unit of language. [p. 88, his emphasis]
This reflects Gardiner's sense of language being at the service of speech. For in speech a speaker tries to communicate something to an audience and uses whatever might best achieve this end:
Sentences are like ad hoc constructions run up for a particular ceremony, constructions which are pulled down and their materials dispersed as soon as their particular purpose has been served. [p. 90]<39>
It is here that Gardiner locates the most important aspects of the distinction between language and speech. The first section of the third chapter of his book is called "The antithesis of 'language' and 'speech'" and there we are told:
The attentive reader will by this time have accustomed himself to think of speech as a form of drama needing a minimum of two actors, a scene or situation of its own, a plot or 'thing meant', and as a last element the extemporized words. Such miniature dramas are going on wherever speech is practiced, and it is little short of a miracle that the authors who deal with linguistic theory seem never to have thought of describing one of them. ...[T]here has been a sort of conspiracy not to isolate or analyse in its entirety a single act of speech.... ...[N]o small part of my purpose will be served if later writers recognize the absolute necessity of examining single acts of speech in their total environment, and if the distinction between language and speech is never again suffered to fall into oblivion. [pp. 106-107]
By "extemporized words" Gardiner is alluding to the use of language: from the words and syntactic structures that constitute language sentences are constructed by speakers to meet the needs she or he has in some given situation. Thus, speech is fundamental for Gardiner: the act of speech, it can be claimed, is the central notion in Gardiner's thought. I will return to this emphasis on speech and acts of speech below.<40>
...the meaning of a word is not identical with an 'idea' in the Platonic sense. ...[W]ord meanings possess nothing of that self-consistency and homogeneity which are characteristic of 'ideas'. Ideas, if attainable at all, are the result of long and toilsome search on the part of philosophers. The metaphysician may ultimately arrive at an adequate concept of 'Truth', and the physicist may define 'Force' in a way which will stand him in good stead. But these notions are not the word-meanings with which speech operates. If we consult the Oxford English Dictionary we shall find the meaning of truth set forth under three main heads, each with numerous subdivisions. The applications of the word range from personal faithfulness or loyalty to verified facts or realities. It is not as an 'idea' that the meaning of the word truth must be conceived, but rather as an area upon which the various potentialities of application are plotted out. [p. 44]<41>
When Gardiner denies that word-meanings are Platonic 'ideas' the issue at stake for him is not the ontological status of word-meanings, but, rather, something more like their epistemological status. We can take him here as pointing roughly to the idea that the notion of word-meaning should be understood in terms of the uses which may be made of a word. He states this a bit more clearly in the following passage:
I believe that all the senses in which linguistic theory must employ the term 'meaning' conceal a similar abbreviation, and that the intending, purposing speaker must always be looked for in the background. Thus when we allude to the 'meaning' of a word, what is signified is the multitude of ways in which a speaker may, if he will, legitimately employ it. [p. 100]
In another place Gardiner is more specific, if still speaking roughly:
My argument having deprived words of some of their importance by denying the self-sufficiency of their meanings, it will naturally be asked what value I do attribute to them. My answer is that they are primarily instrumental, that their function is to force or cajole the listener into looking at certain things. [p. 33]
...the function of words is to make the listener 'see what is meant'. They are, in fact, 'clues'. The thing-meant is itself never shown, but has to be identified by the listener on the basis of the word-meanings submitted to him for that purpose. [p. 34]
"It is a condition which circumscribes within more or less vague and shifting limits the divergence of occasional meanings." Would not this repay more extended treatment? E.g., if a general and usual signification is not a meaning, is it ever a sense? "In order to fix the occasional meaning of words" we need a clue.... [Welby (1983), pp. 256-257]<42>
And we can also note that where Saussure says little about what role meanings were supposed to play in the use of language, for Gardiner, this role is of central importance. So, with respect to the question of expression-meaning, or the central meaning of expressions, we can look at Gardiner as synthesizing the emphases of Welby and Saussure. Welby strongly and consistently resists central meanings because of her concerns about the flexibility of speech. Saussure embraces central meanings for expressions, but says next to nothing about what use is made of these in speech. Gardiner places the role of meaning in speech at the center of his characterization of meaning itself. This is a powerful and original move.
...I showed that the essential method of speech consisted in presenting to the listener successive word-signs each possessing a definite area of meaning. Employing these clues, the listener reconstructs the thing-meant by an effort of his intelligence, using the situation as an additional source of inference. [p. 195]
The use of inference in interpretation is often repeated and stressed:
...the listener's interpretation is always a matter of reasoning. [p. 199]
Thus, the words of a sentence provide 'clues' along with features of the context of the utterance of the sentence and, if all goes well, the audience will deduce from all of this what the speaker's communicative intentions are.<43> The contemporary reader may well think that Gardiner is committed to the view that a language will enjoy a compositional-meaning theory, a finitely axiomatizable theory which entails for each sentence of the language a theorem that says what the sentence means.<44> Such a theory is generally understood to require that sentence meanings are entities of some sort. And, in fact, Gardiner seems friendly to the idea that sentence meanings are things when he notes that in ordinary talk it is common to speak of a sentence's meaning as a sort of thing:
...there is no reason to deny that a thought about something is in itself a thing. For to describe the reference of a complete sentence as a 'thing' is not only in accord with common linguistic usage, but is also vital and fundamental for a satisfactory theory of speech. English permits us to say: That Pussy is beautiful is a THING which can be expressed in many different ways. Or again: Pussy beautiful? I never heard of such a THING! You said someTHING quite different a few minutes ago. Commands and questions may also be taken as 'things', e.g. The question 'how much did he spend?' is a THING you are entitled to ask; The order to start work at 6.0 a.m. was a thing unparalleled.... [sic.] With a little contriving it could be shown that the gist of any sentence could be described as a 'thing' without departing from the general usage of our native tongue and thought. [p. 24]
...we must guard against the supposition that the part of the listener is wholly passive. He is a recipient rather than an initiator, no doubt, but the act of understanding is one which demands considerable mental effort. ...[I]n the course of actual speech, the words serve mainly as clues. It is upon the listener that devolves the duty of interpreting those clues.... ...Sometimes the part to be played by the listener greatly transcends the mere effort of comprehension. In questions and commands a definite responsive movement is expected of him. This responsive movement lies, it is true, outside the speaker's own linguistic act, but in a sense it belongs to it, questions and commands being otherwise inexplicable. [pp. 64-65]<45>
Words do not all resemble one another. They may be likened to the stones in a builder's yard, of different materials and of different shapes. They have been hewn into diverse shapes for special purposes, some meant for this position in the building and some for that. In themselves they carry a presumption of their future use, but at the last moment the builder may change his mind, and use a particular stone in a way for which it was not intended. In skilled hands, a stone so employed may perhaps be even more effective than another originally destined for the same place. [p. 175]
In the following passage, Gardiner display an attitude strongly reminiscent of Welby's towards too great a respect for the priorities of conventional mechanisms of speech:
...mention must be made of...the fallacy of the mot juste. Some eminent authors have been pleased to toy with the illusion that there is only one correct way of saying a thing, and conversely, that each word has only one correct application. To hold such a view is to affirm the rights of language, but to deny those of speech. Individuality in speaker or writer is seemingly forbidden, and it is difficult to imagine, on this presupposition, how new thoughts could come to expression or old ones take on a new aspect. One of the most precious characteristics of language is its elasticity, which permits speech to stretch a word or construction to suit the momentary fancy or need. [p. 174]
Still, Gardiner understood past usage, and the central meanings that past usage gives rise to, to represent constraints upon the speaker. One is not merely free to use a word to mean whatever. He quotes Raleigh in this regard:
The true position is summed up by Walter Raleigh with great profundity: 'The business of letters, howsoever simple it may seem to those who think truth-telling a gift of nature, is in reality twofold, to find words for a meaning, and to find a meaning for words. Now it is the words which refuse to yield, and now the meaning, so that he who attempts to wed them is at the same time altering his words to suit his meaning and modifying and shaping his meaning to satisfy the requirements of his words.' Without the notion of a give and take between speech and language, linguistic theory is an impossibility. [p. 174]
The constraint that the central meaning of an expression places on its use informs Gardiner's understanding of metaphor:
Metaphor, from the Greek
And Gardiner, unlike Saussure, clearly identifies such diversions from central meanings as one of the sources of linguistic change:
The new meaning introduced by speech gradually gains the upper hand over the old meaning imposed by language. If at last the old meaning ceases to be felt when the word is used, incongruent word-function becomes congruent, and metaphor dies. A new word-form or a new word-meaning has become established. Speech has become language. [pp. 165-166]
But Gardiner never attempts a full-scale investigation of metaphor and non-literal usage in every day speech. In the section of his book that he devotes to metaphor he mostly sticks with examples taken from literature. Still his inclusion of the topic marks something, again, of a synthesis of Welby's views and Saussure's. For Welby, non-literal usage appears to threaten the very notion of literal meaning, whereas for Saussure, though he has something of a notion of literal meaning, the use of literal meanings to non-literal ends is never really discussed. Gardiner is able to maintain literal meanings as well as to accommodate the existence of non-literal usage.
Every change in language, conscious or unconscious, great or small, whether of pronunciation or of meaning, has its origin in some single act of speech, hence passing, if it find favour with the multitude, from mouth to mouth, until at last it becomes common property. [pp. 111-112]
And he ends the section from which the above quote is taken with the words:
There is no need for lengthier insistence on the universally recognized truth that language is, and can only be, the outcome of countless single examples of speech. [p. 112].<47>
It is highly important to realize that all linguistic form arouses an expectation of use. The reason is that language is only a name for established habits of speech, built up out of innumerable repeated acts of the same type. [p. 138]
Thus, Gardiner, it seems, somewhat more than Saussure, provides a sort of metaphysical primacy to speech over language. Language is something like the sum-total of speech regularities in the community, and this seems to require for Gardiner the conceptual possibility of language-less speech.<48>
...the title of 'sentence' being reserved for those single words or combinations of words which...give satisfaction by shadowing forth the intelligible purpose of a speaker. It is only when, in a given situation, a word or words betray such a purpose, seem fired or galvanized by some reasonable communicative intent, that the dignity of sentence-rank can be conferred upon them. [p. 182]
Gardiner is sensitive to the variety of reasons a speaker might have for producing a sentence. In the following passage we hear of this variety in a way that might call to mind the writing of J. L. Austin:
On a broad survey there might seem hardly any limit to the variety of purposes with which a sentence can be uttered. Sometimes a speaker makes an affirmation with intent to persuade, protest, or even deceive; sometimes he may give a description for his own amusement or for that of his audience; or again, he may speak merely for the sake of speaking. His sentences may be aspirations, prayers, promises, threats, judicial verdicts, sarcasms, witticisms, sneers, teasings, exhortations, complaints, flatteries, and much else. [p. 186]
But Gardiner does not think that it is the job of the linguist or grammarian to give an account of all of these sorts of purposes. The chief aim of the linguist is with those purposes of speech that are reflected in the formal structure of sentences and not all of the purposes of the above list are so reflected [pp 186-187]. Ultimately Gardiner settles on classification of sentences into four sorts: (1) statements, (2) requests (or commands), (3) questions, and (4) exclamations [p 189].
In requests some specifically named action is demanded by the speaker, whereas in questions a relevant verbal response is desired. [p. 303]
And of exclamations he tells us:
The essence of exclamations is that, whether by way of description or only through implication, they emphasize to the listener some mood, attitude, or desire of the speaker, in extreme cases to the exclusion of all else. [p. 315]
...the purposes with which this sentence-form [the statement] is used are less obvious than in the other classes of sentence. Indeed, those purposes are exceedingly various.... [p. 302]
But still, he does seem to focus, in his discussion of the statement, on its use for the purpose of providing an audience with information of some sort or another, that is, with its use to make assertions:
We now see wherein the peculiarity of statements lies; they predicate something of something. Or to use the term customary in this connexion, statements 'assert'. [p. 295]
He defines assertion in the following way:
...'assertion', the definition of which is contained in the following formula: All statements assert, i.e. present their predicate either as true or else as false of the thing denoted by their subject. [p. 299, emphasis Gardiner's]<50>
...I...mention...a mode of speech which, paradoxical as it may seem, takes the further step of dispensing with words altogether. Questions may be answered with a nod or a shake of the head, and unpleasant subjects dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders. If these acts are not speech, I do not know where to place them; and it should be observed that the communicative means they employ are good elocutional form. [pp. 203-204]
Elocutional-form, Gardiner tells us, "provides the dominant clue to the special quality of the sentence" [p. 205].<51> Thus, the elocutionary-form of a sentence - the tone of voice,the gestures accompanying an utterance, etc. - is the main indication provided by a speaker as to what general sort of sentence is being uttered. This aspect of sentences is extremely important for Gardiner since knowing the sort of sentence that is being uttered is crucial to deciphering what the overall intention of the speaker was in uttering the sentence:
...from the speaker's point of view it is desirable that his listener should know precisely what aim or intention he had in mind. In fact, it is not enough for an utterance to have recognizable function as a sentence, as the vehicle of the general purpose to make a communication; it must somehow reveal or hint at the special purpose entertained by the speaker. [p. 186]
Thus, Gardiner sees it as an essential feature of an act of speech that the speaker intend her or his communicative intention to be recognized. That it should proceed via a speaker's intention to have her or his communicative intentions recognized is, crucially, what Grice later was to indicate as essential to communication. It is also directly related to Austin's notion of securing of uptake, at least as Strawson glossed the latter notion in his classic paper.<52> But the idea seems clearly anticipated here in Gardiner's writing.<53>
Words and sentences not only have immediate reference, resulting from intentionally directed meaning, but they also have 'form', a method of conveying knowledge by a sort of overtone, less well characterized by the term 'description' than by the term implication. Speech achieves its ends partly by describing, partly by implying. [pp. 195-196]<54>
Thus, though the special-sentence quality of an utterance is generally, as has been mentioned, indicated by the elocutional-form of the utterance, it can also be indicated by description. This amounts to what in post-Austinian terminology might be called the use of an explicit performative. Gardiner tells us:
...I ask you, did you give that poor beggar anything? is at least primarily two sentences, of which the first does not tell us that it states, nor the latter that it asks a question. [p. 191]
The first sentence here is the one that says "I ask you": this states that the speaker is asking something, but it doesn't state that it so states. The second sentence is the question, "did you give the poor beggar anything?" This does not state anything about its special sentence-quality at all. Gardiner thinks interesting problems arise in connection with the use of explicit statements within sentences which indicate what the special sentence-quality of the utterance is intended to be. But it is interesting that he discusses this sort of example.<55>
Gilbert Ryle opens his paper "Use, Usage and Meaning" with the following passage:
In 1932 Mr. (now Sir) Alan H. Gardiner published The Theory of Speech and Language (Clarendon Press). A central theme of his book was what, with some acknowledged verbal artificiality, he labelled the distinction between 'Language' and 'Speech'.<57>
Mats Furberg strongly suggests that Austin was influenced by Gardiner. In the penultimate paragraph of a section devoted to removing the common impression that Austin was either a Wittgensteinian or importantly influenced by Wittgenstein, Furberg makes the following remarks:
...the philologist Alan H. Gardiner gave a first sketch of the distinction between locutionary and illocutionary aspects of a speech-act. (See Part II of A [sic.] Theory of Speech and Language.) His remarks on 'sentence-qualifacators' (§§ 61 and 68) are clearly relevant to such philosophical puzzles as why it is odd to say 'S is P, but I don't believe it'. [Furberg (1971), p. 52]
Thus, Furberg acknowledges Gardiner as an originator of the important distinction between locutionary and illocutionary speech-acts before Austin. And more importantly, his point in making the acknowledgments in this passage is to show that we need not believe Austin was influenced at all by Wittgenstein, that is, that we do better to understand that Austin was influenced by Gardiner (and others who Furberg mentions, but are irrelevant here). Immediately following the above quoted passage in Furberg is the claim:
There is, then, no need and no reason to suppose that Austin formed his basic ideas under Wittgenstein's influence. [Furberg (1971), p. 52]
I cannot assess Furberg's claims about Wittgenstein's influence on Austin. But his assessment of Gardiner and his influence on Austin is plausible enough. Unfortunately Furberg says little else about this influence. He only cites a single place where Austin refers to Gardiner.<58> This, of course, is nice since it shows that at least Austin definitely was aware of Gardiner. But it would be nice if there was more to go on here.
Sir Alan Gardiner was perhaps the first to elucidate the sign situation as essentially concerning the take-up of the speaker's intentions by the hearer:
The thing meant by any utterance is whatever the speaker has intended to be understood from it by the listener.but it had indirectly been glanced at over a century before by the rhetorician George Campbell:
Eloquence is the art whereby discourse is adapted to produce the effect which the speaker intends it should produce in the hearer.Recently H. P. Grice has been notable in developing this approach theoretically, but without making reference to his predecessors.<59>
But Wright doesn't indicate whether he thinks Grice was actually influenced by Campbell or Gardiner.
...successful communication depends, not only upon the receiver's reception of the signal and his appreciation of the fact that it is intended for him rather than for another, but also upon his recognition of the sender's communicative intention and upon his making an appropriate behavioural or cognitive response to it. This has long been a commonplace of non-philosophical treatments of meaning and communication (e.g., Gardiner, 1932); and it has been forcefully argued more recently, from a philosophical point of view, by such writers as Grice (1957) and Strawson (1964).<60>
I am not sure whether it is correct or not to take as a commonplace what Lyons suggests here: just above I quote Wright claiming that Gardiner was "perhaps the first to elucidate the sign situation as essentially concerning the take-up of the speaker's intentions by the hearer". But, however things stand in that regard, it is interesting to see Lyons noting Gardiner's anticipation of this important aspect of Oxford philosophy of language.
The meaning of any sentence is what the speaker intends to be understood from it by the listener.<61>
Ogden and Richards criticize Gardiner and the attitude towards meaning they take him and Welby to stand for. Though they later admit the speaker's intention to affect an audience as one of five functions of language they identify (Ogden and Richards (1923), p. 230), they clearly seem to have a strong opposition to the view:
'Mean' as shorthand for 'intend to refer to,' is, in fact, one of the unluckiest symbolic devices possible.<62>
I will leave off my discussion of Gardiner on this note, but he will reappear when I come to speak of Grice in section 2.6.
2.5 Causal Theories of Meaning
2.6 Grice
2.7 The Usual Conception Today of the History of "The Theory of Meaning"
Let us consider the designation relation as it holds between written words and their meanings. Since natural languages do not have general rules which allow us to deduce the meaning of a word from its form, there is no way of indicating the extension of this relation except by enumeration of all its member pairs. If a basic language is already known, then this is done through a dictionary; otherwise, the answer takes on the form, for example, of a botanical garden, that is, a collection of objects, each of which has its name written on it. If the meanings of the words are known, then the answer to the correlation problem of the designation relation for sentences can be solved through a general function, which however, is usually very complicated. It is the syntax of the language in question cast in the form of a meaning rule. A meaning rule may (in an elementary case) have the following form: if a sentence consists of three words, a noun in the nominative case; a verb in the third person singular, present tense, active mood; and a noun in the accusative case, then it designates the state of affairs that the object of which the first word is the sign stands to the object of which the third word is the sign in the relation of which the verb is the sign.
From the correlation problem, we distinguish the essence problem. Here we do not simply ask between what objects the relation obtains, but what it is between the correlated objects, by virtue of which they are connected. The question does not ask for the constitution of the related object, but asks for the essence of the relation itself. Later on,...we shall indicate the difference between science and metaphysics..., and we shall see that the essence problems belong to metaphysics....<85>
This is a striking example of a logically astute philosopher understanding the nature of the question of the logical form of a sentence - for the description that he gives of how to solve the so-called correlation problem is really a sketch of how to describe the logical forms of sentences (see just below on logical form and compositional-semantics) -, but failing to understand the nature of the psychological grounds for the correlations between sentences and their meanings. I think this shows that the project of doing logic for natural language has been taken as independent of the project of providing a theory of meaning (in the sense of this dissertation).
To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true.
(One can understand it, therefore, without knowing whether it is true.)
It is understood by anyone who understands its constituents. [4.024]<91>
These considerations might lead one to assimilate Wittgenstein to the view that I above noted that some seem to believe Frege to have implicitly held, namely, the view that a sentence means what it does, roughly, because speakers who use it are related in a certain way to a compositional-semantic theory of a language to which the sentence belongs.<92> So, the early Wittgenstein might be assimilated to the compositional-semantics tradition somewhat as Frege was. But as with Frege, Wittgenstein never directly raises the question of the theory of meaning nor does he in any obvious manner raise the issues that would motivate such a theory. He does at one place in the Tractatus suggest that everyday language is based on conventions, but he no where really brings up the question of how the meanings of expressions are related to the conventional practices and attitudes of the people who use the expressions.<93>
There are various problems as regards language. First, there is the problem what actually occurs in our minds when we use language with the intention of meaning something by it; this problem belongs to psychology. Secondly, there is the problem as to what is the relation subsisting between thoughts, words, or sentences, and that which they refer to or mean; this problem belongs to epistemology. Thirdly, there is the problem of using sentences so as to convey truth rather than falsehood; this belongs to the special sciences dealing with the subject-matter of the sentences in question. Fourthly, there is the question: what relation must one fact (such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other? This is a logical question, and is the one with which Mr Wittgenstein is concerned. [Russell (1922), p. ix]<94>
Russell when he wrote the "Introduction" had already come to understand the notion meaning in psychological terms. So his looking at Wittgenstein's views here as logical and not psychological amounts, it would seem, to his seeing Wittgenstein as not engaged in the theory of meaning, in the sense of this term as used in this dissertation at least.<95> So, there is some reason, at least, not to assimilate early Wittgenstein to the compositional-semantic tradition that I identified above.
The mistake is to say that there is anything that meaning something consists in.<98>
This suspicion of analysis probably resulted from a sense that there was something wrong with analysis generally<99> as well as from a deep anti-psychologism of sorts that runs throughout Wittgenstein's later works.
2.8 Summary