Post 147

(For those of you with short attention spans, you can skip down to the bolded heading below because that’s where things get interesting: what precedes that is mere exposition because I think what I’m about to say warrants some kind of context.)

I am currently enrolled in a Philosophy of Language class. It’s fascinating stuff, really, and my professor is ridiculously enthused about it all, so I generally enjoy the course. But this past Friday, we had a debate that left me feeling furious! It put me in such a bad mood that I had trouble sleeping throughout the weekend and ditched class on Monday (it’s a MWF-type class, by the way), and it was with great reluctance that I dragged myself to class today because I was still so angry about the whole thing.

What was this debate, you ask? It was whether meaning is in what someone literally says or in their intent. My professor said we had to choose a side and that we weren’t allowed to be middling on the issue—we had to pick a side and argue for it. The class split perfectly in half, so it was 3 on 3 (and people told me horror stories about the huge class sizes at BYU! Ha!). I wasn’t convinced that all the way on one side or the other was very wise, so I considered the extremes: on one side, we have absolutely no wiggle room because every utterance is taken absolutely literally; on the other—wow, I shudder to think. It seemed to me that, if meaning is entirely in the intention, then structured language is totally unnecessary because people ought to just automatically know what I mean by this gesture or this facial expression and, if they misunderstand, that’s their problem. This latter prospect frightened me to death, so I argued in favor of absolute literalism and analyticity.

The class ended before the argument was really able to reach any sort of denouement, but I was happy to escape because the other side was driving me crazy with all these fluffy-bunny arguments that couldn’t be argued against because they were so insubstantial, and then we’d say something smart that they’d turn on its head because, I dunno, because nonsense always comes out on top.

So I was furious, as I said. Fury isn’t really something I’m naturally inclined toward, but I was positively livid about the whole ordeal because it seemed to me that linguistic anarchy had won against formal structure via stubborn belligerence, and I couldn’t take it.

But today I manned up to facing the class again, and I’m very glad I did because today I came to my own theory of meaning. It was mostly during the walk home from class that I refined it, but today’s discussions got my juices flowing in happy rivers again, and I’m sure that precipitated the brilliance that I am about to share with you.

The Schmetterlingian Theory of Meaning

Sentences mean;
People intend.

I have decided that my notion of language is words organized into sentence structures that are governed by set rules. Gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice &c. are not parts of language (except, I suppose, in, say, ASL, which is strictly gestures, or, like, Chinese, in which tone is a part of pronunciation). But if I say, “That’s terrific,” the sentence “That’s terrific” has a literal meaning, and that meaning is not negotiable.

However, I, the speaker, may intend to convey that the antecedent of “that” is not, in fact, terrific—the exact negation of the meaning’s truth value—and perhaps I successfully convey this intention to my audience via a deliberate combination of vocal qualities, hand gestures, and facial expression. These are certainly elements of communication and augment the conveyance of my original intention, but they have no linguistic value and do not change the actual meaning of the sentence, though they may (and, I hope, will) help you to understand my intent in uttering them.

“Oh,” you might think, “so, while he said, ‘That’s terrific,’ he meant, ‘That’s not terrific.’”

NO!!! You aren’t paying attention! I did not mean anything: sentences mean; people intend! So, while I said, “That’s terrific,” I intended to convey my opinion that “that” is not, in fact, terrific.

I was tossing this idea around with my philosophy-major roommate, and I realized that I don’t really know what function words perform. Certainly, words can mean, but I think that meaning in words is more of an exception than a rule. The only evidence I can offer for this is that, if you translate a sentence from one language to another, you have to take the sentence as a whole: if you translate the individual words one at a time, you’re never going to get a very good translation. My roommate suggested that I can simply define words in terms of sentences, viz. “Words are the building blocks that we put together to create sentences.” This, to me, is, for now, at least, a satisfactory explanation, but I hope to come up with something better soon because that definition really makes me wonder how dictionaries can exist.