Linguistic Meaning and Rules of Use

Words and sentences have meanings in languages like English or German. If you know how to speak the language you know the meanings of its expressions. If youre trying to learn a new language, the meanings of words are one thing you are trying to learn. And once you know the meanings of sentences you can use them to say things, ask questions, and tell people to do things. But what is it for a word or a sentence to have a meaning? What sort of a property is a meaning? It is commonly thought that meaning is an arbitrary, conventional property. It is a property that expressions have not because of what they are like in themselves, but because of how speakers have used them in the past and how they use them now. The question is how to develop this basic insight into a fuller story of how language works. The most influential and widely discussed story since the 1970s has been David Lewiss view on which for an expression to have a meaning is for people to conventionally and regularly use it in certain conditions. For example, the meaning of Au! in German is, very roughly, a matter of people regularly using it when they are in pain, instead of using some other expression, where everybody knows this and knows that others know this. In contrast, the core of this project develops and defends an older story on which for an expression to have a meaning is instead for there to be a rule accepted in the community that tells you that you are permitted to use the expression in certain conditions. On this view, the meaning of Au! in German is a matter of the community accepting a rule of use that allows you to use it when you are in pain. If you use it when you are not in pain you have broken the rules and made a linguistic mistake. It is argued here that this view can better explain both how we can intentionally use language dishonestly, to deceive, as well as why we constantly police each others language use by correcting others and arguing over meaning. In further parts of the project it is then shown how thinking of meaning in terms of rules of use makes available powerful tools for the purposes of descriptive semantics, the scientific description of meaning.

The aim of this project was to study the question what is it for a word or a sentence to have a meaning? The project developed and defended the view that for an expression to have a meaning in the public language of a community is for there to be a conventionally accepted rule that tells you that you're permitted to use the expression when in certain conditions. The project resulted in 10 journal publications on the project topic and related issues, including rules in general, games, and speech acts, in leading international philosophical journals. The main output of the project is a book manuscript that is currently under review by a major academic publisher. The project also involved the organization of two workshops with international speakers at the University of Vienna. It set the groundwork for the principal investigator's receiving a Principal Investigator grant from the FWF.