The theory of meaning

This dissertation is concerned with that notion of meaning which is most commonly understood to apply to linguistic expressions. "Snow is white", it can be said, is a linguistic expression which means among English speakers that snow is white. But for an expression to mean something among a group of people, certain facts about the psychological states of the people in the group must hold. Meaning, it is maintained, is primarily to be understood in terms of some regularity of communicative practices among the members of a group, and these communicative practices, in turn, are to be understood in terms of certain psychological states of the members of the group. When the notion of meaning is conceived of in this way, the task of providing a theory of meaning will be understood as the two-fold task of stating which communicative practices are relevant to meaning and then saying what sort of regularity of these practices will constitute meaning.; Chapter 1 is a general introduction by way of a discussion of H. P. Grice's important contribution to this subject.; Chapter 2 is a history of the theory of meaning in the twentieth century tracing important ideas associated with Grice to the works of Victoria Welby, Alan Gardiner, and others.; Chapter 3 contains a more detailed statement of the general conceptual framework of the discussion to follow.; In chapter 4 it is argued that no one has yet given a compelling case that the notion of a compositional-semantic theory is a necessary notion for the theory of meaning.; Chapter 5 is a critique of the "convention"-based theories of meaning of David Lewis and Brian Loar.; Chapter 6 is a critique of a recent "translation"-based theory of meaning due to Stephen Schiffer.; Chapter 7 contains discussion of proposals for avoiding problems found with earlier theories. Grice's notion of "speaker-meaning", the idea, due to Chomsky, that natural languages are infinite in magnitude, and the importance of the notion of "conventional" meaning are all challenged and alternative notions are argued for. To accept these alternatives is to accept a novel conception of the theory of meaning.