22 The Linguist Vol/55 No/3 2016
www.ciol.org.uk
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HIDDEN MESSAGE
Can we hope to
understand language
without context when
people say one thing
but mean another?
W
hat is the relationship between meaning,
speakers and their languages? These are big
issues but, very broadly speaking, there are
two main schools of thought within the philosophy of
language. According to one school, which I'll term the
Formalist approach, linguistic meaning attaches to
formally construed bits of language – things like words
and sentences. These, in turn, are to be identified by
formal features, such as their spelling or underlying
logical form. Formalists do recognise that it is only
because there are intentional agents – people with a
practice of using symbols in the way that we do – that
words and sentences get to mean anything at all, but they
talk about what words and sentences mean independently
of what any given speaker is trying to do with them.
Use-based approaches, on the other hand, worry that
any kind of formal approach risks undervaluing the crucial
role of speakers and hearers, that it misses the point that
meaning comes only through and with use, and is thus tied
inextricably to contexts of use. It is not words that refer or
sentences that mean, it is speakers that do these things.
Each of these schools has a long and venerable history
in philosophy and each has been championed by great
thinkers (renowned Formalists include Frege, Russell and
the early Wittgenstein; use-based theorists include later
Wittgenstein, Strawson and Austin). Both do a good job of
answering some aspects of what we know about language.
For instance, Formal approaches can offer neat explanations
of the learnability of natural languages and facts about the
systematicity of meaning, while use-based approaches
capture nicely the potential fluidity of linguistic meaning
and the dynamic nature of linguistic communication.
Yet both approaches also face problems. Use-based
theorists have trouble in accounting for the apparent
normativity of meaning (i.e. the fact that one can use a
word correctly or incorrectly), and with specifying whose
use, when and where, will count as fixing meaning.
Formalists have difficulty accounting for the evident
IMAGES:
©
SHUTTERSTOCK
Philosophical questions about how language imparts meaning impact on
our understanding of everything from machine translation to legal statutes.
Emma Borg outlines the key theories – and why the experts still can't agree
Finding
meaning
