Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

This holistic view of meaning amounts to the view that a theory of meaning for a language must do no more than “give an account of how the meanings of sentences depend upon the meanings of words” (p. 304). The crucial move is to say that we need not think that “individual words must have meanings at all, in any sense that transcends the fact that they have a systematic effect on the meanings of the sentences in which they occur” (p. 305). The traditional view is that we anchor language to the world by giving meaning by ostension (or some other nonintentional mechanism—one which presupposes no “stage-setting in the language”) to certain individual words, and then going on holistically from there. Davidson’s neo-Wittgensteinian point is that even “red” and “mama” have uses—can help make possible the statement of truths—only in the context of sentences and thus of a whole language (cf. p. 308). Whatever role ostension (or neural pathways, or any other nonintentional setup) plays in learning a language, one need not know anything about these mechanisms to know the language, nor to know how to translate that language. The same goes, Davidson points out, for Tarskian truth-conditions for the sentences of English, and this is why it turns out that “a theory of meaning for the language L shows ‘how the meanings of sentences depend upon the meanings of words’ if it contains a (recursive) definition of truth-in-L”; for what we require for a theory of meaning for a language L is that...

December 2, 2020. Page 304.