Meaning and the Third Realm

Abstract

If I were to identify the most fundamental phenomenon to be explained by the theory of meaning, I do not know what else it could be other than the following: it is a matter of fact that we quite often make utterances (typically, but not necessarily, consisting in the production of sounds or in- scriptions) which have a special kind of effect, or as I shall prefer to say, a special kind of value. We are used to acknowledging this kind of value by saying that something has been asserted, promised, ordered, etc., in the utter- ance. In short, a communicative act has been performed. The communicative act performed in the utterance can quite naturally be called its meaning. A theory which wants to be taken seriously as a candidate for a theory of meaning must offer replies to questions like: what is it in general for an ut- terance to have a meaning and what is it for an utterance to have a particular meaning, e.g., to have the communicative value of an assertion that it is raining? It seems natural to regard these questions as more fundamental than the questions concerning sentence meanings and word-meanings: from this perspective, the meaning of a sentence is its communicative potential which amounts to the ability of the sentence to serve in some linguistic commu- nity as a vehicle of meaningful utterances, and word meaning amounts to a words’s contribution to the communicative potential of sentences in which the word appears as a component.