“A Most Useful Economy”

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes holds that there is an intimate connection between linguistic meaning and thought. This chapter provides a general overview of Hobbes's views on language, and argues that Hobbes holds an inchoate, but recognizable, version of an inferential role or functional role semantics. On Hobbes's theory of language use and linguistic meaning, the meaning of an expression is the functional role of that expression in cognition. The chapter describes Hobbes's account of use of names in cognition – names are marks, applied to objects, for the sake of recalling thoughts of those objects. According to Hobbes, a propositional attitude is a relation between a language-using animal and a sentence. Sentences are signs of thought because they express propositional judgments. The chapter presents Hobbes's account of linguistic understanding. It argues that the understanding of linguistic expressions characteristic of mature, fully language-competent humans is determined by the ability of language-competent humans to deploy names in reasoning.