Words Without Meaning (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Words without meaning by Christopher Gauker Xuelin He Words without meaning. By Christopher Gauker. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 299. ISBN 0262571625. $28. Basing his own approach to linguistic communication on the rejection of two significant notions of speaker meaning and word meaning, Gauker casts new light on some of the most controversial issues in the philosophy of language, ranging from logic puzzles to belief report. This short but impressive monograph consists of twelve chapters, each one providing its own focus on the discussion, but each reinforcing the others to form a well-argued presentation of G’s theory of mind. Ch. 1, ‘The received view’, gives a critical review of the propositional approach to meaning in linguistic communication, one that claims the speaker reveals her belief through the right choice of words and sentences whose meanings are also shared by the hearer. Ch. 2, ‘Mental representation’, criticizes the views that beliefs are mental structures bearing propositional content. Ch. 3, ‘Elements of an alternative’, introduces G’s context-logical approach that features the replacement of truth conditions for sentences with assertibility conditions that are formulated in terms of G’s concept of the context. G assumes that any action in pursuit of a conversational goal may or may not accord with a set of sentences, or the context in G’s definition. The idea of assertibility in a context means that a sentence is assertible in a context if and only if it is a member of the set. The rest of the book concerns the application of this context-logical approach to formulating the assertibility conditions for complicated sentences (i.e. sentences that include logical devices, such as quantifiers, conditionals, truth predicates, the predicate ‘believes’, etc.). Ch. 4, ‘Domain of discourse’, reveals the inadequacy of the view that the speaker’s states of mind function as the sole determinant for the hearer to identify the referents of demonstrative phrases and the domains for quantifiers in the speaker’s sentences. Ch. 5, ‘Presupposition’, discusses problems for the pragmatic theory of presupposition, in particular, informative presupposition and presupposition coordination. Ch. 6, ‘Implicature’, questions the core idea in Gricean theory that the hearer can retrieve the meaning only by contemplating what is in the speaker’s mind. Ch. 7, ‘Quantification’, may be viewed as a nice solution to the validity asymmetry between universal instantiation and existential generalization. Ch. 8, ‘Conditionals’, shows how the context-logical approach can assure the validity of the inference in conditionals in a context in which it is uttered; Ch. 9, ‘Truth’, describes how the new approach avoids some famous semantic paradoxes and shows that no new paradoxes will arise within this approach. Ch. 10, ‘The communication conception’, argues that the account of belief attributions is the account of the nature of beliefs and desires. Ch. 11, ‘Explanation and prediction’, refutes the idea that human behaviors must be attributed to folk psychology. For example, one can also explain or predict the other’s behavior by straight induction or by his/her language competence. Ch. 12, ‘Semantics and ontology’, provides a semantic theory of belief attributions and ontological views on the nature of beliefs. This book will benefit scholars who are familiar and yet not satisfied with the standard solutions to the quandaries in the philosophy of language, but will still be accessible to readers with only elementary knowledge of first-order logic (thanks to the author’s effort to avoid philosophical verbosity and too many ‘isms’ in his narration). G’s brief introduction in the preface and his comparison of his ideas with current philosophical theories in the epilogue also help to facilitate readers’ understanding of the book. Xuelin He Guangdong Foreign Studies University Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America