Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Semantic analyses for dyadic deontic logic
- 2 A problem about permission
- 3 Reply to McMichael
- 4 Why ain'cha rich?
- 5 Desire as belief
- 6 Desire as belief II
- 7 Dispositional theories of value
- 8 The trap's dilemma
- 9 Evil for freedom's sake?
- 10 Do we believe in penal substitution?
- 11 Convention: Reply to Jamieson
- 12 Meaning without use: Reply to Hawthorne
- 13 Illusory innocence?
- 14 Mill and Milquetoast
- 15 Academic appointments: Why ignore the advantage of being right?
- 16 Devil's bargains and the real world
- 17 Buy like a MADman, use like a NUT
- 18 The punishment that leaves something to chance
- 19 Scriven on human unpredictability (with Jane S. Richardson)
- Index
12 - Meaning without use: Reply to Hawthorne
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Semantic analyses for dyadic deontic logic
- 2 A problem about permission
- 3 Reply to McMichael
- 4 Why ain'cha rich?
- 5 Desire as belief
- 6 Desire as belief II
- 7 Dispositional theories of value
- 8 The trap's dilemma
- 9 Evil for freedom's sake?
- 10 Do we believe in penal substitution?
- 11 Convention: Reply to Jamieson
- 12 Meaning without use: Reply to Hawthorne
- 13 Illusory innocence?
- 14 Mill and Milquetoast
- 15 Academic appointments: Why ignore the advantage of being right?
- 16 Devil's bargains and the real world
- 17 Buy like a MADman, use like a NUT
- 18 The punishment that leaves something to chance
- 19 Scriven on human unpredictability (with Jane S. Richardson)
- Index
Summary
Surely it is our use of language that somehow determines meaning. But if we try to say how, we must face the fact that only a tiny part of our language, or any human language, is ever used. There are many reasons why a meaningful sentence might never be suited to serve anyone's conversational purposes, and so might go unused. For instance, take length. Even the most abominable stylist will never write a sentence more than, say, a hundred words long. (Never? – Well, hardly ever.) But almost all of the infinitely many meaningful sentences of English, all but a finite minority, are longer than a hundred words. Almost all are longer than a thousand words, almost all are longer than a million words … So almost all sentences have meaning without use.
Years ago, Stephen Schiffer raised the meaning-without-use problem against my own account of use and meaning, which ran as follows. A language L is a function that assigns truth conditions to certain verbal expressions, called the sentences of L; one of them is true in L or false in L according as the truth condition assigned to it by L is satisfied or not. To be truthful in L is to avoid uttering any sentence of L unless it is true in L; to be trusting in L is to expect others to be truthful in L. We (or any population) use L iff, by convention, we are truthful and trusting in L.
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- Information
- Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy , pp. 145 - 151Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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