Meaning and use
An alternative to the three previous theories is the view that a word’s meaning consists simply in the way it is used. This is the use theory of meaning, and it has been advanced, in different forms, by behaviourist psychologists such as Skinner (1957), and linguists such as Bloomfield (1933). (A rather different, non-behaviourist use theory was advanced by Wittgenstein 1953.) Behaviourist proponents of the use theory typically reject the very notion that words have hidden, unobservable properties called meanings: since meanings are inherently unobservable, it is, they would claim, unscientific to use them in explanations. (This argument would no longer be accepted by philosophers of science: scientific explanation usually involves unobservables.) Use theorists have claimed that the only objective, scientific way to explain language is to avoid postulating unobservable objects called meanings, and to attend only to what may actually be observed, the particular sequences of words and expressions that occur in actual examples of language use, and to describe the relation between these linguistic forms and the situations in which they are used. According to these investigators, the explanatory task of semantics is to provide not an abstract characterization of meanings, whether interpreted as concepts or denotations, but a causal, predictive account of the way a given language is actually used. In the words of Skinner (1957: 5), ‘What happens when a man speaks or responds to speech is clearly a question about human behavior’, and the only correct way to answer it is to proffer a precise account of what linguistic behaviour is likely to be produced in different situations.
Thus, for Bloomfield (1933: 139), the only meaning a linguistic form has is ‘the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer’. To take a particularly simple example, one of the ‘meanings’ of ‘sorry’ in English might be described as a situation where the speaker apologises; the hearer’s typical response will be to treat the utterance as an apology and behave accordingly (e.g. by letting the incident drop, by not accusing the speaker of rudeness, by themselves saying sorry, etc.). We can describe this situation without having to make any reference to a ‘meaning’ of sorry: external analysis of the situation is all that is needed.
QUESTION Can the meanings of the following words be described in terms of situations? Hi, please, you, apple, thanks, this
The project of specifying the uses of linguistic units is not as remote as it might seem from the traditional semantic project of describing denotations or senses. Indeed, the traditional notion of meaning itself is ultimately aimed at explaining language-use, since it is the meaning of individual linguistic expressions that is taken to explain the way they are used: words are used in accordance with their meanings. For proponents of the use theory of meaning, we should directly describe the actual situations themselves in which language is spoken or written, rather than doing this via the intermediary notion of meaning. When we have developed a full theory of the way in which speakers actually use language, then the goal of semantics will have been fulfilled.
The main objection against use theories of meaning is simply the mind-boggling variety of the situations in which linguistic forms may be used. As Bloomfield acknowledges, the number of different situations in which language is used is infinite. There are very few, if any, linguistic expressions which are automatically called up by a specifiable external situation. If the meaning of a linguistic form is the situation of the speaker’s utterance and the hearer’s response, there will be very few words for which a description like the one just given for sorry would even seem plausible. It would not seem to be a feasible project to specify the situations in which most of the words in the previous paragraph are used, since they are not highly context bound and can be used in practically any situation. Think of some of the possible situations in which the noun way, for example, might be used. To catalogue these, we would need to know the individual circumstances of a representative number of speaker/hearer pairs in whatever linguistic community we were investigating, including what was referred to by way on each occurrence of use, the situation which prompted the speaker to utter it, and the response given by the hearer. For even straightforward, unremarkable instances of way like I don’t know the way or which way is quicker? this will already involve a huge variety of different specific situations. But if we add instances where way is used sarcastically, metaphorically, dishonestly, or simply by mistake, it will be clear that the use theory is massively complicated, and that the extraction of any regularities or generalizations about language use will be extremely complicated (Chomsky 1959 has classic objections against this kind of use theory of language).
The prospects for a use theory might be better if the focus changes from the individual word to higher-level linguistic units. It does seem to be the case that there are many phrases and sentences which have a more predictable relationship to their situations than the individual words of which they are composed. Thus, conversational routines like greetings, invitations, asking for the time, congratulating, wishing luck and many others involve highly stereotyped instances of language such as those in (44), which are to some extent predictable from the situations in which they occur.
Yet in spite of the perhaps greater possibilities at the phrase level, the problem for the use theory of meaning remains the enormous variety of sentences which make up any individual’s linguistic behaviour. Even if there are some very stereotypical phrases which crop up more or less pre dictably in given situations, this does not detract from the huge number of phrases and sentences uttered by a language user which are novel. The use theory of meaning, in other words, seems to ignore the compositionality of language. It is because the meanings of sentences are built up out of the meanings of words that we can put words into different combinations to suit new communicative needs, including in situations which we have never previously encountered. The situations in which language is used are constantly changing, yet we do not mysteriously lose our ability to communicate. A theory of meaning must be able to explain how it is that we can use old words to convey new meanings which have never been pre viously conveyed, in situations in which we have never previously been placed.
QUESTION Do obsolete, old-fashioned or archaic words pose a problem for the use theory? If so, why? If not, why not? Do the conceptual and referential/denotational theories fare any better?
