Symbol Grounding - Words and Meanings

Words and Meanings

We know since Frege that the thing that a word refers to (i.e., its referent) is not the same as its meaning (or "sense"). This is most clearly illustrated using the proper names of concrete individuals, but it is also true of names of kinds of things and of abstract properties: (1) "Tony Blair," (2) "the UK's former prime minister," and (3) "Cherie Blair's husband" all have the same referent, but not the same meaning.

Some have suggested that the meaning of a (referring) word is the rule or features that one must use in order to successfully pick out its referent. In that respect, (2) and (3) come closer to wearing their meanings on their sleeves, because they are explicitly stating a rule for picking out their referents: "Find whoever is the UK's former PM, or whoever is Cherie's current husband". But that does not settle the matter, because there's still the problem of the meaning of the components of that rule ("UK," "former," "current," "PM," "Cherie," "husband"), and how to pick them out.

Perhaps "Tony Blair" (or better still, just "Tony") does not have this recursive component problem, because it points straight to its referent, but how? If the meaning is the rule for picking out the referent, what is that rule, when we come down to non-decomposable components like proper names of individuals (or names of kinds, as in "an unmarried man" is a "bachelor")?

It is probably unreasonable to expect us to know the rule for picking out the intended referents of our words—to know it explicitly, at least. Our brains do need to have the "know-how" to execute the rule, whatever it happens to be: they need to be able to actually pick out the intended referents of our words, such as "Tony Blair" or "bachelor." But we do not need to know consciously how our brains do that; we needn't know the rule. We can leave it to cognitive science and neuroscience to find out how our brains do it, and then explain the rule to us explicitly.

So if we take a word's meaning to be the means of picking out its referent, then meanings are in our brains. That is meaning in the narrow sense. If we use "meaning" in a wider sense, then we may want to say that meanings include both the referents themselves and the means of picking them out. So if a word (say, "Tony-Blair") is located inside an entity (e.g., oneself) that can use the word and pick out its referent, then the word's wide meaning consists of both the means that that entity uses to pick out its referent, and the referent itself: a wide causal nexus between (1) a head, (2) a word inside it, (3) an object outside it, and (4) whatever "processing" is required in order to successfully connect the inner word to the outer object.

But what if the "entity" in which a word is located is not a head but a piece of paper (or a computer screen)? What is its meaning then? Surely all the (referring) words on this screen, for example, have meanings, just as they have referents.