The Epistemology of Meaning 1

The externalist is obliged to accompany claims about the ontology of meaning with a plausible epistemology of adequacy for empirical concepts. She must construct an epistemology of meaning to support her claims in the philosophy of mind. (Millikan 2005: 72) Introduction Ever since Hilary Putnam proclaimed that 'meanings ain't in the head', philosophers have worried about how it could be, if semantic externalism were true, that we know what it is that we mean by our words when we speak. Traditionally it has been assumed that linguistic meaning must be transparent to speakers of a language, so that whatever one's words mean, one must, in the normal case, know what they mean. 2 This claim is even more attractive, and seems more obviously true, when applied to thoughts: whatever the contents of one's attitudes are, one must, in the normal case, know what they are. Both semantic and psychological content externalism pose a challenge to these claims. If linguistic meaning and psychological content are individuation-dependent on empirical factors beyond one's mind about which one may know nothing, then a conclusion appears inevitable: one may not, in the 1 This paper continues a conversation on this topic with Ruth Millikan which began after she delivered 'On Knowing the Meaning' (Millikan, forthcoming) at Queen's University Belfast in 2007. We are grateful to Ruth for many such conversations, and for her friendship over the years. 2 For a recent defence of this view see Jackson 2006. 2 normal case-the case in which one's sayings and thinkings are world-involving-know what one is saying or thinking, since one may be ignorant of the empirically discoverable external factors that determine the contents of one's sayings and thinkings to be what they are. Some regard the traditional claim as so incontestable, and the externalist conclusion so ineluctable, that they are driven to reject externalism. Others find the arguments for externalism to be so persuasive that they reject the traditional claim. Ruth Millikan has, in our view, presented one of the most powerful cases for the rejection of the traditional position and for the acceptance of a radical externalism. In a number of groundbreaking works she has articulated a detailed vision of how mind and language work. One aspect of her view is a rejection of neo-Fregean orthodoxy in the philosophy of language, a rejection of anything like a Fregean sense, Sinn, in her account of the meaning …