Meaning and Use

This paper deals with the meaning of natural language expressions, and how meanings of expressions are used in communication. The two disciplines that talk most about meanings of expressions are linguistics (semantics and pragmatics) and philosophy. This paper is about topics discussed in both disciplines. The first part of the paper is more philosophical in nature and discusses what is meaning in the first place, and how it is related with reference. The second part is concerned with the relation between semantics and pragmatics. Although certainly not uncontroversial, there can be little doubt that what is known as ‘formal semantics’ is the most productive brand of natural language semantics within linguistics (cf. the popular introductions, Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet (1990) and Heim & Kratzer (1998)). In formal semantics, the meaning of a sentence is its truth conditions. Once we adopt a truth conditional concept of meaning, it is natural to think of reference as depending on meaning and that semantics is consistent with the Chomskyan cognitive, and individualistic, program in linguistics. In the first part of this paper we will first discuss two well-known problems for a particular way to combine these ideas: ‘Putnam’s paradox’ and Kripke’s counterexamples. Next, we discuss how a causal theory of reference can overcome these problems when framed within a two-dimensional conception of meaning, and what this means for the interpretation of the latter framework. The second part of the paper investigates the relation between semantics and pragmatics. First it discusses that what is communicated with the use of a sentence on top of its semantic meaning: Gricean conversational implicatures. The discussion will be limited to implicatures generated by Grice’s maxim of Quality and his first submaxim of Quantity. Speech acts will be