But what about the past tense statements? How could you learn their meaning comparatively? Since the truth conditions of the present tense statements are exclusive, there's a clear path for comparison. But truth conditions for the past tense statements overlap with each other and with the present tense statements. It's just not clear to me how comparison takes hold here. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not sure how the issue of overlapping is relevant here. Surly not all truth conditions of past tense sentences overlap with each other - the truth conditions of "Frege was born in 1848" don't overlap with "Frege was born in 1850". Similarly, weather reports about the past presuppose either explicit or implicit reference to time and place. If I tell you out of the blue that is was raining without telling you when and where (and it's not clear from the context) then I haven't expressed with the sentence anything with definite truth conditions. So it seems to me that past and present tense sentences are analogous in this respect (and you said that present tense sentences don't pose a problem for me).

Another thing, you ask me how to explain the learning of the meaning of past tense sentences (the beginning of the quote). But this is not the question that I meant to answer, because it is not the challenge which (let's call him) the compositionalist poses to the contextualist (which is how I formulated the argument from the creativity of language). I think both parties agree that someone who can use only present tense sentences cannot learn to use past tense sentences on the basis of this knowledge alone - he must learn some new syntactic or semantic rules. The challenge is rather to explain simpler cases, which do seem troubling for the contextualist but not the compositionalist (because both of them have to explain how we learn sentences with new meaning, it doesn't come for free just because you accept compositionality). So for example, the contextualist should explain how can we understand new sentences in the past tense, even when we already understand some other sentences about the past. The compositionalist will say that it is simply a matter of reconfiguring the meanings of old words according to familiar rules, whereas the contextualist cannot say this since for him the smallest semantic or meaningful unit in a language is the sentence and not individual words. So the challenge here is to explain what it is, if not the meanings of the old known parts, that explains our ability to understand the sentence? (maybe this is not what you meant by your question, but just in case)

And some general remarks about the relations between all these notions (you should keep in mind that this is philosophically very controversial topic).

Traditionally philosophers thought that analytic/apriori/necessary and synthetic/aspoteriori/contingent always go together. But Kant famously argued that there could be synthetic a priori knowledge (like mathematics and geometry). And later, Kripke also argued that there could be necessary truths that could be known only a posteri (like that water is identical with H2O), and also contingent truths that can be known a priori (the standard meter in Paris is 1 meter long).

There were also quite a lot of philosophers (and still there are some), especially the logical positivsts, that rejected the existence of a priori knowledge, and argued that all necessity is either logical or analytical.

(a) analytic truth: truth by virtue of meaning (like "red is a color" or "all bachelors are unmarried").

(b) a priori truth: something you can know (=being justified to believe) independently of sense experience (like that 2+2=4).

(c) logical necessity: true by virtue of the syntactical or formal features of linguistic expressions (i.e., in a case of a tautology like "either p is true or false")

(d) absolute certainty: having evidence in favor of a proposition p that logically guarantee the truth p. alternative explanation: having evidence for p that cannot be defeated by any further counter evidence (and again the 'can't' here is logically necessary).

(e) metaphysical necessity: (controversial - some people think there's no meaningful distinction between this and logical necessity) a proposition which is true in all possible worlds, which is not tautological in form. (the "true in all possible worlds" definition also applies to logical necessity, but it is not sufficient for distinguishing it from metaphysical necessity, if you believe that they are different things)

(f) ontological necessity: I'm not familiar with this notion, but maybe it means metaphysical essence, i.e., the idea that things posses certain properties necessarily, that is, they cannot loose them without ceasing to exist (for example, Obama can't loose the property of being a human without ceasing to exist, that is - it is essential for him that he is a human).

As to your questions: (a) and (b) don't necessarily overlap - according to Kripke there are some analytical truths that can be known only a posteriori (for example when we give definitions).

(edit: on a second thought, this is a bit controversial perhaps, because Kripke doesn't say this explicitly, but it does seem to me to follow from other things which he does say - see below. Anyway, traditionally (and probably still) it was believed that if something is analytic then it is known a priori (but the converse is not true)).

(a) does seem to entail (c), but perhaps Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricsm" could be seen as a challenge to this idea, since he claimed that no sentence is immune to revision, even "logical truths" (and he was also opposed to the notion of necessity).

As I said, I don't know exactly what is meant by (f), but if my conjecture is correct (that it means metaphysical essence) then it is not the same as (e). It is true though, that if something is metaphysically essential, then it is metaphysically necessary, but it doesn't follow that all metaphysical necessity is
concerned with metaphysical essence.

(d) and (c) are not similar nor identical, because (c) is concerned with the formal/syntactical properties of, and relations between sentences, whereas (d) is about epistemology (that is knowledge). However it is widely believed that we know "logical truths" with absolute certainty.

And I don't really want to have a conversation with someone who is so hell-bent on being combative that they can't even say whether they're okay with dropping a particular sentence--that's too much of a concession to make. — Terrapin Station

And I don't want conversations with people who can't be bothered to properly explain themselves.

I'm not asking what I want to do. I'm asking if you're okay in dropping that one sentence, or do you need an explanation of how my post can make sense while not being a definition One thing at a time. Don't type something if it's not important.. (And you and John doing this major thread crapping is certainly important.) — Terrapin Station

Listen, I don't want to argue about meaningless verbal questions. If you still don't understand, or want to ignore the substantial objection that I made about what you said then I'm out.

I wasn't talking about definitions, though. So we're back to you not being able to comprehend how someone could say something like "often thought of as" and not be talking about a definition. So do we need to explain that, or . . . it sounds like you're not very attached now to whether we call my comment a statement of a definition and we can drop your first sentence, "It is a definition even if it doesn't apply to everyone who uses the term." Which option do you want to go with? — Terrapin Station

I already told you that if you don't like the word 'definition' then you can drop it, I don't care. My point is the same whether you call what you said a 'definition' or something else. You say something false about the usage of the word 'reference' among all professional philosophers, and it doesn't change it even if you qualify it by 'often', because no one talks like this ever.

What does the pronoun "it" stand for in that sentence? — Terrapin Station

Whatever you were talking about. Again, if you are trying to explain a term then it's a definition in my understanding. If you don't like the word, you can choose another one, it doesn't matter. My point is that when you make claims about how other people use a certain word, then you can't just make stuff up, you have to back it up with something.

I explicitly said "often thought of." That doesn't denote that I'm about to give a definition. You can't read. — Terrapin Station

First, it is a definition even if it doesn't apply to everyone who uses the term. Secondly, I don't think that any serious philosopher actually thinks that this is what reference is, because there is an obvious distinction between an expression having reference and the question about how reference is fixed, or what are the conditions under which a term acquires a referent. Read any classical text about reference such as Kripke's "Naming and Necessity" and you'll see that he makes a very sharp distinction between the two, and everyone to my best knowledge follows him.

And btw, here's the definition of reference from SEP:

"Reference is a relation that obtains between certain sorts of representational tokens (e.g., names, mental states, pictures) and objects." (my emphesis)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reference/

I seriously challenge you to show me even a single peer-reviewed text that doesn't treat reference as a relation but defines it as an "act" or "procedure".

Why would you believe that I was talking about definitions in my post? You seriously believed that I was saying that the words "act or procedure" were to be found in some formal definition of "reference"? Why would you read my post that way? — Terrapin Station

Well you ought to talk about definitions because you claimed at the beginning of your post that "In contemporary analytic philosophy..." reference means such and such, and that means that we are not talking here about your personal opinion, but about how the term is commonly used/defined/understood by the majority of analytic philosophers. And yes analytic philosophers do often give precise enough definitions for the terminology they are employing (I don't know what you mean by 'formal'), so we ought to talk about definitions, or something close to this.

That's only believed by deficient philosophers to not involve acts or procedures. — Terrapin Station

But it's a question of definition, not you opinion. This is what the term means in the philosophical literature, it has nothing to do with what you or anyone else thinks about how reference is established, they are not treated as the same thing.

"Reference" is often thought of as "the act or procedure of fixing the sense to the referent." A la "How does reference work?" — Terrapin Station

'Reference' is not the same as the act of fixing reference (in the sense of an ostensive definition). 'Reference' is believed by philosophers to be a relation between linguistic expressions (or perhaps some mental states) and things in the world, and not a name for any act or procedure.

Secondly, referents don't have 'sense', but only the bearers of meaning do (such as linguistic expressions or beliefs) that stand in the relation of reference to their referents. The words 'Barack Obama' have sense in English (they denote a particular person, which is their referent), but Barack Obama himself doesn't posses any kind of 'sense'.

The notion of 'sense' (if you mean it the way Frege used it) introduces many other difficulties over and above the concept of meaning (frankly I don't completely understand what Frege meant by that), and I'm not quite sure what is the difference between 'meaning' and 'sense' according to Frege. Also, it seems to me that saying that words have sense appears as a violation of the context principle (so Frege appears to be a bit inconsistent here). After all, he says himself "never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition", and why shouldn't we say the same thing about 'sense'? (and by the way, something like that was Wittgensten's criticism of Frege in the Tractatus - W argued that Frege didn't go far enough, and though Wittgenstein accepted a distinction between 'sense' and 'meaning' (that is Sinn and Bedeutung), he argued that only propositions have sense (TLP 3.3)).

But the more substantial question is what the context principle supposed to deny in the first place (or what kind of view Frege sought to oppose when he formulated the principle), and what interests me in particular are contemporary views about the semantics of natural language which almost all presuppose some strong form of compositionality and also deny the context principle. Contemporary philosophers of language typically think of "meaning" as something like the definition of a term (or some other more abstract sort of rule), and argue that sentences acquire meaning only as a function of the meaning of the words from which the sentence is composed, plus fixed syntactical rules that tell you which words can go where. Now THAT I think Frege would've denied, and no doubt Wittgenstein as well (both early and late). And so the main question (in the contemporary debate about compositionality) is what is the basic semantic unit of a language, sentences or words? And it's not clear to me how exactly Frege's notion of sense is related to this more contemporary understanding of "semantics".

Hi mcdoodle, nice to see you too. Are you from the old forum?

As I'm doing here, I highlighted your post and hit the "quote" button. It's not as if I retyped anything. You apparently edited your post after I quoted you. — Terrapin Station

You are probably right, my fault.

Tell me something about your background with philosophy. I'm curious how this question can fit with the content and tenor of your other comments in the thread so far. — Terrapin Station

I don't see how this is relevant.

And indeed I wasn't. I was talking about what meaning is, in general. I wasn't making up something that bears no resemblance to that and saying that it's meaning--"Oh, just in a special philosophical sense." — Terrapin Station

So on your account, do you want to say that all meaningful words must have mental associations? (because that's an empirical claim whether they do), and if they don't does it follow that they are not meaningful?

I also don't understand what you mean by something that bears "resemblance" to meaning (I suppose you meant something like a definition). How do you identify something as "meaning" in the first place, and know whether your definition "resembles" it or not? (and it's connected to my first question about what it is to analyze something in philosophy).

And by the way, don't change my words when you quote me. I didn't say "There's no analysis of "meaning""

but I don't think the "only sentences have meaning" view can be made to work. — Srap Tasmaner

What's the alternative?

Analysis of what meaning is isn't a field other than philosophy. What biology gets right about beetles and flowers is certainly important for philosophy of biology. Philosophers of biology aren't just going to start making shit up that has no connection to facts per biology. — Terrapin Station

What does it mean then to make a philosophical analysis of meaning? How should we decide who is right?

You're attempting to lecture me about what constitutes philosophy, and then all of sudden you start acting as if it's an empirical science? Seriously? — Terrapin Station

I'm just saying that someone who's complaining about people making things up, shouldn't do the same thing himself...

Wow, the bullcrap is deep in this one. You'll fit in well here. — Terrapin Station

That's not an argument.

Philosophers propose all sort of definitions and theories for the notion of meaning, sure, but they're not doing so by way of making shit up. They're trying to analyze what meaning is. Lots of philosophers are getting that wrong. — Terrapin Station

There's no "correct" analysis of 'meaning', because there are many different senses in which this word is employed, inside and outside philosophy.

The philosophical significance is that it gets right what meaning is. — Terrapin Station

Well, and biology gets things right about beetles and flowers - would you also say that it is philosophically significant?

The point of philosophy isn't to make shit up that has no resemblance to what the world is really like. — Terrapin Station

So far you are the one here who makes shit up. Do you have any empirical evidence that people always have mental associations with every word they know? That sounds to me like a totally far fetched claim. For example I have no idea what kind of things I associate with most of the words I know, except perhaps some faint images with familiar nouns. What mental associations do you have with a words like 'and' or 'because'?

Well, meaning is simply a mental association one makes with a term (for example). One can easily do that with a single term.

That's fine, but in itself it doesn't have any philosophical significance. As I said, it really depends on your philosophical goals. Usually in philosophy of language "meaning" is supposed to do some specific explanatory work of this or that phenomena, as in the argument for compositinality which I presented (i.e., if words had no meaning on their own we couldn't understand unfamiliar sentences). "Meaning" as a psychological association between words and mental images has no philosophical interest in itself (maybe it's true, maybe it isn't, but philosophy obviously can't decide that).

I don't buy that we're talking about some "special sense of the term 'meaning'" in philosophy. If Frege only cared about truth, then that apparently led him astray in his analysis of meaning.

But it's a fact, philosophers did propose all sorts of definitions and theories for the notion of "meaning", so it does become pretty technical in many discussions.

I should also add that I'm not objecting (on the behalf of the contextualist) that words can be legitimately said to have "meaning" in some non-philosophical sense of the term, if this means that some strings of letters or sounds are recognized to belong to this or that language (e.g. the word 'cat' is part of/has a role in the English language, as opposed to 'ajklorlsd' or 'חתול'). The objection is rather to a special 'philosophical' sense of meaning, where it is usually associated with notions such as concepts, ideas, universals etc.

The short answer is that the philosophical notion of "meaning" is pretty obscure (as it was argued for example by Quine in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"), and the notion of the meaning of a single word is even more obscure. As I see it, the real question here is not whether words have "meaning" on their own, but what is "meaning" in the first place? What kind of philosophical work is the notion supposed to do?

So if we go back to Frege, who first formulated the context principle, what interested him was truth and not meaning, and therefore he proposed that we should ask about meaning in language only so far as it helps to illuminate the concept of truth. However the concept of truth clearly applies to whole sentences (propositions) and not single words, therefore Frege proposed (as methodological maxim for investigating truth) that we shouldn't ask about the meaning of words outside the context of a sentence, but ask what kind of logical contribution does a given word makes to the truth conditions of the sentence in which it appears. So there is no such thing for Frege as taking a single word like 'cat' and asking about it's "meaning", rather we should ask what is in common between all sentences that employ the word 'cat'.

It is also connected to Frege's rejection of psychologism, that is treating logical questions as psychological, since he thought that thinking about words an isolation from sentences encourages a picture where we take "meaning" as something psychological or subjective, which would undermine the objectivity of logic and language that Frege wanted to defend.

Here's how I think the two principles could be reconciled.

The primary goal of the principle of compositionality (the idea that the meaning of sentences depends systematically on the meaning of their parts, viz. words) is to explain how can we understand a potentially infinite number of new sentences which we never encountered without much trouble. And the natural idea seems to be that we can understand them because they are composed of words that we are already familiar with, combined according to rules which we have learned in the past. And so the idea is that we deduce the meaning of the sentence (which is unknown) based on the meaning of its parts (which are already known).

However, according to the context principle, words don't have any meaning on their own, but only sentences do, and this seems to be at odds with compositionality. Notice however that the principle of compositionality has two components: 1. the basic thought that to understand something new, it must contain old elements which we already familiar with 2. what the old elements contribute to the new sentence is self-standing meanings that we can grasp independently of their function in sentences. And my proposal is that we can accept (1) (which is not at odds with the context principle) and reject (2) (which is), thus preserving the general explanatory framework of compositionality without accepting its specific explanation of how the meaning of sentences is determined by its parts. And once we make this distinction, it becomes clear that there could be other explanations of how words contribute to the meaning of a sentence, which do not assume that words have meanings on their own.

Here's my alternative explanation of how this can work. When we encounter a new sentence, what we do is not to first analyze the meanings of its individual words (and then deduce the meaning of the complete sentence) but we compare the new sentence with the vocabulary and syntactical structure of other sentences which we are already familiar with. So to take a somewhat simplistic example: suppose that we encounter a sentence like "the dog is on the mat", and suppose also that as children we learned the two sentences "the cat is on the mat" and "the dog is on the sofa", but have never encountered "the dog is on the mat". We can see that there are analogous components and structures in common between the sentences: we know what it is for a dog to sit on a sofa, and we know what it means for a cat so seat on a mat, and from that we can understand that a dog is something that can also sit on the mat analogously to a cat. So what I'm saying here is that what we know is not the "meanings" of individual words like 'dog' and 'cat', but rather we are familiar with sentences that make claims about cats and dogs, and by analogy we employ this knowledge to grasp new sentences about dogs and cats (so there's nothing in this process which we grasp that is less than the meaning of a complete sentence). There's no such thing as abstract knowledge of the meaning of words like 'cat' or 'dog', rather we have a stock of propositions about cats and dos which we understand, on the basis of which we can understand new propositions about cats and dogs. We do however need the new sentences to be composed from old familiar words (this is the part which is correct in compositionality), however they don't have a meaning on their own which they carry into new sentences, but they serve as syntactical cues which help us to connect the new sentences with the old familiar ones.

Your version of radical empiricsm simply cannot work (i.e., that all cognition is explainable by experience), and even the logical positivsts understood this, because they saw that one must presuppose the analytic/synthetic distinction for the viability of their empiricst project.

The reason is that syntetic sentences, that is, sentences which derive their meaning from experience, must presuppose some analytic definitions to function as 'synthetic' in the first place. Because think in what sense can a sentence said to be 'derivable' from experience: it must mean that there is some general a-priori rule which justifies you in inferring the sentence from a certain experience. Thus the positivists thought that all empirical terms have a fixed meaning or definition (or at least we can construct such definitions for a 'perfect' scientific language). So for example 'cat' is defined via the experience of such and such shapes and colors occurring in a certain configuration; and therefore in the present of such an experience it follows analytically that you are seeing a cat (because this is what the term means). And this is where their famous verification criteria of meaningfulness comes from: every empirical sentences must be connected to experience (empiricism); to be connected to experience is to be verifiable by experience; and to be verifiable is to have an analytic definition - prior to any experience - that tells you which experience should count as the verification of the sentence. Otherwise, if you don't have such definitions that fix the meaning of your empirical terms, then nothing could follow from your experience, no sentence could be ever verified by experience (and hence you wouldn't have empiricsm).

The conclusion is therefore that there cannot be only synthetic sentences, but also analytic which are true independently of experience. And this is also how they thought that science works: you have a theory from which (by virtue of the meaning of the terms it contains, as they have been defined) a set of certain possible observations follow. Then when you go on testing the theory, if the predicted observations obtain, then the theory is verified; if not then it is disproved. And the idea here is the dame: unless theory and observation are connected by definitions, no observations could follow (deductively or inductively) from any theory, and there will be no way to test it experimentally, in which case science would be impossible.

And as a historical sidenote, it is important to note that though Quine famously attacked the analytic/synthetic distinction, what he was primarily concerned with is the positivists' conception of the 'meaning' of sentences (this is why he talks so much about synonimity in "two dogmas"); however, he himself didn't reject the distinction (which was central to the positivsts as well) between theory and observation, but only claimed that they are mutually interdependent, and that observation cannot verify or disprove individual sentences, but whole theories (and maybe the whole body of science). And so according to Quine, the way experience is connected to our body of beliefs is not via "definitions" but whole theories or world views ("conceptual schemes"), but it still retains the same idea that our experience is mediated by logical connections which themselves are prior to experience.