If meaning is use, then I can use the word "meaning" in a particular way, and that is what it means. — Harry Hindu

It's a curious thing. People not intimately familiar with Wittgenstein almost always interpret the slogan "meaning is use" as an endorsement of Humpty Dumpty:

‘And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!’
‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’
‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,”’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’

But on the other hand, there's something a bit claustrophobic sometimes about LW's language-games. (2) is a dreary affair, isn't it? And Wittgensteinians (present company excluded, of course) have this way of calling people out for violating the rules of the language-game, or illicitly taking a word from the language-game it belongs to and passing it off as something else, etc. In short, treating the rules of the various language-games as prescriptive. Exactly the opposite of the casual anti-Wittgensteinian who dreads the chaos of Humpty-Dumptyism.

And then I think of a marvelous passage from Ryle about "The Bogy of Mechanism," where he describes a scientist unfamiliar with chess studying a game being played (with the players hidden from him) and figuring out the rules. When the players are revealed, "He commiserates with them upon their bondage. 'Every move that you make,' he says, 'is governed by unbreakable rules..." He explains that when he has figured out the rest of the rules, he will be able to predict their moves even better than he can now. Ryle then distinguishes, as is his wont, from a move being governed by the rules and being ordained by them.

Which brings us back to animal signaling, I should think.

My question really is whether you think someone's motivation determines the truth of what they say. Mathematicians enjoy mathematics, and of course that's why they do it. Finding an especially good result may make you especially happy, but the converse obviously does not hold.

There has been some controversy within philosophy in recent years about whether alternative points of view are suppressed by charging them with committing the genetic (and related) fallacies. I was wondering if you were taking a side here.

However, for us mortals we are bound to our motivation – even in our quest for pure mathematics. We are caged, like rats, with our motivations and emotions. We cannot escape the gravity of our emotions. — Thinker

Do you actually believe this, or were you just having a go at @Sapientia?

They surely can't be saying god is simply implausible because if they are then they'd need to have access to a vast amount of knowledge - extending from the subatomic to the intergalactic - and that I'm confident they don't. — TheMadFool

Btw, I'm almost certain Hume had a related argument that the order you perceive in the universe could be the order only of the little bit you have knowledge of, and that for all you know the far greater portion of it is a seething chaotic hellscape, or words to that effect.

If it looks like I'm making up stuff ''to hold it together'' I probably am but...are there any logical errors? That's the question that I care about. — TheMadFool

I think, as I tried to show in my little dialogue, and in the post before that, the argument from design undercuts itself. Remember, conscious agency only gets in at all by noticing there is a difference between things attributable to it and things not. Once you say those things are all the same, you've lost the ground for attributing anything to conscious agency.

Besides, contra my dialogue, there are tidy rooms in nature. The first time you find an intricately woven bird's nest can be a puzzling experience. Did this grow this way? Incredible! But do birds serve a long apprenticeship learning how to make these things, study the nests of other birds, make smaller, simpler practice nests before they attempt the real thing? No. There's agency at work here, and birds do have some consciousness obviously, but even though a bird's nest obviously has a design with a definite purpose, it's hard to say whether its production was conscious. What about anthills? Which ant is the architect?

There are extraordinary structures, crystals for instance, created by natural processes of nonliving matter. There are extraordinary structures, which seem different, roses for instance, attributable to living matter, but maybe not to consciousness. The chambered nautilus. Life shows different patterns of sensitivity and reaction to its environment, and we can see that. Then there are extraordinary structures attributable only to conscious agency.

You'll think the preceding paragraph is making your point for you, because, even though we agree that the universe is a quite astonishing place, you're looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope.

Okay, that is not what I expected. Well done?

My reply to that is there's a difference of degrees between man-made order and god-made order (laws of nature). Humans can't break the laws of nature. The most they can do is pit one law against another e.g. a plane flies by a play between fluid dynamics and gravity. In a sense humans are restricted by the laws of nature and are therefore man-made order is inferior (a subset) of natural laws. — TheMadFool

Yeah, by "you're making stuff up," I didn't mean that you hadn't actually said this, but that what you say here again you're just making up. This has nothing to do with the original argument. There's no plausible analogy between the two things you describe here. People move around bits of already existing stuff in accordance with rules they can't break; God makes all the stuff out of nothing and creates all the rules. I'm sure you can find some way to make these analogous, but no one would ever think to start the argument from design here-- it's just something you make up later to hold it together.

Your concern is that, under a certain doctrine, all there is to using language is emitting appropriate sounds at appropriate times, mechanically, as if there were no difference between human language and the sort of signaling other animals do, and that meaning here is not so much explained as explained away. The popular alternative, around here at least, seems to be that meaning is what's going on in the minds of speaker and hearer. I guess people call this "externalism vs. internalism."

Because I find this sort of debate intensely boring, I propose instead we try together to analyse an example, leaving our pet theories aside, and see if we can discover something about meaning.

Suppose I go hiking with a friend in an area he knows but I don't. We come to a fork in the trail, and I start to go right, but he says, "This way," starting left, "That way's kinda dangerous." Also consider a version of this story where my companion is Lassie, who sits and whimpers when I start to go the wrong way. Or a Neanderthal who grunts and shakes his head, and gestures to the left.

What does it mean to understand each of these? What do we expect if something is to be called "understanding"?

The situation is tricky because man-made order is a subset of the laws of nature. — TheMadFool

Dude, you're just making stuff up now.

I'll try to get to your critique of "meaning is use" sometimes tomorrow when I have time, but in the meantime, you should note that linguists already have pretty good criteria for distinguishing human language from animal signaling. One place to start is Hockett's design features.

Q: Why do we not find tidy rooms in nature?
A: A tidy room is the work of a conscious agent, acting with purpose and intelligence.
Q: So we see two different sorts of phenomena in the world: those that show the hallmarks of conscious agency, such as design and purpose, and those that don't. The latter are the results of nature blindly following natural law, so to speak.
A: Yes, that's right.
Q: But isn't the entire natural world something like a machine, following rules laid down by its creator?
A: But to what purpose?
Q: I know not. But if I see a great factory, I may not know what is made there, but still recognize the hallmarks of conscious agency in its design. Is that not so?
A: It is.
Q: Then is not the entire universe like a great tidy room, governed by the laws laid down by its creator?
A: Perhaps. But we began by noting the difference between tidy rooms and nature, and we saw in the distinctiveness of the tidy room evidence of design and purpose. If there is also tidiness in nature, what is it about the room that leads us to infer a conscious agent acting with purpose? If tidiness is everywhere, it is not the distinguishing feature we thought it was.
Q: There are degrees of tidiness.
A: Are they all signs of conscious agency?
Q: They are.
A: Degrees of conscious agency?
Q: Exactly.
A: So the tidy room is distinguished from nature, not by being the work of conscious agency, acting with intelligence and purpose, for so is nature.
Q: Correct, although you should put in the bit about degrees.
A: Then the distinction left for us is that there are tidy rooms on the one side, and there's nature on the other. We no longer deduce from this difference anything, but we happen to know they're both the results of conscious agency.
Q: Of different degrees.
A: How do we know there are these different degrees? How can we tell which is at work in a given instance?
Q: It's as plain as the difference between a tidy room and nature.
A: Then aren't you saying the same thing I was saying before?
Q: You had conscious agency on one side, and nature on the other; I have both on both sides, but with the different degrees.
A: Right.

(5) Why are there three physical dimensions rather then some other number?
(6) Why is there an arrow of time?

Here are some other questions you might consider:

(1) What is a law of nature?
(2) Why are the laws of nature the way they are, and not some other way?
(3) Have the laws of nature always been the same?
(4) Why are there laws of nature at all?

I think those are all pretty good questions. I can't answer any of them.

Btw, you forgot to tell me what conscious agency was responsible for the behavior of the bean machine.

Natural law. — Terrapin Station

But where there's law, there must be a law-giver.

Let's say, because we're doing philosophy, that I believe you are responsible for tidying up the living room because I see you doing it. That would be empirical evidence.

Let's say I didn't see you do it, but I knew you were home and I have known you to do it before. That's more complicated but clearly a reasonable if defeasible inference. Note that there is empirical evidence here too; it's what I am inferring from.

Let's say I'm in an office I've never been to and it's tidy. I have empirical knowledge of how offices are run, and I infer the custodial staff does a good job and the other people who work here are not slobs. Again, reasonable and defeasible. I could fill in lots of details about how I acquired my knowledge of offices and the people who work in them.

Are you saying that you are watching God create order right now? No.

Are you saying that you've seen God create order in the universe before? No.

Are you saying that the order in other universes you know of was created by God, and you can fill in details (which will look like the first two options) of how you came to know this? No.

But to do anything otherwise would be jumping to conclusions. — TheMadFool

Is the evidence for the existence of a conscious agent that created the universe anything like the evidence on which we base other beliefs?

A normal distribution is just a discovery that when studying large samples, values under study tend to be arranged (ordered) in a particular pattern. It however doesn't claim the origin of such order is chaos. If andrewk explains he'll disappoint you because he believes random (the normal distribution) is NOT chaos. Rather he thinks randomness arises from unknown order. — TheMadFool

Sure, I can see that, and what @andrewk says above is helpful.

Only now we've traded talk of an ordering agency of some kind for talk of order (known or unknown) leading to more order. If every example of something apparently disordered is going to be explained away as either revealing an order we did not previously perceive or indicating the presence of an order we cannot perceive, then I'm left wondering what it was conscious agency was supposed to explain. Were they creating order? Of course not, there was already loads of order. The conscious agent was order. If you reinterpret everything this way, your analogy evaporates, no?

Is it possibly true that there was a conscious agent who created the universe? Sure, I guess.

Is it rational or reasonable to hold that belief? No.

This is the part that seems to bother you. You want everyone to say, "We just don't know," and everyone ends up on an equal footing. That equal footing represents to me an abhorrent laziness.

There could still be a question of whether that projection is reasonable, we could develop standards, etc.

(Phil Dick once said that true paranoia is not when you think your boss is out to get you-- he probably is-- but when you think your boss's phone is out to get you.)

Now, I think we spoke in the language of gesture to each other. But do you think that this sort of gesture is 'prior to language'? — mcdoodle

We treat children as potentially competent speakers of our language right from the start, in part because they begin understanding speech earlier and faster than they can produce it. (Talking's hard.) I think this charming scene fits in this general pattern of behavior. We also use lots of gestures and facial expressions with children as they learn our language.

Normal distributions. Watch the video.

There's lots more to talk about after you accept that as an example. (At which point I'll beg @andrewk to explain some stuff for me, because he knows a helluva lot more about this stuff than I do.)

I just have a resistance to Quine.

And the label doesn't matter. I don't think doing philosophy should be like choosing a breakfast cereal. ("I really like this one, but I know this other one is supposed to be better for me.")

All I want to demonstrate is the logical error an atheist commits by refuting the argument from design. — TheMadFool

Given this argument:

(1) If there is order, there is an orderer.
(2) There is order.
∴ (3) There is an orderer.

If I deny (1) or (2) and conclude that there is no orderer, I have committed a fallacy, sure. I deny (1) and conclude that I have still been given no grounds for accepting (3). If it comes to that, there are loads of propositions, actual and possible, that I have never been given grounds for accepting. For some of those, it is clear what I could count as grounds for accepting them; for some it isn't.

I lean away from holism. I'm not clear on all the labels, but I think my camp might be molecularism.

There's something mysterious about the notion of something being transferred - why think along those lines?

Why not just suppose that we learn the use? — Banno

No more mysterious than information, or energy, heh heh.

Analogies for language always come up short in some way. The sharing of semantic content just is exactly what language is for. When I speak to you, there's stuff in my mind you don't get, can't get. But there's something you do get that doesn't belong to me; Frege calls that the thought expressed by what I say. Like our mental contents, it's invisible, but like physical objects it's, um, objective.

I think from my side, the question is whether you take seriously the word "use." The words we utter to ourselves or others have content; they aren't just signals. Compare:

(1) When I say, "Go!" go.
(2) When I say "Brang-glubble!" go.

Where the word "go" is mentioned, it does not have its usual content. But to understand either of these instructions, you have to understand the content, which includes the word "go" being used. (Notice the similarity of (1) to a T-sentence.)

Wittgenstein's quasi-behaviourism is just continuing Frege's fight against psychologism. Understanding (1) or (2) has nothing to do with getting the same images or whatever I have in mind when I speak them. Understanding means acquiring the content, which is not peculiar to me or to you. If you leave content out, you're leaving out what makes language different from signaling.

Exactly. Frege argues that what you happen to have in mind, your ideas, associations, and so on, cannot be the meaning of what you say, because that's non-transferable. He calls whatever it is that is transferable, the thought. You could call it semantic content. Whatever. But he argues at length that there is something transferable and that it cannot be just reference.

That Phosphorus and Hesperus are the same is a better example for your purposes. But again, when we find out that Hesperus is Phosphorus, did we really find out something more than a novel use for the words "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus"?

That is, is sense any more than use? — Banno

I hope not? Use is what we expect here, so I'm not sure why that's a problem.

To start with expressions: "my" and "car" have senses, but not until you combine them into "my car" do you also have a reference, namely the car I own, the object. The senses of "my" and "car" determine what the expression "my car" will refer to.

With a sentence, the sense is the thought expressed by the sentence, and for Frege this is completely objective, public, shared. Reference for sentences is just truth-value. We don't go around just telling each other "True" and "False."

So yes, the sense of a word is its use.

Sure. You could also say it's the stuff that logic can ignore, lovely though it may be, just as it ignores the difference between "and" and "but."

Unfortunately-- or fortunately, since I find this stuff interesting-- it's not perfectly simple to say what logic can ignore and what it can't. Indexicals (I, here, now, etc.) are hard to ignore. If a sentence is elliptical, so that some of it is understood from context, you have to drag in what was understood but not stated. It's still a distinction you have to make if there's to be any point to logic at all.

Exactly. It's why an equation can be informative. Remember that Frege came up with the whole sense/reference business to explain why saying "The morning star is the evening star" is different from saying "Venus is Venus." The first could be informative, but the second couldn't. That takes some explaining if reference is all that matters.

But they also have the same extension. I don't see how your example works for you. — Banno

Yeah, reference and extension on one side; sense and intension on the other.

Yeah, utterance is actually saying something, in a particular situation. Or at least that's how I use the word, and I think it's at least close to standard.

In general, you can mean something by what you say, and have it be different from what you literally say. Example I was cooking up: You and four other folks are heading for a life raft that will only safely hold four; when you point this out, one of the others points a gun at you and says, "Five minus one is four." Okay, the literal meaning of that is one thing, but what's meant by it is another. The literal meaning is what logic deals with; the other is pragmatics or something.

I'm more or less just defending Fregean orthodoxy these days until I'm convinced to stop.

There was a time when I was inclined to say that words never refer to things, but that people, by their utterances, refer to things. Only I think logic needs reference and doesn't need utterance, so I can't hand reference over to utterance.

Oh sure, I agree it can't be done. And I didn't mean at all to admonish you. I was going to reach for a more or less technical use of "reference," in which case it wouldn't be a synonym for "meaning," and just wanted to make it clear that's all I was doing. It would hardly be fair of me just to say, "That's not reference, you dunderhead!" and not say I mean something particular by the word "reference."

Also, not to nitpick, but just in good faith, how accurately can we do this? Is this a deal-breaker? I could take the entire following paragraph that you wrote in your post that I just quoted and analyze the terminology, but could I nail down the terminology beyond a reasonable doubt? If we had to do this with every paragraph written and communicated, we wouldn't actually communicate anything. — Noble Dust

I'm not clear about this. Are you talking about the impossibility of defining everything, or about some sort of indeterminacy?

I think it's clearest with an example: "2+2" and "4" both refer to the same object, 4, but have different senses. Thus "2+2=4" and "4=4" express different thoughts. Just as "2+2" and "4" have the same reference, so "2+2=4" and "4=4" have the same truth-value.

This is what Davidson tried to bring out by translating natural languages into first order language. It didn't quite work. — Banno

But Davidson wants to treat language as purely extensional. We Fregeans have sense as well as reference.

Just nailing down the terminology.

I would say this: the meaning of a word is the contribution it makes to the meaning of a sentence in which it is used. (That's more or less Dummett's version of Frege, and I'm happy with it at the moment.) The key word there is "used": in distinction from "mentioned" of course, but also in the sense that the sentence is the unit of doing something linguistically--making a statement, placing a bet, asking a question, etc.

"Hello" just is the greeting; it doesn't refer to it.

Some of the issue here may be terminological, because it's perfectly clear that not every sort of word has anything to do with things: the logical constants, syncategorematic words, the list goes on.

In general, it's only names that carry the reference to some thing with them; other words can be combined to form expressions that refer, such as "my truck."

That's not to say that words that don't refer don't mean anything, only that there's more to meaning than referring to things.

Sure; only we can pretty much drop "meaning' in favour of "use"... Look at what we do with words rather than mean with them. — Banno

Change of vocabulary is no help, as they suffer from almost exactly the same ambiguity.

There's what words mean, as used in sentences, and then there's what we mean by them, as used in, you know, life. There's the use of words in sentences, and the use of words to tell people stuff, ask them questions, pronounce them guilty, etc.

We have good reasons for distinguishing between these sorts of things, but they are intimately linked, so it's no surprise that the same words end up smeared across the whole domain. Word-meaning and sentence-meaning are pretty different, but they're far from unrelated. And they're different again from what we mean by uttering a sentence in a particular context, but the meaning of the sentence, and hence of the words of which it is composed, is usually far from irrelevant.