Indeed; it depends entirely on what "prior" might mean... — Banno

I guess I'm okay with it as indicating what's being explained in terms of what. If A is explained in terms of B, then B is prior to A. That could be conceptually prior, metaphysically prior, who knows. If we've ruled out circularity, or mutual dependence, etc.

If there's no way to explain what language is, how it works, how it's used, whatever, without talking about meaning, then I guess that would make meaning prior to language.

Hmmm. Doesn't Austin point out that when the judge says, "Guilty," he has done something with words besides mean something?

More to the point of the thread, if meaning is something we can do by various means, language among them, then doesn't that suggest that meaning is "prior" to language? I'm not wild about "prior" talk, but it seems your position would lead you to agree with him.

Meaning is not separable from language because meaning is what language does — Banno

So meaning is separable from language, because we can mean something with a painting, but language is not separable from meaning because all we can do with language is mean things. Is that right?

Meaning is what we do with language. — Banno

Counting, and meaning, are the action; number, and language, the tool. — Banno

Meaning is not separable from language because meaning is what language does — Banno

Meaning is not a function of language; meaning is something we do with language.

But better: forget about meaning altogether and just look at what we do with language. — Banno

You seem to be saying several different things, Banno.

If language is a tool we mean things with, then it's conceivable we could mean things with something else. If you're saying there's nothing else we can mean things with, you'd need to argue for that.

Unless it turns out you were defining the word "meaning" here as "what we do with language." Then you could save the tool talk, I guess: "meaning" would mean "using the tool language." On the other hand, how informative would such a definition be?

The question is really as to whether nature is merely a brute existence or if intentionality (telos) is behind its workings. Empirically speaking we simply don't know, and I don't believe we ever can know by means of purely rational or empirical enquiry. There doesn't seem to be any imaginable way we could know by those means. — John

That's the bit I had in mind. If you take the additional step of linking the truth of a statement to a conception of what could count as evidence for it, then your statement here would be a textbook antirealism about the intentionality of the universe, i.e., a denial that the law of the excluded middle applies here, so that you do not feel compelled to consider such statements true or false. Since people generally have a revulsion to messing with the "laws of thought," it's more likely you intended only to claim that whether there is a fact of the matter or not-- and the assumption is usually that there is-- we cannot know it. (But then what are you saying?) Anyway, you've got options here. I don't have a horse in this race.

I'm no expert on alternative logics, but there are lots of ways to tinker. For the stuff I'm interested in, there can be motivated restrictions of the application of the law of the excluded middle, but the law of contradiction stays put, and I can't imagine what could be gained by ditching that under any non-literary circumstances.

I'm going to pass on commenting on the rest of what you say here, interesting thought it is. I've already spent more time at this altitude than I consider healthy! I'm going to head back to earth.

Thanks for the exchange, John.

Many other species have some ability to communicate, have calls and such that might qualify as symbols. I am coming to believe that the peculiarity of language is that it is a far more powerful tool than we could have needed just for communication at the time when language emerged. Granted, we now use it for more nuanced sorts of communication than any other species, but those other species get along pretty well with what they have. I think either language answered to other purposes (than communication) from the beginning, or, my guess, it's an accident that we ended up with so much more than we needed.

It's just speculation. But if you're going to explain what language is or how it works, you ought to try not to leave out whatever it is that makes language distinctive from other sorts of animal communication.

(I see @Wayfarer has chimed in with a related point as I was writing.)

I just assume the natural numbers 1,2 and 3 — Pippen

You really need to get the basics squared away, man. 1, 2, and 3 do not have truth-values. They cannot be premises.

The expected ordering of my thoughts is not coming along, so I'll just indicate a few of the things on my mind.

It seems to me there is a broad sense in which Hume and Kant give a similar explanation for what you here mark out as "self-evident," namely that it has its source in our own nature. Hume calls the principle of human nature that leads us from bare experience to cause and effect "Custom." For Kant, it's the transcendental aesthetic, yes? (Kant I have neglected.) At any rate, both, again broadly, say that we cannot help but think in such terms. We think the way we think because we do. (I'm sure that's a travesty of Kant, and welcome clarification while I continue to put off studying him.)

"Cannot help but" suggests that "self-evident" here may mean "cannot be doubted."

And yet: Quine was an anti-realist about meaning, and thus denied there was any "fact of the matter" about the correctness of a translation (among many other things). @andrewk, you'll no doubt recall, is an anti-realist about causation, so he neither affirms nor denies propositions such as "a caused b." The general form of the argument here is, as Michael Dummett explains, to deny the applicability of the law of the excluded middle to the questioned domain. That may seem a steep price to pay, but there's reason to think all of us are anti-realists about some domains. What we argue about is with regard to which domains we are willing to abandon the law of the excluded middle. Intuition will play its usual role here, though: if you can produce a proposition that the anti-realist feels compelled to consider either true or false, then he must abandon his abandonment and join you in realism about that domain.

That "feels compelled" there is odd. Compelled by what? Self-evident truth? Human nature? Custom?

I think often the sense of being compelled comes from linguistic habit. That by itself is not to say you are being steered away from or toward truth. I also think language is precisely what enables us to overcome the sense of compulsion, for good or ill.

Added: You yourself, John, espoused an anti-realism about the intentionality of the universe.

Thanks, John! This is an excellent response. You tie together several things nicely here. I have loads to say about this, but I want to try to set my thoughts in order first.

I'm not at all saying "we're just completely guessing"! Humans cannot be "empty zombies". I believe this because I intuit it, not because I have any purely rationally based empirical evidence to support it; I don't, and neither do you. — John

This struck me as an interesting position to take. I suppose I think of an intuition, philosophically, as a belief for which no reason comes readily to hand (if ever). As such, intuition is indispensable to get any thinking done at all. But I'm curious, because of the way you put things here, how you think of the epistemic value of intuition.

There's a remark of Frank Ramsey's I often think of -- I think he was talking about aesthetics, but it seems to apply more broadly. He said too many arguments have this form:
Philosopher A: I went to Grantchester yesterday.
Philosopher B: No I didn't.

I think somehow the "unity of science" hasn't been explicitly addressed in this thread. I'd guess you have your doubts, but If like to see arguments from each side.

One way to start is to say that Harry Potter is a person we pretend exists, or, better, that we pretend there's a world the novels describe in which Harry Potter exists. I don't exist in that world, and he doesn't exist in this one.

But the expression "Harry Potter" exists in both. In his world, it names a person; in this one, it doesn't. In this world, we use that expression in several ways: to talk about the cultural artifact created by J. K. Rowling, and to talk about Harry "in-world," pretending that his world is real. And we mix those up by saying things like, "On page 35, Harry says he knows who did it."

In the Potterverse, "Harry Potter" is the real, not pretend, name of Harry Potter (it might not have been); it bears the relation is-a-name-of to the object Harry Potter. In our world, although "Harry Potter" is a real expression, it does not bear that relation to any real object. Not a person, anyway. I suppose it's the name of a cultural object. But does it make sense, in our world, to also think of "Harry Potter" as the real name, a name in our world, of a pretend person, a person who happens not to exist in our world?

I don't think so. I think it's part of pretending that the Potterverse is real, to pretend that the linguistic expressions bear the is-a-name-of relation to objects we pretend exist. It's not only the person that's pretend; it's also the relation between that person and his name. That means that statements in our world that use the expression "Harry Potter" where a name would go are either "in-world" or taking about the cultural artifact, and otherwise not well-formed. "Harry Potter does not exist," is not actually a statement, because "Harry Potter" as used here is not actually a name.

Well, truth is truth. All true statements are (truth-functionally) equivalent.
Btw, I hope "1", "2", and "3" are statements, not the numbers 1, 2, and 3.

In natural deduction, if that's what we're doing here, the introduction rule for → is roughly:
________ (a)
P
.
.
.
Q
________
P→Q (a)

That is, if assuming P and then doing stuff gets you Q, then you can say P→Q. (You are then said to "discharge" your assumption of P, marked here as "a.")

I still have no idea what's going on here though, because your premises are obviously inconsistent, so you can deduce whatever you want.

I don't think so. They're defined relative to something, but that something is not so much the context of their utterance, but how the sequence is defined. Lots of definitions are relative to other definitions without being indexicals.

It's a good question though. I'll bet there's something there.

Do you perceive order here?

Here's an example to clarify my view of the context principle.

I mentioned the logical constants several times. Let's suppose someone asks me, "What does 'and' mean?" I seriously have no idea what to say. Can you explain that without using the word? (I'm tempted to check and see how dictionaries handle this, but of course dictionaries have to rely on cycles of words to define each other mutually.)

You have to show someone how to use the logical constants. You train them. (The sequent calculus carries an echo of this in its introduction and elimination rules.) At some point they know how to use them, and understand how the logical constants modify the truth conditions of statements.

Frege's point is that once you know that, there's nothing left to know about their meaning. There's no meaning besides how they're used in sentences and how that use changes truth conditions. That use is their meaning.

Now that I think of it, maybe "rhetoric" is the traditional term for my pragmatics level. It's acquired some crust I wouldn't want to disturb though.

It's not really worded well there. What I meant was there are several choices for where to go after sentences, and I gave some examples. I don't know if there is one next step, but there are candidates that I think are important.

One of those is pragmatics, and yes I think of what is meant by an utterance of a sentence as something other than what the sentence (literally, as they say) means, and that depends on loads of stuff, including but not limited to the intentionality of the speaker. (Sometimes pragmatics has been taken as the theory of indexicals, but there's some reason to think they ought to come in earlier, at the sentence level. It's tricky, right?)

One other place to go from sentences is inference, and here I'm talking about reasoning and logic. For one thing, here the concept of utterance doesn't seem particularly valuable, and you're looking exactly at what a sentence means, not what someone might mean by it. (Sentences connect to each other to form arguments, in a way reminiscent of words connecting to form sentences.)

That sounds a little dogmatic, because of course one of the things we do a lot of, and why I found the Comey testimony interesting, is reason about utterances, and quite often it's the difference between what was said and what was meant by what was said that's at issue. But here we have the utterance as object. The utterance of your reasoning about some utterances -- maybe you're into rhetoric there, or something.

Letters are not meaningless; their meaningfulness consists in their relationships to sounds that can be made by the human voice and the diverse but phonetically constrained ways in which they can combine to form words. Words are not meaningless; their meaning consists in both their individual references and the relationships of similarity and difference between their various references as well as the diverse but constrained ways in which they can combine to form phrases and sentences.

I would say it's semantics all the way down. — John

There's something to this, so long as, as you follow the chain up from phoneme to morpheme to word to sentence, you manage to mark the boundaries. (There's also a side trip some words take through "singular term.") The boundaries are important. It is arguably one of Frege's greatest legacies that he recognized the importance of the crossover from word to sentence.

It might be reasonable, helpful, or desirable, to use a different word for what we get at each step that we didn't have at the one before. The use of "meaning" at the word stage and the sentence stage does lead to confusion, but the usage is pretty well entrenched. There may be a darn good reason.

We don't have to stop at sentence, either. One next step that works for a lot of cases is language-game. You could also look to pragmatics, maybe speech-acts; whatever you call it, this would be the point at which you're looking not just for what a sentence means, but what is meant by its utterance. There is one more next step up from sentence that I think deserves special treatment, and that's inference.

Like Captain America, I'm loyal to nothing but the dream.

Right now I see a group of capoeira practicioners in the garden. It is a group with specific characteristics. And it seems to me that meaning for each one of them is increased when they share their own identity with each other, because they can see their own reflection on his and her friend that is practicing too. — oranssi

That's really lovely.

If words are the smallest units of meaning, then letters are meaningless. If sentences are the smallest unit of meaning, then words are meaningless. But it is clearly possible to hold that words are meaningful and can be combined into larger meaningful expressions, including sentences. I so hold.

The way I construe the meaning of a word, the logical constants are meaningful.

[Edit: wrote "connectives" instead of "constants."]

Sorry I don't get your point. On my account you don't have to know the truth or falsehood of this or that particular sentence, only understand the truth conditions of some sentences (which is of course not the same as knowing whether they actually obtain). — Fafner

You either analyse sentences into components or you don't. If only sentences have meaning, then their components are meaningless. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Your contextualist who notices "structural similarities" among sentences would be like the guy who reasons that "ball" and "balk" and "balm" must have similar meanings. If you don't get to use components, all you have is truth conditions.

Again, I don't see your point here... If as you say logical constants recursively generate sentences by combining other sentences, then how is the question about the meaning of single words supposed to arise here? I think that on the contrary, truth functional logic seems to be very congenial to the contextualist. — Fafner

It's the logical constants themselves that you don't get to have, because by definition they're meaningless.

I think I'm okay with your last paragraph, mostly at least, but I'm at work, so...

The past tense thing was just meant as a proxy for all the stuff we learn to talk about where we cannot directly check that the relevant truth conditions obtain. I think you hit a wall pretty quickly if all you have to go on is the truth and falsehood of statements.

Even the natural next step is blocked, which is recursively generating complex statements from simple ones using the logical constants. (And similarly for understanding such statements by analysing then into simple statements so coupled.) I don't see how you get the logical constants going at all.

If forced to choose, I'm saying the word is the basic semantic unit, not the sentence, so long as it's understood that the meaning of a word is the semantic contribution it makes to a sentence in which it is used. The statement is the unit of judgment, though, so "semantic" up there is really the wrong word. The word is the smallest unit of meaning.

If it matters, I think this is Frege's view as well, despite the way it is expressed in the Grundlagen, but that's considerably less important.

Fafmer's summary is very good. These things can be confusing because philosophy addresses what is the case, how we know what is the case, and how we talk about what it is the case. You can sometimes reason from one of these to another, and then you have to be really careful.

1. If there's order, then there's an orderer
2. There's order
So,
3. There's an orderer. — TheMadFool

Among the points you should consider:

(1) is not, in the modern era, a reasonable premise. We now know many, many ways in which what appears as order to us can arise "bottom up." Normal distributions just happen; no one makes them happen. Evolution by natural selection is a powerful tool for creating order. The recent discoveries in biophysics that Apokrisis is always talking about is another. I'm sure others here could chip in dozens more examples. These sorts of processes were not well understood before the modern era, so the argument from design was more persuasive.

Dawkins's argument: if we perceive complexity that cries out for an explanation, positing a designer does not help, because the designer would have to be even more complex that what it is supposed to explain. By kicking the can down the road, you've only made your task harder. (A similar argument applies to the "likelihood" version: the creator is even more unlikely than the unlikely occurrences it is supposed to explain.)

Hume, from the Dialogues: even granting the argument, you get pretty close to no knowledge about what did this designing, not that it was singular -- it might have been a poorly run committee -- not that it has any of the attributes some expect, like goodness, perfection, etc.

It is the argument from design. I just wondered if you were familiar with any previous discussion of the argument, or if you're starting from scratch here.

Did you consider reading, for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument?

The question about this thread is:

I want to try to make an approach to the "only sentences have meaning" view. (For now, I'll use the word "meaning" without saying what it is.)

We'll all agree, I think, that only statements (let's leave aside everything else for a bit) can have a truth-value. But we need to distinguish somehow between grasping the meaning of a statement and knowing whether it is true or false.

So what's the meaning of a statement? What do you know when you know what the meaning of a statement is? One widely discussed view is that when you know the meaning of a statement, you know what conditions must obtain for the statement to be true, so that should do for now.

Let's take two statements, "It is raining," and "It was raining." One can be true when the other is false, so they must not have the same meaning. The proposal is that we grasp the meaning of a statement by comparing it to other statements that we already know the meaning of. So let's try that here.

Suppose our stock of statements include, besides the two at issue, "It is sunny," "It is cloudy," "It is snowing," and the past tenses of all those. So maybe we learn to say "It is raining," when the other three present tense statements are false. In that sense, we know the meaning of "It is raining" and the other present tense statements comparatively.

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.

Quickly, yes I'm going to be following Frege's usage. There's some exegesis you have to get through, because at the time of the Grundlagen he hadn't split meaning into sense and reference yet, and he never enunciated the context principle again later.

However, there are statements in the Grundlagen (ref. when I get home) that show Frege also believed in compositionality. So he didn't think they were incompatible.

The motto he gives goes something like this: from the word to the sense, from the sense to the reference. So the sense of a singular term is what fixes its reference, and its reference is an object. The sense of a sentence is the thought it expresses, and the reference is its truth-value.

More later.

If you don't like the analogy, that's fine. I'm not in love with it. The motivation was to combine two ideas: that performing a linguistic act is like making a move or taking a turn in a game; a sentence is composed of words put together in a certain way.

(Tangrams aren't like jigsaw puzzles. There's likely more than one way to do it.)

The alternative is to say that words do have sense, and that the sense of a word is the contribution it makes to the sense of a sentence in which it is used.

You avoid circularity by beginning with sentences simple enough for you to have a way of grasping their sense independently. These atomic sentences are just what Frege forms concepts/predicates from.

More later.

Thanks for your thoughts. I'm tied up at work right now but will get to this soon as I can.

Absolutely we'll deny (2) as formulated, but I don't think the "only sentences have meaning" view can be made to work.

More later. Have fun with Terrapin.

I'm glad you posted this. Is there a particular point you'd like to make about this exchange?

I think one of the things you're missing is that an argument has an audience. You have to expect that what you need/want to treat as a brute fact will be accepted as such by the target audience. If you don't think they'll go along, there's no point.

But you can also argue that something is a brute fact by going through the usual types of explanations offered for it and disposing of them. You might be able to do even better by providing a taxonomy of possible explanations and showing how nothing we might come up with anywhere in that taxonomy will work. That doesn't prove something cannot be explained, but it might be enough to make it likely, or plausible, or any of those substitutes for certainty that philosophers use.

It's your level of enlightenment, man.

Part of McGinn's point is pretty straightforward, and similar to what @Moliere was saying, that relative to a given theory, something is explained and something isn't. That's interesting, and I would think uncontroversial.

But then it's natural to ask if there is anything that, relative to some largish class of theories, will always be in the "unexplained" bucket. Or even if there is something that will be unexplained for all conceivable theories. I would think it's around here we start talking about "brute facts."