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."

No one actually uses, or ever learns, more than a proper subset of a given natural language. — Srap Tasmaner

Here I think you're going back on your own original impulse about 'use', though, and I admire the original impulse more. We find ourselves saying words, or writing words, or understanding words heard or read. To call this finding-ourselves-doing-something 'use' is not quite right, though sometimes near enough for jazz. Our language and our selves intertwine in expression and understanding. — mcdoodle

I think the bit you're talking about was concerned with representing our knowledge of a language propositionally. There's a whole lot to recommend that view, but no one here has risen to its defense, so we haven't really talked about it. I'm still in the skill camp, but we've been discussing what kind of skill that is. (And maybe that just comes down to analysing skill-concepts better.)

As for the word "use," it's standard, and I'm fine with it. It is true that a lot of what goes into the use of language is involuntary and unconscious, but we still count as the agents. (Since posting, I have been thinking a lot about what else the word "use" means in this neighborhood, but I'm not ready to go into it yet.)

What after all is 'a given natural language'? It feels to me that there is some residual myth of the given lurking in this. There is no monolithic English, for example, portions of which we gradually acquire. This imagined abstraction is sometimes conjured into life by grammarians and pedagogues, but lived languages are a plurality, being renewed all the time, with enough in common between us that we understand each other and can make ourselves understood.

I used "given" here to mean "arbitrarily selected." Just shop talk.

I don't disagree with the substance of the rest of what you say here, but I am unapologetic about conjuring into life imagined abstractions. It won't bother me to use a fictive English that's just a union of the vocabularies of the members of some English-speaking community, a snapshot at some time of all the words any of them use. On the other hand, I don't need it. I can get the same point just by noting that snapshots of the vocabularies of the community members are not identical. For everyone, there are words they don't know or use that are known and used by other members of their community. In short, the plurality you speak of was exactly my point.

The point of making that point was to legitimize treating beginners as users of the language, despite their lack of competence. At the moment, I'll just add that beginners are treated by competent users of the language as pre-competent, as being on their way to competence. We interact with them as users of our language from the beginning. They're sort of "honorary members" of the speech community.

There are some words that I know-that they exist, and don't forget that because they are funny-sounding, easy to remember words, but for which I keep forgetting the meaning (the knowledge-how bit).

Examples are crepuscular, crapulous, rebarbative, cupidity. — andrewk

I can't help thinking there's a joke here about Buddhism and enlightenment. "Andrew doesn't even know the meaning of the word 'cupidity.'" Something like that.

The method of "postulating" what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil. — Bertrand Russell

If we find that everything that has a heart has kidneys, and everything that has kidneys has a heart, then the two sets, things that have a heart and things that have kidneys, are the same. But is saying something has a heart the same as saying it has kidneys? It doesn't seem like it is. It seems like two different concepts, even though they apply to exactly the same things.

On the other hand, would we have to do research to find that everything that has a heart has a body? How would you search for something that has a heart but no body? (Leaving aside Roy Orbison.) It's already built into the concept "has a heart" that it can only apply to things that have bodies. That's the analytic part. So you can know that the one set is a subset of the other without looking. That's the a priori part.

I've never thought of Hume as a skeptic.

There are like three different threads in here, which is totally my fault.

First off, sure, the piano and your vocal folds are tools. I might even be willing to say that language is a kind of technology we use to communicate (among other things). Another way to say that is, "We use words to communicate," where "words" basically means language. That ambiguity is unfortunate.

I wasn't looking for use in that broad sense, but in the sense that the meaning of a word is its use in sentences, the semantic contribution it makes to sentences it appears in. (When you learn how to use a word, you've learned what it means.) I was wondering if instead of there being a generic skill--using the word ____--maybe using the word "red" is a skill, using the word "crepuscular" is a skill, and so on, just as drawing a straight line is a skill, drawing a hand is a skill, etc. (I recall now that somewhere Dummett says the issue here isn't so much individual words, but word types: how to use color-words, number-words, mass nouns, proper names, etc.)

Looking back, I don't think I ever explicitly said I meant there to be an analogy between word/sentence and note/tune. (As the tune is made of certain notes in a certain special arrangement, the sentence is made of certain words in a certain special arrangement.) But that's why I end up unwilling to say that words are tools, even if I might be willing to say that language is a tool, because I was thinking of the use of a word in a sentence rather than the use of "words," i.e. language, to say something.

But now I need to say that these two uses of "use" are the same, or at least really closely related. A word is used in a sentence precisely in the sense that a sentence is what we use to perform what we can vaguely call a "linguistic act," the sense in which we use language to do something. That still doesn't exactly make a word a tool. I'm not even sure I would say a sentence is a tool. Language is more like a shared technology that includes the producing and consuming sides of the transaction.

But I do have one more observation. I lean toward molecularism, which is why I was claiming that we don't learn an entire language in one go, and wanted to look at how we add words. But there may be a sense in which that's false. No one actually uses, or ever learns, more than a proper subset of a given natural language. This need not be an idiolect--I mean only that fewer than all the words in the language are used, but those are used in the standard way. We're surely not going to say that you don't speak English unless you speak all of it. Speaking a proper subset is the norm. There may be a sorites here--how much of the language do you have to speak? Or we could just allow that there's a continuum. (I speak "ein bißchen Deutsch.") If we do that, then from the moment you learn how to use an English word, you're in the same position as the English speaker you learned the word from; the only difference is the cardinality of your subsets.

That allows us to connect language as a shared technology to the use of a word right from the start.

You mean the observed fact that it always has fallen down?

I'm still not sure. I worry a little that the word "use" makes us think of words as tools.

If you play a song on the piano, you strike the right keys at the right time to produce the right notes. The song is made up of those notes. We don't normally say you "use" the notes to make the song, although a composer explaining a piece might say something like, "Here I'm using an A7 to build tension" or whatever. You obviously use the piano to make the notes, to play the song.

I'm not worried about this as a question of English usage. You play the song by playing the notes. Playing the notes is playing the song. There's no temptation here to think of the notes as tools. The act you perform is not made up of the tools you perform it with. It's made up of smaller acts you perform.

This seems really close to the way we speak (or write or think). But maybe words are simply more like material. The clay is not the tool you make the sculpture with, or the paint the tool you make the picture with. (W. C. Williams once described the poem as "a small machine, made of words.")

My interest here is not literary. I'm not trying to find the best metaphor for language use. I'm looking for clues to theorizing better about language.

"Propositional attitude" is a term of art. Are you really not familiar with it? (Relates to verbs like believe, know, think, doubt, say and so on, that can take a complete proposition as their object, verbs that can be followed by "that" clauses.)

(In Archer voice) Nevermind! It's too late, you've ruined the moment.

You are, for one. — Thorongil

If it's to be an insinuation, then I won't. (Did you really miss the joke? I'm about to lose all the newfound respect I had for you.)

Well, okay. I obviously agree with you.... — Thorongil

Huzzah!

There are many sorts of things, musical instruments, tools, and so on, of which I can know what they are and how they are used without myself possessing the skill to use them. Can the same thing be said of a word? Is there a step left to take between knowing how a word is used and knowing how to use it? Or from knowing how to use a word to being able to use it?

You can know, in a sort of theoretical way, how to swim, how to ride a bike, and so on, without being able to. With language, the theoretical knowledge seems to be completely coincident with the practical ability, and that's odd. (I feel certain I'm repeating here something Ryle said about abilities.)