An early proponent of the view that meaning is context-dependent is Husserl. His thought on meaning, as manifested in his first major work Logical Investigations, starts out from the problem of what it is for a linguistic expression, as used by a speaker or (scientific) author, to function as a meaningful unit.[1]
Husserl’s approach is to study the units of consciousness that the respective speaker deliberately presents herself as having—that she “intimates” or “gives voice to”—when expressing the meaning in question. This is what Searle refers to as the condition of sincerity of the relevant speech act (Searle 1983, pp. 9-10). These units of consciousness Husserl labels INTENTIONAL EXPERIENCES or ACTS, since they always represent something—thus exhibiting what Brentano called intentionality. They are “about”, or “as of,” something. For instance, if you claim “One of my goals is to defend contextualism,” you give voice to a judgment or belief-state to the effect that defending contextualism is among your goals. This judgment is intentional, in that it represents a state of affairs, namely your having a particular goal; it is “about” that state of affairs, even if the latter does not exist (i.e., obtain) because you do not have that goal. Now it is the content of this judgment (which may be empty or unfulfilled, i.e., made in the absence of a corresponding intuition, such as a corresponding perception) that a hearer has to know in order to understand your utterance, i.e., to grasp its literal meaning. Thus, the (unfulfilled) judgment functions as the “meaning-bestowing” or “meaning conferring act” (Husserl 2001, p. 192) regarding the sentence uttered. This act is given voice to, or intimated, “in the narrow sense” (Husserl 2001, p. 189)—it is the condition of sincerity of the speech act. However, in the present example (“One of my goals is to defend contextualism”) the speaker also deliberately presents herself as someone who wants to defend contextualism; after all, she explicitly ascribes that intention to herself. This latter act (the intention in question) is given voice to “in the broader sense” only (Husserl 2001, p. 189), as it fails to be the meaning-bestowing act regarding the sentence uttered and thus to be given voice to in the narrow sense. In other words, the speaker intentionally presents herself as performing or undergoing that act, but if the hearer does not recognize that intention he does not thereby fail to grasp the literal truth-conditional meaning of the utterance. Again, if you assert “This is a blooming tree,” you give voice, in the narrow sense, to a demonstrative judgment; but you also present yourself as perceiving (or having perceived) something as a blooming tree, where the act of perception is given voice to in the broader sense. This perceptual act verifies the unfulfilled judgment by intuitively “fulfilling” it (Husserl 2001, p. 192). Since the meaning-bestowing act finds its aim, so to speak, in this intuitive fulfilment, Husserl also refers to it as the corresponding “meaning intention” (Husserl 2001, p. 192). Since any meaning intention aims at its intuitive fulfilment, every meaningful utterance can in principle be made to give voice (in the broader sense) to such an act of fulfilment, provided its literal meaning is not evidently inconsistent. In sections 3 and 4 I shall argue that only the group of speakers capable of both making and understanding such epistemic implicitures (the “producers”) must meet the requirements of Searle’s Background Hypothesis. One does not have to meet these requirements in order to express, or correctly ascribe, a meaning intention and thus grasp the literal truth-conditional meaning of an (assertive) utterance.
The “original function” of linguistic expressions is their communicative use in giving voice to meaning-bestowing acts, or meaning intentions (Husserl 2001, p. 189). However, this “indicating (anzeigende)” function is not essential to their functioning as meaningful units, as they can also be employed “in [the] solitary life [of the soul] (im einsamen Seelenleben),” thanks to meaning-bestowing acts not actually given voice to but experienced all the same (Husserl 2001, pp. 190-191). But these acts and the meanings they bear are constrained by semantic factors concerning the linguistic expressions employed, with these factors being determined by linguistic conventions regarding the relationship between their meaning and the features of non-linguistic reality they serve to represent:
[...] it pertains to the usual [i.e., conventional; CB] sense of these classes of expressions, that they owe their determinate meaning to the occasion […] [T]heir [respective] meaning is oriented in each case to the individual instance, though the manner of this orientation is a matter of usage.[2] (Husserl 2001, p. 221)
Husserl’s theory of meaning strongly resembles the mainstream view in philosophy of language attacked by Searle and other contextualists. In the following passage Searle gives a concise summary of that view:
Sentences have literal meanings. The literal meaning of a sentence is entirely determined by the meanings of its component words (or morphemes) and the syntactical rules according to which these elements are combined. […] The literal meaning of a sentence needs to be sharply distinguished from what a speaker means by the sentence when he utters it to perform a speech act […]. For example, in uttering a sentence a speaker may mean something different from what the sentence means, as in the case of metaphor; or he may even mean the opposite of what the sentence means, as in the case of irony; or he may mean what the sentence means but mean something more as well, as in the case of conversational implications and indirect speech acts. […] For sentences in the indicative, the meaning of the sentence determines a set of truth conditions […] Sometimes the meaning of a sentence is such that its truth conditions will vary systematically with the contexts of its literal utterance. Thus the sentence ‘I am hungry’ might be uttered by one person on one occasion to make a true statement and yet be uttered by another person, or by the same person on another occasion, to make a false statement. […] It is important to notice however that the notion of the meaning of a sentence is absolutely context free. Even in the case of indexical sentences the meaning does not change from context to context; rather the constant meaning is such that it determines a set of truth conditions only relative to a context of utterance.[3] (Searle 1978, pp. 207-208)
To bring out the relevant semantic factors, consider what Husserl calls “essentially occasional expressions,” i.e., systematically context-sensitive, or indexical, expressions such as “I,” “here,” “now,” “I am here now.”[4] In his pioneering discussion of these expressions in the first Logical Investigation, paragraph 26, Husserl introduces the semantic distinction between, on the one hand, an expression’s general meaning-function (i.e., the linguistic meaning of the expression, roughly corresponding to what Kaplan calls “character”) and, on the other hand, the propositional, or sub-propositional,[5] content – the “respective meaning” – expressed in a given context of utterance (Husserl 2001, p. 218). If, for example, you and I both say “I,” then our two utterances share the same general-meaning function but express different respective meanings, with different referents. Again, if you and I both assert “I have blood type A,” our utterances share the same general meaning-function but express different respective meanings, with different truth conditions. These respective meanings, or truth-conditional contents, are often referred to as propositions expressed by the utterance of a sentence.
Husserl regards the general meaning-function as fixed by common usage (Husserl 2001, p. 221). The respective meaning determines the expression’s reference, or truth condition, in the sense that two expressions sharing that meaning are thus bound to refer to the same object(s), or to represent the same state of affairs, if any. Husserl construes “respective meanings” as two-factored, with the general meaning function plus the relevant context of utterance (if any) determining the meaning in question. Thus we have two levels of meaning[6] being expressed when a meaning intention is given voice to:
General meaning-function (conventional linguistic meaning, “character”) =Df The general meaning-function of an expression is a function yielding a respective meaning for a use of that expression in a given utterance context; where the assignment of this meaning-function to the relevant expression is generally a matter of (implicit or explicit) linguistic convention.
Respective meaning ([sub-]propositional content, semantic content)[7] =Df The respective meaning of an expression as used in a given utterance context is a function yielding a reference or extension for that expression as used in that context, given particular circumstances of evaluation (see below).
In the case of indexical expressions, the respective meaning, alias semantic content, is a function of both the context of utterance and the general meaning-function of the expression used, which differs from the respective meaning; in all other cases, the two levels can be said to coincide.
Indexicality =Df An expression is used as an indexical if and only if it is used in such a way that its respective meaning is dependent on both the utterance context (see below) and its general meaning-function, such that it may acquire different referents or extensions in different utterance contexts in virtue of its general meaning-function.
The level of respective meaning is subject to what Husserl calls “pure grammar,” which is the study of what distinguishes sense (i.e., respective meaning) from nonsense.[8] On this view, semantic content displays something like formal, syntactic structure. This idea helps to explain the compositionality of meaning, which in turn explains how speakers and hearers, or interpreters, are able to grasp the meaning of an infinite number of sentences, many of which they have never heard before, on the basis of a finite vocabulary and a finite set of linguistic rules or conventions.
It is at the level of respective meaning that the bearers of truth-value (that is, of truth and falsity, respectively) are located—i.e., propositions. In modern semantics, truth-value ascriptions are relativized to what Kaplan calls circumstances of evaluation, consisting of possible worlds and, according to Kaplan, also times, on occasion. To illustrate one of the theoretical merits of this relativization to possible worlds, consider an utterance of mine of the sentence
(S0) I exist.
If we make the relativization in question, we can say two things: first, for every context of utterance it holds that the respective proposition expressed in an utterance of this sentence is true in the possible world of that context, so that the sentence can be said to be a priori or logically true (Kaplan 1989). Second, the proposition expressed in a particular utterance of S0, the respective meaning, is only contingently true – after all, the speaker need not exist: there are, in other words, possible worlds in which the proposition in question is false. Note that:
Context of utterance =Df The utterance context consists of the possible world in which the utterance is (assumed to be) performed, the speaker, the addressee, the time and the place of utterance and/or all other entities that (according the general meaning-function of the expressions uttered) have to be identified in order to evaluate the utterance in terms of truth, falsity, or reference, relative to given circumstances of evaluation.
Or thus goes the rather common definition of “utterance context” I have used in earlier writings (e.g., Beyer 2001, pp. 278-279).
It is generally agreed upon, in mainstream semantics, that the levels of meaning mentioned so far – character and respective semantic content – do not exhaust what is communicated in speech. As Husserl puts it, there are mental states given voice to “in the broader sense,” and their contents are candidates for what the speaker non-literally means or suggests, which Grice calls “implicature.” At the same time, these contents are further candidates for what the hearer grasps when understanding, or successfully interpreting, the utterance.
This has been standardly regarded as a third level of meaning that is not the subject matter of formal semantics but rather of pragmatics: the study of the use of language for purposes of action other than the expression of literal meaning.
What is implicated (suggested, indirectly communicated) =Df By using an expression in an utterance context, a speaker implicates the intentional contents of the mental acts she gives voice to in the broader sense. These contents can be made out on the basis of the respective meaning of the expression in that context by applying certain conversational maxims (cf. Maibauer 2010).