Contextualism, Pragmatism and Determination of Meaning

Abstract

In How to Make our Ideas Clear, Charles S. Peirce presents a principle that I shall call the Principle of the Determination of Meaning . Its wording could be as follows: The root of any distinction in thought or in the meaning of linguistic expressions is to be found in their sensitive effects, in our practices and activities. Peirce is one of the founders of the New Logic, but he didn’t follow the path chosen by the language philosophers of the logical trend (Frege, Russell, Carnap, Tarski, etc.). These philosophers adopted a top-to-bottom perspective in semantics; in that perspective semantics must be developed in parallel with syntax, and the problems we face in semantics are relegated to pragmatics (the notorious “pragmatic waste basket”). Recently,many philosophers of language inverted that perspective: it is semantics that must answer to pragmatics, as Brandom says, and with him the Contextualists in the philosophy of language (Charles Travis, François Recanati, Anne Bezuidenhout, Julius Moravcsik, Hilary Putnam, etc.). Peirce might be presented as the fi rst philosopher to defend that “bottom-to-top” perspective in philosophical semantics. For many years Travis and Recanati multiplied examples illustrating Peirce’s Principle. My aim in this paper is to show, through the presentation of many examples, how the meaning or the content of our utterances (“What Is Said”) is determined in context and depends on our activities and practices. I will show how Mindreading and the structure of Plan that organizes our activities make a contribution in determining a specifi c meaning for the words used in context. I will also show how Recanati’s Principle of Availability echoes Peirce’s Principle. Recanati’s Principle says that the proposition actually and correctly understood in context is always the one which is directly and consciously accessible to the speaker-hearer.