Gotta have a theory

[Sanford Levinson]

Matt Adler is, I believe, entirely correct.  Indeed, the classic example is
coming upon a sentence in the sand as one is walking on a (presumptively)
deserted beach. You see the words "Live Free or Die."  It is, of course,
possible, that in a one in ten-trillion event, sticks, seashells, etc.,
just happened to form these words.  (If that's the case, and we know it to
be the case, the "words" are quite literally nonsense, since we know that
no sentient being intended to communicate anything by them, unless, of
course, we see this as evidence of divine presence in the world).  Most of
us would see them, though, as evidence that the beach isn't probably *that*
deserted after all.  We would assume that the author "intended" to convey
some kind of meaning.  And we would attribute the intended meaning to the
standard definitions in the language of the time.  (This is why we can try
to interpret anonymously-authored work, precisely because the specific
identity of the author is, at bottom, often irrelevant, though we might
very much want to know the socio-historical context within which the
anonymous work was written.)  If we found the author further down the beach
and discovered that he thought he was writing "Live Free or Diet" (or,
indeed, that a wave wiped out the "t" at the end)," we would have a hearty
laugh about the difference between speaker's intent and "actual meaning" to
the reader.

Sandy


  At 02:33 PM 08/14/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>Not quite.  Johnson is probably right that, without some kind of
>subjective intent to communicate, supposed "words" are meaningless.  We
>probably need (1) a subjective intention that certain scribbles are
>indeed words, and (2) a subjective intention to invoke a particular set
>of linguistic conventions, i.e., a particular language.   But this is
>much less ambitious than -- much weaker than -- the claim that the
>linguistic meaning of a word just is what its speaker thereby intended
>to communicate.  If I say "his hat's on backwards," thereby intending to
>make a linguistic utterance in English, and in particular intending to
>communicate the proposition "his shoe's on backwards," the so-called
>"conventional meaning" or "sentence meaning" of the utterance is: "his
>hat's on backwards."  This is a perfectly kosher kind of linguistic
>meaning and can differ quite dramatically from "speaker's meaning,"
>which is what Johnson asserts to be the only kind of linguistic
>meaning.  -- Matt Adler
>
>
>Calvin Johnson wrote:
>>
>> This claim that words can have meaning without "subjective intent" is
nonsense. The Constituiton was not written by 1000 monkeys pounding at
random. Words have pruposes and rationales. As Lord Coke appropriate said,
"The law is unknown to him that knoweth not the reason thereof." I have
seen lots of cheating interpretations that happen to fit the words; it is
just not the historical meaning the author meant. The letters and the
spirit make binding law. But without the spirit you have nothing but silly
letters, devoid of meaning. .
>>
>>
>