Word Meaning: What it is and what it is not.

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It appears to be a straightforward claim about human language abilities that we understand a word if we know its meaning. However, it has proven remarkably difficult to provide a theoretical account of word meaning that is faithful to two deeply ingrained intuitions. On the one hand, there is an intuition that a word has a fixed linguistic meaning; on the other hand, we interpret words differently in different contexts. Reading the instruction 'Keep shut' printed on a fire door, we understand that we may in fact open the door and pass through it, but should shut it behind us. When the instruction occurs on an oven door in which a soufflé is rising, we realize we should not open the door. Interpretation depends in part on the particular situation of use, yet there is also an intuition that 'keep shut' has a constant linguistic meaning. This phenomenon can be replicated for almost any word. Interpretation of the verb 'paint' differs in each of the following: 'Michelangelo painted a picture', 'John painted his house', 'Mary painted her fingernails'. How we interpret 'moving' when we say 'The trees are moving' depends on whether we are interested in wind strength or in the possibility of a landslide. How we interpret the claim that a situation is an 'emergency' depends in part on the nature of the specific occasion. Yet there is also a robust intuition that the words 'painted', 'moving', and 'emergency' have a linguistic meaning which is constant across all occasions of use. It seems highly plausible that our knowledge of this constant linguistic meaning plays a crucial role in the explanation of (i) how we apply a word in different contexts, and (ii) how we understand what someone says by uttering the word in different contexts. The central aim of the project is to spell out what kind of a thing word meaning must be in order to play these roles.If knowledge of the linguistic meaning of a word guides its application in a systematic way but does not determine in advance its correct application for every conceivable context of utterance, it seems that the meaning must be schematic rather than fully specified, hence some kind of outline or template. A meaning schema guides us toward the correct interpretation only if we can draw on our common-sense or pragmatic know-how when using it. The project will develop an account of word meaning in terms of this notion of a schema or outline. We will show how, in conjunction with general cognitive-pragmatic abilities, this account of word meaning can explain the range of interpretations a word may have in different contexts. In order to assess the explanatory weight of this view of word meaning, it will be applied to various different kinds of words, including general terms like 'shut', 'paint', and 'moving', proper names and pronouns, and connectives like 'but', 'if ...then' and 'so'. Finally, we will use our results to shed light on some longstanding debates in linguistics and philosophy, including the relation between word meanings and concepts.