Stephen Schiffer

What is it for marks or sounds to have meaning, and what is it for someone to mean something in producing them? Answering these and related questions, Schiffer explores communication, speech acts, convention, and the meaning of linguistic items in this reissue of a seminal work on the foundations of meaning. A new introduction takes account of recent developments and places his theory in a broader context.

A central claim of Paul Horwich’s 1998 book Meaning was that meaning properties reduce to acceptance properties, where  a meaning property is a property of the form e means m for x, e being “a word or phrase—whether it be spoken, written, signed, or merely thought (i.e. an item of ‘mentalese’)” (44);  an acceptance property for an expression e relative to a person x is a relation of the form x is disposed to accept an e-containing sentence of kind … in circumstances of kind …