"What Do You Mean?"

Jerry A. Fodor

The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 57, No. 15. (Jul. 21, 1960), pp. 499-506.

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" W H A T DO Y O U MEAN" 499

heights of articulation, precision, and clarity fa r beyond any level of these for which prior existence, implicit in ordinary language, could be claimed. There is no need to suppose logical laws to be other than purely procedural and formal, quite without content- ~ ~ i t h o u t ,if YOU will, meaning. This assertion is perfectly com-patible with that understanding of the function of logic, of its rela- tion to language, and of its epistemological responsibilities which comes with seeing its principles as explicit and purified conven-tionalizations of the mores of language.

C. DOUGLASMCGEE V:\bs.is COLLI~GE

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN?"

I THINK that some philosophers have conceived of linguistic communication on the following model: a language consists of

a delimited set of sounds, various combinations of which may, as the result of the existence of a socially prescribed system of con-ventions, be used by speakers to refer to more or less well defined situations, or objects, or events, in a more or less interpersonal world of nature. The paradigmatic case of language using is the employment of some sequence of sounds to refer to a situation to which a speaker means or intends to refer. The paradigmatic case of successful communication with language is the one in which the speaker correctly chooses a sign which, by virtue of its con-ventional referential liaisons, evokes in some listener an idea similar or identical to the idea which the speaker means to convey; that is, communication is successful in just the case where the speaker's use of signs successfully communicates what he means.

The model yields a linear schematization of successful com-munication which looks something like the following : communica-tion commences with the occurrence of a mental act of meaning or intending or reference. This act finds overt expression in the choice and utterance of a sequence of sounds-that is, a "linguistic sign"-which is understood, according to the conventions of the speech community, to refer to just the thing or things the speaker means. A listener then hears the sounds and employs their con- ventional meanings to reconstruct the state of mind of the speaker, and thus to know what the speaker means by the utterance. Com-munication is thus understood to consist of the exactly symmetrical processes of encoding and decoding a pre-existent, non-linguistic, psychological or "mental" message.

Notice that it is a consequence of this model that the nature of

500 T H E JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

the message-that is, of the mental message or "ideaw-is or may be completely undetermined by the nature of the code, just as the message that one hands to a telegrapher is undetermined by the characteristic of the telegrapher's code. The act of meaning a thing is distinct from the act of uttering a sentence in just the way that filling out a telegraph blank is distinct from encoding it. To put this slightly differently, the question which asks what one means by the utterance of a sentence is a different question from the question which asks what the sentence means. What the sen- tence means is decided by an appeal to the conventions, but what you mean by the sentence is something that only you can know for sure.

I will call this model the "replacement theory" of meaning, for it is most naturally held in conjunction with the doctrine that the root function of linguistic signs is to replace the objects to which they refer. Language, the doctrine holds, makes it possible to refer to objects in the spatial or temporal non-present by enunci- ating the signs that-quite literally-stand for them. The mental act which, in a pre-linguistic state, would find its most pertinent expression in the manipulation or exhibition of a physical object is, according to this theory, expressed indirectly in a language system by the employment of signs.

I do not know whether this theory is or is not in general true. Nor am I much inclined to argue directly the question of whether meaning is a mental act. I n the present paper, however, I want to show that there are some important characteristics of situations in which we mean a thing which the theory either obscures or fails to cover altogether, and to suggest that the prevalence of this theory and its variants has led us to misconstrue a number of important expressions about meaning.

I t is a consequence of the replacement theory as me have just formulated it that in ordinary discourse (as distinct from singing a song or reciting a poem) every occasion upon which I say some-thing is an occasion upon which I mean something. I t is the mean- ing that requires the saying; I say the thing becaz~seI mean it and because I want you to know what I mean. Of course it is a com- monplace that some derivative language perfornlances require say- ing what one doesn't mean. But, according to the replacement theory, these performances are somehow parasitic upon the stand- ard ones. If I indulge in irony, then I am using words to com-municate something that I don't mean. What I mean b y the sentence departs somehow from what the sentence conventionally expresses. Still, the very ability to do this presupposes that some- one sometimes uses these words to conlmunicate the thing he does

501 " W H A T DO Y O U IIIEAN?"

mean. I t is rather as though two bored telegraphers were to vary their code by transmitting every nth message as the negation of whatever is inscribed upon the telegraph blank.

By and large, whenever I say a thing it is because I mean the thing I say. And it is always appropriate to ask me what I mean because if I 've said the thing I must have meant something. There must, in short, always be a procedure more or less directly analo- gous to comparing the received telegram with the inscription upon the telegraph blank. The need for such a procedure follows im- mediately from the apparently obvious fact that what I say is logically distinct from what I mean b y what I say.

Let's see : I telephone a friend and his wife answers. "John," she says,

"cannot speak to you because he has gone down town to buy a pair of shoes. " I can say "What a pity, " or "Have him call me when he gets home," or "Damn!" or nothing at all. What I cannot say -at least not in the sense which the replacement theory requires- is "What do you mean ? " In circumstances like these, the question "What do you mean?" is simply unanswerable.

Misunderstandings.

1. I can, of course, ask what she means in the sense "What is she up to?" If I live across the street and know that John is home because I have just seen him at the window, then "What do you mean?" is a proper, if colloquial, way of inquiring into a suspect motive. But notice that in this case "What do you mean?" means "Why do you say that?" or "How can you lie so blatantly?" I t does not mean what the replacement theory wants it to mean. In particular, it does not require information about what message is being encoded.

2. I can ask "What do you mean?" in the sense "What does the sentence mean?" That is: "What is the meaning of the sentence 'John has gone down town to buy a pair of shoes'?" But notice that I can ask this only if I am willing to accept a transla- tion; if I am willing to accept another sentence in some language which is at least roughly equivalent to "John has gone down town to buy a pair of shoes." But if, as we may suppose, both my informant and I are native English speakers, the question is simply pointless. If I don't understand "John has gone down town to buy a pair of shoes," it is not likely that I will understand any synonymous string in English. There just is no simpler way of saying it.

Notice that the claim is not that it is senseless to ask "What do

502 T H E JOURNAL OP I'IIZLOSOPHY

you mean?" in this second sense, but only that it is not helpful in the present case. I t always makes sense to ask what a sentence means: that is, there is always some answer which satisfies the re- quest for a sentence synonymous or similar in meaning to a given sentence. On the other hand, for reasons which will be brought forth presently, it does not always make sense to ask what someone means by a sentence. There is no sense in asking unanswerable questions.

The replacement theory depends, 1 think, upon systematically confusing the behavior of the question "What does the sentence S mean?" with that of the question "What do you mean by the sentence S?," a confusioii which is quite natural in that the ques- tion "What do you mean?" may itself mean either or both of these. The first question-"What does the sentence S mean?"-is a request for a recitation of the convention ; it is properly answered when one offers another sentence which means the same as S does. "Meaning," in the sense invoked by "What does the sentence S mean?'' is a function of a set of relations in a language system. In particular, "meaning" in this sense depends upon the existence of more or less rigorous synonymy relations within the language. I t depends, that is, upon the fact that some sentences or strings of sentences "say the same thing" as other sentences or strings of sentences. One set serves as an explication of the other. The answer to "What do yon mean?" in this sense of the question is just such an explication.

Even in the present case, however, the game cannot go on for- ever. If you ask what a bit of pedantry like "Homo sapiens is a ratiocinative biped" means, I can correctly answer with "Men have two legs and they think." But if you ask what this means in turn, I can only refer you to a dictionary. And the chances are that if you don't understand "Men have two legs aiid they think," you won't understand the dictionary entry either.

"What do you mean by the sentence S?" is, however, a quite different sort of question, and it is here that the replacement theory misleads us with its strong suggestion that this must always be-at least in principle-a nzoot question. The question "What do yon mean by the sentence 8 % "is, in effect, a request for disambigua- tion; a request that you clarify the sense in which you desire a given utterance to be understood. I t is a sensible question only where there exists a real option in respect of the available in- terpretations of the utterance, and it is not the case that such

"WHAT DO Y O U MEAN"

options always exist. That is why, for example, it makes n o sense to ask what one means by "John has gone down town to buy a pair of shoes," in the kind of situation sketched above. This utterance, in this situation, is quite simply unambiguous. All the meaning there is-and hence all the specification of meaning that can be requested-is the meaning that the sentence has by virtue of its systematic relations to the rest of the language. The question "What do you mean by 'John has gone down town to buy a pair of shoes'?" is unanswerable because i t requires that one dis-ambiguate an unambiguous utterance. The only question that can be asked-or, at any event, the only question that can be answered -is "What does the sentence mean?"and, in the present cir-cumstances (a discourse between native speakers) even t ha t ques-tion is likely to be out of place. Roughly speaking, and the re- placement theory to the contrary notwithstanding, sentences mean, people don't.

Exceptions.

Sometimes-in fact, quite often-real options exist, and then it does make sense to ask "What do you mean?'' Whether or not this requires that meaning be a mental act antecedent to the ut- terance is a question which I shall not attempt to answer. But whatever the purpose of disambiguation-whether or not, for ex-ample, it is to effect a perfect "match" between an utterance and an antecedent mental state-the technique of disambiguation is almost invariably the same. One disambiguates an utterance by adding to the context of the utterance. One m a y do this by invok- ing synonymy relations. One need not do so, however, and this is just because the question "What do you mean by the sentence?" i s different from the question "What does the sentence mean ? "

Someone says (rather than 'writes') "The sons raise meat," and may answer "What do you mean?" with "The male offspring grow cattle," or with "Vixible solar radiations converge." Here he invokes what is roughly a synonymy relationship to specify which of two competitive interpretations of an ambiguous utterance is intended. On the other hand, Anthony says "Brutus is an honorable man," and answers "What do you mean?" with "I mean 'Brutus is a murderous cad.' " I t is an important-and quite natural-kind of mistake to want to reply " 'Brutus is an honorable man' doesn't mean 'Brutus is a murderous cad."' Anthony never said that i t did. The question was "What do you mean ? " (viz., "What do you mean by the sentence ?"), not "What does the sentence mean 9"

T H E JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

Hump t y Dump t y Again.

The egregious confusion between the behavior of "What do you meail by the sentence?" and "What does the sentence mean?" leads the replacement theory to assume that the former question shares the universal appositeness which is in fact characteristic only of the latter, a confusion which may now and then be exalte'd to the status of a metaphysical principle. I have recently heard an eminent philosopher complain in tones of outraged privacy that linguistic analysts presume to tell him that certain kinds of utterances are meaningless (or embody category mistakes or what- ever) only by virtue of overloolring his ability to decide introspec- tively not only whether these utterances are meaningful, but what they in fact mean (e.g., what he in fact means by them.) I want to maintain, on the contrary, that there are limitations upon what one can mean b y the utterance of a sentence, just as there are limitations upon what a sentence can mean. The question whether a call for disambiguation is appropriate is, in short, itself deter-mined by the objective options which the language system provides.

Humpty Dumpty is seated on a wall. "There's glory for you," he remarks, apparently 6 propos of nothing in the preceding con- versation. "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice re- plies. Note, she does not say, "I don't know what 'glory' means," because she does know. Like Humpty, she speaks the language. "Of course you don't-till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you,' " says Humpty. But, Alice ob- jects, " 'glory' doesn't mean 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you.' " And furthermore, we may add, one can't mean by "glory" '(there's a nice knock-down argument. " Not, at least, if one persists in speaking English.

There are, of course, all sorts of ways to mean by sentences (or, as in this case, words) things other than what the sentences or words mean. I t is possible to mean by an utterance of the sentence "Brutus is an honorable man" that Brutus is a murderous cad, although it is certainly not the case that the sentence "Brutus is an honorable man" is equivalent in meaning to the sentence "Brutus is a murderous cad." To this extent our philosopher is certainly right in thinking that no appeal to the Oxford English Dictionary can serve to delimit the range of things that he can mean by an utterance. What one must recognize, however, is that there are limits. I t is not possible for an English speaker to mean "There's a nice knock-down argument" by "There's glory for you." That is not one of the departures from standardness which is licensed in English. I n exactly the same way, it is not possible to

"WHAT DO Y O U MEAN?"

mean by an utterance of "It 's a lovely day" that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180". This is not, it must be noticed, the result of a psychological limitation. We couldn't do the trick by trying harder or by having the right dispositions. The kinds of things that one can mean by the utterance of a sentence are much more various than what any dictionary could determine the sen-tence as meaning, but they are not limitlessly various. What one can mean by a sentence, like what the sentence means, is eventually determined by the structure of the language system. If there is a real option as to the available interpretations, I can ask you what you mean in the sense of "Which of these interpretations do you intend?" But Alice is quite right. There are some things you calz't mean.

I t ought to be mentioned that the regularities which determine what sorts of departures from dictionary standardness are licit within a language are themselves pretty flexible. Sophisticated speech-acts may often entail stretching, or, more rarely, altering the rules. Dallying at the borders is the preferred occupation of poets and nietaphysicians. The important point, however, is to avoid permitting the doubtful cases to blind you to the clear ones. I think it is fairly clear that the transition from "Brutus is an honorable man" to "Brutus is a murderous cad" will pass in a way that the transition from "glory" to "a knock-down argu- ment" will not. A good test is whether what one claims to mean by the utterance is something that a reasonably sophisticated speaker of the language might be inclined to construe the utterance as meaning.

Xummary.

If the replacement theory is correct, every speech act-except- ing such performances as recitation, song, and so forth-must be consequent upon an internal, mental act of meaning or intending. Meaning the thing calls forth saying the thing faute de mieux, just as filling out the blank, in a somewhat less direct manner, sets the telegraph key into motion. In consequence, the question "What do you mean by the sentence?" is always a reasonable question and is always distinguishable from the question "What does the sentence mean?,'' just as the request to compare the received telegram with the original message is always a reasonable request and always distinguishable from a request for an explanation of the teleg- raphers' code. I t follows that if the replacement theory is cor-rect, it is perfectly reasonable for one skilled speaker to ask of another what he means by the utterance of a very simple sentence

506 T H E JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

like "John has gone down town to buy a pair of shoes"; that is, it is reasonable to ask the question even upon the assumption that both speakers know quite well what the sentence means. I t is reasonable because, on the replacement theory, meaning the thing and saying the sentence are two quite distinct acts, like filling out the form and encoding the message. Hence, although i t is usually (per accidens) the case that what one says expresses adequately what one means by what one says, still the nagging doubt persists: it is always possible in principle that what one means by what one says is something quite different from what the sentence that one utters means. The question "What if everyone means by what he says something quite different from the meaning of the sentence he utters?" seems to be very like the question "What if teleg-raphers maliciously jumbled all the messages submitted to them ? "

I have wanted to argue that the replacement theory is mislead- ing in its implications as to the function of such questions as "What do you mean?,'' and that if what it implies about them were true, it would follow that it must be appropriate to ask strictly un-answerable questions. For, with simple sentences in ordinary con- texts, there are no options as to what one can mean. The only answer to "What do you mean?" turns out to be one which specifies what the sentence means, and this is ex hypothesi not in doubt.

The question "What do you mean?," in the sense with which we have been most concerned, is a request for disambiguation. I t can be asked only when an ambiguity in fact exists. I t cor-responds, if you like, rather more closely to a request for a con- firming telegraph than to a request to see the blank. But the range of ambiguities-and hence the range of utterances to which the question "What do you mean?" is appropriate-is itself de-termined by the language system. For certain utterances in cer- tain contexts the language offers only one interpretation. There exists no ambiguity to disambiguists.

s o :

(1) "What do you mean?" is not always an appropriate ques- tion (unless you think that it is ever appropriate to pose un-answerable queries)

and

(2) I t is a question to which it is perfectly possible to give an incorrect answer. There are some things that one can't mean by a given utterance.

JERRYA. FODOR MASSACHUSETTS OF TECHXOLOGYINSTITUTE