Jerrold J. Katz Literal Meaning and Logical Theory 1981

Journal of Philosophy, Inc.
Literal Meaning and Logical Theory

Author(s): Jerrold J. Katz
Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Apr., 1981), pp. 203-233
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LITERAL MEANING AND LOGICAL THEORY 203
LITERAL MEANING AND LOGICAL THEORY*
I N "Literal Meaning," l John Searle claims to refute the view that

sentences of a natural language have a meaning independent of
the social contexts in which their utterances occur. The present
paper is a reply on behalf of this view. In the first section, I show that
the issue is not a parochial dispute within a narrow area of the philos-
ophy of language, of interest only to specialists in the area, but is at
the heart of a wide range of important philosophical problems, those
on which the recent linguistic turn in philosophy has properly taken
a grammatical perspective. In the second section, I reply to Searle's
criticisms of the view.
Philosophers who take the position that contextually independent

sentence meaning exists have a reason for thinking that literal sen-
tence meaning does not depend on contextual factors, namely that
such meaning can be accounted for purely grammatically as a com-
positional function of the meanings of component words and syntac-
tic structure. This reason has at times been challenged by philos-
ophers and linguists, but these challenges turn out on close examina-
tion to bear only on dispensible aspects of the way compositionality
has been formulated and so to be easily met.' Searle's criticisms, how-
ever, do not constitute another of these indirect challenges; they at-
tack the idea of context-free meaning directly.
But Searle's attack is itself strangely context-free. One could hardly
guess from Searle's discussion that the issue has broad philosophical
* The author wants to thank Ned Block for helpful discussions of an earlier draft.
t Erkenntn is, xiil, 2 (July 1978): 207-224; reprinted in Searle's Expression and M
ing (New York: Cambridge, 1979), pp. 117-136. Parenthetical page references to Searle
will be to this article, unless otherwise noted, with the Erkenntnis numbering.
'For example, Donald Davidson in making the crucial step in motivating his pro-
gram, the step from a 'means that' form of analysis to a 's is T if and only if p' form,
claims that the step is warranted as the only way he knows to deal with the difficulty
that "we cannot account for even as much as the truth conditions of [belief sentences
and others containing intensional contexts] on the basis of what we know of the mean-
ings of words in them." See his "Truth and Meaning," in J. F. Rosenberg and C.
Travis, eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Language (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 453-455. Davidson says this without argument, presumably
relying on Benson Mates, "Synonymity," in L. Linsky, ed., Semantics and the Philos-
ophy of Language (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1952), pp. 111-138. Noam
Chomskl; also uses a variant of Mates's aigument to motivate his Extended Stanidard
Theory: see his "Deep Structure, Surface Structure, and Semantic Interpretation" in
Studies on Semanaitics in Generative Granmmar (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), pp. 87/8.
The standar-d intensionalist rejoinder in Alonzo Church, "Intensional Isomorphism
and Identity of Belief," Philosophical Studies, v, 5 (October 1954): 65-73, though on
the right track, is not sufficient. See my discussions in Semantic Thleory (New York:
Ha-rper& Row, 1972), pp.265-280, hereafter ST, and in "Chomsky otl Meaning," Lan-
guage, ixi, 1 (March 1980): 29-32.
204 THE JOUIRNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
significance. He neither explains its significance nor identifies the

particular form of the pro-literal-meaning view that he is singling out
for criticism (207). Readers are left in the dark about the philosophi-
cal background that gives the issue its philosophical significance. It is
not clear why Searle or anyone else, apart from natural curiosity,
ought to be bothered about the prospect of sentences having a purely
compositional meaning.
To learn why Searle is bothered by this prospect, we need look no
further than the description he gives of the view he sets out to refute:
"the view . . . that the literal meaning of a sentence is the meaning
that it has in the 'zero context' or the 'null context"' (207).2 The tech-
nical terms here are unique to the theory that I developed in Proposi-
tional Structure and Illocutionary Force.3 Now, this book argues
that what the tradition from Austin to Searle claims to be a theory
of speech acts is, in fact, no theory at all, but merely a loose assort-
ment of observations about various aspects of language, on the one
hand, and of its use, on the other. It argues that "speech act theory"
lacks the coherence and congruity to be a proper theory and that it
should be replaced by at least two distinct theories, one dealing with
the grammatically determined literal meaning of sentence types
(including both constatives and performatives) and the other deal-
ing with the extragrammatical information on which speakers use
their knowledge of the meaning of sentence types to perform illocu-
tionary acts. These theories, individually, have the coherence and
congruity that speech act theory lacks: the former concerns the
grammatical structure of a language, and the latter concerns the
language user's application of grammatical and contextual knowl-
edge in actual speech.
To pin the point down, consider the rules Searle gives for syntactic
indicators of illocutionary force. One such rule says that the verb
promise' involves the notion of the speaker's undertaking an obliga-
tion and also reference to a future act (relative to the speech point) in
which the speaker is the agent.4 Now, there is a range of grammatical
facts that show that these semantic conditions are inherent aspects of
the grammar of 'promise', e.g., the contrast between 'promise' and
'advise', on the one hand, and the contrast between 'promise' and
'thank', on the other. Another such rule of Searle's, completely on a
par with the former rule in his treatment, says that it should not be
2Searle introduces the pro-literal-meaning view under the misleading description

"received opinion." Considering the popularity of contextualism nowadays, such a
description is like describing Berkeley as a typical American city.
3New York: Crowell, Harper& Row, 1977; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1980). Here-
after, PSIF.
4Speech Acts (New York: Cambridge, 1969), pp. 57-61.
obvious that the speaker will do the act that fulfills the promise in the
normal course of events. Another rule, again on a par, says that the
promisee wants the speaker to fulfill the promise. These conditions
can be shown not to be a part of the grammar of 'promise', but merely
aspects of contexts that speakers normally take into consideration in
their use of language. Note that such conditions, in contrast to the
obligation and future-act conditions, need not be satisfied in straight-
forward literal uses of 'promise'. Typically, pledges and oaths (which
are promises) are given when it is obvious that the speaker will do the
act(s)-e.g., honest Abe's oath-and a promise can be made when the
last thing in the world that the promisee wants is to see it fulfilled-
e.g., a student promises to finish a three-hundred-page paper by the
end of the semester, so that the professor can read it over the vacation
(PSIF 34-36, 150-152).
If these considerations are right, Searle's speech act theory can be
divided up in this way and its rules parceled out, on the one hand, to a
theory of the grammatical structure of the language and, on the other,
to a theory of how speakers use sentences in different contexts. Given
such a challenge to the speech act tradition and to Searle's own theory
in particular, it is clear why Searle would be bothered about the pros-
pect of sentences having a purely compositional meaning. Such a
prospect underlies the dismemberment of Searle's treatment of mean-
ing and speech acts.
Why should other philosophers bother about the issue? There is the
trivial answer that a large number of philosophers accept something
like Searle's treatment of meaning and speech acts. But there are
deeper reasons for interest in the issue, reasons which apply more
generally.
Underlying speech act theory is the assumption that meaning is
use, that the explanation of the meaning of a word is fundamentally
like an explanation of how we make the proper moves in games or
social practices. This assumption has been adopted, in one form or
another, by a large and influential number of philosophers in con-
temporary Anglo-American philosophy, including Wittgenstein,
Ryle, Strawson, and Dummett, and it has been exploited by them in
areas as diverse as the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of
mathematics.
To take one recent illustration, Michael Dummett uses the equa-
tion of meaning with use to ground his constructivist philosophy of
mathematics.5 The use theory provides the general semantic under-
"Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Mathematics," Phlilosophical Review, i,xv'm, 3

(July 1959): 324-348; reprinted in Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard, 1978).
206 THE JOUIRNAL OF PHIIOSOPHY
pinnings Dummett requires to argue, in particular, that the meaning

of a mathematical theorem is
. . .the conditions under which we regard ourselves as justified in as-

serting [the theorem], that is, the circumstances in which we are in pos-
session of a proof (325).
This verificationism comes directly out of a feature common to a wide

range of use theories, namely, the notion that assertion is governed by
a rule requiring that the speaker have sufficient evidence or reas'ons to
make the assertion.6 Without the general semantic basis provided by
the use theory, Dummett's constructivism would be in the unfortu-
nate position of having to treat the meaning of mathematical sen-
tences and the meaning of grammatically indistinguishable everyday
sentences in a gratuitously dissimilar manner.7 No wonder, then, that
Dummett claims that nothing short of a use theory would satisfy the
philosophical demands on a theory of meaning.'
It is one thing to have philosophical applications fall out of a the-
ory of meaning independently justified on appropriate linguistic
grounds, another to begin with desired philosophical applications
and reason backwards to the necessary character of a theory of mean-
ing. The danger in the latter course, which I think Dummett takes, is
that the theory chosen because it fits the philosophical desiderata may
fail to be an adequate theory, on linguistic grounds. One ought to
begin without philosophical desiderata and ask what a scientific the-
ory of meaning must do in order to say what meaning is, and then hav-
ing arrived at an answer, go on to see whether the linguistically suc-
cessful theory will serve any of our philosophical purposes.
I have argued (ST, 1-10f) that when one takes this approach, the
'For example, Searle says that the preparatory ruLle for assertion is that the
speaker has evidence (reasons, etc.) for the truth of the assertion (Speech Acts, 64);
and H. P. Grice ["Logic and Conversation," in P. Cole and J. L. Morgan, eds., Syn-
tax and Semantics 3 (New York: Academic Press, 1975), p. 46] introduces the "su-
permaxim" under the category quality: "Try to make your contribution one that is
true," and, more specifically, "Do not say what you believe to be false" and "Do not
say that for which you lack adequate evidence."
'Paul Benacerraf, "Mathematical Truth," this JOURNAL, LXX, 19 (Nov. 8, 1973):
661-677.
8"What Is a Theory of Meaning?", in Mind and Language (New York: Oxford,
1975), pp. 100/1. Dummett writes, "Any theory of meaning which was not, or did not
immediately yield, a theory of understanding, would not satisfy the purpose for which,
philosophically, we require a theory of meaning. For I have argued that a theory of
meaning is required to make the workings of language open to view. To know a lan-
guage is to be able to employ a language." See also his sequel, "What Is a Theory of
Meaning (II)," in G. Evans and J. McDowell, eds., Truth and Meaning (New York:
Oxford, 1976), pp. 67-137.
criterion for an adequate theory of meaning is that it answer the

specific questions that the general question "What is meaning?"
breaks down into, such as "What is sameness of meaning (synon-
ymy)?", "What is multiplicity of meaning (ambiguity)?", "What is
the difference between meaningfulness and meaninglessness (se-
mantic deviance)?", "What is redundancy of meaning?", and
"What is truth by virtue of meaning (analyticity)?" The linguistic
criteria for a theory of meaning, then, are simply that it explain the
component notions in the pretheoretical notion of sentence meaning
in a way that is confirmed comprehensively by predictions about
the synonymy, ambiguity, meaningfulness, meaninglessness, re-
dundancy, analyticity, and other semantic properties and relations
of sentences, and that it be the simplest such theory forming part of
the over-all grammar of the language.9
On Dummett's approach, asking that a theory of meaning first
meet certain philosophical desiderata-specifically, yield a theory of
understanding in his sense-has the effect of pushing the boundaries
of semantics beyond language into matters of everyday manners and
morals, psychology and sociology, and so on. On the approach out-
lined above, however, one obtains far tighter boundaries for the do-
main of meaning. Instead of a theory of meaning having to account
for understanding, it becomes a theory of the meanings understood.
All aspects of manners, morals, psychology, etc. required to explain
understanding and use now fall outside the domain of semantics.
The principal consequence of this in the present connection is that
constructivism is deprived of a defensible semantic basis. The criteria
for a theory of meaning on our approach exclude from the factors
relevant to the meaning of a sentence any condition that a speaker
have sufficient evidence or reason to assert anything, just as a related
distinction between matters of language and matters of linguistic be-
9 Dummett tries to establish his "full-blooded" theory of meaning by refuting "mod-

est theories." These modest theories claim that the proper task of theory construction in
semantics is only to explain the grammatical association of concepts and propositions
(sentence meanings) with expressions and sentences (as their senses in the language).
But Dummett's reasons for rejecting modest theories rest on the curious assumption
that Davidson's theory of interpretation is an acceptable exemplar for modest theories
generally. (See, for example, "What Is a Theory of Meaning?", pp. 101/2.) Davidson's
theory is, it can be shown, not even a theory of meaning at all. [See my "Logic an
Language: An Examination of Recent Criticisms of Intensionalism," in K. Gunder-
son, ed., Language, Mind, and Knowledge, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of
Science, vol. VII (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1975), pp. 63-76.] The cen-
tral point is that Davidson's move from the analysis paradigm 's means m' to the analy-
sis paradigm 's is T if and only if p' takes his theory of interpretation completely out-
side the range of theories of meaning. Therefore, no argument like Dummett's showing
that Davidson's theory is inadequate can establish that modest theories generally are
inadequate.
208 THE JOUJRNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
havior excluded Searle's nonobviousness condition on promising.

Since such conditions would be considered a matter of the use of lan-
guage, or better yet, a general feature of cooperative behavior, the
meaning of mathematical sentences would come out to have nothing
directly to do with "the conditions under which we regard ourselves
as justified in asserting [them], that is, the circumstances in which we
are in possession of a proof." It is even plausible to suppose that an
explication of the pretheoretic notion of sentence meaning will pro-
vide truth conditions for mathematical sentences which are most rea-
sonably construed in accord with a realist position. At the very least,
the existence of contextually independent sentence meaning under-
mines the most serious contemporary attempt to show that mathe-
matics is created rather than discovered.
I wish to give one further reason for philosophical interest in the
issue of contextually independent sentence meaning. I have two mo-
tives in this. One is that this reason exhibits the connection between
this issue and questions that are extremely important for both logical
theory and metaphilosophy. The other is that this further reason
makes clear that a conception of compositional sentence meaning,
and in particular the conception sketched above, is not to be thought
of as necessarily Fregean and, as a consequence, open to objections
that have been brought, rightly in many cases, against Fregean
semantics.
In many ways, Frege got intensionalist semantics off on the wrong
foot. One example of this was his doctrine that natural languages
contain imperfections, conditions intrinsic to them which are injuri-
ous to scientific thought, and his program of constructing a logically
perfect language with which to replace natural languages for the
purpose of doing science.'0 The influence of this doctrine and pro-
gram is hard to exaggerate. Not only subsequent logic and philos-
ophy of logic but subsequent philosophy of language, epistemology,
and other areas of philosophy have been strongly influenced by them.
The first philosopher to try to check this "tendency to sublime the
logic of our language" was Ludwig Wittgenstein.1 He argued that,
rather than natural languages being too imperfect, artificial lan-
guages designed as logical perfections of natural language were too
primitive. Typical of Wittgenstein's criticisms is the passage in the
Philosophical Investigations that begins by asking how many kinds
of sentence there are, enumerates a variety of things one can do using
'0 See my discussion in "The Theory of Semantic Representation," Erketnntnis, xIII,

2 (July 1978): 63-79; and also in Language and Other Abstract Objects (New York:
Rowman &8 Littlefield, 1981), pp. 162-166.
" Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), ?38, p. 18'.
language, and ends with
It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and

the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence,
with what logicians have said about the structure of language (?23,
p. 12e).
John Austin's constative/performative distinction puts the criticism

in another way.12 The crux of the problem, in Austinian terms, is
that these logicians, in trying to "rationally reconstruct" natural
languages on the model of artificial languages like Frege's
Begriffsschrift or Principia Mathhematica, focus exclusively on con-
stative structure, ignoring performative structure. The logical rela-
tions, such as implication, characterized in such artificial lan-
guages can hold only between sentences that can bear truth values,
but performative sentences, by their nature, cannot. Austin writes:
. . .to say "I promise to . . ." -to issue, as we say, this performative
utterance-just is the act of making a promise; not, as we see, at all a mys-
terious act. And it may seem at once quite obvious that an utterance of
this kind can't be true or false (23).
The problem that has been inherited from Wittgenstein's and Austin's
criticism of the Fregean tradition in logical theory is whether this tra-
dition with all its obvious advantages has to be abandoned as an ap-
proach to the logical structure of natural language because its too
limited conception of logical form cannot shed light on the logic of
promising, asking, requesting, advising, and the other performative
aspects of natural language.
There have been two responses to this problem, one from those in-
fluenced by Frege and Russell and the other from those influenced by
Wittgenstein and Austin. The former, as might be expected, holds on
to the constative conception of logical form, either maintaining
Frege's theory without fundamental revision or adopting an exten-
sionalist theory like that of Quine or Davidson, and tries to solve the
problem by squeezing promise-sentences, question-sentences, re-
quest-sentences, and other performatives into some constative mold
within its traditional conception of logical form. Sometimes these
philosophers claim that performative sentences are really constatives
in grammar and use; sometimes they claim that such sentences are
constative in grammar but performative in use. Also, as might be ex-
pected, the response of those influenced by Wittgenstein and Aus-
tin-what might be called the solution of "ordinary language philos-
2"Performative-Constative" in C. E. Caton, ed., Philosophy and Ordinary Lan-

guage (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1963).
210 THE JOIJRNAI OF PHILOSOPHY
ophy"- abandons formal explication as an approach to meaning in

natural language. Instead of explaining meaning in terms of consta-
tive logical forms within formalized artificial languages,.it explains it
by exhibiting the details of how expressions are used in speech and
codifying, informally, the rules for such linguistic practice.
My view is that neither of these responses is wholly satisfactory.
The ordinary language solution sacrifices formalization, theory, and
the wealth of logical insights of the Fregean tradition. In addition, it
abandons the notion that meaning is part of sentence grammar and
embraces a questionable use theory of meaning, thus leaving unex-
plained the semantic connections between constatives and performa-
tives in the grammatical structure of natural languages. I would
think, in connection with the first point, that even the most con-
vinced ordinary language philosopher would agree that formal ex-
plication, if feasible, is to be preferred as a way of representing logi-
cally relevant features of natural languages, since, other things equal,
it is better to be more rather than less explicit. On the second point,
there are well-known, long-standing objections to the identification
of meaning with use which still go unanswered. For example, the use
theory is forced to predict that obscene words and their non-obscene
medical synonyms-which have very different uses-are different in
meaning. Also, it is forced to predict that sentences that are too long
or too syntactically complex ever to be used-being a trillion words
long or having a thousand center-embeddings "-are not meaningful
even though they are built up from meaningful components by oper-
ations that preserve meaningfulness. Again, since almost every word
has ironic as well as literal uses, the use theory is forced to predict that
all ordinary words like 'beautiful', 'happy', 'clever', etc. are ambigu-
ous between their customary sense and the sense of their antonyms.
Such difficulties are not temporary embarrassments that can be ex-
pected to disappear once the notion of use is better understood, but
deep-seated troubles reflecting the conflation of language and its
14
use.
Note further how semantic connections in the grammnar of consta-
tives and performatives go unexplained. The knowledge of the
13 Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pr

1965), pp. 10-15. Hereafter, ATS.
14 The hope that they will eventually disappear has been expressed by William P
Alston in "Meaningand Use," Philosophical Quarterly, xiii, 51 (April 1963): 107-124.
Alston seems to believe that Austin's account of illocutionary acts provides the clarifi-
cation required to avoid these difficulties. But, as Janet Fodor points out, such clarifi-
cation cannot yield a general theory that solves the difficulties; see herSemantics (New
York: T. Y. Crowell, Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 25-27. PSIF carries this line of argu-
ment to its logical conclusion.
grammar of 'promise' on the basis of which English speakers extrapo-

late the meaning or truth conditions of constative sentences like "I
promised to go" or "Jill promises to stay" is the same knowledge on
the basis of which they extrapolate the meaning or fulfillment condi-
tions of performative sentences like "I (hereby) promise to go." Con-
stative and performatives are thus inextricably connected at the level
of word meanings. Hence, in their zeal to account for performative
structures, ordinary language philosophers have chosen a form of de-
scription which, in principle, cannot explain the fact that there is a
common source of information, such as the following:
(a) speaker undertakes an obligation at some time (the speech

point)
(b) speaker makes reference at that time to an act that is future
with respect to it
(c) the future act is an act of the speaker's
for both constative sentences like "I promised to go" and performa-
tive sentences like "I promise to go" (see PSIF, 25-36).
The Fregean tradition's solution sacrifices the insights of Wittgen-
stein and Austin about the kinds of sentences in natural language
and, in consequence, makes false claims about natural language. Witt-
genstein and Austin were simply right about natural languages. It is
false to claim that sentences like "I hereby apologize for not phoning
you," "I wish you a happy birthday," "I congratulate you on your
elegant solution," etc. are true or false on their standard, literal uses.
The falsehood of such claims is reflected in the fact that sentences like
"Bernard's apology for not phoning is true" are quite absurd-un-
less, of course, they are taken, as they are not intended to be taken, to
mean ". . . rings true" (false apologies are not false in the truth-value
sense, but are simply insincere apologies, like false promises).
Furthermore, the attempt on the part of some philosophers to pre-
serve a uniform constative treatment of all sentences and still do jus-
tice to performativeness by consigning performativeness to pragmat-
ics suffers from the same implausibility as the attempt to squeeze
performatives into constative logical forms. In a typical attempt of
this kind, Kent Bach'" argues that, although performative sentences
are grammatically assertions, they can be used performatively on the
' "Performatives Are Statements, Too," Philosophical Studies, xxviii, 4 (October

1975): 229-236. I have chosen this case because it is the case best worked out along these
lines; see also Bach and R. M. Harnish, Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIi Press, 1980) for the full development. See PSIF, 175-177, for
flirther criticisms.
212 THE JOI'RNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
basis of pragmatic reasoning concerning the speaker's communica-

tive intentions. According to Bach (234),
. . .the audience reasons, and is intended to reason, as follows:
(1) He [the speaker] is saying, 'I order you to leave'.

(2) He is stating that he is ordering me to leave.
(3) If his statement is true, then he must be ordering me to leave.
(4) If he is ordering me to leave, it must be his utterance that constitutes the
order (what else could it be?).
(5) Presumably, he is speaking the truth.
(6) Therefore, in saying, 'I order you to leave', he is ordering me to
leave.
But how can (2) be used as an assumption of the argument? The ques-
tion at issue is whether it is true to claim that what a speaker is doing
in ordering (apologizing, congratulating, etc.) is makinga statement.
One can hardly show, contrary to the strong Austinian intuition cited
above, that performatives are constatives, too, using an argument
with a premise that is implausible on the basis of these very intuitions
[e.g., "Virginia's request for you to go is true (false)"]. (For further
arguments, see PSIF, 75-77 and 170-177.)
My aim has been to show that neither of the two widely accepted
solutions is optimal and to indicate where there is room for im-
provement. In a nutshell, a better solution would avoid the vices of
both the Fregean and the ordinary language solutions while incorpo-
rating their virtues. Unlike the former, it would not ignore the logical
features of performatives, but would try to find a way of exploiting
Wittgenstein's and Austin's insights to get at the grammatical basis of
speech acts in the use of natural languages. Unlike the latter, it would
not abandon formalization and theory or adopt a questionable use
theory of meaning, but would try to find a way of extending the for-
mal explication of how laws of logic apply to sentences in natural
language which succeeds in accounting for the logical features of per-
formative sentences.
The last of my reasons for claiming that the issue of the existence of
context-free sentence meaning has general philosophical interest is,
then, that its existence makes possible a better solution. Starting with
the notion of sentence meaning, independent of context and compo-
sitionally determined, we can build a rich enough conception of the
semantics of natural language to allow us to place the blame for the
logical fallacies Frege cites in his doctrine of the imperfection of natu-
ral languages where the blame rightly belongs, namely, on the imper-
fection of language users. Thus, for example, we do not blame the
English language for fallacious inferences like that from "Sam likes
old wine and women" to "Sam likes old women," any more than we
blame a wrong turn on the fork in the road. We can reject Frege's doc-
trine and program of constructing a logically perfect language, and
in their place we can put Wittgenstein's doctrine that natural lan-
guages need no subliming and our own program of constructing a
scientific theory of compositional sentence meaning. Therefore, a
kind of conceptual notation may be developed as the representation
system for meaning in such a theory. But the notation would be em-
ployed not to reform or perfect a natural language, only to state the
compositional meaning of sentences just as it is in the language.
Now, since the meaning of performative sentences has special fea-
tures and since such a notation has to state them just as they are in the
language, an adequate notation has to represent both the semantic
connections between performative and constative sentences, e.g.,
those discussed above in connection with (a)-(c), and the logical fea-
tures of performative sentences, such as the analyticity of (6):
(6) If I promise to help others, then I undertake an obligation

to help them.
and the validity of the argument (7):
(7) I promise to help others.
I undertake an obligation to help them.
Accordingly, we are here, too, required to reject accounts of logical

form in the tradition descended from Frege and Russell, which re-
stricts logical form to structures determined exclusively by the limited
vocabulary of logical particles and thereby precludes structures de-
termined by the vocabulary of performative verbs and other grammat-
ical devices for expressing performativeness.16 In place of this ac-
count, we must put an account that takes all meaningful words in a
natural language to contribute to the logical form of its sentences.
One such account is that for which I have argued over the years in my
attempt to defend the analytic/synthetic distinction. If my arguments
in that connection are sound, ordinary nouns and adjectives like
'bachelor' and 'unmarried' belong to the logical vocabulary of the
language. In the present connection, acceptance of ordinary nouns
and adjectives as logical vocabulary constitutes the thin edge of the
wedge. Acceptance of these as logical vocabulary involves the accept-
16I have argued extensively elsewhere for the elimination of the standard distinction
between logical and extralogical vocabulary. See, for example, "Where Things Now
Stand with the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction," Synthese, xxviii, 3 (November 1974):
283-319.
214 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
ance of analytic sentences like "If John is a bachelor, then John is

unmarried," and it is then a short step to analyticities based on verbs
and other grammatical structures, such as "If John convinced Jane
that she should bet, then Jane came to believe that she should bet,"
and finally, to analyticities like (6) which turn on performative verbs.
Such a solution is set out in Propositional Structure and Illocu-
tionary Force. It consists of two innovations. One is a stock of new
logical forms to supplement standard quantification theory. These
enable theories of natural languages to represent the logical form of
sentences as a function of the meanings of performative verbs, other
illocutionary-force-indicating devices, as well as ordinary nouns, ad-
jectives, and the logical particles. Thus, they enable us both to draw
the distinction between constative and performative sentences and to
describe their underlying semantic connections at the lexical level.
The other innovation is a more abstract conception of logical valid-
ity. Such a revision in the methatheory of logic is required in order to
account for valid arguments like (7), in which the propositions do not
bear truth values. Since the conclusion in an argument like (7) fol-
lows from the premise deductively, but since the standard model-
theoretic account of 'follows from' in terms of preservation of truth is
too narrow to cover these cases, we require a more abstract notion of
validity, which does not presuppose that the components of valid
arguments are statements, i.e., are true or false. Our new concep-
tion of validity is general enough to be applicable to arguments in-
volving performative sentences as well as arguments consisting
solely of constatives (PSIF, 222-242).
This solution is preferable because it does not force performatives
into an uncongenial constative mold or ignore their logical features;
moreover, it does not sacrifice theory, formalization, or faithfulness to
the facts of natural language. But the innovations on which the solu-
tion rests depends on the existence of context-free sentence meaning.
Hence, the possibility of a better solution to the problem raised by
Wittgenstein's and Austin's criticisms also depends on the existence
of context-free sentence meaning.
II
Wittgenstein's and Austin's assumptions about the study of language

set the character of subsequent thinking about speech acts within the
ordinary language tradition. The principal assumption was that ex-
plaining the meaning of an expression is explaining its use, giving
general rules for its use. Accordingly, the study of performative as-
pects of natural language in this tradition is a study of acts, linguistic
behavior. In contrast, my solution to the problem that Wittgenstein
and Austin raised makes a sharp competence/performance distinc-
tion, which purifies the study of language of all performance ele-

ments by abstracting away from features of language use and be-
havior. The study of natural language concerns
. . . an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-

community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such
grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distrac-
tions, shifts of attention and interest and error . . . in applying his
knowledge of the language in actual performance (ATS, 3).
Thus, the account of performative aspects of natural language on

this approach is an account of semantic competence, the ideal
speaker-hearer's perfect knowledge of the compositional meaning
of sentence types in the language."7 An account of speech acts is a
account of semantic performance, the way a language user employs
semantic competence and information about a speech context to
determine the meaning of sentence tokens in the context.
Given such an account of performativeness, PSIF (13-36) puts forth
the following pragmatic theory of how semantic competence is re-
lated to semantic performance. The main idea is that semantic per-
formance is concerned exclusively with the assignment of sentence
tokens, or utterances generally, to grammatically specified semantic
types. Semantic types, which are the compositional meanings of sen-
tences in the language, provide the utterance meanings of sentence
tokens assigned to them (with respect to the context). Utterance
meanings are not another kind of meaning, but simply composi-
tional meanings of sentences under another kind of correlation.
On this theory, the role of the grammar is to supply a complete
stock of meanings, each of which is grammatically correlated with a
sentence in the language. The role of contextual information and
pragmatic principles is to provide a means to determine which mean-
ings from this stock are assigned to which particular sentence tokens.
For example, an ironic use of "He's a wonderful doctor" on the part
of a patient suing for malpractice will be assigned not the meaning
that the grammatical structure of English correlates it with, but the
meaning of the antonymous sentence "He's an awful doctor." Of
course, context does not always direct the speaker and listeners to the
meaning of some sentence different from the one the speaker used: the
compositional meaning of "The null set is a member of every set"
" Since writing PSIF, I have changed my view of what the grammar of a language,
and hence the semantic component, is a theory of. I no longer think it is a theory of the
ideal speaker-hearer's knowledge of the language, but of the language itself. See my
Language and Other Abstract Ob jects. I have maintained the original framework be-
cause, from the point of view of the present controversy, this change is an unnecessary
complica tLion.
would be assigned to a use of the sentence on the part of a mathemat-

ics teacher in an ordinary classroom situation. Here, in contrast to
cases where contextual information makes a substantive contribution
to the speaker's message, information about the context plays no role
in determining the content of an utterance meaning. It is such con-
texts, in which contextual information makes no contribution and
the utterance meaning of a sentence is identical with the composi-
tional meaning of the sentence, which, for obvious reasons, were
called "zero contexts" or "null contexts."
Pragmatic principles, on this theory, say how contextual informa-
tion from non-null contexts is utilized for choosing the proper mean-
ing, from the stock of grammatically determined meanings, to be the
utterance meaning of a sentence token. The theory thus specifies the
general form of pragmatic principles, but does not prejudge the em-
pirical question of what these principles are. It says only that the sys-
tem of such principles is an input-output device for computing the
utterance meaning of uses of sentences as a function of the grammar's
sentence-meaning correlation and relevant contextual information
about the context of use."8
The significant feature of this theory for the present discussion is
that, since pragmatic principles and contextual information have no
role beyond choosing antecedently specified compositional mean-
ings to serve as utterance meanings, questions about the conceptual
and logical structure of sentences are a matter of semantics rather than
pragmatics. Given our broadened conception of semantics, this
means that the nature of the constative sentence/performative sen-
tence distinction, what makes arguments like (7) involving performa-
tives sentences valid (in the same sense as arguments involving con-
stative sentences), and similar questions are to be handled in a theory
of compositional sentence meaning which is logically prior to the-
ories of how sentence meanings become utterance meanings.
It is clear, then, that this approach was, from the outset, on a colli-
sion course with the Austinian approach to performative structure.
Each approach assumes that the proper account of performativeness
does nicely without what the other approach takes to be the essential
explanatory factor. The Austinian approach addresses itself to se-
mantic performance and ignores compositional sentence meaning
18 This theory is compatible with a wide range of views about the true pragmat
principles. In particular, it is easy to see how, for example, principles like those of H. P.
Grice and other perlocutionary theorists can be adapted as principles for determining
utterance meaning in the above sense. See Grice, "Logic and Conversation," in P. Cole
and J. Morgan, eds., Syntax and Semantics 3 (New York: Academic Press, 1975), pp.
41-58. Note, however, that the adaptation is not without difficulties; see Katz and D.
T. Langendoen, "Pragmatics and Presupposition," Language, Lll (1976): 1-17.
independent of contextual information (and in Searle's recent form of

the approach rejects it as a matter of principle). It seeks rules reflect-
ing the contextual conditions under which language users perform
speech acts of various kinds. In contrast, my approach idealizes away
from just such aspects of performance, treating them as factors that
complicate the statement of the laws of compositional meaning in the
grammar. The identification of compositional meaning with utter-
ance meaning in the zero or null context19 makes this idealization ex-
plicit: it precludes rules reflecting contextual conditions from any
role in the explanation of performativeness in the language. The per-
formativeness of the sentence "I hereby request that you close the
window" and the constativeness of the sentence "The window is wide
open" or "You want us to freeze" are explained at the semantic level
of the grammar of English, whereas the explanation of how uses of
the two constative sentences can sometimes have the meaning of the
performative sentence as their utterance meaning is left to a prag-
matic account of how information about contexts enables language
users to assign the compositional meaning of the performative sen-
tence to some utterances of the constative sentences. Grammatical ex-
planation is restricted to the formal representation of the composi-
tional meaning of explicit performative and constative sentences.
Hardly a sharper opposition to the Austinian approach could be
found, but the clash between these approaches did not occur right
away. Semanticists working in the Chomskian framework were in-
itially occupied with other issues, and those who first turned their at-
tention to the problem of performativeness came under the influence
of the Austinian approach, some to such an extent that they aban-
doned the Chomskian framework of generative grammar in favor of a
9There have been some unnecessary confusions about this notion which can be
cleared up here. The notion, adapted from the anonymous-letter situation that Jerry
Fodor and I introduced in our "The Structure of a Semantic Theory," Language, xxxIx
(1963): 170-210, is also formulated as an idealization. It was defined as a context whose
features provide no relevant information for choosing a compositional meaning as the
utterance meaning different from the compositional meaning of the sentence used. The
notion of a null context generalizes the anonymous-letter situation in the form of an
idealized context containing no basis for a departure from sentence-meaning, in which
semantic competence fully determines utterance meaning. Thus, Harnish's criticism
in "Meaning and Speech Acts," Lingua, IL (1979): 349-350, is based on a confusion.
Harnish says that my conditions for performativeness "cannot be satisfied in the null
context because in such a context there is nothing but the sentence itself" (350). This is
an unwarranted construal of my term 'null'. 'Null' was used to mean not void, but
merely lacking in information on which to base a departure from sentence-meaning.
Harnish's criticism is like saying that the conditions for Salviati's test of Galileo's hy-
pothesis about free-falling bodies cannot be satisfied because in an idealized experi-
ment there is no surface for a ball to roll down.
radically contextualist view of natural languages.20 PSIF was the first

attempt to study the meaning of explicit performative sentences and
to present a theory of the formalization of such meaning within the
framework of generative grammar. This theory was set out as an at-
tack on Searle's speech act theory both because that was the most so-
phisticated version of Austinian speech act theory available at the
time and because it embodies in the clearest form this tradition's en-
demic conflation of matters of language with matters of language use.
In "Literal Meaning," Searle sees correctly that the thrust of this at-
tack is directed at the use theory of meaning underlying the Austin-
ian approach to the explanation of performativeness. Searle defends
the use theory by launching an attack against the theory on which
the alternative, grammatical account of performativeness rests. His
attack consists of a set of alleged counterexamples to its view that
sentences of a language have a literal compositional meaning that is
absolutely free of contextual dependency. Searle explains that his
. strategy in constructing the argument will be to consider sentences

which appear to be favorable cases for the view that literal meaning is
context free and then to show that in each case the application of the no-
tion of the literal meaning of the sentence is always relative to a set of
contextual assumptions (210).
Such an argument would be important for philosophers who rely on

the use theory of meaning in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy
of mind, and other areas, because it would support their applications
of this theory by refuting the only alternative conception of meaning
that can handle performativeness in language without equating
meaning with use.21
Searle's examples are all variants of his initial example of a cat and
a mat floating freely in outer space. The point of this example is that,
in outer space-"perhaps outside the Milky Way galaxy altogether"
(211)-there is no intrinsic up-and-down orientation. Thus, Searle
claims that "the notion of the literal meaning of the sentence 'The cat
is on the mat' does not have a clear application, unless we make some
further assumptions," that is, provide contextual supplementation
that orients cat, mat, and space (21 1). Searle means this claim to assert
that the very question of whether the cat is on the mat does not have an
answer, that the sentence "does not yet determine a clear set of truth
conditions" (212). Most philosophers would find Searle's claim ex-
tremely implausible on the grounds that, contrary to Searle's opinion
20 See, for example, D. Gordon and G. Lakoff, "Conversational Postulates," in Cole

and Morgan, op. cit., pp. 83-106.
21 See, for example, the discussion of Dummett in section X above.
of the matter, "The cat is on the mat" is simply false in the case at
hand; the cat is not on the mat if there is no up-and-down orientation.
Searle, though he doesn't consider this response, would, I suspect,
reject it because he takes falsehood to depend on orientation. I take it
that he thinks that truth consists in the cat's position being over the
mat, so that the bottom of a rightside-up cat touches the top of the
mat, and falsehood consists in the cat's position being under the mat
so that the bottom of the mat touches the bottom of an upside-down
cat (or in some other similar setup). Since I have some sympathy for
this conception of falsehood, I have no inclination to press the afore-
mentioned criticism. Rather, I wish to challenge the supposition that
these examples undermine the thesis that sentences have a composi-
tional meaning independent of context. As Searle puts it:
These examples are designed to cast doubt on the following thesis: Every
unambiguous sentence, such as "The cat is on the mat" has a literal
meaning which determines for every context whether or not an utterance
of that sentence in that context is literally true or false (214).
The danger in failing to tie criticism down to a real position is the

risk that the criticism will refute a straw man and leave the real posi-
tion unscathed. This is exactly what happens in the case of Searle's
criticisms. His examples cast doubt on a straw man, but miss entirely
the position on which "the literal meaning of a sentence is the mean-
ing that it has in the 'zero context' or the 'null context' " (207). Some-
how this position becomes changed so that it is vulnerable to the
counterexamples.22 The change is to tack on to the principal claim of
the position the further claim that the compositional meaning of a
sentence must determine "for every context whether or not an utter-
ance of that sentence in that context is literally true or false." Since the
real position denies this further claim, Searle's arguments are of the
form -(P & Q) hence -P.
One of the main ideas underlying my position is that composi-
tional meanings do not, in all instances, determine whether or not the
use of a sentence is literally true or false (PSIF, 88-96, and ST,
127-150). Contrary to Russell's meaning-as-reference conception, on
which a meaningful, well-formed constative sentence is ipso facto
true or false, on my conception, meaning is sharply distinguished
from reference, and meaningfulness depends exclusively on intra-
sentential sense relations (i.e., selectional restrictions). I have argued
22 Ithink that, by not sticking closely to the real position, Searle fails to see certain of
its features and in their place reads in claims that it is natural to make on his own use
theory. We will see further examples of this interpolation below.
220 THE JOtJRNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
in one place23 that this sharp distinction between sense and reference
is what enables my account of proper names to escape the criticisms
Kripke uses so successfully against Searle, and in another,24 that this
conception of meaningfulness, coupled with Frege's account of the
conditions under which a sentence bears a truth value, provides the
best treatment of statementhood.
The meaningfulness of a constative sentence is, on my view, its hav-
ing at least one sense,25 whereas its statementhood is its having a
sense whose referring terms succeed in referring. This guarantees
that meaningful senses have truth conditions, but allows them to
be unsatisfied without the sentence being ipso facto false: it will
have no truth value in the case in which the objects it is about do
not exist. Therefore, Searle has no right to saddle all positions that
claim the existence of context-free compositional meaning (and in
particular the position that makes use of a zero or null context)
with the further claim that compositional meaning "determines for
every context whether or not an utterance of that sentence in that
context is literally true or false."
The sentence "The cat is on the mat" has a literal compositional
meaning. Unlike "Itches drink theorems," its selectional relations are
in order. Its meaning is, roughly, that some (contextually specified)
cat is vertically positioned over some (contextually specified) mat and
that the aforementioned cat is also positioned so that its bottom is in
contact with the top of the mat. Thus, a use of "The cat is on the mat"
is true if and only if such is the case with respect to cat and mat. In
Searle's examples, uses of the sentence are neither true nor false be-
cause, given the absence of up and down in outer space, neither the
sentence-world relation required for truth nor the sentence-world re-
lation required for falsehood obtains. But there is nothing wrong
with this, providing one is not committed to thinking of meanings
as fully determining use-in particular, the statementhood, of
sentences.26
As a use theorist, Searle is committed to this way of thinking; his
mistake here is to read it into the positions he is criticizing. When he
considers the possibility of his opponent's distinguishing the "de-
23 "The Neoclassical Theory of Reference," in P. A. French, T. E. Uehling, Jr., and

H. K. Wettstein, eds. Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1979), pp. 105/6.
24ST, 127-150, and also "A Solution to the Projection Problem for Presupposi-
tion," in Choon-Kyu Oh and D. A. Dinnean, eds., Syntax and Semantics 11 (New
York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 91-126.
25The selection restrictions allow at least one composition of senses (ST. 89-116).
26 See "The Neoclassical Theory of Reference," pp. 11 1-1 18, for a discussion of why
intensionalists should not go along with Frege's view that meaning determines
reference.
scriptive meaning" of a sentence from a condition for its application,

he says
. we could treat this condition as a further stage direction for the ap-
plication of the sentence, but still the stage direction would be part of the
literal meaning, at least in the sense that they would be made completely
explicit in the semantic analysis of the sentence (212).
It is just this assimilation of such "stage directions" to meaning

which the position Searle is criticizing wishes to reject as a confusion
of language with language use.
On this diagnosis of his mistake, Searle conflates competence with
performance, takes the conflation to represent linguistic fact, and
then concludes that the facts cast doubt on the existence of an abso-
lutely context-free notion of sentence meaning. This mistake under-
lies all Searle's arguments.
Searle asks whether the order that he gives in using (8):
(8) Give me a hamburger, medium rare, with ketchup and

mustard, but easy on the relish.
is obeyed if the hamburger is brought encased in a solid lucite cube or

turns out to be a mile wide. Searle answers that
. it has not been fulfilled or obeyed because that is not what I meant in
my literal utterance of the sentence (though again it is easy to imagine
variations in our background assumptions where we would say that the
order had been obeyed) (211).
Searle takes this to be an argument against supporters of context-free

literal meaning because he thinks they are required to say that the
order has been fulfilled by delivery of the encased or enormous burger,
and, further, that they have to say that a customer would have to use a
sentence like (9):
(9) Give me a hamburger, medium rare, with ketchup and mus-

tard, but easy on the relish and don't encase it in lucite or bring
one that is a mile wide.
(though fantastically more elaborate) in order to express "exactly and

literally" what was intended. But the supporter of absolutely context-
free meaning does not have to say either of these things.
Searle is right in saying that in giving his order for a hamburger he
said "exactly and literally" what he meant and that it is unnecessary
for him to use a sentence like (9) containing extensive qualifications.
But Searle can draw no conclusion about the notion of context-free
literal meaning from this. Saying exactly and literally what he meant
does not require him to specify that the hamburger not be encased in
lucite, etc. but only to use 'hamburger' nonfiguratively (more on
this below) and in accord with the obvious expectations of all con-
cerned. The supporter of absolutely context-free sentence meaning
does not deny that background assumptions reflecting such expecta-
tions and other contextual information shape the meaning of sen-
tence uses in actual speech; such shaping is an essential part of the
notion of a non-null context. The supporter denies only that such
background assumptions are relevant to the meaning of sentences in
the language. Only if Searle is conflating what the language user's
utterance of a sentence means in speech with the quite distinct matter
of what the sentence used means in the language could he think that
such examples cast doubt on the notion of an absolutely context-free
sentence meaning. Searle's phraseology in the above quote, viz.,
"what I meant in my literal utterance of the sentence" (italics mine) is
a dead give-away.
Searle's mistake is particularly clear in his claim that
. it is hard to see how the sentence [(8)] could have quite the same obe-
dience conditions if these institutions [restaurants, money, etc.] did not
exist (215).
If the connection between existence and truth conditions, obedience

conditions, etc., were as tight as Searle supposes, the entire corpus of
modern science fiction, fairy tales, utopian literature, and comic
books would become linguistically problematic. Sentences like
"Let's try and create a classless, purely egalitarian society!" would be
paradoxical, and sentences like "I'd like to have Tom Swift's or
anyone's televisionphone" would change their meaning (fulfillment
conditions) with technological progress.
In a more recent paper, Searle reformulates this line of argument on
the basis of new examples.27 Searle claims that "it is hard to see how
we can hold both . . . that the literal meaning of a sentence is the
meaning that it has in the 'null context' " and "that the meaning of a
sentence determines the truth conditions of that sentence" (BM, 223).
His reason is that in (10) and (11):
(10) Bill cut the grass

(11) Sally cut the cake
. . one and the same semantic content, expressed by the word 'cut', oc-
curs in each sentence; and yet it seems to make a different contribution to
the truth conditions of the sentence in each case (223).
27 "The Backgrounds of Meaning," in Searle, F. Kiefer, and M. Bierwisch, eds.,

Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics (Boston: Reidel, 1980), pp. 221-232. Hereafter, BM.
Why does Searle think the semantic content of 'cut' makes different
contributions to the truth conditions of (10) and ( 11)? Because, as he
puts it,
The sort of thing that constitutes cutting the grass is quite different from,
e.g., the sort of thing that constitutes cutting a cake. One way to see this is
to imagine what constitutes obeying the order to cut something. If some-
one tells me to cut the grass and I rush out and stab it with a knife, or if I
am ordered to cut the cake and I run over it with a lawn mower, in each
case I will have failed to obey the order. That is not what the speaker
meant by his literal and serious utterance of the sentence (223, italics
mine).
Again, the same dead give-away phraseology. True enough, the

speaker's intentions rule out running over the cake with a lawn
mower, just as Searle's intentions in ordering the hamburger rule out
encasement in lucite, but what counts as obeying particular orders
cannot be supposed to reflect directly the meaning of the sentences
that the speakers used to issue the orders-unless, of course, one as-
sumes to begin with that meaning is use. The fact is that I can cut a
cake with a lawn mower if I feed it into the blades cleverly enough.
The person who gave the order may be displeased with the unor-
thodox way I cut the cake, but cannot say I didn't cut it (there may be
no way to tell your cake-knife-cut pieces from my lawn mower-cut
pieces except for the bits of grass). Stabbing is not cutting (i.e., "Her
hat pin as a small blade so that she can stab and then cut an assail-
ant"), but one can cut grass with, say, a cake knife-again, an unor-
thodox way, but still a way. Thus, Searle is simply wrong that the se-
mantic content of 'cut' makes a different contribution in (10) and (1 1):
specification of the way the cutting is done is not part of the meaning
or truth conditions of (10) and ( 1)-any more than specifying knife
and fork, chopsticks, fingers, etc. is part of the meaning or truth con-
ditions of "I ate some vegetables." The semantic contribution of 'cut'
to (10) and (11) is the same, namely, the concept of dividing some-
thing (the pieces of grass in the one case and the cake in the other)
with a sharp-edged instrument.28
28 Searle considers three possible replies: 'cut' is ambiguous; like a variable function
in mathematics; and vague (BM, 224/5). My view of the semantic contribution of 'cut'
is different from all three. I agree with Searle that 'cut' occurs unambiguously in the
sentences (10) and (11). I do not think that 'cut' is like a variable function in the sense
"the word 'cut' has different interpretations in 1-5. . . determined by the different ar-
guments-grass, hair, cake, skin and cloth" (BM, 224). I think it has, throughout, the
one sense mentioned in the text, but that, as with compositionality in general, who and
what performs the action expressed in the verb and what it is performed on derive from
the meanings of subjects and objects. [Thus the fact that in (10) the action is performed
on the individual grass plants, but the success is specified in terms of effect on the area
224 THE JOIJRNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
Searle claims that the supporters of absolutely context-free mean-

ing are, as he puts it, "likely to resort to certain standard moves" to
"rescue" this notion from his criticisms (222). The "move" is an ap-
peal to the competence/performance distinction, but, according to
Searle, it won't work. In an attempt to "obviate these moves before
they can even get started" (222), Searle says that he has all along been
. discussing the understanding of the literal meaning of a sentence by

a speaker as part of the speaker's semantic competence. The thesis I have
been advancing is that for a large class of sentences the speaker, as part of
his linguistic competence, knows how to apply the literal meaning of a
sentence only against the background of other assumptions (222).
Searle is correct in thinking that supporters of absolutely context-

free meaning will appeal to the idealization of competence. It is only
to be expected that the confusions in one's arguments will be pointed
out by supporters of the notion at which the arguments are directed.
But Searle is wrong in thinking that his notion of "semantic compe-
tence" obviates the move. Searle's notion embodies the same confu-
sion as the arguments against which we have made the move. There is
an equivocation in Searle's use of 'semantic competence' between an
ordinary sense, in which competence involves knowledge of how to
use sentences ("how to apply the literal meaning of a sentence") and a
technical sense, from generative linguistics, in which competence in-
volves no extragrammatical knowledge (performance aspects of use
have been abstracted out to avoid complicating the laws of composi-
tional meaning). Searle's attempt to obviate the "rescue operation"
trades on this equivocation. It is true that the ordinary sense of 'se-
for which they collectively constitute ground cover is a consequence of the meaning of
the object "grass."] Finally, I see no reason to say that 'cut' is vague, but I agree with the
third reply's emphasis on the divergence of what a speaker means in a certain context
from what the sentence means in the language. Searle's objections to this reply seem to
me without force. The first simply ignores the fact that all theories of compositionality
employ selectional restrictions to weed out anomalous combinations of senses. A sen-
tence like "Max cut the sun" (BM, 225) is semantically anomalous because the selec-
tional restriction on the object of 'cut' requires that there be a solid object for the opera-
tion to be performed on. (Note that, accordingly, there is no reason to say that "Sam cut
the coffee" is anomalous, since the object can refer to a cube of frozen coffee; it is hard to
see why Searle thinks there is any problem about "Bill cut the mountain.") The second
objection rests on the language/language use confusion. So what if "cut the cake" lit-
erally applies to the use of a lawnmower to produce cake slices? Such applications are
only "crazy misunderstandings" if someone takes them to be the proper way to inter-
pret the speaker in context, which in our view is another matter. The third objection is
irrelevant. The view being criticized does not claim that, in actual performance, the
speaker always follows a strict ordering from sentence meaning to speaker's utterance
meaning. No doubt the speaker sometimes short-cuts the process. But even if we did
make this claim, Searle gives no reason to show that it is implausible.
mantic competence' is incapable of supporting such a "rescue opera-

tion," and it is also true that Searle has been working with this notion
all along. But the move in question is an appeal to the technical sense.
This notion, as we have shown, is quite capable of confounding
Searle's arguments, and it is not a notion that he can claim to have
been working with all along.29
Searle's "performancization" of semantic competence, like Dum-
mett's, results from reasoning backwards from his philosophical de-
siderata to a conception of what meaning must be. Searle says:
There are certain jobs that we want the notion of meaning to do for us; it
connects in all sorts of systematic ways with our theory of language and
with our pretheoretical beliefs about language. Meaning is tied to our
notions of truth conditions, entailment, inconsistency, understanding,
and a host of other semantic and mental notions (220).
The equivocation noted in the last paragraph now pops up in a new

place. Meaning, of course, is "tied to," "connects with," understand-
ing and other mental notions. But this is an extremely loose way of
speaking. Its looseness allows Searle to conflate two quite different
ways in which meaning might be related to understanding and other
mental phenomena, one reflecting the ordinary sense of semantic
competence and the other reflecting the technical sense. The relation
in the former is that a wide range of performance variables involved in
understanding are part of meaning, the relation in the latter is that
meaning is one of the variables determining performance. The con-
flation makes it seem as if only a use theory can account for the ob-
vious relations between meaning and psychological phenomena. But
accounting for such relations does not require that meaning be taken
as a potpourri of use factors. These relations can be accounted for, on
our notion of compositional sentence meaning, simply by taking se-
mantic competence (in the technical sense) to be one of the inputs to
the psychological performance mechanism.30
As far as the relation of meaning to other semantic notions like
truth conditions, analyticity, semantic entailment, synonymy, ambi-
guity, antonymy, and so on are concerned, there is hardly a need to go
beyond a purely grammatical notion of meaning. As we said above,
the theory of compositional sentence meaning is set up precisely to
account for such semantic properties and relations in terms of their
29Searle's equivocation on 'semantic competence' is nothing new. See PSIF, p.

28/9, for a discussion of an earlier instance.
30For further discussion concerning the role of this input in the operation of the
-mechanism in the case of reference, see "The Neoclassical Theory of Reference," pp.
110-122.
226 THE JOUJRNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
definitions and of a conception of the representation of meaning

structures in sentences.3' The relation of meaning to the broader no-
tions of logical theory like implication and inconsistency is based on
the thesis we have defended elsewhere that the propositions between
which laws of logic hold and the senses of sentences in natural lan-
guage are one and the same. Truth conditions, analyticity, semantic
entailment, synonymy, ambiguity, etc. are notions into which the no-
tion of meaning breaks down, whereas logical implication, logical
inconsistency, understanding, etc. break down into notions that in-
clude, inter alia, the notion of meaning.
Searle claims that
A second skeptical conclusion that I explicitly renounce is that the

thesis of the relativity of literal meaning destroys . . . the distinction be-
tween the literal sentence meaning and the speaker's utterance meaning,
where the utterance meaning may diverge in various ways from literal
sentence meaning (221).
The orthographic act of renunciation is one thing, but it is quite

another for use theorists like Searle to be able to make this distinc-
tion given the uncompromising stand they take on the relativization
of literal sentence meaning to context. Searle will have to try to draw
the distinction on the basis of relevant extragrammatical, contextual
information. The question is how he is to draw the distinction be-
tween the information to which literal meaning is relative and the in-
formation that reflects the departures from literal sentence meaning
responsible for speaker's utterance meaning. The only suggestion
along these lines that appears in Searle's "Literal Meaning" is that
the former information consists of background assumptions that it
would be somehow absurd to miss (e.g., such as that hamburgers are
expected to be of normal size and served so they can be eaten). But this
suggestion is of little use. Background assumptions that contribute
to determining the speaker's utterance meaning are often just as ab-
surd to miss. It is surely as absurd to miss the background assumption
3 I do not wish to give the impression that Searle is unaware of this tighter notion of
meaning or that he has not previously criticized it or that these criticisms were left tin-
answered. The reader is referred to his "Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics," The
New York Review of Books, 1972; reprinted in G. Harman, ed., On Noam Chomsky
(New York: Anchor Books, 1974), pp. 27-30. One needs only to be informed that
Searle's circumlocution "the semantic theory of Chomsky's grammar" and similar
phrases refer to the theory of meaning that I have developed over the years. For my re-
plies to Searle's criticisms in this article, see my "Logic and Language: An Examilna-
tion of Recent Criticisms of Intensionalism," pp. 107-120 and PSIF, 25-28. These re-
joinders remain unanswered.
that produces the ironic utterance meaning of "fine" in (12):
(12) That's a fine way to treat your devoted parents, letting them go
without food and shelter and laughing at their plight.
as it is to miss the background assumption that makes an ordinary use

of (8) a request for an ordinary hamburger. Thus, how absurd it
would be to miss a background assumption bears no relation to the
difference between literal sentence meaning and speaker's utterance
meaning. The suggestion collapses, and we are left with no idea of
how to draw the distinction on a full relativization of literal sentence
meaning to context.
But even if there were some way, the antecedent question is whether
it would be correct to distinguish literal sentence meaning and speak-
er's utterance meaning on the basis of aspects of the speech context.
Such a distinction plainly falsifies the logic of these notions. There
are clear cases where contextual information is unavailable, but
where, nonetheless, the sentence has a perfectly straightforward
(compositional) literal meaning, e.g., phrase-book translations like
"Voici mon passeport" for "Here is my passport" or "on m'a vole"
for "I have been robbed." It is surely a mistake to treat the literal sen-
tence meaning in such cases as containing unobservably miniscule,
but still definite, amounts of background or contextual information.
It is instructive to see what Searle does when faced with such clear
cases. The example he considers is (13):
(13) Three added to four equals seven
He writes:
Even here, however, it appears that certain assumptions about the nature
of mathematical operations such as addition must be made in order to
apply the literal meaning of the sentence (219).
Let us ignore the fact that Searle's phraseology is unfortunate is con-

ceding that sentences like (13) might have a context-free meaning
whose application requires "certain assumptions." Elsewhere he
makes it clear that he wants to say
. . .that even these sentences only determine a set of truth conditions

against a background of human practices and various background as-
sumptions, and these practices and assumptions are so pervasive that we
seldom notice them (BM, 229).
Searle's argument for this claim is borrowed from Wittgenstein's dis-

cussion of sentences like (13) (see 219 and BM, 229). But, on this use of
Wittgenstein's discussion, it is a transparent case of simply changing
228 THE JOIJRNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
the meaning of 'add'. Hence, Searle himsel

in saying
. one might reply. . that these assumptions are in a sense part of the
meaning of the sentence (219).
Calling them "background assumptions" is, of course, illegitimate

from the viewpoint of supporters of context-free compositional sen-
tence meaning, since the concept of addition is a matter not of the
background context but of grammatical structure.
In "Literal Meaning," Searle makes no rebuttal. He supposes that
conceding cases like (13) is not damaging to his position because his
earlier cat-in-outer-space examples show that "the notion of abso-
lutely context free literal meaning does not have general application
to sentences" (220). This supposition, as we have seen, is an error, be-
cause the standard language/language use distinction renders all
these examples harmless. Thus, rather than claim that mathematical
examples are exceptions (or perhaps contain miniscule, undetectable
amounts of contextual assumptions in their interpretation), there is
nothing to prevent us from taking the general view that all sentences
have a compositionally fixed literal meaning and all utterances a con-
textually fixed literal or figurative meaning (usually different from
the meaning of the sentence the speaker used).
In "The Background of Meaning," Searle attempts a rebuttal (BM,
229-230). He says that
. . . there is nothing in the content of the representations that, so to

speak, forces us to accept only one set of moves to the exclusion of all
others. The representations are not self-guaranteeing (BM, 230).
If 'forces' has reference to the applications that language users make

of sentences, what Searle says is true. A language user is under no
compulsion to use words in conformity to their grammatical mean-
ing. On this construal of 'forces', Humpty Dumpty is right: we, not
the words, are master. But, although what Searle says is true, his re-
mark, on this construal, is irrelevant to the issue. As we have already
noted, the supporter of compositional meaning does not claim that
meaning determines use in this strong sense. On the other hand, if
'forces' has reference to the grammatical structure of sentences, Searle
is making the relevant claim that there is no compositional meaning
in sentences to provide a semantic standard specifying the grammati-
cal point from which language users may depart. But now Searle is
wrong. Alice is right: 'glory' does not mean "a nice knock-down ar-
gument." Moreover, Searle's remark begs the question of whether
sentences like (13) have a compositional meaning in which the con-
cept of arithmetical addition appears, because it merely reiterates his

answer.32
There are, furthermore, reasons for thinking that a full relativiza-
tion of meaning to context eliminates even the notion of the literal
meaning of a use of a sentence. The literal meaning of a use of a word
is a matter of its utterance meaning on that use coinciding with its
meaning in the language. The literalness of the use of 'hamburger' in
(14):
(14) Tal would make hamburger of Karpov
on the part of English missionaries whose references to Tal and

Karpov are, respectively, to the local cannibal chief and to a Russian
missionary is a matter of the utterance meaning of 'hamburger' coin-
ciding with the meaning of 'hamburger' in English, whereas the non-
literalness of a use of (14) on the part of chess players is a matter of
their utterance meaning of 'hamburger' failing to coincide with the
meaning of 'hamburger' in English. Since, as argued above, a full rela-
tivization sacrifices an independent notion of literal sentence mean-
ing, the notion of the literal use of a sentence is sacrificed, too.
Searle assures us that his criticisms of the notion of a context-free
literal sentence meaning do not have these consequences (220/1). But
it is hard to see how the necessary distinction between literal sentence
meaning and utterance meaning can be preserved in a complete rela-
tivization. Searle thinks that the distinction can be explained in terms
of the notions "context of utterance" and "background assumptions"
(221), but these notions, on Searle's use of them, represent a distinc-
tion without a difference. Throughout Searle's paper, the notions
"context of utterance" and "background assumptions" function
pretty much interchangeably in reference to the same sort of extra-
grammatical influences on utterance meaning. Moreover, it is no
quirk of Searle's presentation that they function interchangeably:
'context of utterance' and 'background assumptions' are nothing
more than different labels referring to the same contextual informa-
tion from different perspectives. In the former case, the reference is
from the perspective of the source of the information in the world,
32Searle's discussion (BM, 230/1) of "Snow is white" adds nothing to the controversy.
His new example is merely a variant on Hilary Putnam's original set of examples in "Is
Semantics Possible?" Metaphilosophy, i, 3 (July 1970): 212-218. Searle seems com-
pletely unaware of the problems that have been raised about such examples in the re-
sponse to Putnam, for example, "The Neoclassical Theory of Reference" and earlier
studies such as "Logic and Language: An Examination of Recent Criticisms of Inten-
sionalism" and my "A Proper Theory of Names," Philosophical Studies, XXXI, 1 (Jan-
uary 1977): 1-80.
230 THE JOLTRNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
whereas, in the latter, it is from the perspective of the representation

of the information in the minds of the language users. Context of ut-
terance encompasses beliefs and other background assumptions of
the speaker and hearer, and background assumptions encompass con-
textual information.
At the end of both papers, Searle offers what he takes to be a reason
for thinking that things should be the way the use theory says they are.
Searle answers the possible rejoinder that
Meanings are, after all, a matter of convention, and if heretofore such

conventions have rested on background assumptions why not put an end
to this dependence by a new convention that there shall henceforth be no
such dependence? (222)
saying
. . . there is no way to eliminate the dependence in the case of literal

meaning which would not break the connection with other forms of in-
tentionality and hence would eliminate the intentionality of literal
meaning altogether (222).
. . since meaning is always a derived form of intentionality, contextual

dependency is ineliminable (BM, 231).
Here, however, Searle is merely arguing from his own theory.

Searle's theory of meaning is the perlocutionary theory that he adapts
from H. P. Grice's account of nonnatural meaning.33 In this theory,
meaning is explained in terms of the effect that a speaker intends to
produce in listeners by virtue of their recognition of the speaker's in-
tention to produce the effect in uttering the sentence. Now, given this
theory, it is quite true that the meaning of a sentence is tied via inten-
tions to such things as beliefs and perceptions, which, in turn, depend
on background assumptions (222/3). Given Searle's conception of
meaning, there is, as he claims, no way to eliminate contextual de-
pendency. But, given the conception he has been criticizing in these
papers, that is, the tighter notion of compositional meaning based on
the idealization of semantic competence (in the technical sense), de-
pendence on context is eliminated for sentence meaning. On this
tighter notion, what is "always a derived form of intentionality" is
not meaning, but the assignment of sentence meanings to uses of
sentences in non-null contexts. Since the question at issue is the
33"Meaning," Philosophical Review, LXVI, 3 (July 1957): 377-388.
choice between these different conceptions of meaning, Searle's claim

that "meaning is always a derived form of intentionality" begs it.34
Searle was closer to the truth when, a number of years ago, he op-
posed intention and convention:
Meaning is more than a matter of intention, it is also at least sometimes a

matter of convention (Speech Acts, 45).
His target at that time was Grice's original formulation of the perlo-
cutionary notion of meaning. Searle introduced a clever counterex-
ample to show that Grice's claim that non-natural meaning is
"always a derived form of intentionality" does not account for the
meaning of sentences determined in their grammatical structure,
Searle's example was that of an American soldier in the Second World
War who addresses his Italian captors with an utterance of (15):
(15) Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen bliihen?
which is the one sentence he remembers from high school German, in

order to make them think he is German. Searle's point against Grice
is that (15) does not mnean 'I am a German soldier' ("Ich bin ein
deutscher Soldat" means that) but rather "Knowest thou the land
where the lemon trees bloom?" Thus, Grice's claim about meaning
makes the false prediction that the American soldier's utterance
means "I am a German.soldier," since this is what the Italians cor-
rectly recognized as his intention to have them recognize as his com-
munication, but it is not the meaning of the soldier's utterance of the
sentence (15).
Since Searle now takes the same view as Grice, he is open to the
same counterexample. He has to make the same false prediction, be-
cause his theory of meaning, like Grice's, makes meaning solely a
matter of intentionality and leaves no place for an independent no-
tion of meaning based on grammatical structure in sentences. Searle
has to predict that the utterance means "I am a German soldier" when
clearly this is not what it means, but just something that the Italians
infer from the fact that a soldier is speaking in German. The simple
truth about the example is that an American soldier gets his captors to
believe he is German by an utterance that means "Knowest thou the
34The dependence on background assumptions is eliminated without dire conse-

quences. Even though the direct connection Searle has in mind is broken, the relation
of competence to performance involves an indirect connection between the absolute
context-free literal meanings of sentences on the one hand and, on the other, the inten-
tions and belief structures behind their use and, hence, the literal utterance meanings
-their use produces. On this connection, the intentional and other psychological ele-
ments to which meanings are related in no way undermine the independence of com-
positional meaning from context.
land where the lemon trees bloom?", but the utterance can mean
this only by virtue of its being a use of a sentence with this com-
positional meaning.
It is hardly credible that the conventions that pair the German sen-
tence (15) with the meaning "Knowest thou the land where the lemon
trees bloom?" depend on background assumptions common to con-
texts such as the situation of the American soldier in Searle's ex-
ample, the high school German class that he attended, various cir-
cumstances where sentimental German poetry is read, etc. There
are no background assumptions common to such contexts that can
explain the literal meaning of (15) and its utterances. Moreover, it
seems quite straightforward that the literal meaning of (15) and its
utterances is to be accounted for compositionally as a function of
the meanings of the German words 'kennst', 'du', etc., their posi-
tions in the sentence, and its interrogative form. Hence, talk about
intentions and background assumptions expressing information
about context is idle, and, accordingly, it is to be excluded by Oc-
cam's razor from a scientific account of meaning in natural
language.
III
I have dealt at length with Searle's arguments, first, because they are
the only explicit defense in the literature of the central semantic as-
sumptions of the Wittgensteinian/Austinian approach to performa-
tiveness which comes to grips with a more serious challenge to these
assumptions than the artificial-language approach, and, second, be-
cause they are, from my experience, an accurate expression of what
ordinary language philosophers and many outside this tradition take
to be knock-down arguments against the notion of context-free sen-
tence meaning.
Wittgenstein thought that his critique of Frege's and Russell's the-
ories of meaning and logical form had eliminated all competing the-
ories, leaving only one or another form of the use theory. Supposing
Wittgenstein to be correct, and further that the principal grounds on
which such competition was eliminated is, as the quotes from the
Philosophical Investigations above suggest, that other theories do
not account for the full range and diversity of what natural languages
have the potential to do, the obvious moral is that the exclusion of use
from "conceptual notation" theories is precisely their mistake.
Hence, from the perspective of Wittgenstein's trenchant critique of
Frege and Russell, the use conception of meaning appears a great phil-
osophical breakthrough. Philosophizing about natural language
need no longer be hamstrung by a primitive picture of language that
reflects only a small part of what enables natural languages to func-
tion as they do in issuing orders, making promises, asking questions,

and so on.
Wittgenstein's critique is, however, not as general as he thought or
as is required to refute all "conceptual notation" theories. His view of
such theories shares three assumptions with the Frege-Russell con-
ception which restrict the scope of his critique to one class of "concep-
tual notation" theories. First, it is assumed that "conceptual nota-
tion" theories of logical structure are about constative logical
structure and ignore performative logical structure. Second, it is as-
sumed that "conceptual notation" theories are put forth as sublim-
ings of highly imperfect natural languages. Third, it is assumed that,
in such theories, the vocabulary determinants of the logical structure
of sentences are only the so-called "logical particles." I have argued
that these assumptions are false. If so, then both the target of Wittgen-
stein's critique and the philosophical consequences that he and other
use theorists draw about meaning from this critique are mistaken.
The general rationale Wittgenstein fashioned for the use theory
collapses.
Thus there emerges the possibility of a "conceptual notation" the-
ory which is not limited by these assumptions. It is a theory of per-
formative logical structure as well as constative logical structure; it is
put forth not as perfecting or replacing a natural language, but as a
scientific theory of the language; it treats all vocabulary in the lan-
guage as determinants of the logical structure of its sentences. Now,
from the very different perspective of such a "conceptual notation"
theory, the use theory appears in a different light. Without the confi-
dence that came from the belief that Wittgenstein's critique removes
all competition for the use theory and against a "conceptual nota-
tion" theory that incorporates many of the insights of this critique,
the use theory now appears as an unnecessary sacrifice of the advan-
tages of formalization, theory, and the possibility of explaining the
grammatical relations between constative and performative struc-
tures in natural language.
Searle's two articles are an attempt to restore confidence in the use
theory by showing that such an alternative cannot make use of the
notion of compositional sentence meaning it requires. I have argued
here that this attempt fails because it conflates questions of language
with questions of language use. If these arguments are convincing,
the use theory ought no longer appear to be a highly sophisticated
and liberating approach but, instead, a highly confused as well as an
unnecessarily limited approach.
JERROLD J. KATZ
The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Jerrold J. Katz Literal Meaning and Logical Theory 1981

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Literal Meaning and Logical Theory

LITERAL MEANING AND LOGICAL THEORY*

I N "Literal Meaning," l John Searle claims to refute the view that

Philosophers who take the position that contextually independent

significance. He neither explains its significance nor identifies the

2Searle introduces the pro-literal-meaning view under the misleading description

"Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Mathematics," Phlilosophical Review, i,xv'm, 3

pinnings Dummett requires to argue, in particular, that the meaning

. . .the conditions under which we regard ourselves as justified in as-

This verificationism comes directly out of a feature common to a wide

criterion for an adequate theory of meaning is that it answer the

9 Dummett tries to establish his "full-blooded" theory of meaning by refuting "mod-

havior excluded Searle's nonobviousness condition on promising.

'0 See my discussion in "The Theory of Semantic Representation," Erketnntnis, xIII,

language, and ends with

It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and

John Austin's constative/performative distinction puts the criticism

2"Performative-Constative" in C. E. Caton, ed., Philosophy and Ordinary Lan-

ophy"- abandons formal explication as an approach to meaning in

13 Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Pr

grammar of 'promise' on the basis of which English speakers extrapo-

(a) speaker undertakes an obligation at some time (the speech

' "Performatives Are Statements, Too," Philosophical Studies, xxviii, 4 (October

basis of pragmatic reasoning concerning the speaker's communica-

. . .the audience reasons, and is intended to reason, as follows:

(1) He [the speaker] is saying, 'I order you to leave'.

(6) If I promise to help others, then I undertake an obligation

and the validity of the argument (7):

(7) I promise to help others.

I undertake an obligation to help them.

Accordingly, we are here, too, required to reject accounts of logical

ance of analytic sentences like "If John is a bachelor, then John is

Wittgenstein's and Austin's assumptions about the study of language

tion, which purifies the study of language of all performance ele-

. . . an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-

Thus, the account of performative aspects of natural language on

would be assigned to a use of the sentence on the part of a mathemat-

independent of contextual information (and in Searle's recent form of

radically contextualist view of natural languages.20 PSIF was the first

. strategy in constructing the argument will be to consider sentences

Such an argument would be important for philosophers who rely on

20 See, for example, D. Gordon and G. Lakoff, "Conversational Postulates," in Cole

The danger in failing to tie criticism down to a real position is the

23 "The Neoclassical Theory of Reference," in P. A. French, T. E. Uehling, Jr., and

scriptive meaning" of a sentence from a condition for its application,

It is just this assimilation of such "stage directions" to meaning

(8) Give me a hamburger, medium rare, with ketchup and

is obeyed if the hamburger is brought encased in a solid lucite cube or

Searle takes this to be an argument against supporters of context-free

(9) Give me a hamburger, medium rare, with ketchup and mus-

(though fantastically more elaborate) in order to express "exactly and

If the connection between existence and truth conditions, obedience

(10) Bill cut the grass

27 "The Backgrounds of Meaning," in Searle, F. Kiefer, and M. Bierwisch, eds.,

Again, the same dead give-away phraseology. True enough, the

Searle claims that the supporters of absolutely context-free mean-

. discussing the understanding of the literal meaning of a sentence by

Searle is correct in thinking that supporters of absolutely context-

mantic competence' is incapable of supporting such a "rescue opera-

The equivocation noted in the last paragraph now pops up in a new

29Searle's equivocation on 'semantic competence' is nothing new. See PSIF, p.

definitions and of a conception of the representation of meaning

A second skeptical conclusion that I explicitly renounce is that the