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Conjoining Meanings
CONTEXT AND CONTENT

SERIES EDITOR : François Recanati, Institut Nicod
Other titles in the series:

The Inessential Indexical
On the Philosophical Insignificance of Perspective and the First Person
Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever
Fixing Reference
Imogen Dickie
Propositional Content
Peter Hanks
The Mirror of the World
Subjects, Consciousness, and Self-Consciousness
Christopher Peacocke
Assessment Sensitivity
Relative Truth and its Applications
John MacFarlane
Context
Robert C. Stalnaker
Conjoining Meanings
Semantics Without Truth Values
PAUL M. PIETROSKI
1
3
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Contents
Preface vii
Chapter zero: Overture 

Chapter one: Locating meanings 
Chapter two: Introducing concepts 
Chapter three: Invention and satisfaction 
Chapter four: Truth or understanding 
Chapter five: Events and framing 
Chapter six: Massively monadic, potentially plural 
Chapter seven: Minimal semantic instructions 
Chapter eight: Reprise 
References 
General Index 
Index of names 
Preface
It’s hard to say when I started writing this book. In , I was in the early stages of
writing a book that was beginning to address similar issues. That activity initiated a
scattered process that resulted in this product. The descendant bears little resem-
blance to its ancestor. But at some point, there was a book that was this one, whose
main thesis is that meanings are instructions for how to access and assemble concepts
of a special sort. One implication of my view is that ‘book’ does not have an
extension, and that semanticists don’t need to worry about what books are, or
when they come into existence. So let me turn to the more important matter of
thanking some people who provided help, along the road that led to this progress
report, and apologizing to the many people who provided help that I have forgotten
or never recognized. I have benefited from many academic villages and their citizens,
in ways which guarantee that much of what I think is due to them, in ways I cannot
trace. But I do remember some of my debts.
The largest is to my friend and colleague, Norbert Hornstein. I admired his Logic
as Grammar before I got to know its author. But references to Norbert’s written
work, and our collaborative efforts, fail to capture his deeper influence. We have been
talking about this stuff, usually over lunches, for most of this century. Norbert
provided insightful comments on many drafts. More importantly, he has been an
unfailing source of encouragement, good advice, and general camaraderie. I initially
met Norbert via Jim McGilvray, a friend and former colleague at McGill University.
I learned a lot from Jim, who regularly challenged my youthful fondness for truth
conditional semantics. At McGill, I was also part of a reading group that included
Jim, Dave Davies, and two linguists—Mark Baker and Brendon Gillon—who make
appearances in the pages below. In retrospect, I see being part of that group as a
formative experience with regard to how I currently think about meaning, syntax,
and truth.
Going further back, to teachers at MIT, I was ridiculously lucky. George Boolos,
Jim Higginbotham, and Richard Larson each had a major impact that is reflected in
several chapters. And no version of this book would exist if not for Noam Chomsky.
It will be obvious that his work plays a central role in mine, and that several aspects of
my proposal are due to him. Noam showed me a fruitful way of thinking about
philosophy of language and linguistics. I am enormously grateful for this, and for his
generous support. Also, his examples are pretty good.
In –, I went back to Cambridge as a fellow in the Mind, Brain, Behavior
program at Harvard. During a dream year there, I attended terrific lab meetings in
Psychology, taught a seminar and met wonderful students in Philosophy, and worked
through some material that eventually became chapters in a reading group organized
by Cedric Boeckx—an early supporter of this project and a consistently stimulating
lunch partner—all while living in Boston’s North End (post Big Dig) and getting to
watch the Red Sox win the World Series again. Thanks to Marc Hauser, who made
viii Preface
the visit possible, Susan Carey, Elizabeth Spelke, Bernhard Nickel, Susanna Siegel,
Jake Beck, and Dennis Ott; though listing makes me sure I’m forgetting.
Between  and , I had the chance to present newer versions of the ideas at
the Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics in Tromsø, the Language
Research Group at Durham University, the Center for the Study of Mind in Nature in
Oslo, Beihang University in Beijing, and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio
Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre. Thanks to the many who arranged for and partici-
pated in those extended discussions; special thanks to Peter Svenonius, Gillian
Ramchand, Wolfram Hinzen, Robyn Carston, Francis Lin, and Ana Maria Tramunt
Ibanos. A more recent trip to the CSMN in Oslo was partly arranged by Terje
Lohndal, a former Maryland student who became a collaborator and friend. The
emerging connection to Norway has been an unexpected delight. They even turned
on the Aurora Borealis one night in Tromsø.
In June of , I gave a series of “Context and Content” lectures at the Institut
Jean Nicod. Many thanks to François Recanati for the invitation and the conversa-
tions it led to with him and others, including Pierre Jacob, Philippe Schlenker, Kit
Fine, and whoever happened to be passing through in a given week. I’ve never gotten
through fewer slides in talks, given the discussions that would break out in the first
two minutes, or had more fun presenting material. If forced to pick a place in which
this book was born, I would have to say it was Paris. Preparing the talks—in the
delightful apartment that François had suggested, or just wandering from one café
to another—led to a draft that I tried out with the Foundations of Semantics Group
at the University of Konstanz in . Thanks to Brendan Balcerak Jackson for
organizing that visit and a series of conversations that included Magdalena Balcerak
Jackson and Irene Heim. Those experiences led to a revised draft, which was
subjected to trial by graduate seminar and eventually became a version that went
off to OUP.
The help did not end there. Peter Momtchiloff, patient as always, sent the
manuscript to a pair of referees who together provided the most valuable reports
I have encountered. They were kind, encouraging, and just plain right about some
things that needed to be fixed. That led to a major rewrite, which took a while to
settle. John Collins, who deserves a special category, offered incisive, informed, and
intelligent comments at several stages. The graduate student philosophy and linguis-
tics group (PHLING) at Maryland provided valuable feedback on the penultimate
draft in the fall of , when I was able to devote time to getting it finished, thanks to
the goodwill of my chairs, Bill Idsardi and Chris Morris.
More generally, the University of Maryland provided the daily setting that made
the book happen. I’m also grateful for the occasional sabbatical support that let me
spend time elsewhere, including a favorite spot in northern New Mexico where many
pages were written. But being at UMD, in linguistics and philosophy, is what led to all
this. The initial prompt was some seminars led by Norbert and Juan Uriagereka,
whose blackboard got well used while we talked in his office. Their students would
come into my office, wanting to know how semantics was related to Chomsky’s
minimalist program. So we talked. When Howard Lasnik joined the group, watching
him teach syntax helped me understand the subject in a new way. Being at Maryland
Preface ix
also allowed me to learn about psycholinguistics, on the job, by collaborating with

Stephen Crain and then Jeff Lidz. After meeting with Stephen to discuss the latest
experiments involving Kermit, Grover, and anaphoric dependence, I could go talk
with Georges Rey—who I have known and admired since my days in grad school—
about conceptions of intentionality.
Jeff connected me to Justin Halberda at Johns Hopkins; and the three of us have
spent a lot of time thinking together about how meanings are related to mental
representations. Our meetings and joint work have been deeply satisfying, intellec-
tually and personally, in ways I couldn’t have imagined without Jeff and Justin. They
and a series of amazing students—Tim Hunter, Darko Odic, and Alexis Wellwood—
helped me see how experimental tools really could, given the right team, be brought
to bear on old questions about logically equivalent logical forms. In a related vein, Jeff
Horty’s work on Frege played an important role in my thinking about lexicalization,
as did Peter Carruthers’ proposals about the role of the human language faculty in
integrating modules. Valentine Hacquard and Alexander Williams, colleagues in
semantics, were great conversational partners who provided sympathetic ears along
with needed doses of facts and skeptical questions. This book is very much a
Maryland product.
I can’t list all the students who helped by asking penetrating questions, and the
audiences who had me rethinking issues on the way home after presentations at
colloquia or conferences. But special mention is due to Chris Vogel, who helped with
the index and in other ways via many thoughtful discussions connected with his
dissertation. Visits to the University of Arizona turned out to be particularly valuable;
thanks to Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, for much over many years, and to Heidi
Harley and Tom Bever for conversations in Tucson and Maryland.
Many of the ideas in this book were first presented in public at Rutgers University
in colloquia, or at events caused by Ernie Lepore. I met Ernie at a conference when
I was still teaching at McGill and just starting to write papers in philosophy of
language. He became a generous mentor and invited me to the initial philosophy/
linguistics workshops that he organized, back when they were small local affairs.
Through those growing sessions, I got to meet or reconnect with terrific philosophers
and semanticists, including many who I need to thank for comments and discussions
that led to many deletions of errors and additions of good points: Zoltán Szabó, Jason
Stanley, Rich Larson, Peter Ludlow, Jim Higginbotham, Michael Glanzberg, Rob
Stainton, David Braun, Steven Gross, Elisabeth Camp, Bob Matthews, Frankie Egan,
Kirk Ludwig, Thony Gillies, Roger Schwartzschild, Kai von Fintel, Veneeta Dayal,
Ken Safir, Barry Schein, and Barry Smith. The two Barrys, along with Ernie and
Martin Davies, have been especially important in shaping my thinking about Donald
Davidson’s project and its relevance for cognitive science. In terms of intellectual
influence, my debt to Jerry Fodor is huge, as will be clear from the text.
I was an undergrad at Rutgers. So it has been a real treat to visit regularly, most
recently on the university’s th birthday. (Another implication of my view about
linguistic meaning is that proper nouns like ‘Rutgers’—‘Barry’, ‘Balcerak Jackson’,
etc.—do not have denotations, and that it’s not my job to worry about when my alma
mater began.) I’m writing these words in a transitional phase, thrilled by knowing
x Preface
that I’ll soon be joining the faculty there, while also feeling real gratitude for my time
at Maryland.
Through it all, my partner and best friend, Susan Dwyer, offered sanity checks and
some of the best conversations about the important issues. In her work, Sue juggles
so many balls that I get tired just watching. But she found ways to provide lots of
patience, support, and love.
In short, this book reflects the various neighborhoods I have been fortunate to
hang out in. A lot of resources that were not mine have been invested in this project.
Thanks to all.
Chapter zero
Overture
Some animals undergo dramatic changes after birth. Caterpillars go through a pupal
stage and emerge with scaled wings. Humans acquire languages of a special sort. Such
changes can transform an animal’s lifestyle. Butterflies flutter. People talk. In talking,
we use expressions that are meaningful, pronounceable, and remarkably combinable.
As children, we acquire languages whose expressions have these striking properties.
This book is about our linguistic expressions, their meanings, and how these mean-
ings are related to human thought.
I think meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble
concepts. More specifically: lexical meanings are instructions for how to fetch
concepts that can be combined in certain systematic but limited ways; phrasal
meanings are instructions for how to build monadic concepts (a.k.a. mental predi-
cates) that are massively conjunctive. On this view, meanings are recipes for how
to make mental representations of a special kind. For example, the meaning of
‘red dot’ is a recipe for how to assemble a monadic concept from ingredients
that can be accessed via the lexical items ‘red’ and ‘dot’. In defending this account
of what meanings are, I’ll argue that meanings do not determine extensions, and
that ordinary sentences do not have truth conditions. But words like ‘meaning’
and ‘concept’ get used in many ways. So let me start by saying a little about the
topic and my terminology.
. Human linguistic meanings

Many things are meaningful in some sense. Smoke often indicates fire, and a red light
may be a signal to stop. In some contexts, a shrug can convey a lot of information;
see, e.g., Grice (, ). But linguistic expressions are meaningful in an inter-
esting combinatorial way.
. Distinctively composable

A speaker of English might use ‘red’ to report the color of a nearby apple. This word
can also be used along with others to assert that some distant apples are not red, to
ask whether blood is red, or to call for a certain bucket of paint. Similarly, utterances
of ‘dot’ need not be symptoms of dots. Words do not merely signify. Words are
significant in a way that is interwoven with how they can be combined. The meanings
of ‘red’ and ‘dot’ are intimately related to the meaning of ‘red dot’, which has
 . Overture
something in common with the meaning of ‘green line’, which somehow depends on
the meanings of ‘green’ and ‘line’. In general, each meaningful expression is a
constituent of boundlessly many others. So whatever linguistic meanings are,
humans can connect many of them with pronunciations, and thereby create expres-
sions that can be used—systematically—to talk about many things.
These expressions, of a language like spoken English or ASL, seem importantly
different from any analogs in animal communication systems. We can say that
forager bees use a dance language to indicate locations of food. But even if bees
thereby communicate intentions, their dances do not have meanings of the kind
exhibited by phrases like ‘food over there’. The languages that children naturally
acquire also differ from various notational systems that adults have introduced, for
scientific purposes, by explicitly formulating rules for how to generate and interpret
certain symbols. Such notation can be useful in many ways. But expressions of an
invented mathematical language may not be meaningful in the ways that ordinary
words and phrases are. Likewise, human linguistic expressions may lack a kind of
significance that is exemplified by bee dances, or by invented formulae whose
interpretations are stipulated. We can and should allow for many types of languages,
whose expressions may be significant in sundry ways.
For these purposes, let’s say that something counts as a language if it connects
interpretations of some kind with signals of some kind. If this conception of
languages is too generous, that will do no harm. The spoken or signed languages
that children can acquire as native languages, given ordinary human experience, can
be described as special cases. It will be convenient to have a term for these distinct-
ively human languages. I’ll call them Slangs. But whatever we call them, Slangs
connect interpretations of a special sort with signals that are spoken or signed.
I will use ‘meaning’ and ‘pronunciation’ to talk about these human interpretations
and signals. Given this terminology, Slangs connect meanings with pronunciations.
So whatever meanings are, Slangs connect them with pronunciations.
. Pronounceable instructions

This leaves room for many proposals about what Slangs are, and how these child-
acquirable languages are related to other things (e.g., concepts, expressions, and
aspects of environments that speakers share). As discussed in chapter one, I think
Slangs are biologically implementable procedures that generate expressions; see
Chomsky (, ). But this is not a matter of definition. I will argue against
other conceptions of Slangs, in order to stress that meanings are connected with
pronunciations via expression-generating procedures that children can acquire.
I think children also have languages of thought that connect certain interpretations—
perhaps mind-independent objects, properties, or possibilities—with mental symbols.
We don’t know how such symbols are related to meanings. But many animals represent
things. When a dog chases a rabbit, the dog tracks its moving target. And a child can
represent the rabbit, as an entity distinct from the dog, without having a word that can
be used to talk about either animal. Indeed, in acquiring the word ‘rabbit’, a child may
well connect a prior representation of rabbits with a pronunciation. Though not
everything that gets linked to a pronunciation is a meaning.
. Meanings are not concepts 
I’ll argue that lexical meanings are instructions for how to access mental symbols
that may be introduced in the course of acquiring a lexicon. In acquiring words like
‘rabbit’ and ‘chase’, a child may use available representations to create new concepts
that exhibit a distinctive representational format. Moreover, as a child matures, a
lexical item that was initially linked to a single concept may become an address for a
family of accessible concepts. On this view, Slangs play an important role in cogni-
tion, not just in communication. So my proposal is deeply mentalistic. But my use of
‘meaning’ and ‘language’ is more neutral.
Others can hypothesize that the meaning of ‘rabbit’ is a set of rabbits, or a
mapping from possible worlds to sets of rabbits, and that Slangs are sets of
meaning-pronunciation pairs; see, e.g., Lewis (a). As discussed below, I think
this abstraction from psychology has outlived its utility. But these are empirical
issues, not matters for stipulation. We have to figure out what meanings are, even
if we describe them as things that Slangs connect with pronunciations.
For present purposes, we can remain neutral about what pronunciations are.1 One
can start with the idea that spoken Slangs connect meanings with certain “sounds,” in
some sense that abstracts from many dimensions of variation across acoustic signals,
which may be produced by sopranos from Sydney or baritones from Brooklyn. But
refining this idea, say in terms of phonological features, calls for investigation as
opposed to stipulations regarding the operative notion of sound. It is even less clear
what Slangs connect with pronunciations. Though it may be useful to locate my
proposal about meanings relative to some more familiar alternatives, and hint at
some arguments that are developed in later chapters.
. Meanings are not concepts

One historically important claim is that meanings are concepts. A more recent
suggestion, discussed in section three, is that meanings are extensions of idealized
concepts. I think the older idea is wrong, and the newer one is worse. I’ll return to the
proposed alternative in section four.
. Concepts: Symbols vs. contents

Like ‘meaning’, ‘concept’ gets used in many ways. I use the ‘c’-word to talk about
mental representations of a special sort; see also Margolis and Laurence ().
Peacocke () and many others use ‘concept’ to talk about Fregean senses, or
other abstract entities that exhibit logical relations. In ordinary speech, the word
plays various roles depending on the context. But along with Fodor (, ,
, ) and many others, I want to stress that animals often represent aspects of
their environments by employing mental symbols that are composable in the follow-
ing sense: each can be combined with some others to form complex representations.
Prima facie, many animals use such symbols to think about food, nests, distances,
1
Though unsurprisingly, I tend to think of pronunciations as instructions for how to articulate. Halle
(, p. ) describes such instructions—executed by certain anatomical structures of the vocal tract—as
“choreographic scores” that tell each anatomical “dancer” what to do and when; see §. of chapter seven.
 . Overture
directions, partners, predators, events, causal relations, social dominance, etc. I will
use ‘concept’ to talk about composable mental symbols that can be used to think
about things.
As discussed in chapter two, the relevant notion of “thinking about” allows for
concepts that are not as systematically composable as Slang expressions. There may
be minds, perhaps equine, that can form concepts of delicious grass and scary rabbits
without being able to form concepts of scary grass and delicious rabbits. However, to
think about a rabbit is to think about it as a thing of some sort (e.g., as a rabbit, or as
something that was chased by a dog). In this sense, concepts have contents that can
be described as ways of thinking about things; see Evans (). A concept that can
be used to think about something as a rabbit, whatever that amounts to, has a content
that we can gesture at by talking about the concept type RABBIT. An instance of this
type is a mental symbol that can be used to think about a rabbit as such, or to classify
something—perhaps wrongly—as a rabbit; see Fodor (). A concept of the type
RABBIT-THAT-RAN, which can be used think about something as a rabbit that ran, is
presumably a complex mental symbol whose constituents include an instance of
RABBIT. A thought can be described as a sentential concept that lets us think about (some
portion of) the universe as being a certain way. Thoughts of the type A-RABBIT-RAN can be
used to think about the world as being such that a rabbit ran.
Classifying concepts in terms of contents allows for instances of RABBIT that differ
in other respects. Thinkers may employ mental symbols that are formally distinct
concepts of this type. We can distinguish ‘•’ from ‘⊗’ even if in some language, both
symbols indicate the same operation of multiplication. Perhaps a conceptual content
can also be mentally encoded in diverse ways. That said, distinct minds may often use
the same symbols. Children who encounter similar rabbits may acquire a common
instance of RABBIT. Likewise, instances of RED-DOT may include a common concept of
conjunction, even if the instances of RED and DOT are diverse. For present purposes,
we can be agnostic about how multiply realizable concept types are.2
We can also distinguish two versions of the idea that meanings are concepts:
(i) each meaning is a concept type like RABBIT or RED-DOT; (ii) each meaning is itself a
concept, and hence a token of some such type. On the first view, speakers of the same
language can connect a pronunciation π with a meaning μ via distinct concepts of the
type μ. On the second view, such speakers connect π with distinct meanings/concepts
of type μ. I think this contrast is largely terminological, and that in any case,
meanings are neither concepts nor concept types.
. One meaning, a family of concepts

In my view, a meaning can be the Slang correlate for two or more conceptual
contents. This phenomenon is often described in terms of polysemy. My aim is not
to provide an account of polysemy. But the phenomenon suggests that a meaning
need not correspond to a single concept.
2
As Piatelli-Palmarini () discusses, our immune systems respond to new viruses with the same
antibodies. Of course, utterances/inscriptions of ‘rabbit’ can be spatiotemporally distinct, as can events of
using any particular instance of RABBIT. And let’s not worry, until §., about concepts like RABBIT-STUFF.
. Meanings are not concepts 
Consider the noun ‘book’ and a familiar contrast between two ways of thinking
about some corresponding things: as spatially located objects that can carry infor-
mation; or as chunks of information that can be encoded in many ways. Given
examples like ‘book that he defaced’ and ‘book that he plagiarized’, it seems that
‘book’ can be used to access concepts that have different contents, whatever we say
about the ontology of books. So let’s distinguish BOOK:VEHICLE from BOOK:INFO. If
neither type is the meaning of ‘book’, perhaps this lexical meaning lets us access
instances of either type. Some speakers may also have a neutral concept of books. But
in my view, the meaning of ‘book’ is not a concept, not even a permissive one.
Similarly, I don’t think there is a noun ‘circle’ whose meaning is a concept that
applies to certain ideal figures governed by geometric theorems and to certain
perceptible figures made of chalkdust on blackboards. We can use ‘line’ to speak of
Euclidean lines, fishing lines, telephone lines, waiting lines, lines in faces, lines of
thought, etc. We can use ‘door’ to access a concept of certain impenetrable objects, or
a concept of certain spaces that can be occupied by such objects. In later chapters,
I discuss ‘country’ and ‘France’, which can be used to access concepts of terrain or
political institutions. Polysemy is ubiquitous. So often, the meaning of a word seems
to be an aspect of a Slang expression that lets us access members of a certain family of
concepts.
To be sure, homophony is also common. The pronunciation of ‘bank’ can be used,
with different meanings, to talk about financial institutions or river edges. Following
the practice of lexicographers who distinguish ‘1bank’ from ‘2bank’, we can distin-
guish $BANK from ▽BANK. To take another example, I recently learned that the
pronunciation of ‘fish’ can be used to talk about a flat plate of metal that has been
attached to a beam, or across a joint, as an added source of support (especially as a
temporary repair to a damaged mast or spar). This was an instance of acquiring a
new lexical item, ‘2fish’. I didn’t learn that the more familiar noun ‘1fish’ has an
expansive meaning that can also be used to talk about both trout and certain flat
metal plates.
Perhaps some alleged examples of polysemy are really cases of distinct words
connecting the same pronunciation with different meanings. Maybe we use ‘1door’ to
talk about things that can block the doorways we speak of by using ‘2door’. Though
given doors to success, and windows of opportunity, polysemy appears to outrun
homophony. Some cases may be hard to classify, especially given the possibility of
metaphorical usage. But one generation’s metaphor can be another generation’s
polysemy. So even allowing for homophones and metaphors, it seems that a typical
word meaning corresponds to more than one concept.
The adjective in ‘bare skin’ shares its pronunciation with some words that get
spelled another way. But ignore the nouns that are used to talk about ursine animals
or pessimistic denizens of Wall Street. There is at least one verb meaning that we can
use to talk about certain episodes or states of carrying or supporting something.
We speak of bearing gifts, weight, malice, pain, a likeness to relatives, children,
names, and false testimony. Citizens may bear arms; things can bear watching; etc.
Dictionaries typically describe this variation partly in terms of homophony—two or
three verbs, each listed with a few subsenses—but not in terms of many separate
 . Overture
verbs used to talk about carrying or supporting or having or yielding or tolerating or

meriting something. Listing subsenses for a single word is, in my view, a way of
reflecting the fact that one lexical meaning can be the Slang correlate for a cluster of
concepts. However many meanings there are for ‘bear’, there seem to be more
corresponding concepts.
Prima facie, a pronunciation π can be connected with a meaning μ that is more
flexible than any concept that is accessed via π and/or μ. I think the pronunciation
bʊk is connected with a meaning that is sometimes used to access an instance of BOOK:
VEHICLE, and sometimes used to access an instance of BOOK:INFO. Of course, no single
example establishes that polysemy is a real phenomenon, distinct from homophony
and metaphorical usage. But there are many examples. So rebutting a few doesn’t
make it plausible that each lexical meaning is conceptually univocal.
It is also worth remembering that in acquiring lexical items, a child cannot treat
each encountered use of a pronunciation as the first encountered use of a new
expression. If a child has already connected the pronunciation bæŋk with an instance
of $BANK, and then hears a speaker using bæŋk to talk about something having to do
with a river, this might lead the child to distinguish ‘1bank’ from ‘2bank’. But there is
no reason to think that a typical child tries, or should try, to maintain a lexicon in
which each entry is linked to exactly one concept. Given that Slang expressions are
often used polysemously, it may be useful—e.g., for scientific purposes—to invent
languages whose expressions are univocal, in that each expression connects a per-
ceptible signal with exactly one concept. But the words that we naturally acquire may
be well suited to ordinary thought and talk among primates who can think about
things in many ways.
. Other kinds of conceptual equivocality

Whatever we say about homophony and polysemy, we need to be careful when using
Slang expressions (perhaps written in a special font) to talk about concepts. If an
instance of DOT is a concept with which one can think about something as a dot,
then thinking about something as a red dot may well require an instance of DOT. But if
an instance of RABBIT is a concept with which one can think about a rabbit as such,
then thinking about some stuff as rabbit may not require an instance of RABBIT.
Someone might acquire a mass-concept of rabbit in the way that many of us acquire a
concept of tofu—in response to some stuff on a plate—and only later acquire a
corresponding count-concept that can be used to think about a rabbit as a potential
source of rabbit. Such a person might initially think that rabbit is a vegan-friendly
substitute for chicken. Someone else might think that tofu comes from free-range
tofus, and that he once saw a tofu. Such a person might often use ‘tofu’, misguidedly,
to access a count-concept.
Let’s say that instances of RABBITC and TOFUC are count-concepts, while instances of
TOFUM and RABBITM are mass-concepts; see chapter two. This makes it vivid that an
instance of PREFERS-TOFUM-TO-RABBITM need not include an instance of TOFUC or
RABBITC. One can think about tofu and rabbit (as such) without thinking about
anything as a tofu or a rabbit. We can also posit types like [RABBITC STUFFC/M]M and
[TOFUM THINGM/C]C; where the slashed subscripts indicate concepts that combine with
. Meanings are not concepts 
a concept of one sort to form a concept of another sort. By hypothesis, an instance of

[RABBITC STUFFC/M]M is a complex mass concept. We can think about some stuff in this
complex way—i.e., as some stuff from a rabbit, or perhaps stuff from one or more
rabbits. But one need not think about rabbit in any such derivative way. Prima facie,
instances of RABBITM and TOFUM can be atomic concepts. And one needn’t be confused
to have an atomic mass-concept of rabbit. We can think of rabbit in this simple way,
if only to entertain and ascribe false thoughts according to which some rabbit on a
certain plate is textured soybean.3
The count/mass contrast reminds us that if a theorist uses ‘RABBIT’ to offer a
hypothesis about the meaning of ‘rabbit’, then we need to know which concept (type)
RABBIT is supposed to be, and which expression ‘rabbit’ is supposed to be. We can and
should distinguish the count noun ‘rabbit+CT’, which can be pluralized, from the
homophonous root noun ‘rabbit–CT’. I prefer to describe ‘rabbit–CT’ as a root noun
that is neither singular nor plural, rather than a mass noun.4 But whatever our termi-
nology, the meaning of ‘rabbit–CT’ seems to be neither RABBITM nor [RABBITC STUFFC/M]M
nor any instance of either concept type. Likewise, in my view, the meaning of ‘rabbit+CT’
is neither RABBITC nor [RABBITM THINGM/C]C nor any instance of either concept type.
The meanings are more neutral than any concept.
This neutrality might be described as a kind of polysemy. We can use ‘rabbit–CT’ to
access an instance of RABBITM or an instance of [RABBITC STUFFC/M]M. Perhaps concepts
of these types are coextensive, while instances of BOOK:VEHICLE and BOOK:INFO are not.
But two concepts can apply to the same stuff, yet provide different ways of thinking
about it. Likewise, a thinker might sometimes use ‘triangle’ to access a concept with
which one can think about the relevant figures as three-sided, and sometimes use the
same word to access a concept with which one can think about these figures as having
three angles that sum to  . If you know that Paderewski was both a musician and a
3
Faced with stuff from a rabbit, one can think that it is textured soybean; and this does not require an
instance of RABBITM or RABBITC. But the point concerns “de dicto” thoughts that we might correctly ascribe to
someone who thinks there are no rabbits; cp. the thought that tofu is not stuff from one or more tofus. Even
if RABBITM is necessarily coextensive with [RABBITC STUFFC/M]M, a thinker can have an atomic mass concept
of rabbit.
4
The relevant nouns include ‘furniture’ and ‘jewelry’. But furniture isn’t uncountable stuff, at least not
in the way that rabbit/beef/water is; jewelry includes countable rings and necklaces. For discussion, see
Gillon (), Bale and Barner (). We can think of beef as stuff from one or more cows; see Pelletier
(), who discusses David Lewis’s idea of a “universal grinder.” But ground tables and chairs would not
be typical furniture. Speakers of English use ‘hair–CT’ and ‘spaghetti–CT’ (cp. ‘a hair+CT’ and ‘a noodle+CT’)
to talk about the same stuff/things that speakers of French/Italian describe with plural count nouns
(‘cheveux+PL’, ‘spaghetti+PL’). And while sand might seem uncountable, until you focus closely, a pound of
gravel seems like a pound of pebbles. So it can be misleading to say that nouns of the form ‘ . . . –CT’ are mass
nouns, as if the grammatical property of being neither singular nor plural is tied to mass-concepts. Drawing
on Gillon, one can say instead that root nouns are neutral in this respect, and that the count feature adds a
restriction: count nouns cannot be used to fetch mass-concepts, which do not support counting; see §. of
chapter six. On this view, while ‘furniture–CT’ can be used to fetch a concept of things that are countable,
using a bare count noun will often suggest a mass-concept (apart from special locutions like ‘hunting
rabbit–CT’). For now, let’s not worry about the further complication that ‘rabbit’ can also be used to talk
about fur, or a jacket that incorporates such fur in a salient way; see Recanati (). If ‘rabbit+CT’ can also
be used to fetch a concept of a certain species, then the count noun is polysemous in yet another way.
 . Overture
politician, you might connect his name with two ways of thinking about him; cp.
Kripke (a). But the point of such examples is not to insist that a word is
polysemous if it is connected to concepts that have distinct contents. My claim is
that an account of what meanings are, and how they compose, must allow for cases of
conceptual equivocality that are not cases of homophony. And while this phenom-
enon is often illustrated with nouns or verbs, I think that modifiers also tend to be
conceptually equivocal.
Consider ‘green paint’, ‘green bottle’, and ‘green apples’. The adjective ‘green’ can
combine with a root noun or a count noun, singular or plural. Absent reasons for
recapitulating these grammatical distinctions for adjectives, it seems that the same
lexical item ‘green’ can be used to describe (i) some paint that is uniformly green,
(ii) a bottle that might be described as tinted but transparent, (iii) an apple that is
green only on the surface, or (iv) some bottles or apples, each of which is green.
Moreover, ‘green’ is not limited to an adjectival form. Some greens (or shades of
green) are greener than others. In this sense, ‘green’ is strikingly flexible in terms how
it can be used in combination with other expressions.
One can posit instances of GREENM as mass-concepts, instances of GREENC as count-
concepts, and even instances of GREENM-OR-C as neutral-concepts that can combine
with instances of either PAINTM or BOTTLEC. But in my view, the meaning of a flexible
word is not a correspondingly flexible concept. As discussed in later chapters, I have
nothing against concepts that are neutral along various dimensions. I think that
humans often use meaningful expressions to introduce concepts that are more like
words, in various respects, than the concepts we share with other animals. But if the
meaning of ‘green’ is used in the course of introducing an instance of GREENM-OR-C,
then presumably, the word meaning differs from the concept and its content.
Instead of saying that meanings are concepts, we can say that each lexical meaning
is an instruction for how to access a concept from a certain address, which may be
shared by a family of concepts. On this view, ‘green’ can be used to express a concept,
but there is more than one concept that can be expressed with the word. The meaning
of ‘green’ is apt for varied uses, including acts of describing some paint, some apples,
or both. The meaning of ‘green apples’ can be described as an instruction for how to
build a concept from lexically accessible ingredients. So the phrase need not, and
apparently does not, correspond to exactly one concept.5
In general, I think a Slang expression Σ can be used to access/build/express a
concept C that is less flexible than Σ—in terms of what Σ can be used to talk about,
and how it can combine with other expressions, compared with what C can be used
5
We also need a verb/noun distinction, since one can 1vfish for 1nfish and 2vfish a mast with a 2nfish. It is
tempting to specify the meaning of ‘1vfish’ as TRY-TO-CATCH-1FISH-IN-A-STANDARD-WAY. But someone can be
fishing without trying to catch anything; see Fodor and Lepore () on the hazards of decomposition. So
why think any one concept of 1vfishing applies to cases of fishing for trout, fishing hats from holes, fishing
for complements, etc? And even if speakers connect ‘1vfish’ with a suitably permissive concept type, it’s
hard to see how any such content could be defined in terms of 1FISH. But ‘1vfish’ and ‘1nfish’ are not mere
homophones; cp. ‘1vfish’ and ‘2nfish’. We need a conception of meaning that doesn’t commit us to
diagnosing lexical flexibility in terms of homophony, decomposition, or permissive concepts that are
exactly as combinable as the corresponding lexical items.
. Meanings are not extensions 
to think about and how it can combine with other concepts—since Σ might be used
to access/build/express a related but distinct concept C0 . As we’ll see, this flexibility
can promote a kind of cognitive integration. For certain purposes it can be useful to
regiment ordinary thought and talk in ways that approximate a scientific ideal of
using each expression as a perceptible sign of exactly one concept. Infants may also
link pronunciations to concepts in one-to-one fashion, at least initially. But as a child
acquires many words and concepts, partly in response to varied uses of Slang
expressions, a lexical item that provides an address for one concept may attract
related concepts. In this way, I claim, a lexical item can become polysemous. So we
shouldn’t expect the meaning of ‘green’ or ‘book’ or ‘book that I bought’ to be any
particular concept. We can instead describe the meaning of a Slang expression as an
instruction that can be executed in more than one way.
. Meanings are not extensions

In other chapters, I offer some further reasons for not identifying meanings with
concepts. But for these introductory purposes, let me turn to the idea that meanings
are extensions of ideal concepts that actually have extensions. I suspect that typical
concepts don’t have extensions, if only because of vagueness; see Sainsbury (),
cp. Williamson (). Though let’s suppose that each instance of POSITIVE-INTEGER
applies to a given entity, regardless of context, if and only if that entity is a positive
integer. Then instances of this type have an extension—{x: x is a positive integer},
a.k.a. {x: x is a natural number that zero precedes}. A set can be the shared extension
of distinct conceptual contents. So we can invent languages that connect signals with
extensions, leaving room for variation in how users enforce such connections. For
example, some thinkers might link the symbol ‘P’ to a certain set via instances of
POSITIVE-INTEGER, while others link ‘P’ to the same set via instances of NATURAL-
NUMBER-THAT-ZERO-PRECEDES. But in my view, Slang expressions do not have exten-
sions. I’ll argue that given polysemy, meanings do not even determine extensions.
Moreover, if each Slang expression has an extension, there is an obvious initial
objection to identifying meanings with extensions.
. Coextensive meanings

To use a standard example, ‘creature with a heart’ and ‘creature with a kidney’ have
different meanings. Yet the creatures with hearts are the same animals as the
creatures with kidneys. In general, it seems that if Slang expressions have extensions,
then many pairs of expressions have the same extension but different meanings. Alas,
replies to this simple point can get complicated.
Perhaps there could have been animals with hearts but no kidneys. So one might
say that there are “possible worlds” that include such animals, and that meanings are
sets of a special sort—i.e., functions that map each possible world onto some set, like
the set of things with hearts at that world. On this view, meanings are extensions of
ideal concepts that can be used to think about certain mappings from possible worlds
to extensions. But the objection remains. At every possible world, the numbers  and
 are the prime factors of , which is the second perfect number; and at every
 . Overture
possible world,  and  are the first two prime numbers apart from the successor or
predecessor of the fourth positive integer. Nonetheless, the meaning of ‘prime factors
of the second perfect number’ differs from the meaning of ‘first two prime numbers
apart from the successor or predecessor of the fourth positive integer’.
One might respond by saying that atomic meanings are extensions of some kind,
and that complex meanings are structured entities, built from atomic meanings.
On this modified view, phrasal meanings can be composite things that determine
extensions, and phrases with different meanings can be coextensive.6 But given words
like ‘unicorn’ and ‘ghost’, which seem to have atomic meanings, the initial objection
remains if there are no possible worlds at which there are unicorns or ghosts.
Similarly, if ‘woodchuck’ and ‘groundhog’ differ in meaning, the objection remains
if there are no possible worlds at which the woodchucks differ from the groundhogs;
cp. ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’. In §., I’ll argue that it doesn’t help to insist on the
possibility of unicorns, ghosts, and woodchucks that are not groundhogs. But first,
let me say why I follow Kripke () in thinking that there are no possible worlds
that include such things. For especially in linguistics, Kripkean intuitions are often
ignored when theorists invoke possibilities to salvage some version of the idea that
meanings are extensions.
Perhaps there could have been uni-horned horse-like animals. Maybe there are
such things on some actual planet in a distant galaxy. But if our uses of ‘unicorn’ have
been causally independent of any such creatures, possible or actual, one can’t just
assume that these unicornish things are unicorns as opposed to simulacra. We can
sensibly talk about possible horses that were never actually born—distinguishing
them from horse-like creatures of some other kind—since we can think about things
as animals of the same kind as actual horses. So we can sensibly talk about possible
scenarios in which an animal of that kind (i.e., a horse) is born with a horn, or
surgically altered to make it look like a unicorn. But if there are no actual unicorns
about which we have had some thoughts, then no possible thing is relevantly like
some actual unicorn that we have thought about. So it’s not at all clear that we can
sensibly talk about possible unicorns.
Perhaps many possible worlds include creatures that are born looking unicornish
in some respects. But if these possible creatures are diverse—in terms of their
appearance, history, and constitution—are they all unicorns? If not, what makes
some of them genuine albeit nonactual unicorns? Absent some plausible account of
what would distinguish possible unicorns from mere lookalikes, I doubt that there is
such a distinction. So I don’t think there could have been unicorns, given that there
are none. (I’ll return to the related idea that if a “kind-concept” actually applies to
nothing, then it applies to nothing at every possible world.)
Similarly, I don’t think there are ghosts at any possible world. So in my view,
‘unicorn’ and ‘ghost’ do not have distinct extensions. In which case, these words do
6
Perhaps some lexical items also have complex meanings. Examples may include nouns like ‘bachelor’
and ‘triangle’, along with irregular verbs like ‘brought’ (cp. ‘carried’, whose past tense is expressed with a
morpheme).
. Meanings are not extensions 
not have extensions that are their meanings. Given a domain of things called worlds,
one can model meanings with functions that map each world w onto a set of things
that exist at w, given a specified sense of ‘exist at’. The question, however, is what such
models are models of. There are many ways of representing the fact that ‘unicorn’ and
‘ghost’ have different meanings. For example, we can represent words by pairing their
pronunciations with certain functions, subject to the requirement that words with
different meanings be represented with different functions. This doesn’t tell us what
the meanings are. But if such models invariably associate the pronunciation of
‘unicorn’ with a function that maps each world w onto a set that is either empty or
full of things that are not unicorns—and likewise for ‘ghost’—this suggests that
meanings are not extensions.
Identity claims bolster this suspicion. Woodchucks are groundhogs, members of
the species Marmota monax, a.k.a. whistlepigs. Yet it seems that speakers of English
can connect the pronunciations of ‘woodchuck’ and ‘groundhog’ with different
meanings, just as they can connect the pronunciations of ‘woodchuck’ and ‘rabbit’
with different meanings. Imagine someone who acquires ‘groundhog’ in an encoun-
ter with a small whistlepig (kg, cm), and later acquires ‘woodchuck’ a thousand
miles way, in an encounter with a very large whistlepig (kg, cm). Such a speaker
might well think that woodchucks differ from groundhogs. But it doesn’t follow that
there are possible worlds at which woodchucks are not groundhogs.
A theorist can choose to represent the meanings of ‘woodchuck’ and ‘groundhog’
with functions that map at least one world w onto different sets. But my intuitions
suggest that at least one of these sets will not be the set of woodchucks/groundhogs at
w, even if the members of both sets are furry animals. Theorists can try to argue that
these Kripkean intuitions reflect some error, as opposed to correct judgments
regarding how Slang expressions can be used to describe possibilities. Though absent
reasons for thinking that the intuitions are unreliable, it seems that ‘woodchuck’ and
‘groundhog’ do not have distinct extensions. We can invent languages in which
analogs of these words connect pronunciations with distinct mappings from worlds
to sets, perhaps in ways that reflect different similarity metrics; see Lewis (,
), discussed below. But even if it would be useful to speak such a language for
certain purposes, this doesn’t show that the meanings of ‘woodchuck’ and ‘ground-
hog’ are such mappings.
This point is reinforced by an even humbler Kripke-style example. Suppose that
two dice are thrown. One lands on the left and comes up , as the other lands on
the right and comes up . Some of the people watching introduce ‘Louie’ as a name
for the die on the left; and they use ‘Ralph’ to talk about the other die. Others
introduce ‘Trey’ as a name for the die that came up three; and they use ‘Deuce’ to
talk about the other die. Eventually, there might be consensus that Louie is Deuce,
and that Ralph is Trey. Though at least initially, many of those watching the dice
may not have realized that the one that landed on the left also came up , or that
the one that came up  also landed on the right. So prima facie, ‘Louie’ and ‘Deuce’
have different meanings, as do ‘Ralph’ and ‘Trey’. But this observation about
some words doesn’t make it plausible that there is a possible world at which
Louie isn’t Deuce.
 . Overture
If the dice are fair, then there are worlds at which Louie—the die that actually
landed on the left and came up —landed on the right and came up . But those are
not worlds in which Louie is Ralph. They are worlds in which Louie is Louie, Louie is
Deuce, and Deuce came up . Likewise, I don’t think there are worlds in which the
woodchucks are not the same animals as the groundhogs. The words ‘woodchuck’
and ‘groundhog’ differ in meaning, but not because there are worlds at which the
whistlepigs are distinct from the woodchucks and/or the groundhogs.
I haven’t yet said anything about what possible worlds are. But like Kripke, I take
them to be ways the universe could be, independent of how we think about things; see
also Stalnaker (, ). Given this conception of worlds, as possible configur-
ations of the things surrounding and including us, Louie (a.k.a. Deuce) is such that
there are no worlds at which that die exists yet fails to be Deuce. Though as Kripke
notes, one need not adopt any particular conception of modality or meaning to find
the following generalization plausible: given any entity e and any entity e0 , if e is
identical to e0 , then there is no possible world at which e is distinct from e0 . Given this
generalization, which seems to be a logical truism, there are no worlds at which
Deuce (a.k.a. Louie) is a thing distinct from Louie. And if a proposal about meanings
requires false ancillary assumptions about possible worlds, then we should look for
another proposal.
I readily grant that talking about possibilities can be relevant when discussing
meanings. Kripke noted that certain hypotheses—e.g., that the meaning of a proper
noun like ‘Aristotle’ or ‘Louie’ is the meaning of some associated description—seem
less plausible if we remember that words can be used to describe scenarios that are
not actual. But appealing to non-actual possibilities is an odd way to maintain that
meanings are extensions, as opposed to mental representations of some kind. If the
meaning of a word is not whatever set of things that the word happens to be true of,
why think the meaning is a mapping from each possible world w to whatever set of
things that the word happens to be true of at w? Once we agree that Slang expressions
need not connect pronunciations to actual things, it seems contrived to insist that
these expressions connect pronunciations to possible things. I think that invoking
possible unicorns is contrivance on stilts.
In later chapters, I’ll address the idea that while meanings are not extensions,
knowing what Slang expressions mean is a matter of knowing in a special way what
the expressions are true of. For example, one can hypothesize that understanding
‘woodchuck’ is a matter of (linguistically) perceiving that this expression is true of
an entity e if and only if e is a woodchuck, and that even if a speaker of English
knows that woodchucks are groundhogs, she can understand ‘woodchuck’ without
perceiving that this lexical item is true of an entity e if and only if e is a groundhog.
Similarly, one can say that speakers of English perceive that ‘unicorn’ is true of e if
and only if e is a unicorn, but not that ‘unicorn’ is true of e if and only if e is a
ghost. I think this turns out to be an indirect way of identifying meanings with
concepts like WOODCHUCK, GROUNDHOG, and UNICORN. But others have suggested that
if we posit enough things, then meanings can be identified with extensions after all.
So let me digress, mainly for specialists, to say why I think that positing more
things doesn’t help.
. Meanings are not extensions 
. Metaphysical detour: Outlandish worlds don’t help

People are fallible. So even for those who justifiably believe that Louie was Deuce, it
will seem logically possible that Louie and Deuce are distinct. This can make it
tempting to say that there are possible worlds at which Louie is distinct from Deuce.
More generally, one might embrace the following generalization: if it is logically
possible that P, then there is a possible world at which P. This can make it tempting
to characterize meanings in terms of logical possibilities that can be described as
possible worlds, some of which are worlds at which there are unicorns and wood-
chucks that are not groundhogs. But while logical possibility can be modeled in terms
of things that can be called possible worlds, I don’t think this provides any plausible
defense of the idea that (atomic) meanings are extensions.
Consider our dice. For all I said thus far, it is logically possible that they are ten-
sided. But if Louie is six-sided, I don’t think there is a possible world at which that die
came up . Similarly, the possibility of not knowing that Louie is Deuce doesn’t imply
a world at which Louie isn’t Deuce. Ignorance is a poor basis for drawing conclusions
about how things might have been, just as it is a poor basis for drawing conclusions
about how things are.7
As Frege (b) discussed, logical possibility has something to do with how
things can be presented to rational thinkers. Prima facie, this is why the following
inference is not valid: Louie is Louie; so Louie is Deuce. The invalidity is not evidence
of possible worlds at which the premise is true and the conclusion is false, at least not
if possible worlds are ways things could be independent of how we think about them.
One can use ‘possible world’ to talk about other things—e.g., sets of thought contents
that are consistent and “maximal” in some specified sense. So one can speak of
worlds that include the thought that Louie is a disguised groundhog, and Deuce is a
disguised unicorn. But that is no reason for thinking that such worlds can be mapped
onto nonempty sets of unicorns, ghosts, or groundhogs that are not woodchucks.
Again, it’s important to distinguish theoretical models from the represented phe-
nomena. We can model logical possibility with invented languages whose sentences
include formulae, like ‘=(α, α)’ and ‘=(α, β)’, that can be assigned various interpret-
ations. For example, ‘α’ and ‘β’ might be constants, each of which can be interpreted as
standing for any element of some domain that includes Louie/Deuce and other things.
But suppose that ‘=’ must stand for the relation of identity. Then ‘=(α, α)’ is true on
every permitted interpretation, while ‘=(α, β)’ is true on some of these interpretations
and false on others. So even if ‘α’ and ‘β’ happen to be interpreted as labels for the same
thing, we can say that an inference from ‘=(α, α)’ to ‘=(α, β)’ is invalid because some
interpretations make ‘=(α, α)’ true and ‘=(α, β)’ false. But even if we use ‘possible world’
to talk about possible interpretations for the pronunciations of ‘Louie’ and ‘Deuce’, it
doesn’t follow that there are possible worlds at which Louie isn’t Deuce.
7
Limited knowledge—perhaps expressed with ‘For all I know, Louie might not be Deuce’— can fail to
rule out worlds at which Louie isn’t Deuce, but also fail to rule in such worlds. Relatedly, a priori knowledge
is a not a sure sign of necessity. One can know a priori that Louie landed on the left, even though there are
possible worlds at which Louie landed on the right.
 . Overture
Likewise, if ‘G’ and ‘W’ are predicates, we can say that an inference from ‘Gα’ to
‘Wα’ is invalid, regardless of which interpretations the predicates happen to have.
From this perspective, it doesn’t matter if ‘G’ and ‘W’ are interpreted as analogs of
‘green’ and ‘white’, ‘groundhog’ and ‘woodchuck’, or ‘prime factor of the second
perfect number’ and ‘first or second prime that is not the successor or predecessor of
the fourth positive integer’. Correlatively, the possibility of assigning various inter-
pretations to invented symbols doesn’t show that there are possible worlds at which
the set of groundhogs differs from the set of woodchucks. And we don’t need to posit
such worlds to account for why replacing ‘groundhog’ with ‘woodchuck’ is not
logically valid. Two words can be used to express distinct concepts that turn out to
be extensionally equivalent, even across possible worlds.8
Lewis () offers an alternative that is, in my opinion, spectacularly implausible.
He proposes a radical form of nominalism according to which possible worlds—ways
things could be—are universes that really exist, though not in any region of our
spacetime. According to Lewis, each of these worlds is an isolated totality of things
like us and the things around us. Indeed, each of us has endlessly many “counter-
parts,” each existing in the same way that we do. And while we are causally
disconnected from our simulacra, they determine the truth or falsity of our modal
claims. On this view, Louie could have come up six if and only there is a world at which
a counterpart of Louie came up six. The things we call actual are simply the things in
our universe: we have counterparts who use ‘actual’, with equal right, to talk about the
things in their worlds; and for Lewis, these possible things are as real as actual things.
I find it hard to take this proposal seriously. But I won’t try to rebut Lewis’s reasons for
positing his pluriverse. Here, I just want to note two points. First, if this is the best way
to defend the idea that meanings are extensions, then perhaps we should adopt a
different hypothesis about the place of meanings in nature. Second, I still don’t see why
we should think that any totality of things includes unicorns, woodchucks that are not
groundhogs, or something that is Louie but not Deuce.9
8
For related reasons, I think model-theoretic conceptions of logical possibility are overrated; see
Etchemendy (). We might use ‘G’ and ‘W’ in representing an invalid inference from a premise
about groundhogs to a conclusion about woodchucks. But if the question is why the represented inference
is invalid, it doesn’t matter that we could have used ‘G’ and ‘W’ to represent gophers and wombats. Even if
premises and conclusion are themselves (ideal?) formulae that admit various interpretations, and validity is
a matter of preserving truth relative to every admissible interpretation, the real work would involve
specifying the relevant formulae—and accounting for the range of admissible interpretations, rather
than just stipulating that the interpretations of “logical items” are fixed.
9
The actual situation—in which Louie/Deuce came up  and landed on the left, while Ralph/Trey came
up  and landed on the right—differs from the superficially similar but nonactual situation in which Louie/
Deuce came up  and landed on the right, while Ralph/Trey came up  and landed on the left. If we don’t
enforce this distinction, and count possibilities in terms of surface appearances, we can describe the
possible outcomes (ignoring position) with locutions like “one die came up , and the other die came up
.” But then instead of partitioning the possibilities into  equally likely cells, we’ll be partitioning them
into  cells,  of which are twice as likely as the other . Even if that is coherent, it’s not how we naturally
think about the space of possibility regarding fair six-sided dice. Like Stalnaker (), I think it’s better to
forego Lewis’s nominalism and regard possible worlds as modal properties of the universe: ways the totality
of things could be; where one of these ways is the way the universe actually is.
. Meanings are not extensions 
If there are Lewisian totalities that include creatures that look like we would expect
unicorns to look, those creatures are as irrelevant to our word ‘unicorn’ as any similar
inhabitants of some actual planet in a distant galaxy. The question was whether the
meaning of ‘unicorn’ determines a distinction between unicorns and mere lookalikes,
despite the absence of encountered examples. Positing more lookalikes doesn’t help.
Lewis defends appeal to totalities that include unicorns—groundhogs that are not
woodchucks, Louie but not Deuce, etc.—by combining his outlandish metaphysics
with an implausible conception of how Slang expressions are used to describe
possibilities. The idea is that given a context, ‘unicorn’ (‘groundhog’, etc.) is associ-
ated with a similarity metric that determines a mapping from each world w to a set of
things that count as unicorns (groundhogs, etc.) at w relative to that context. This
allows for variation in what makes something sufficiently unicorny (groundhoggy,
etc.) for the purposes at hand.
We can invent expressions, including ‘Lunicorn’, that work this way. Though we
can also stipulate that ‘Kunicorn’ applies only to things of the same kind as paradig-
matic unicorns, with the consequence that if there are no such paradigms, then
‘Kunicorn’ does not apply to anything in any world. One can say that ‘Lunicorn’ is a
more ideal expression, since the logical possibility of Lunicorns corresponds to
worlds at which there are Lunicorns, and that an ideal language would include ‘L’-
analogs of ‘groundhog’ and ‘woodchuck’. But one can’t also assume that meanings or
extensions are preserved by “translations” from Slangs to ideal languages.
For some purposes, it can be useful to replace instances of ‘it is logically possible
that there is at least one Φ’ with invented sentences of the form ‘◇∃x[Φ(x)]’. Yet
choices remain. If ‘◇’ is glossed as ‘there is a possible world at which’, then ‘◇∃x
[Kunicorn(x)]’ is false, while ‘◇∃x[Lunicorn(x)]’ is true and in this respect like the
thought that unicorns are logically possible. But in other respects, ‘Lunicorn’ is unlike
‘unicorn’ and the concept UNICORN, which seems more like ‘Kunicorn’. There is a
tension between using ‘◇’ to reflect logical possibility, of thoughts we actually
express, and glossing ‘◇’ in terms of possible worlds. Unsurprisingly, no translation
into an alien language will be perfect for all purposes. And the mere logical possibility
of unicorns doesn’t ensure that some things, at home or abroad, are unicorns.
. Polysemy redux

We were, recall, considering an obvious objection to the idea that meanings are
extensions—viz., that expressions with different meanings can have the same exten-
sion. Considering replies can lead to complicated discussions about possible worlds
and how they can be correctly described. But in my view, the net result is that if Slang
expressions have extensions, these extensions are not the meanings that the expres-
sions connect with pronunciations. Moreover, the antecedent of this conditional can
be challenged. And if some expressions have meanings but not extensions—unlike
ideal concepts, which have extensions but not meanings—that’s another reason
for denying that meanings are extensions. So the phenomenon of polysemy is
again relevant.
One can insist that either (i) ‘book’ is a lexical item whose extension includes many
bodies of information as well as the corresponding vehicles, or (ii) the pronunciation
 . Overture
of ‘book’ is homophonous as between two or more words, each with its own
extension. But I think both options are less plausible than saying that ‘book’ can be
used to access more than one concept. And as discussed in section two, the apparent
examples of polysemy are diverse: ‘circle’, ‘line’, ‘window’, ‘country’, ‘France’, several
words with the pronunciation of ‘bear’, etc. So even if some cases are plausibly
diagnosed in terms of homophony or inclusive extensions, this doesn’t motivate
diagnosing every case in one (or both) of these ways. Absent plausible specifications
of the alleged extensions, it seems that meanings tend to be conceptually equivocal,
with the result that Slang expressions are flexible devices that do not have extensions.
In my view, there is nothing special about the meanings of ‘unicorn’ and ‘ghost’.
These words are like ‘book’ and ‘green’ in not having extensions. The concepts BOOK:
VEHICLE and BOOK:INFO apply to actual things, while UNICORN and GHOST do not. But
customers who look for the unicorns in a toy store might find them next to the
dragons; and the guests at a costume party can include some ghosts, unicorns, and
dragons. We have concepts like PRETEND-GHOST that apply to actual things. So my
claim is not that ‘ghost’ and ‘unicorn’ have empty extensions. I think these words
illustrate the general point that words don’t have extensions. If we ignore polysemy,
the relevant point is that there are no ghosts or unicorns. If we don’t ignore polysemy,
the case against identifying meanings with extensions is even stronger.10
In §., I noted that lexical meanings are flexible in ways that go beyond the usual
examples of polysemy. Even if the root noun ‘rabbit–CT’ has an extension that
includes the extensions of both the mass-concept RABBITM and the count-concept
RABBITC, it isn’t clear what the extension of ‘green’ would be, given that the adjective
can combine with nouns like ‘paint’, ‘bottle’, ‘apples’, and ‘fish–CT/fish+CT/fish+PL’.
A related concern, discussed in the chapters below, is that the meaning of a word is
often context sensitive in subtle respects.
Again, the ways in which paint can be green seem different than the ways in which
bottles or apples can be green, as if ‘green’ can be used to access concepts that differ in
content. Moreover, these concepts seem to differ with regard to which aspects of
contexts matter with regard to whether or not the stuff or things count as green. One
can still speculate that ‘green’ has an extension—perhaps a set of ordered pairs <k, s>
such that k is a context, in some technical sense, and s is a set of things that are green
relative to k. But absent a plausible specification of this alleged extension, why think
the meaning of ‘green’ determines any such set? A meaning may provide access to
certain concepts, each of which may be context sensitive in its own way.
10
We can grant that some theorists sometimes use ‘unicorn’ to express the technical concept LUNICORN.
But if ‘unicorn’ can also be used to express the concept KUNICORN, then it seems like contrivance to insist
that the Slang expression has a meaning that maps some contexts onto the extension of LUNICORN and other
contexts onto the extension of KUNICORN. If we assume that words like ‘possibly’ have extensions, then
perhaps we should specify the meanings of such words in terms of a suitably generic notion of world that
allows for special cases corresponding to metaphysical and epistemic modalities; cp. Kratzer (, ).
But in my view, theorists should not posit (things that include) unicorns in order to accommodate
correct uses of ‘Possibly/Perhaps/Maybe unicorns exist’ or ‘There may be unicorns’; and likewise for
squarable circles.
. Meanings are not extensions 
In this respect, the interesting and much discussed word ‘I’ can be a distraction.
Each speaker of a Slang may be a thinker who has concepts of two special types, EGO
and SPEAKER; where the former can be used to think about oneself in a first-personal
way, and the latter can be used to think about the speaker in a given context as such.
Neither of these concepts is the meaning of ‘I’. It is often inappropriate to access an
instance of EGO upon hearing someone else use ‘I’; and prima facie, one can use ‘I’
without thinking of oneself as the speaker. So especially after Kaplan (b, ), it
can be tempting to say that the meaning of ‘I’ is a function that simply maps each
communicative context onto its speaker. One might then conclude that the meaning
of ‘green’ is also the extension of some context-sensitive concept. But we shouldn’t
assume that ‘I’ provides a good model for all species of context sensitivity.
The meaning of ‘I’ may be a relatively permissive instruction that can be executed
by accessing any concept of the relevant user. In contexts where I use ‘I’, such an
instruction might be executable by directly accessing an instance of EGO. In contexts
where an unknown speaker uses ‘I’, the same instruction might be executable by
accessing an instance of SPEAKER. In contexts where my wife Susan uses ‘I’, the same
instruction might be executable by accessing a concept with which I think about her
as that very person (viz., my wife Susan), perhaps via some recognition that she is
speaking. This would be yet another kind of conceptual equivocality, even if the
meaning of ‘I’ is partly specified in terms of a concept like SPEAKER. This isn’t yet an
argument that the meaning of ‘I’ is an instruction as opposed to an extension. But
reflection on ‘I’ hardly shows that all conceptual equivocality can be plausibly
diagnosed in terms of the hypothesis that meanings are extensions.
More generally, given that a single meaning can correspond to several concepts, it
can be tempting to think that meanings are somehow less removed from the mind-
independent things that we think and talk about. But we shouldn’t conclude that
meanings are extensions of concepts. There is another diagnosis of conceptual
equivocality. In my view, meanings are doubly removed from the external world:
we use meanings to access and assemble concepts that let us think about things in
certain ways; and a lexical meaning can connect its pronunciation with a family of
polysemously related concepts. Putnam () suggested that meanings provide a
“coarse grid over use.” I like the grid metaphor. Though it might be better to say
that meanings provide coarse grids over human concepts, and that uses of Slang
expressions depend on these expressions having meanings that can be used to build
concepts that can be used in many ways.
. Communication without extensional equivalence

I deny that Slang expressions have extensions. Nonetheless, these expressions are
often used in episodes of successful communication. So like Strawson () and
many others, I deny that successful communication requires expressions that have
extensions. In §., I’ll address Putnam’s () influential and apparently contrary
claims about the meaning of ‘water’. But first, let me stress that communicative
success comes in degrees.
If you don’t know which meaning a speaker of English is expressing with the
pronunciation of ‘pen’, you might not know whether she is talking about writing
 . Overture
implements or animal enclosures. And speakers who use this pronunciation to

express different meanings, in a single conversation, might mistakenly think that
they disagreed (or agreed) about the cost of something. But speakers can also use one
of the meanings to formulate a point of substantive disagreement (or agreement)
regarding a certain writing implement, as if that meaning connects its pronunciation
with certain objects that are not animal enclosures. Similarly, the meaning of ‘star’ can
be used to formulate tendentious hypotheses about the nature of certain celestial points
of light—as if that meaning somehow embraces the stars, whatever they turn out to be.
Such examples can make it seem that meanings at least determine extensions.11
On the other hand, speakers can connect the pronunciation of ‘pen’ to the same
meaning without determining a set of pens that they are talking about. If each
speaker uses a polysemous word that lets her access a concept of writing implements,
as opposed to animal enclosures, they resolve the homophony the same way and
thereby avoid blatant miscommunication. In this sense, they connect a common
pronunciation with a common meaning. But it doesn’t follow that any speaker used a
word that has an extension, much less a word that can be modified by ‘green’ to form
a phrase that has a certain set of green writing implements as its extension.
As Travis (, ) discusses, speakers can agree about what ‘green pen’ means,
yet not be in sync with regard to what they would count as a green pen. Likewise, they
might have different standards for what counts as expensive, or at least expensive for
a green pen. So even if speakers connect the pronunciation of ‘the green pen was
expensive’ to the same sentential meaning, they need not connect this pronunciation
with a meaning that determines an extension—e.g., a truth value, or a set of situations
in which the sentence would be true—much less an extension that could be deter-
mined by an impartial referee who knew the relevant facts.
Perhaps variation in standards is another kind of conceptual equivocation. But in
any case, speakers can agree about what expressions mean, yet fall short of a certain
ideal for communication. For some purposes, it might be nice to describe an entity
and a set of green pens—resolving any uncertainty about which entity and which set
we are talking about—and then have a debate about whether or not the entity is an
element of the set. For many other purposes, this would be horrifically tedious.
Though whatever the merits of creating situations in which linguistic expressions
are used in ways that approximate extensional equivalence, creating such situations
takes work. To achieve this kind of communicative precision, conversational partners
need to do more than just agree about which pronunciations go with which meanings.
Given that humans can use a single pronunciation to access different concepts,
there is always some risk of speakers “talking past each other.” Resolving homo-
phonies helps. But one person might use ‘book’ in saying that the content of a certain
tome is interesting, while someone else uses ‘book’ to say (in a disagreeing way) that
the tome is boring. Even if such disputes are not substantive, they need not be verbal
11
This leaves room for views like Putnam’s, according to which at least some meanings are multi-
dimensional entities that comprise extensions and other things, like pointers to paradigm cases. Or perhaps
competent speakers are expected to know, or at least assume that many other speakers will assume, certain
bits of “common sense;” see, e.g., Higginbotham ().
. Meanings are not extensions 
as opposed to conceptual. Meanings provide a framework for a kind of communi-

cation that is distinctively human and enormously valuable. But meanings are not
prophylactics against miscommunication. Even in the absence of any special compli-
cations, connecting pronunciations with the same extensions seems like a quixotic task,
or at least much harder than connecting pronunciations with the same meanings.
However, one might think that substantive disagreements about the things or stuff
that we can talk about—e.g., disagreements about the nature of rabbits, stars, or
water—tell in favor of the idea that meanings determine extensions. A concept of
rabbits can be used to form, and perhaps endorse, eccentric thoughts that can be
expressed with the word ‘rabbit’. We can entertain the thought that rabbits are robots
from Mars; that they are ideas in the mind of God; that stars are luminous rabbits, set
in the heavens to honor their deeds; or that rabbits are stars sent down from the
heavens to scare horses. Similarly, people who know what ‘star’ means can have
different views about what things like Polaris and Sirius are: holes in the canopy; fires
attached to the celestial sphere; effects of nuclear fusion; etc. We describe the sun as a
star, and not as a planet, though for many humans, this description would have
seemed bizarre, since the sun is among the “wanderers” whose position in the sky is
not fixed relative to the background stars. But if speakers can use ‘star’ to advance
very different hypotheses about the same things, this does suggest that speakers can
connect ‘star’ with distinct concepts that are extensionally equivalent.
If a child can acquire an instance of STAR, then an educated speaker may have
acquired an instance of a more scientific type, STAR*, and learned that every star is a
star*. (Perhaps this is how one learns what stars are.) It doesn’t follow that every
star* is a star. But even if STAR has the same extension as STAR*, and a child acquires
‘star’ by connecting its pronunciation with an instance of STAR, the acquired word
might become polysemous—as the child acquires a concept of the gold stars that
indicate praise for homework, a concept of the stars awarded by a critic to a star-
studded movie, and (eventually) a scientific concept of things like Polaris and Sirius.
Moreover, if we focus on the shared extension of STAR/STAR* and ignore the other
concepts, then I think ‘star’ is an unusual case from which we should not generalize.
It’s worth being explicit about this, since there is an important point about concepts in
the vicinity, with implications for the study of Slangs and meanings. To advertise: we
can use ‘star’ to express a concept that applies to celestial objects of a certain kind,
which competent speakers (theorists included) may misdescribe; but we can also use
‘meaning’ to express a concept that applies to interpretations of a certain kind, which
competent speakers (theorists included) may misdescribe.
We can discover that the sun is a star as opposed to a planet, and that meanings
are polysemous instructions for how to access and assemble concepts, as opposed to
concepts or extensions.
. Meanings, natural kinds, and hard water

When a child perceives things like Polaris and Sirius, and hears them described as
stars, she may acquire a count-concept that is also a kind-concept in the following
sense: the concept applies to (and only to) things that are similar, along some
dimension, to the initial examples; the relevant dimension of similarity is determined
 . Overture
by the nature of the paradigms, as opposed to any associated appearances or

descriptions; and so the acquired concept applies to the sun, along with the light
sources responsible for the Milky Way, but not to quasars. The familiar idea is that a
kind-concept of stars is a concept with which we think about stars as things that share
a common nature, regardless of how much one knows about stars. We can discover
this nature empirically. But substantive conceptions of stars can also be wildly
incorrect. And it’s easy to misapply a kind-concept of stars, since some non-stars
seem more starry than many visible stars.
Spelling out the details is hard, though not my job. My claim is that even if words
like ‘star’ are initially paired with kind-concepts that have extensions, meanings don’t
determine extensions. Again, kind-concepts do not preclude polysemy. But even
ignoring gold stars and movie stars, a scientific concept that an adult can express with
‘star’ may have a somewhat different extension than a kind-concept that a child
naturally acquires. As an analogy, consider the various concepts that have been
proposed as scientific correlates of the ordinary word ‘planet’; some but not all of
these concepts exclude Pluto.12 Still, let’s suppose/pretend that there is an ordinary
concept STAR:KIND whose extension is shared by any concept that can be accessed with
‘star’. Then ‘star’ is not a counterexample to the claim that meanings at least
determine extensions. But the question is whether the general claim is plausible.
And in this context, it is impossible to avoid discussion of ‘water’, given Putnam’s
() thought experiment involving Twin Earth.
My own view is that Putnam misapplied the moral of his example. I think ‘water’ is
a complicated case that tells against the idea that words have extensions; see Pietroski
(a). I won’t rehearse the full argument here. But since Putman’s claims have been
influential, I do want to stress—following Chomsky (b, b)—that we use
‘water’ in many ways, and that focusing on natural kind uses does not make it
plausible that the word has an extension.
Putnam asked us to imagine a planet like Earth except that in place of HO, Twin
Earth has a chemically distinct substance, XYZ, that is superficially similar and
equally potable. He then invited us to share his judgment that the watery stuff on
Twin Earth is not water, infer that the extension of ‘water’ is limited to samples of
HO, and then generalize to broader claims—e.g., that meanings “ain’t in the head”
no matter how you “cut the pie.” But let’s slow down. I grant that ‘water’ can be used
to access a kind-concept that applies to, and only to, samples of HO; where some
stuff can count as HO, despite trace impurities. In which case, ‘water’ can be used to
access a concept—an instance of the type WATER:KIND—that does not apply to samples
of XYZ (a.k.a. twin-water). Let’s also grant that in this sense, many conceptual
contents are individuated externalistically; cp. Burge (, ). Nothing yet
follows about the individuation of word meanings, if only because a word can be
used to access more than one concept.
12
Infants may assume that many things have essences; see, e.g., Keil (). But a child-acquirable
concept of woodchucks may not have the same extension as the corresponding biological concept
MARMOTA-MONAX.
. Meanings are not extensions 
We can speak of polluted water, salty water, hard water, etc. In some places, water
from taps can lead to health threats that are not due to trace impurities. This already
suggests that ‘water’ and WATER:KIND are relevantly different. A little investigation
bolsters the point. I happen to have a well in an area where the ground water has a
high mineral content. Experts at “National Testing Laboratories, Ltd.” analyzed a
sample of the stuff that comes from my well, and according to their “Quality Water
Analysis,” that stuff is about . percent HO. These experts reported that the water
from my well is very hard. (Six parts per thousand is a lot.) But ocean water of
average salinity is only about . percent HO. The water contents of some other
familiar substances are also listed below, data from the United States Department of
Agriculture; where for these purposes, water does indeed contain only trace impur-
ities beyond HO.13
Club Soda .
Diet soda, not cola .
Tea .
Diet Cola .
stuff from my well .
Coffee .
Espresso .
ocean water, avg. salinity .
Michelob Ultra .
Bud Light .
Distilled vinegar .
Diet Coke has a higher percentage of HO than my well water, which has the
granularity of coffee. So if the stuff from my well counts as HO, why doesn’t Diet
Coke count as water? Tea is even closer to pure HO. An espresso has a higher
percentage of HO than typical samples of ocean water. Distilled vinegar and Bud
Light are much closer to ocean water—by an HO modulo impurities test—than
ocean water is to HO. Perhaps some impurities are especially polluting; though see
Malt () for a study of actual judgments by ordinary speakers. And why ignore
the fluoride in tap water, yet stress the neither-hydrogen-nor-oxygen components of
clear diet soda?
I note these facts in part because of Chomsky’s (b) illuminating example.
Suppose cup- is filled from the tap. It is a cup of water, but if a tea bag is dipped into it, that is
no longer the case. It is now a cup of tea, something different. Suppose cup- is filled from a tap
connected to a reservoir in which tea has been dumped (say, as a new kind of purifier). What is
in cup- is water, not tea, even if a chemist could not distinguish it from the present contents of
cup-. . . . In cup-, the tea is an “impurity” in Putnam’s sense, in cup-, it is not, and we do not
have water at all (except in the sense that milk is mostly water, or a person for that matter). If
cup- contains pure HO into which a tea bag has been dipped, it is tea, not water, though it
13
See https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/nutrients.
 . Overture
could have a higher concentration of HO molecules than what comes from the tap or is drawn
from a river (pp. –).
As Chomsky observed, there are ordinary uses of ‘water’ such that what counts as
water in this human sense is a complicated matter having to do with sources and
intended purposes. We can also use ‘water’ to talk about the stuff itself, and the
common nature—given that there is one—exhibited by samples of pure water.
Borrowing an Aristotelian distinction, Chomsky notes that we often think about
aspects of reality in terms of function as well as form. Putting the point in terms of
conceptual contents, we might say that instances of WATER:FUNCTION let us think about
some stuff as water in a familiar human sense—viz., a sense in which the stuff in
Chomsky’s cup- and the stuff from my well is water, while the stuff in his cup- and
Diet Coke is not. By contrast, instances of WATER:KIND let us think about some stuff as
water in another familiar sense that Putnam highlighted.
This provides a simple diagnosis for why the following argument is obviously
invalid: water is HO; the water from my well has a high mineral content; so the HO
from my well has a high mineral content. In my view, the following argument is also
invalid: water is HO; so ‘water’ is true of an entity e if and only if e is a sample of
HO. The premise is about water, while the conclusion is about a word. If the word is
polysemous, then the premise is true only if the polysemy is resolved in favor of
scientific usage. So even if the conclusion is true when restricted to scientific usage, it
is a fallacy to drop the restriction and conclude that however the polysemy is
resolved, ‘water’ is true of all and only samples of HO.14
In short, I think ‘water’ is yet another example of a conceptually equivocal word
whose meaning does not determine an extension. And if ‘water’ can be used to access
an instance of WATER:FUNCTION, I see no reason to insist that the watery stuff on Twin
Earth cannot be described as water. For what it’s worth, my own intuition is that
people on Twin Earth can quite literally water their lawns and take a drink of water
from a garden hose. But context matters. In situations where chemistry is important,
uses of ‘water’ are more likely to access instances of WATER:KIND; and Putnam’s
thought experiment explicitly makes chemical composition relevant. Chomsky’s
thought experiment reminds us that ‘water’ has other uses. I also see no reason to
insist that when children acquire ‘water’, they connect this word with an instance of
WATER:KIND as opposed to an instance of WATER:FUNCTION. So I don’t think ‘water’
14
Putnam initially says that whatever meanings are, they are not “in the head” and also things that
determine extensions. (Chomsky agrees, as do I.) But Putnam then slides into assuming that meanings
determine extensions. He concedes that talk of words having extensions is a “very severe” idealization
(p. ). Yet he goes on to say that two familiar “assumptions” are “not jointly satisfied by any notion, let
alone any notion of meaning” (pp.–): (i) “knowing the meaning of a term is just a matter of being in a
psychological state;” and (ii) the meaning of a term determines its extension. Putnam says that (i) is to be
understood in terms of methodological solipsism: no psychological state “presupposes the existence of any
individual other than the subject to whom that state is described.” He then takes (ii) as a premise to argue
against (i). Yet he concludes (p. ), “The traditional problem of meaning splits into two problems. The
first is to account for the determination of extension. Since, in many cases, extension is determined socially
and not individually, owing to the division of linguistic labor, I believe this problem is properly a problem
for socio-linguistics.” But why think ‘water’ has an extension, much less one that is determined socially?
. Meanings are not extensions 
lends support to the idea that ‘star’ provides a paradigmatic example of how word
meanings are related to kind-concepts.
In the big scheme of things, stars are remarkably uniform. Animals of the same
species are also quite similar. Though even with regard to ‘dog’, it is far from obvious
that the biological facts determine a set of animals that corresponds to correct
application of the word. It’s hard to distinguish dogs, wolves, and coyotes in terms
of their biology. But I think we have a concept of dogs that excludes coyotes yet
allows for tame wolf-crosses. We may also use ‘dog’ to access a kind-concept whose
extension is determined by the relevant biological facts, whatever they are, making it
reasonable to defer to biologists about which animals this concept applies to. Though
if we have such a concept, then prima facie, the meaning of ‘dog’ is conceptually
equivocal in a way that tells against the idea that ‘dog’ has an extension. And if we
remember that things may be less uniform than some philosophers would like,
further thought experiments come to mind.
Suppose that on Fraternal-Earth, dopplegangers of our scientists discover—to
their great surprise—that all the stuff they call ‘mud’ has the same chemical structure.
Those scientists could acquire a corresponding kind-concept and use their word
‘mud’ to express it. Other speakers might defer to these experts. There is, in effect, a
Platonic form of Frat-mud, all of which would count as Earth-mud. But why think
the Frat-Earth scientists, who grew up as our children do, couldn’t use their word
‘mud’ to talk about our diverse samples of mud? Why think their word has a
restrictive meaning just because their mud is especially uniform? Prima facie, the
Frat-Earth scientists supplement their ordinary concepts with a new kind-concept.
Similarly, in my view, we can have a kind-concept of water that is not the only
concept we can access with ‘water’.15 I have dwelled on this point for two reasons:
First, Putnam () has been so influential that it can be hard to a get a hearing for
internalist conceptions of meaning; cp. McGilvray (), Stainton (). Second,
while Putnam rightly highlighted the importance of “natural kind uses” of words,
he ignored the possibility that ‘meaning’ can be used to access a kind-concept of
the interpretations—whatever they are—that Slangs connect with pronunciations.
We have to figure out what these meanings are and how they related to other things
like concepts, extensions, and truth. And theorists must be prepared to discover
that Slangs connect pronunciations with interpretations that do not determine
extensions.
15
Kripke’s () points apply, in my view, to certain concepts rather than nouns; cp. Evans ().
This allows for the logical possibility that stars are, like pieces of jade, varied examples of more than one
kind of stuff. Likewise, it is logically possible that most rabbit is textured soybean, and that some rabbit is
made from cotton; cp. note  above. Nebulae actually turned out to be things of diverse sorts. But after the
discovery of galaxies, astronomers refined at least one concept of nebulae in a way that excludes things like
the so-called Great Nebula in Andromeda. Prima facie, the meanings of ‘star’ and ‘planet’ do not differ in
kind. But given the history of how ‘planet’ has been used, and how Pluto has been classified, it seems
plausible that ‘planet’ can be connected with distinct conceptual contents (even for a speaker who knows
the relevant facts). And prior to astronomers developing the current technical concept of a planet, it’s not
obvious that they were using extensionally equivalent concepts.
 . Overture
Speakers of English are free to use ‘meaning’ as a word for talking about things
that determine extensions. But like most words, ‘meaning’ is polysemous. So in the
spirit of Putnam’s observation that theoretical disagreements can run deep, we
should ask if there is a natural phenomenon that we can think about with a kind-
concept of meaning—i.e., a concept that lets us think about some things that we call
meanings, and think about them in a theoretically neutral way that lets us offer
hypotheses about what these meanings are. And there is indeed a natural phenom-
enon of humans acquiring distinctive languages that connect meanings with pro-
nunciations in specific ways. In the next chapter, I’ll discuss some relevant facts that
can help us zone in on the meanings in question. But while the details cannot be
known in advance, we should have suspected all along that inquiry is required to
reveal the nature of stars, water, and meanings.
. Meanings as modest Begriffsplans

In thinking about what meanings are, one important question is whether meanings
compose. I think they do. If two Slang expressions are combined to form a third, then
in my view, the meaning of the third expression has parts that include the meanings
of the first two. As discussed in chapter one, this is controversial, in part because
many theorists take meanings to be more like sets than concepts. The set {x: x is a red
dot} does not have parts that include {x: x is a dot} or {x: x is red}. But a typical
concept of red dots is presumably complex, perhaps of the type +(RED, DOT); where ‘+’
signifies some concept that can combine with two others, of the right sort, and
thereby form a conjunctive concept that has three constituents. I think the meaning
of ‘red dot’ is likewise an instruction that includes the meanings of ‘red’ and ‘dot’.
If phrasal meanings have lexical meanings as constituents, then the relevant
combinatorial operations are unlike set-theoretic intersection, and more like oper-
ations of concatenating symbols or connecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; see, e.g.,
Frege (a). This highlights a series of questions about the typology of meanings
and any corresponding concepts: how many types of meaning are there; what are the
atomic and non-atomic types; what kinds of concepts can be accessed via atomic
meanings and built via non-atomic meanings? In later chapters, I argue for a spare
typology according to which all non-atomic meanings are instructions for how to
assemble concepts that are conjunctive and monadic—i.e., predicative as opposed to
relational—while atomic meanings are instructions for how to access concepts that
are monadic or dyadic. In this section, I advertise some of the details, mainly for
specialists.
. Instructions that compose

An instruction for how to build something can be complex in ways that mirror the
complexity of things built by executing the instruction. Many recipes—e.g., for how
to make dough—do not have this property. But imagine a series of numbered boxes
and the following instruction: get something from box ; get something from box ;
link them both to a connector from box . Carrying out this tripartite instruction will
yield a tripartite object. Though depending on the contents of the boxes, following
. Meanings as modest Begriffsplans 
the instruction twice might yield very different products; and depending on the
available connectors, choices from boxes  and  may have to be made judiciously
in order link them. Indeed, there is no guarantee that the instruction can be executed,
given the materials at hand. But the instruction exhibits a kind of structure that is
reflected in any objects that are created in the specified way. I think meanings are
instructions of this sort.
Let ‘μ(Σ)’ stand for the meaning of expression Σ. To a first approximation, I think
that μ(‘red dot’) is the tripartite instruction Join[μ(‘red’), μ(‘dot’)]; where any instance
of the general form dJoin[μ, μ]e is an instruction for how to build a concept by
conjoining the results of executing the subinstructions, μ and μ. On this view,
executing μ(‘red dot’) can be a way of building an instance of +(RED, DOT) and thereby
building a concept of red dots.
The idea that expressions can pair signals with directions for use, or instructions
for how to build representations of some kind, is far from new; see, e.g., Strawson
(), Hobbs (), Espinal (), Cann et al. (). Programming languages
provide obvious examples. As discussed in chapter three, I draw more heavily on
Frege (, , ). But since I don’t borrow the aspects of his work that
semanticists have tended to adopt, a preview may be useful.
Frege held that each sentence of his Begriffsschrift, an invented “Concept Script,”
mirrors the logical structure of the thought that the sentence expresses. This thought,
a potential premise/conclusion, is said to be the sense of the sentence. The sense of a
sentence is composed of senses expressed by constituents of the sentence. Each sense
presents a corresponding denotation, which may be a truth value, or an entity in
some specified domain, or a function.16 Frege argued that thoughts exhibit a kind of
function-argument structure, as opposed to classical subject-predicate structure. But
typically, the value of a function given an argument isn’t composed of the function
and the argument. So while senses compose, denotations don’t.
Frege also maintained that each denotation is presented by many senses, making it
possible to formulate informative identity claims like ‘=(h, p)’; where ‘h’ and ‘p’ are
symbols that present a certain celestial object as, respectively, the Evening Star and
the Morning Star (a.k.a. Hesperus and Phosphorus). In ideal cases, each user of the
Begriffsschrift links each atomic expression to the same sense, thereby associating
each sentence with the same thought. In practice, however, different users may think
about the same denotation in different ways.
Two people might both use ‘v’ as a label for Venus, but link ‘v’ to different senses,
perhaps because they use different concepts to think about Venus. Or they might
represent the relation of identity in different ways. So they might agree that ‘=(h, v)’ is
true, and that it implies ‘Planet(h) Planet(v)’, yet not associate ‘=(h, v)’ with the
same thought. One can insist that such people are using different languages, or that at
least one of them is using a shared language incorrectly. But thinkers could use
Fregean expressions as instructions for how to build mental representations of
16
The words ‘thought’ and ‘sense’ are polysemous. Fregean thoughts (Gedanken) are idealized pro-
positions, not mental representations; and he took senses (Sinnen) to be publicly available ways of
presenting denotable things (Bedeutungen).
 . Overture
denotations, while allowing for some variation in the representations that get built,
given agreement about which Begriffsschrift sentences are true and which arguments
are valid. And one can imagine further departures from the Fregean ideal.
In particular, a language might allow for atomic expressions that are denotation-
ally equivocal in certain limited ways, with the result that two uses of a complex
expression (to construct a mental representation) may not present the same denota-
tion. A sentence of such a language might be used twice to construct two thoughts
that do not have the same truth value. But complex expressions of the language
could still be viewed as “Begriffsplans” that provide instructions for how to build
mental representations from a stock of atomic elements. For some purposes, a
pseudo-Fregean language of this sort might provide a useful model for Slangs,
whose expressions are often polysemous. But in my view, there is a deeper respect
in which Begriffsschrift expressions reflect ideal thoughts as opposed to Slang
expressions.
As discussed in chapter three, complex expressions of Frege’s invented language
can be generated by combining simpler expressions, or by abstracting a constituent
from a complex expression. Moreover the relevant form of abstraction is permissive
in a way that makes it possible to generate expressions of boundlessly many types. At
the risk of overburdening an introduction, I want to briefly discuss this somewhat
technical but important point, which will figure prominently in my argument that
composition of meanings is restricted far more severely.
Given the Fregean sentence ‘Planet(v)’, abstraction on ‘v’ yields ‘Planet(_)’, with
the blank indicating a gap that corresponds to expressions of the same type as ‘v’.
Given the same sentence, abstraction on ‘Planet’ yields ‘__(v)’, with the longer blank
indicating a gap that corresponds to expressions of the same type as ‘Planet’. So if
‘Planet(v)’ is an instance of the truth-evaluable type <t>, and ‘v’ is an instance of the
entity-denoting type <e>, then ‘Planet’ can be described as an instance of the abstract
type <e, t>. In terms of Frege’s favored metaphor, saturating ‘Planet(_)’ with an
entity-denoter yields a truth-evaluable sentence. Instances of type <e, t> correspond
to functions from entities to truth values—e.g., the smallest function that maps each
entity in a given domain to truth or falsity, depending on whether or not that entity is
a planet. So the abstracted expression ‘__(v)’ can be described as an instance of a
“higher” type <<e, t>, t> that corresponds to functions from <e, t>-functions to truth
values. Instances of such types can also be introduced. For example, we can stipulate
that ‘∃[__]’ indicates a function that maps each <e, t>-function to truth or falsity
depending on whether or not that <e, t>-function maps something to truth. Then the
Fregean sentence ‘∃[Planet(_)]’, in which ‘Planet(_)’ saturates ‘∃[__]’, is true if and
only if something is a planet.
More generally, given expressions of any types <α> and <β>, Frege’s Begriffsschrift
allows for expressions of the type <α, β>. So given expressions of types <e> and <t>,
there are expressions of boundlessly many types. Indeed, as we’ll see, expressions that
exhibit millions of types can be easily generated with just a few rounds of recursion.
Contemporary semanticists often describe Slangs as Fregean in this respect. By
contrast, I follow Frege in thinking that he needed to invent a language whose
expressions exhibit this kind of interpretive typology.
. Meanings as modest Begriffsplans 
This point is interwoven with Frege’s work on the logical foundations of arith-
metic. Given classical conceptions of grammar and logic, as developed by Aristotle
and the medieval logicians, proofs by arithmetic induction seem different in kind
from valid syllogisms. As Kant discussed, the a priori character of classical logic was
rooted in the “analytic” idea of a predicate “containing” a subject, while the a priori
character of geometry and arithmetic seemed to have some other “synthetic” basis;
see Friedman () for helpful discussion. Frege responded by offering a broader
conception of logic along with an invented language that let him represent proofs by
induction as instances of valid inference forms, while also representing the “axioms”
of arithmetic as reducible claims that are not logically independent.17
Frege assumed that sentences of languages like German (English, Greek, etc.)
exhibit subject-predicate structure, as opposed to the function-argument structure of
ideal thoughts. Though he also held that we somehow use ordinary sentences to
indicate thoughts. The idea was that a thought content can be “dimly grasped,” in
some natural way, and then re-presented in a more logically perspicuous format that
highlights inferential relations to other contents—many of which we might entertain
only via the new formal notation. But this raises further questions. How can we use
ordinary sentences to even gesture at thoughts that are mirrored by Begriffsschrift
sentences? And if Slang expressions have their own meanings, how are the meanings
of complex expressions related to the meanings of words? In particular, if phrases like
‘chased every rabbit’ and ‘precedes every positive integer’ are predicates that can
combine with subjects to form sentences, then one wants to know how the meanings
of such phrases are compositionally determined. As discussed in later chapters,
the answer may require a conception of grammar according to which Slangs are
not sources of subject-predicate structure; cp. Chomsky (). But that raises the
question of why appeals to such structure seem natural.
I think we can make progress by viewing meanings as “modest Begriffsplans” that
diverge from the Fregean ideal in two respects. First, a Slang expression is an
instruction for how to build a concept, but not any particular concept (or even a
concept that has a certain extension). Second, meanings exhibit very few types—
perhaps just two—with the most important type being predicative. The idea will be
that predicates play a central role in the systems of judgment that interface with
Slangs, which let humans employ evolutionarily ancient cognitive capacities in new
ways. I assume that many animals can form Subject-Predicate thoughts, which can be
viewed as sentences generated by internalized procedures that are often called mental
languages. But these old procedures may provide only limited ways of building
17
Frege’s language was designed to represent higher-order relations, like the “transitive closure”
relation exhibited by the relations indicated with ‘is an ancestor of ’ and ‘is a parent of ’. Even given relative
clauses like ‘who begat Seth’ and ‘who Adam begat’, English does not let us abstract on ‘begat’ to form a
clause (e.g., ‘which Adam Seth’) that would apply to each relation that Adam bears to Seth. Similarly, even if
‘ancestor’ and ‘parent’ are analogs of ‘AncestorOf(_, _)’ and ‘ParentOf(_, _)’—expressions of type <e, <e, t>>—
we cannot introduce a verb of type <<e, <e, t>>, <<e, <e, t>>, t> and use ‘Ancestor transits parent’ to mean
‘TransitiveClosureOf[AncestorOf(_, _), ParentOf(_, _)]’. I’ll say that again, more slowly, in chapter three.
 . Overture
complex predicates, while Slangs let humans build boundlessly many predicates that
are systematically combinable.
As we’ll see, this proposal draws heavily on Frege’s idea that a language can be
used to re-present conceptual contents that were initially presented in a different
format. Frege did not invent his Begriffsschrift merely as a tool for connecting certain
interpretations with public signifiers. He used the invented notation to introduce
symbols that exhibited a distinctive representational format that was useful for
certain computational purposes; see Horty (). But while Frege wanted logically
perspicuous representations, and so invented a language designed to be unlike Slangs
in important respects, I’ll argue that Slangs let us build mental representations whose
format is logically boring though useful in other respects.
. A monadic basis

In my view, Aristotle and the medieval logicians were right to think that predicates
play a central role in thought, its linguistic expression, and our natural sense of valid
inference. I’ll say more about the relevant notion of predication in the next chapter.
But intuitively, a predicate classifies things, into those that meet a certain condition
(e.g., being a rabbit) and those that do not. Anything that meets the condition
satisfies the predicate, which applies to anything that meets the condition. We can
invent perceptible predicates. Though for now, let’s focus on predicative concepts,
like instances of RABBIT. I assume that many animals have such mental predicates.
Given some things to think about, a predicate may apply to each of those things, or
to nothing. But these are just special cases of classifying. Likewise, even if a predicate
applies to exactly one thing, it differs from any denoting (or “singular”) concept with
which one can think about that thing as a particular individual. A predicate also
differs from any concept, like an instance of ABOVE, with which one can think about
some things as exhibiting a certain relation. But there are at least two ways to blur the
distinction between predicates and relational concepts.
One can say that all such concepts classify: monadic predicates classify individual
things; dyadic/triadic/n-adic predicates classify ordered pairs/triples/n-tuples of
things. Alternatively, one might describe a monadic predicate M as expressing a
certain dyadic relation that entities can bear to truth values—i.e., a relation that each
entity e bears to truth or falsity depending on whether or not M applies to e. Likewise,
one might describe a dyadic predicate D as expressing a certain triadic relation that
pairs of things can bear to truth values, etc. In Frege’s Begriffsschrift, all unsaturated
expressions are relational in this sense. But even if logically ideal predication is
relational as opposed to classificatory, there seems to be a psychological distinction
between relational and classificatory concepts, even if we speak of monadic/dyadic/n-
adic predicates.18
18
If an instance of BETWEEN is a predicate that applies to ordered triples <x, y, z> such that x is between y
and z, and an instance of ABOVE is a predicate that applies to ordered pairs <x, y> such that x is above y, then
non-monadic predicates must be distinguished from predicates that are collectively (but not distributively)
plural in another sense of applying to some things without applying to any one of them. Consider FORMED-
A-TRIO, instances of which might apply (collectively) to three people—perhaps identical triplets—one of
. Meanings as modest Begriffsplans 
I assume that unboundedly many Slang expressions correspond to monadic

predicates. Here, I am not just thinking about phrases like ‘red dot’. A noun can
also combine with a relative clause—as in ‘doctor who saw a lawyer’, or ‘lawyers who
a doctor saw’—to form a phrase that corresponds to a conjunction of predicates.
Such combination is often described in neo-Fregean terms, by saying that (subject to
grammatical restrictions) two expressions of type <e, t> can be combined to form a
third; where things of type <e> can be plural entities (e.g., sets of lawyers) or events
(e.g., episodes of seeing a lawyer). This invites the hypothesis that words like ‘dot’ and
‘doctor’, along with relative clauses, are used to access Fregean concepts that relate
entities to truth values. But I suspect that the accessed concepts are genuinely
monadic, and that the corresponding Slang expressions are instances of a basic
type <M>. These expressions have meanings that are instructions for how to access
or build mental predicates, which classify things.
Slangs provide several ways of creating complex expressions of type <M>. But one
way is to simply (ad)join two expressions of type <M>. Suppose that Σ and Σ0 are
such expressions, with meanings μ(Σ) and μ(Σ0 ). Then Σ^Σ0 —the result of combin-
ing Σ and Σ0 —is an expression of type <M> whose meaning, μ(Σ^Σ0 ), is an instruc-
tion for how to build a monadic concept by conjoining two concepts obtained by
executing μ(Σ) and μ(Σ0 ). If the meaning of ‘doctor’ is used to fetch a monadic
concept, and the meaning of ‘who saw a lawyer’ is used to build a complex concept of
the same type, then the meaning of ‘doctor who saw a lawyer’ can be described as an
instruction to execute the constituent instructions and conjoin the results.
Many conjunctive operations are conceivable. For example, we have grown accus-
tomed to an ampersand that can connect an open sentence that has two unbound
variables with an open sentence that has three unbound variables to form an open
sentence that has four unbound variables, as in ‘Sxy & Byzw’. In my view, combining
meanings of type <M> invokes a simpler operation that is limited to monadic
concepts: given two such concepts, joining them creates a third that applies to an
entity e if and only if each of the two constituent concepts applies to e. This operation
has set-theoretic and truth-theoretic analogs.19 But I posit “M-junction” as an
operation that applies to certain mental representations, not the represented things.
And because this operation is limited to predicates, applying it does not require
variables or any other mechanism for establishing which saturatable position is
linked to which; see chapter three.
Relative clauses offer another way of constructing predicates. The meaning of ‘who
a doctor saw’ seems to be a result of performing some operation on a sentential
meaning like that of ‘a doctor saw her/him/them’. This makes it tempting to say that
expressions of type <t> can be converted into expressions of type <e, t>. But this neo-
Fregean hypothesis about Slangs goes far beyond the mere claim that there are truth-
evaluable thoughts and entity-denoting concepts. It describes relative clauses as
whom is between the other two. But let’s delay discussion of this complication and the question of how
triplets can form a trio that does not form triplets.
19
Higginbotham () spoke in terms of modification and identifying saturable/bindable positions.
Heim and Kratzer () say that one expression of type <e, t> can restrict or modify another.
 . Overture
expressions of a non-basic type, characterized in terms of abstracting entity-denoters

from sentences, which are described as expressions of a basic type that is character-
ized in terms of truth. I will defend an alternative view, according to which sentences
and relative clauses are special cases of type <M> expressions.
As we’ll see, it isn’t clear what sentences of a Slang are. But sentence meanings can
be described as instructions for how to build “polarized” predicates that are satisfied
by each thing or by nothing; cp. Tarski (). This suggestion can be encoded in
terms of two operations on monadic concepts. Given any such concept M, applying
the operation “UP” yields a polarized concept, ⇑M, that applies to each thing if
M applies to something; applying “DOWN” yields a polarized concept, ⇓M, that
applies to nothing if M applies to something. For example, an instance of ⇑RABBIT
applies to everything or nothing, depending on whether or not there is a rabbit. An
instance of ⇑RABBIT^HOPS applies to everything or nothing, depending on whether or
not something is both a rabbit and a thing that hops; and likewise, ⇑HOP^DONE-BY-A-
RABBIT applies to everything or nothing, depending on whether or not something is
both a hop and done by a rabbit. But the idea is not that ⇑ is a quantifier that binds a
variable, as in ‘∃e[Rabbit(e)]’, much less a quantifier of the Fregean type <<e, t>, t>.
A polarized concept is still a predicate.20
From this perspective, a relative clause is a tool for converting a polarized
predicate into a more complex predicate that can apply to some but not all things.
If only for simplicity of initial exposition, let’s assume that ‘who a doctor saw’ has the
following grammatical structure: [who [a doctor saw t]]; where ‘who’ has been
displaced from the embedded sentence, leaving a coindexed trace. I’ll argue that the
meaning of the embedded sentential expression, which contains an index, is an
instruction for how to build a polarized predicate that is correspondingly indexed.
Borrowing from Tarski, the idea will be that a predicate containing one or more
indices can apply to each thing or to nothing relative to an assignment of values to the
indices. For example, relative to any such assignment A, a polarized predicate that
contains exactly one index might apply to each thing or nothing, depending on
whether or not a doctor saw whoever (or whatever) A assigns to that index. The
meaning of a relative clause can then be described as an instruction for how to build a
correspondingly de-polarized and de-indexed predicate, which might apply to an
entity e if and only e was seen by a doctor.
Spelling out the proposed de-polarizing/de-indexing operation, “M-abstraction,”
requires a review of (i) Tarski’s notion of satisfaction and (ii) how assignments of
values to indices are related to the notion of abstraction made explicit in Church’s
() lambda calculus; see chapter three. But the same review is required to
understand how expressions of type <t> could be converted into expressions of
type <e, t>. Once the formal background is clear, I’ll argue that the Fregean typology
is neither needed nor wanted in an account of how relative clauses are related to their
embedded sentential expressions, and that the requisite operation of abstraction is
best characterized as one that builds predicates from polarized predicates. This has
20
As discussed in chapter seven, the logic of “truth tables” is easily recast in these terms.
. Meanings as modest Begriffsplans 
implications for quantificational constructions, like ‘chased every rabbit’. But here
too, I’ll argue that Fregean typology is neither needed nor wanted, and that the
requisite operation of abstraction both applies to and yields mental predicates.
In short, Slangs let us access and assemble monadic concepts that can be con-
joined, indexed, polarized, and used as bases for a limited kind of abstraction. I think
Slangs also let us access some dyadic concepts, in a limited way that has a dramatic
effect. Indeed, much of this book is devoted to showing how dramatic the effect
can be.
. Modest relations

I readily grant that expressions of a Slang can be used to assemble and express
thoughts whose constituents include some relational concepts. For example, speakers
can think and say that every rabbit was faster than most of the dogs that like to chase
rabbits. This invites a pair of empirical questions: what kinds of relational concepts
can be fetched via lexical meanings; and to what degree can phrasal meanings be used
to build relational concepts?
My strategy for addressing these questions will be to formulate and defend a
specific proposal, according to which Slangs are minimally relational. I suspect that
while lexical meanings are often used to access dyadic concepts, they are rarely if ever
used to access triadic concepts, and that phrasal meanings are (almost?) always used
to assemble monadic concepts. So I will be suggesting a very spare meaning typology
for Slang expressions: lexical items exhibit two basic types, <M> and <D>, suggesting
monadic and dyadic concepts; complex expressions are of type <M>, allowing for
sentences and relative clauses as special cases, as sketched in §. above. This requires
an additional composition principle, according to which expressions that exhibit the
two basic types can be combined to form an expression of type <M>. But otherwise,
the proposed system for constructing concepts is fundamentally geared to predicates.
Indeed, the suggestion will be that allowing for a little dyadicity can greatly enhance
the utility of an otherwise boring system that generates only predicates.
I can’t establish, even for a single Slang, that every construction can be plausibly
described in these spare terms. But I’ll argue that the simple typology accommodates
textbook examples, along with many others, in attractive ways that often yield
explanations of otherwise puzzling facts. So I think we should at least explore the
option that Slangs are minimally relational, and that Slang expressions exhibit very
few types. If my initial proposal is too spare, it is relatively easy to relax the
constraints and allow for more non-monadic expressions.
By contrast, Frege’s Begriffsschrift is unlikely to provide a good model for Slangs,
despite frequent claims to the contrary. As noted above, Frege designed his language
to allow for expressions of (boundlessly many) types that are apparently not exhib-
ited by Slang expressions. But the issue here is not just about the “higher” types that
Frege discussed in the context of his proposals about how arithmetic is related to
logic. The important point, stressed in chapter three, is that Frege’s logic was
fundamentally relational as opposed to predicative. So his Begriffsschrift was designed
to accommodate relational notions of any adicity. Yet as discussed in chapter six, a lot
of evidence suggests that Slangs abhor even triadic concepts.
 . Overture
For example, we say that Jupiter is between Mars and Saturn—not that Jupiter
betweens Mars Saturn—as if we need to circumlocute, using ‘between’ along with
‘and’ to form an oddly complex predicate, instead of expressing a triadic concept
more directly. We can say that Judy gave Martin the soap. But a verb can—and in my
view, ‘gave’ does—appear in ditransitive constructions without expressing a triadic
concept. We can also say that Judy sold/threw/kicked Martin the soap, or that she
sold/threw/kicked/gave the soap to Martin. More generally, I’ll argue that despite
some constructions that might suggest otherwise, lexical meanings are either dyadic
or monadic. If this is even roughly correct, then instead of viewing Slangs as pale
imitations of a Fregean language that was invented for certain scientific purposes,
perhaps we should view Slangs as modest extensions of a more Aristotelian model in
which predicates play a central role; cp. Sommers (), Parsons (, ),
Schein (, , ), Pietroski (a), Pratt-Hartmann and Moss (),
Moss ().
There are many ways to extend the predicate-generator sketched in §. above.
But one simple way is to add an operation that lets an expression of the dyadic type
<D> combine with an expression of the monadic type <M> to a form another
expression of type <M>. Recall that given two monadic concepts, the operation of
M-junction yields a third such concept that applies to an entity e if and only if each
of the two constituent concepts applies to e. Characterizing an analog operation of
D-junction is relatively easy: given a dyadic concept and a monadic concept, this
operation yields a concept that applies to an entity e if and only if e bears the dyadic
relation to some entity that the monadic constituent applies to.
For example, D-joining an instance of ABOVE with an instance of RABBIT yields a
monadic concept that can be represented as shown below.
∃[above(_, _)^rabbit(_)]
The monadic concept is targeted by the “internal” slot of the dyadic concept, and
also targeted for a kind of closure, so that the resulting concept applies to an entity e
if and only if e is above a rabbit. But the idea is not that ‘∃’ binds a variable, as
in ‘∃y[Above(x, y) & Rabbit(y)]’, much less that ‘∃’ is an instance of the Fregean
type <<e, <e, t>>, <e, t>>. As discussed below, that would allow for analogs of
‘∃x[Above(x, y) & Rabbit(y)]’, and ‘∃x[Above(x, y) & Rabbit(x)]’.
My suggestion is that Slangs employ a simpler operation that makes it possible to
link a two-slot (doubly unsaturated) concept to a one-slot (predicative) concept in a
particular way, thereby forming a complex predicate with the following features: its
one unsaturated slot corresponds to the “external” slot of the dyadic concept; and it
applies to things that bear the dyadic relation to something that meets the condition
imposed by the constituent predicate. This book is largely an attempt to see how
much can be explained by identifying meanings with instructions for how to access
and assemble concepts that exhibit this spare typology.
. Meanings as modest Begriffsplans 
. Idealizations idealize

If meanings are instructions for how to build concepts, then the hypothesis that each
meaning is a concept can be viewed as a simplification that abstracts away from
polysemy. One can imagine minds that are disposed to connect each lexical item with
exactly one concept. Faced with the input that a typical child receives, such thinkers/
speakers might acquire a similar lexicon that exhibits more homophony. Or perhaps
they would ignore much of the usage that leads to conceptual equivocality in minds
like ours. I don’t deny that a capacity to acquire Slangs might be combined with
independent constraints that preclude conceptually equivocal expressions. And for
some purposes, it may be useful to pretend that our minds impose such constraints.
But we shouldn’t conclude that each Slang expression connects its pronunciation
with only one concept.
Put another way, the hypothesis that meanings are concepts can viewed as a severe
idealization concerning the minds that can use meanings to assemble concepts. If we
assume that for each Begriffssplan, there is only one concept it can be used to build—
i.e., that executing the instruction always yields a concept of the same type—then
each Begriffssplan can be identified with the corresponding concept type. This leaves
room for conceptual equivocality across the members of a speech community. But as
noted above, one might give up the idea that successful communication requires that
speakers use the same meanings/concepts.
Alternatively, one might say that meanings are extensions of idealized concepts.
This hypothesis can be viewed as an idealization that abstracts away from many cases
of polysemy by imposing an external constraint on how expressions can connect
their pronunciations with concepts. But the proposal allows for a limited kind of
conceptual variation across (and within) speakers. One can imagine communities
that try to promote and maintain the external constraint. And for some purposes, it
may be useful to pretend that meanings are extensions, or that understanding the
expressions of a Slang is a matter of knowing what the expressions are true of. But we
shouldn’t conclude that each Slang expression connects its pronunciation with an
extension or a class of extensionally equivalent concepts. Ideal minds might be able to
use Slangs this way. But it doesn’t follow that our minds are ideal, much less that
meanings themselves enforce the constraints that certain minds might impose.
As I will stress in the next chapter, we should also be cautious when adopting the
idealization that members of a community have acquired the same language—or that
they use the same words, or words that have the same meanings. There may be as
many English languages as there are speakers of English. And as noted in section three
above, speakers who resolve homophonies in the same way may still talk past each
other in various respects. One can adopt a more demanding notion of “same meaning,”
and then ask whether speakers who communicate to some degree do so by using
expressions that have the same meanings. But in my view, focusing on communication
is not a useful way to get at the natural phenomenon of linguistic meaning. (I think it’s
more helpful to focus, at least initially, on how meanings compose.)
One can say that ‘rabbit’ is the English translation of ‘lapin’, the French translation
of ‘rabbit’. In this sense, the two words have the same meaning; and one can ask in
 . Overture
virtue of what this is so. Similarly, one can ask in virtue of what my word ‘rabbit’ is
the homophonic translation of yours. If the meaning that I connect with the
pronunciation of ‘rabbit’ is an instruction for how to access a concept from a certain
lexical address of mine, and the meaning that you connect with a very similar
pronunciation is an instruction for how to access a concept from a certain lexical
address of yours, one might want to know what makes my word ‘rabbit’ the analog of
yours. But in my view, we shouldn’t expect deep answers.
One relevant fact, I assume, is that the words in question are so often used to
access concepts of rabbits and rabbit (and not, say, concepts of dogs and dog).
Indeed, concepts like RABBIT-KIND may play an important role in letting us coordinate
language use, in ways that often allow for smooth translation. We can say that ‘lapins’
is the French word for rabbits, and that my word for rabbits sounds a lot like yours.
This may be a kernel of truth lying behind that idea that meanings determine
extensions; cp. Putnam’s () metaphor, noted earlier, of coarse grids. But it
may also be relevant that conceptual equivocality can facilitate communication. If a
lexical item can provide access to a range of concepts, then a sympathetic listener
may be able to adopt and use another speaker’s concepts, at least temporarily. If we
meet someone who thinks that tofus have visited Hesperus but not Phosphorus, then
we might try to think about tofu and Venus in the ways that he does, even if we reject
the thought that he endorses. Or the conceptual adjustment might be mutual. Instead
of arguing about whether a certain pen is green, we might agree on definitions for
SEMIGREEN and SUPERGREEN, and agree that only the first of these concepts applies to the
pen. This might be a special case of letting a lexical item become more conceptually
equivocal than it already was; cp. Wilson and Carston () on “ad hoc” concepts.
So a lexical item that I use to access certain concepts might count as the analog of a
lexical item that you use to access somewhat different concepts, in part because we
could each make our addresses more polysemous in a way that would let us access the
same concepts.21
That said, there may be many cases in which there is no determinate answer to the
question of whether or not two speakers have connected a certain pronunciation with
the same meaning—or a certain meaning with the same pronunciation—absent a
stipulation about what counts as sameness for the purposes at hand. My suspicion,
pace Quine (), is that this doesn’t matter. It may be tempting to say that meanings
are what expressions with the same meaning have in common, and then ask what it is
for an expression Σ to have the same meaning as an expression Σ0 . But I think that’s a
distraction. If we want to know what meanings are, we should try to figure out what
Slangs connect with pronunciations, and delay questions about how meanings are
related to our ordinary talk of expressions having the same meaning. Ordinary talk is,
at best, an imperfect guide to the natural phenomena we sometimes talk about.
21
See also Carston (, ). Davidson () allows for cases of changing one’s language on the fly;
see Ludlow () for related discussion. But I don’t think that making a word more polysemous should be
assimilated to cases of connecting pronunciations with new meanings, as in Davidson’s example
of someone connecting Mrs. Malaprop’s pronunciation of ‘derangement of epitaphs’ with the meaning
of ‘arrangement of epithets’.
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Thus the good seed sown in Western Europe during the
preceding century brought forth its fruit. England could not long
remain a stranger to the march of events. But, slow as usual and
averse from hasty experiments, she pondered while others
performed. Besides, she had been spared the volcanic eruption of
the Continent which, while destroying much that was venerable and
valuable, had cleared the ground for the reception of new things.
There is every reason to believe that the ordinary Englishman’s
view of the Jews during the first half of the nineteenth century
differed in no respect from the view entertained by the ordinary
American of the same period, as described by Oliver Wendell
139
Holmes. The ordinary Englishman, like his transatlantic cousin,
grew up inheriting the traditional Protestant idea that the Jews were
a race lying under a curse for their obstinacy in refusing the Gospel.
The great historical Church of Christendom was presented to him as
Bunyan depicted it. In the nurseries of old-fashioned English
Orthodoxy there was one religion in the world—one religion and a
multitude of detestable, literally damnable impositions, believed in by
countless millions, who were doomed to perdition for so believing.
The Jews were the believers in one of these false religions. It had
been true once, but now was a pernicious and abominable lie. The
principal use of the Jews seemed to be to lend money and to fulfil
the predictions of the old prophets of their race. No doubt, the
individual sons of Abraham whom the ordinary Englishman found in
the ill-flavoured streets of East London were apt to be unpleasing
specimens of the race and to confirm the prevailing view of it.
The first unambiguous indication of a changing attitude towards
the Jew appears in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Scott in that work
gives utterance to the feeling of toleration which had gradually been
growing up in the country. It was in 1819, during the severest season
of the novelist’s illness, that Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, his friend, “sitting
by his bedside, and trying to amuse him as well as he could,” spoke
about the Jews, as he had known them years before in Germany,
“still locked up at night in their own quarter by great gates,” and
suggested that a group of Jews would be an interesting figure in a
140
novel. The suggestion did not fall on stony ground. Scott’s eye
seized on the artistic possibilities of the subject, and the result was
the group of Jews which we have in Ivanhoe. Although the author in
introducing the characters seems to have been innocent of any
deliberate aim at propagandism, his treatment of them is a sufficient
proof of his own sympathy, and no doubt served the purpose of
kindling sympathy in many thousands of readers.
Not that the work attempts any revolutionary subversion of
preconceived ideas. The difference between Isaac of York and
Nathan the Wise is the same as the difference between Scott and
Lessing and their respective countries. The British writer does not try
to persuade us that the person whom we abhorred a few generations
before as an incarnation of all that is diabolical, and whom we still
regard with considerable suspicion, is really an angel. Whether it be
that there was no need for a revolt against the Elizabethan tradition,
or Scott was not equal to the task, his portrait of the Jew does not
depart too abruptly from the convention sanctioned by his great
predecessors. His Isaac is not a Barabas or Shylock transformed,
but only reformed. Though in many respects an improvement on
both, Scott’s Jew possesses all the typical attributes of his
progenitors: wealth, avarice, cowardice, rapacity, cunning, affection
for his kith and kin, hatred for the Gentile. But, whereas in both
Barabas and Shylock we find love for the ducats taking precedence
of love for the daughter, in Isaac the terms are reversed. It is with
exquisite reluctance that he parts with his shekels in order to save
his life. Ransom is an extreme measure, resorted to only on an
emergency such as forces the master of a ship to cast his
merchandise into the sea. But on hearing that his captor, Front-de-
Bœuf, has given his daughter to be a handmaiden to Sir Brian de
Bois-Guilbert, Isaac throws himself at the knight’s feet, imploring him
to take all he possesses and deliver up the maiden. Whereupon the
Norman, surprised, exclaims: “I thought your race had loved nothing
save their money-bags.”
“Think not so vilely of us,” answers the Jew. “Jews though we be,
the hunted fox, the tortured wildcat, loves its young—the despised
and persecuted race of Abraham love their children.”
On being told that his daughter’s doom is irrevocable, Isaac
changes his attitude. Outraged affection makes a hero of the Jew,
and for his child’s sake he dares to face tortures, to escape from
which he had just promised to part even with one thousand silver
pounds:
“Do thy worst,” he cries out. “My daughter is my flesh and blood,
dearer to me a thousand times than those limbs which thy cruelty
threatens.”
While emphasising the good qualities of the Jew, the author
takes care to excuse the bad ones. Isaac is despoiled and spurned
as much as Barabas or Shylock. But there is an all-important
difference in Scott’s manner of presenting these facts. He describes
Isaac as a victim rather than as a villain, as an object of compassion
rather than of ridicule. “Dog of a Jew,” “unbelieving Jew,”
“unbelieving dog” are the usual modes of address employed by the
mediaeval Christian towards the Jew; just as they are the usual
modes of address employed by the modern Turk towards the
Christian rayah. The Jews are “a nation of stiff-necked unbelievers,”
the Christian “scorns to hold intercourse with a Jew,” his propinquity,
nay his mere presence, is considered as bringing pollution—
sentiments which far exceed in bitterness those entertained by the
Turk towards the Christian. Under such circumstances Isaac makes
his appearance: a grey-haired and grey-bearded Hebrew “with
features keen and regular, an aquiline nose and piercing black eyes,”
wearing “a high, square, yellow cap of a peculiar fashion, assigned
to his nation to distinguish them from the Christians.” Thus attired,
“he is introduced with little ceremony, and, advancing with fear and
hesitation, and many a bow of deep humility,” he takes his seat at
the lower end of the table, “where, however, no one offers to make
room for him.” “The attendants of the Abbot crossed themselves,
with looks of pious horror,” fearing the contamination from “this son
of a rejected people,” “an outcast in the present society, like his
people among the nations, looking in vain for welcome or resting
place.”
Isaac has scarcely taken his seat, when he is addressed, with
brutal frankness, as a creature whose vocation it is “to gnaw the
bowels of our nobles with usury, and to gull women and boys with
gauds and toys.” So treated, the Jew realises that “there is but one
road to the favour of a Christian”—money. Hence his avarice.
Furthermore, the impression of a craven and cruel miser, that might
perhaps be derived from the above presentation, is softened by the
author, who hastens to declare that any mean and unamiable traits
that there may be in the Jew’s character are due “to the prejudices of
the credulous vulgar and the persecutions by the greedy and
rapacious nobility.”
Scott endeavours to engage the reader’s sympathy for his Jew
by dwelling at great length on these causes of moral degradation:
“except perhaps the flying fish, there was no race existing on the
earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an
unremitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this
period.” “The obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a
measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those
under whom they lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the
persecution with which they were visited.” “On these terms they
lived; and their character, influenced accordingly, was watchful,
suspicious, and timid—yet obstinate, uncomplying, and skilful in
evading the dangers to which they were exposed.” Thus we are led
to the conclusion that the Jew’s vices have grown, thanks to his
treatment, his virtues in spite of it. For Isaac is not altogether
impervious to gratitude and pity. He handsomely rewards the
Christian who saves his life, and he himself saves a Christian’s life
by receiving him into his house and allowing his daughter to doctor
him.
But, just as he is to the father, Scott is more than just to the
141
daughter. While Isaac is at the best a reformed Barabas or
Shylock, Rebecca is the jewel of the story. The author exhausts his
conventional colours in painting her beauty, and his vocabulary in
singing the praises of her character. “Her form was exquisitely
symmetrical,” “the brilliancy of her eyes, the superb arch of her
eyebrows, her well-formed, aquiline nose, her teeth as white as
pearls, and the profusion of her sable tresses,” made up a figure
which “might have compared with the proudest beauties of England.”
She is indeed “the very Bride of the Canticles,” as Prince John
remarks; “the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley,” as the
Prior’s warmer imagination suggests. Immeasurably superior to
Abigail in beauty and to Jessica in virtue, she equals Portia in
wisdom—a perfect heroine of romance. Withal there is in Rebecca a
power of quiet self-sacrifice that raises her almost to the level of a
saint. Altogether as noble an example of womanhood as there is to
be found in a literature rich in noble women. To sum up, in contrast
to Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s creations, there is a great deal of
the tragic, and little, if anything, of the comic in Scott’s Jew.
It would, however, be an error to suppose that Scott was the
spokesman of a unanimous public. His Ivanhoe appeared in 1819.
Four years later we find the writer who with Scott shared the
applause of the age, giving an entirely different character to the Jew.
The Age of Bronze, written in 1823, carries on the Merchant of
Venice tradition. To Byron the Jew is simply a symbol of relentless
and unprincipled rapacity. Referring to the Royal Exchange, “the
New Symplegades—the crushing stocks,”
“Where Midas might again his wish behold

In real paper or imagined gold,
Where Fortune plays, while Rumour holds the stake,
And the world trembles to bid brokers break,”
the poet moralises at the expense of the Jew, to whom he traces our
own greed and recklessness in speculation:
“But let us not to own the truth refuse,

Was ever Christian land so rich in Jews?
Those parted with their teeth to good King John,
And now, Ye Kings! they kindly draw your own.”
Alas! times have changed since the day of “good King John.” Now
the Jews, far from being the victims of the royal forceps,
“All states, all things, all sovereigns they control,
And waft a loan ‘from Indus to the pole.’
And philanthropic Israel deigns to drain
Her mild per-centage from exhausted Spain.
Not without Abraham’s seed can Russia march;
’Tis gold, not steel, that rears the conqueror’s arch.”
Nor is this all. Sad as the state of things must be, since Spain the
persecutrix has been degraded into a suppliant, the worst of the
calamity lies in the circumstance that these new tyrants of poor
Spain and poor Russia are a people apart; a people without a
country; a people of parasites:
“Two Jews, a chosen people, can command

In every realm their Scripture-promised land.
What is the happiness of earth to them?
A congress forms their ‘New Jerusalem.’
On Shylock’s shore behold them stand afresh,
To cut from nations’ hearts their ‘pound of flesh.’”
But our modern Jeremiah’s indignation is not altogether

disinterested. He confesses elsewhere, with a candour worthy of his
prophetic character,
“In my younger days they lent me cash that way,

142
Which I found very troublesome to pay.”
And not only Byron but piety also was still inimical to the Jew.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose philosophy, in its second childhood,
sought comfort in the cradle of theology—a not uncommon
development—gives vent to some exceedingly quaint sentiments on
the subject. On April 13, 1830, he declares that the Jews who hold
that the mission of Israel is to be “a light among the nations” are
utterly mistaken. The doctrine of the unity of God “has been
preserved, and gloriously preached by Christianity alone.” No nation,
ancient or modern, has ever learnt this great truth from the Jews.
“But from Christians they did learn it in various degrees, and are still
learning it. The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the
light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing
143
but itself.” Here we find Coleridge, in the nineteenth century,
reviving the complaint of Jewish aloofness—of the provincial and
non-missionary character of Judaism—which was one of the causes
of the Roman hatred towards the race in the first. Nor is this the only
case of revival presented by Coleridge’s attitude.
Luther, three hundred years earlier had said, “I am persuaded if
the Jews heard our preaching, and how we handle the Old
144
Testament, many of them might be won.” Coleridge now says: “If
Rhenferd’s Essays were translated—if the Jews were made
acquainted with the real argument—I believe there would be a
145
Christian synagogue in a year’s time.” He is, however, somewhat
in advance of Luther, inasmuch as he does not insist upon the Jews’
abandoning circumcision and “their distinctive customs and national
type,” but advocates their admission into the Christian fold “as of the
seed of Abraham.” He is also in advance of Luther in forgiving the
Jews their claim to be considered a superior order; for he finds that
this claim was also maintained by the earlier Christians of Jewish
blood, as is attested both by St. Peter’s conduct and by St. Paul’s
protests. He also refers to the practice of the Abyssinians—another
people claiming descent from Abraham and preserving the Mosaic
Law—and asks: “Why do we expect the Jews to abandon their
national customs and distinctions?” Coleridge would be satisfied with
their rejection of the covenant of works and with their acceptance of
“the promised fulfilment in Christ.” But what really distinguishes
Coleridge’s missionary zeal from that of the great Reformer is his
demand that the Jews should be addressed “kindly.” It is hard to
imagine Coleridge in his old age taking a Jew on to London Bridge,
146
tying a stone round his neck and hurling him into the river.
However, though three centuries of humanism had not been
altogether wasted, the philosopher is in theory as hostile to the poor
Jew as Luther himself: “The Jews of the lower orders,” he tells us,
“are the very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty
in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and
exclusive occupation.” Nor was this prejudiced view of the race
softened in Coleridge by his profound admiration for its literature,
any more than it was in Luther. The latter was an enthusiastic
admirer of the Psalms—the book that has played a larger part in
men’s lives than any other—and so was Coleridge: “Mr. Coleridge,
like so many of the elder divines of the Christian Church, had an
affectionate reverence for the moral and evangelical portion of the
Book of Psalms. He told me that, after having studied every page of
the Bible with the deepest attention, he had found no other part of
Scripture come home so closely to his inmost yearnings and
147
necessities.” But Coleridge’s affection for ancient Hebrew
literature deepened, if anything, his contempt for the modern Jew.
He called Isaiah “his ideal of the Hebrew prophet,” and used this
ideal as a means of emphasising his scorn for the actual: “The two
images farthest removed from each other which can be
comprehended under one term are, I think, Isaiah—‘Hear, O
heavens, and give ear, O earth!’—and Levi of Holywell Street—‘Old
clothes!’—both of them Jews, you’ll observe. Immane quantum
148
discrepant!” The philosopher does not deign to reflect on the
possible causes of this lamentable discrepancy.
Again, Coleridge, like Luther, delighted in clandestine
conversion. He was on friendly terms with several learned Jews,
and, finding them men of a metaphysical turn of mind, he liked, as
was his wont, to preach to them “earnestly and also hopelessly” on
Kant’s text regarding the “object” and “subject,” and other things
weighty, though incomprehensible. At one time he was engaged in
undermining the faith of four different victims of his zeal and
friendship, or may be of his sense of humour: a Jew, a
Swedenborgian, a Roman Catholic, and a New Jerusalemite. “He
said he had made most way with the disciple of Swedenborg, who
might be considered as convert, that he had perplexed the Jew, and
had put the Roman Catholic into a bad humour; but that upon the
New Jerusalemite he had made no more impression than if he had
149
been arguing with the man in the moon.”
Even the genial Elia was not above entertaining and elaborating
the hoary platitude that Jews and Gentiles can never mix. Although
he declares that he has, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews, he
admits that he would not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse
with any of them. Centuries of injury, contempt and hate, on the one
side—of cloaked revenge, dissimulation and hate, on the other,
between our and their fathers, he thinks, must and ought to affect the
blood of the children. He cannot believe that a few fine words, such
as “candour,” “liberality,” “the light of the nineteenth century,” can
close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. In brief, he frankly
confesses that he does not relish the approximation of Jew and
Christian which was becoming fashionable, affirming that “the spirit
150
of the Synagogue is essentially separative.”
Yet, in defiance of Byronic wrath, of Elian humour, and of
Coleridgean theology, the demand for justice daily gained ground. In
1830 Mr. Robert Grant, member of Parliament for Inverness,
sounded the trumpet-call to battle by proposing that Jews should be
admitted to the House of Commons. The Bill was carried on the first
reading by 18 votes, but was lost on the second by 63. The initial
success of the proposal was evidence of the progress of public
opinion; its final rejection showed that there was room for further
progress. Indeed, the victory of light over darkness was not to be
won without a severe conflict: the prejudices of eighteen centuries
had to be assaulted and taken one after the other, ere triumph could
be secured. How strong these fortifications were can easily be seen
by a glance at the catalogue of any great public library under the
proper heading. There the modern Englishman’s wondering eye
finds a formidable array of pamphlets extending over many years,
and covering the whole field of racial and theological intolerance. But
the opposite phalanx, though as yet inferior in numbers, shows a
brave front too. In January, 1831, Macaulay fulminated from the
pages of the Edinburgh Review in support of the good cause:
“The English Jews, we are told, are not Englishmen. They are a
separate people, living locally in this island, but living morally and
politically in communion with their brethren who are scattered over
all the world. An English Jew looks on a Dutch or Portuguese Jew as
his countryman, and on an English Christian as a stranger. This want
of patriotic feeling, it is said, renders a Jew unfit to exercise political
functions.”
This premosaic platitude, and other coeval arguments, Macaulay
sets himself to demolish; and, whatever may be thought of the
intrinsic value of his weapons, the principle for which he battled no
longer stands in need of vindication.
The warfare continued with vigour on both sides. The Jews,
encouraged by Mr. Grant’s partial success, went on petitioning the
House of Commons for political equality, and their petitions found a
constant champion in Lord John Russell, who year after year brought
in a Bill on the subject. But the forces of the enemy held out gallantly.
That a Jew should represent a Christian constituency, and, who
knows? even control the destinies of the British Empire, was still a
proposition that shocked a great many good souls; while others
ridiculed it as preposterous. A. W. Kinglake voices the latter class of
opponents in his Eothen. A Greek in the Levant had expressed to
the author his wonder that a man of Rothschild’s position should be
denied political recognition. The English traveller scowls at the idea,
and quotes it simply as an illustration of the Greek’s monstrous
materialism. “Rothschild (the late money-monger) had never been
the Prime Minister of England! I gravely tried to throw some light
upon the mysterious causes that had kept the worthy Israelite out of
the Cabinet.” Had Kinglake been endowed with the gift of foreseeing
coming, as he was with the gift of describing current events, he
would probably never have written the eloquent page on which the
above passage occurs. But in his own day there was nothing absurd
in his attitude. Till 1828 no more than twelve Jewish brokers were
permitted to carry on business in the City of London, and vacancies
were filled at an enormous cost. Even baptized Jews were excluded
from the freedom of the City, and therefore no Jew could keep a
shop, or exercise any retail trade, till 1832.
The struggle for the enfranchisement of the Jews was only one
operation in a campaign wherein the whole English world was
concerned, and on the result of which depended far larger issues
than the fate of the small community of English Jews. It was a
campaign between the powers of the past and the powers of the
future. Among those engaged in this struggle was a man in whom
the two ages met. He had inherited the traditions of old England, and
he was destined to promote the development of the new. His life
witnessed the death of one world and the birth of another. His career
is an epitome of English history in the nineteenth century.
In 1833 Gladstone, then aged twenty-four years, voted for Irish
Coercion, opposed the admission of Dissenters to the Universities,
and the admission of Jews to Parliament. He was consistent. Irish
Reform, Repeal of the Test Acts, and Relief of the Jews, were three
verses of one song, the burden of which was “Let each to-morrow
find us farther than to-day.” In 1847 Gladstone, then aged thirty-eight
years, “astonished his father as well as a great host of his political
supporters by voting in favour of the removal of Jewish
151
disabilities.” His desertion, as was natural, aroused a vast amount
of indignation in the camp. For had he not, only eight short years
earlier, been described as “the rising hope of the stern and
unbending Tories”? But the indignation, natural though it might be,
was unjustifiable. Gladstone was again consistent. Several important
things had happened since his first vote. Both Dissenters and
Roman Catholics had been rehabilitated. In other words, the Tory
party had surrendered their first line of defence—Anglicanism, and
abandoned their second—Protestantism: was there any reason,
except blind bigotry, for their dogged defence of the third? Gladstone
could see none. The admission of the Jews was henceforth not only
dictated by justice, but demanded by sheer logic. Furthermore, the
Jews in 1833 had been permitted to practise at the bar; in 1835 the
shrievalty had been conceded to them; in 1845 the offices of
alderman and of Lord Mayor had been thrown open to them; in 1846
an Act of Parliament had established the right of Jewish charities to
hold land, and Jewish schools and synagogues were placed on the
same footing as those of Dissenters. The same year witnessed the
repeal of Queen Anne’s statute, which encouraged conversion; of
the exception of the Jews from the Irish Naturalisation Act of 1783;
and of the obsolete statute De Judaismo, which prescribed a special
dress for Jews. After the bestowal of civil privileges, the withdrawal
of political rights was absurd. Gladstone could not conceive why
people should be loth to grant to the Jews nominal, after having
admitted them to practical equality. But though prejudice had died
out, its ghost still haunted the English mind. Men clung to the
shadow, as men will, when the substance is gone. Those orators of
the press and the pulpit whose vocation it is to voice the views of
yesterday still strove to give articulate utterance and a body to a
defunct cause. Sophisms, in default of reasons, were year after year
dealt out for popular consumption, and the position was sufficiently
irrational to find many defenders. But the result henceforth was a
foregone conclusion. Even stupidity is not impregnable. Prejudice,
resting as it did upon unreality, could not long hold out against the
batteries of commonsense.
Yet ghosts die hard. Baron Lionel de Rothschild, though returned
five times for the City of London, was not allowed to vote. Another
Jew, Alderman Salomons, elected for Greenwich in 1851, ventured
to take his seat, to speak, and to vote in the House, though in
repeating the oath he omitted the words “on the true faith of a
Christian.” The experiment cost him a fine of £500 and expulsion
from Parliament. Meanwhile, the Bill for the admission of the Jews
continued to be annually introduced, to be regularly passed by the
Commons, and as regularly rejected by the Lords. The comedy did
not come to an end till 1858, when an Act was passed allowing Jews
to omit from the oath the concluding words to which they
conscientiously objected. Immediately after Baron de Rothschild took
his seat in the House of Commons, and another “red letter day” was
added to the Jewish Calendar.
The Factories Act of 1870 permits Jews to labour on Sundays in
certain cases, provided they keep their own Sabbath; and the
Universities Tests Act, passed in the following year, just after a Jew
had become Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, enables them to
graduate at the English seats of learning without any violation to their
religious principles. At the present day the House of Commons
contains a dozen Jewish members, and there is scarcely any office
or dignity for which an English Jew may not compete on equal terms
with an English Christian. The one remnant of ancient servitude is to
be found in the Anglo-Jewish prayer for the King, in which the
Almighty is quaintly besought to put compassion into his Majesty’s
heart and into the hearts of his counsellors and nobles, “that they
may deal kindly with us and with all Israel.”
Tolerance has not failed to produce once more the results which
history has taught us to expect. As in Alexandria under the
Ptolemies, in Spain under the Saracen Caliphs and the earlier
Christian princes, and in Italy under the Popes of the Renaissance,
the Jews cast off their aloofness and participated in the intellectual
life of the Gentiles, so now they hastened to join in the work of
civilisation. When the fetters were struck off from the limbs of Israel,
more than the body of the people was set free. The demolition of the
walls of the ghettos was symbolical of the demolition of those other
walls of prejudice which had for centuries kept the Jewish colonies
as so many patches of ancient Asia, incongruously inlaid into the
mosaic of modern Europe. The middle of the eighteenth century,
which marks the spring-time of Jewish liberty, also marks the spring-
time of Jewish liberalism. It is the Renaissance of Hebrew history; a
new birth of the Hebrew soul. The Jew assumed a new form of pride:
pride in the real greatness of his past. He became once more
conscious of the nobler elements of his creed and his literature. And
with this self-consciousness there also came a consciousness of
something outside and beyond self. Moses Mendelssohn did for the
Jews of Europe what the Humanists had done for the Christians. By
introducing it to the language, literature, and life of the Gentiles
around it he opened for his people a new intellectual world, broader
and fairer than the one in which it had been imprisoned by the
persecutions of the Dark Ages; and that, too, at a moment when the
shadows of death seemed to have irrevocably closed round the body
and the mind of Israel. This deliverance, wondrous and unexpected
though it was, produced no thrill of religious emotion, it called forth
no outpourings of pious thankfulness and praise, such as had
greeted the return from the Babylonian captivity and, again, the
Restoration of the Law by the Maccabees in the days of old. The joy
of the nation manifested itself in a different manner, profane maybe
and distasteful to those who look upon nationality as an end in itself
and who set the interests of sect above the interests of man; but
thoroughly sane.
Orthodoxy, of course, continued to hug the dead bones of the
past, to denounce the study of Gentile literature and science as a
sin, and to repeat the words in which men of long ago expressed
their feelings in a language no longer spoken. This was inevitable.
Equally inevitable was another phenomenon: a religious revival
springing up simultaneously with the intellectual awakening. The
Jewish race includes many types. As in antiquity we find Hellenism
and Messianism flourishing side by side, as the preceding century
had witnessed the synchronous appearance of a Spinoza and a
Sabbataï Zebi, so now, while Moses Mendelssohn was writing
Platonic dialogues in Berlin, another representative Jew, Israel
Baalshem, was mystifying himself and his brethren with pious
152
hysteria in Moldavia. But the more advanced classes declared
themselves definitely for sober culture. The concentration which was
forced upon Judaism as a means of self-defence, more especially
after the expulsion from Spain and the subsequent oppression
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was now to a great
extent abandoned, and then ensued a period of dissent
proportionate to the previous compulsory conformity. There was a
vast difference of opinion as to the length to which reform should go.
But one result of the movement as a whole was a more or less
thorough purification of Judaism of the stains of slavery. The solemn
puerilities of the Talmud and the ponderous frivolities of Rabbinic
tradition, grotesque ritualism, and all the inartistic ineptitudes in belief
and practice, with which ages of barbarism had encrusted Judaism,
were relegated to the lumber-room of antiquarian curiosities, and all
that was fresh and truly alive in the Jewish race sought new vehicles
for the expression of new thoughts: modern emotions were
translated into modern modes of utterance and action. The
Messianic dream came to be regarded as a vision of the night,
destined to vanish in the light of freedom, and its place was taken by
an ideal of a spiritual and racial brotherhood of the Jews, based on
their common origin and history, but compatible with patriotic
attachment to the various countries of their adoption.
Nothing is more characteristic of the general healthiness of the
emancipation of the Jewish mind than the new type of renegade Jew
which it brought into being. In the Middle Ages the Jew who
renounced the faith of his fathers often considered it his sacred duty
to justify his apostasy by persecuting his former brethren. The
conditions which produced that vulgar type of renegade having
vanished, there began to appear apostates of another kind—men
who, though unwilling to devote to a sect what was meant for
mankind, or, perhaps, unable to sacrifice their own individuality to an
obsolete allegiance, yet never ceased to cherish those whom they
deserted. In them the connection of sentiment outlasted the links of
religion, and these men by their defection did more for their people
than others had done by their loyalty. Heinrich Heine, born in 1799,
was baptized at the age of twenty-five, prompted partly by the desire
to gain that fulness of freedom which in those days was still denied
to the non-Christian in Germany, but also by a far deeper motive: “I
had not been particularly fond of Moses formerly,” he said in after
life, “perhaps because the Hellenic spirit was predominant in me,
and I could not forgive the legislator of the Jews his hatred towards
all art.” The case of Benjamin Disraeli in this country was an
analogous, though not quite a similar one. Among later examples
may be mentioned the great Russo-Jewish composer Rubenstein
who, though baptized in infancy, never sought to conceal his Jewish
birth, but always spoke of it with pride—and that in a country where it
still is better for one to be born a dog than a Jew. Many of these ex-
Jews have attempted, and in part succeeded, in creating among the
Gentiles a feeling of respect towards the Jewish people as a nation
of aristocrats. And, indeed, in one sense the claim is not wholly
baseless.
Since the abolition of religious obstacles the Jews have taken an
even more prominent part in the development of the European mind
under all its aspects. Israel wasted no time in turning to excellent
account the bitterly earned lessons of experience. The persecution
of ages had weeded the race of weaklings. None survived but the
fittest. These, strong with the strength of long suffering, confident
with the confidence which springs from the consciousness of trials
nobly endured and triumphs won against incredible odds, versatile
by virtue of their struggle for existence amid so many and so varied
forms of civilisation, and stimulated by the modern enthusiasm for
progress, were predestined to success. The Western Jews, after a
training of eighteen hundred years in the best of schools—the school
of adversity—came forth fully equipped with endowments, moral and
intellectual, which enabled them, as soon as the chance offered, to
conquer a foremost place among the foremost peoples of the world.
Science and art, literature, statesmanship, philosophy, law, medicine,
and music, all owe to the Jewish intellect a debt impossible to
exaggerate. In Germany there is hardly a university not boasting a
professor Hebrew in origin, if not always in religion. Economic
thought and economic practice owe their most daring achievements
to Jewish speculation. Socialism—this latest effort of political
philosophy to reconcile the conflicting interests of society and its
constituent members—is largely the product of the Jewish genius. It
153
would be hard to enumerate individuals, for their name is legion.
But a few will suffice: Lasalle and Karl Marx in economics, Lasker in
politics, Heine and Auerbach in literature, Mendelssohn, Rubenstein
and Joachim in music, Jacoby in mathematics, Traube in medicine;
in psychology Lazarus and Steinthal, in classical scholarship and
comparative philology Benfey and Barnays are some Jewish workers
who have made themselves illustrious. Not only the purse but the
press of Europe is to a great extent in Jewish hands. The people
who control the sinews of war have contributed more than their
share to the arts and sciences which support and embellish peace.
And all this in the course of one brief half-century, and in the face of
the most adverse influences of legislation, of religious feeling and of
social repugnance. History can show no parallel to so glorious a
revolution. Mythology supplies a picture which aptly symbolises it.
Hesiod was not a prophet, yet no prophecy has ever received a
more accurate fulfilment than the poetic conception couched in the
following lines received in the Hebrew Palingenesia:
“Chaos begat Erebos and black Night;
But from Night issued Air and Day.”
CHAPTER XXI
IN RUSSIA
The one great power in Europe which has refused to follow the new
spirit is Russia. In the middle of the sixteenth century Czar Ivan IV.,
surnamed the Terrible, voiced the feelings of his nation towards the
Jews in his negotiations with Sigismund Augustus, King of Poland.
The latter monarch had inserted in the treaty of peace a clause
providing that the Jews of Lithuania should be permitted to continue
trading freely with the Russian Empire. Ivan answered: “We do not
want these men who have brought us poison for our bodies and
souls; they have sold deadly herbs among us, and blasphemed our
Lord and Saviour.” This speech affords a melancholy insight into the
intellectual condition of the people over whom Ivan held his terrible
sway. Nor can one wonder. Printing had been popular for upwards of
a century in the rest of Europe before a press found its way into the
Muscovite Empire, where it aroused among the natives no less
astonishment and fear than the first sight of a musket did among the
inhabitants of Zululand, and was promptly consigned to the flames
by the priests, as a Satanic invention. Things did not improve during
the succeeding ages. Till the end of the seventeenth century Russia
remained almost as total a stranger to the development of the
Western world and to its nations as Tibet is at the present day.
Venice or Amsterdam loomed immeasurably larger in contemporary
imagination than the vast dominions of the White Czar. British
traders at rare intervals brought from the port of Archangel, along
with their cargoes of furs, strange tales of the snow-clad plains and
sunless forests of those remote regions, and of their savage
inhabitants: of their peculiar customs, their poverty, squalor, and
superstition. And these accounts, corroborated by the even rarer
testimony of diplomatic envoys, who in their books of travel spoke of
princes wallowing in filthy magnificence, of starving peasants, and of
ravening wolves and bears, excited in the Western mind that kind of
wonder, mingled with incredulity, which usually attends the narratives
of travellers in unknown lands.
This home of primordial barbarism was suddenly thrust upon the
attention of the civilised world by the genius of one man. Peter the
Great, a coarse and cruel, but highly gifted barbarian, conceived the
colossal plan of bridging over the gulf that separated his empire from
Western Europe, and of reaching at a single stride the point of
culture towards which others had crept slowly and painfully in the
course of many centuries. It was the conception of a great engineer,
and it required great workmen for its execution. It is, therefore, no
matter for surprise if the work, when the mind and the will of the
original designer were removed, made indifferent progress, if it
remained stationary at times, if it was partially destroyed at others. It
must also be borne in mind that Peter’s dream of a European Russia
was far from being shared by the Russian people. The old Russian
party, which interpreted the feelings of the nation, had no sympathy
with the Emperor’s ambition for a new Russia modelled on a
Western pattern. They wanted to remain Asiatic. And this party found
a leader in Peter’s own son Alexis, who paid for his disloyalty with
his life. The idea for which Alexis and his friends suffered death is
still alive. Opposition to Occidental reform and attachment to Oriental
modes of thought and conduct continue to exercise a powerful
influence in Russian politics. Europe and Asia still fight for
supremacy in the heterogeneous mass which constitutes this hybrid
Empire, and there are those who believe that, although Russia
poses as European in manner, in soul she is an Asiatic power; and
that the time will come when the slender ties which bind her to the
West will be snapped by the greater force of her Eastern affinities.
Whether this view is correct or not the future will show. Our business
is with the past.
The history of the Russian Empire from the seventeenth till the
twentieth century is largely a history of individual emperors, and its
spasmodic character of alternate progress and retrogression is
vividly illustrated by the attitude of those emperors towards their
Jewish subjects. Peter the Great welcomed them, his daughter
Elizabeth expelled them, Catherine II. re-admitted them, Alexander I.
favoured them. No democratic visionary was ever animated by a
loftier enthusiasm for the happiness of mankind than this noble
autocrat. By the Ukase of 1804 all Jews engaged in farming,
manufactures, and handicrafts, or those who had been educated in
Russian schools, were relieved from the exceptional laws against
their race; while special privileges were granted to those who could
show proficiency in the Russian, German, or Polish language. Other
decrees, issued in 1809, ensured to the Jews full freedom of trade.
These concessions, while testifying to the Emperor’s tolerant
wisdom, show the severity of the conditions under which the race
laboured normally. On the partition of Poland the Russian Empire
had received an enormous addition to its Jewish population, and the
Czars, with few exceptions, continued towards it the inhuman policy
already adopted under Casimir the Great’s successors. The Jews
were pent in ghettos, and every care was taken to check their growth
and to hamper their activity. Among other forms of oppression, the
emperors of Russia initiated towards their Jewish subjects a system
analogous to the one formerly enforced by the Sultans of Turkey on
the Christian rayahs: the infamous system of “child-tribute.” Boys of
tender age were torn from their parents and reared in their master’s
faith for the defence of their master’s dominions. Alexander I.
determined to lift this heavy yoke, and, as has been seen, he took
some initial steps towards that end. But, unfortunately, the closing
years of the high-minded idealist’s life witnessed a return to
despotism, and consequently a series of conspiracies, which in their
turn retarded the progress of freedom and hardened the hearts of its
foes.
1825 Alexander’s stern son, Nicholas I., was a
nineteenth century Phalaris. His reign was inaugurated
with an insurrectionary movement, whose failure accelerated the
triumph of the Asiatic ideals in Russian policy. Nicholas, imbued with
a strong antipathy to all that was Occidental, and convinced that the
greatness of Russia abroad depended on tyranny at home, set
himself the task of undoing the little his predecessors had done in

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Conjoining Meanings: Semantics

Without Truth Values Paul M. Pietroski

CONTEXT AND CONTENT

Other titles in the series:

Chapter zero: Overture 

also allowed me to learn about psycholinguistics, on the job, by collaborating with

. Human linguistic meanings

. Distinctively composable

. Pronounceable instructions

. Meanings are not concepts 

. Meanings are not concepts

. Concepts: Symbols vs. contents

. One meaning, a family of concepts

. Meanings are not concepts 

verbs used to talk about carrying or supporting or having or yielding or tolerating or

. Other kinds of conceptual equivocality

. Meanings are not concepts 

a concept of one sort to form a concept of another sort. By hypothesis, an instance of

. Meanings are not extensions 

. Meanings are not extensions

. Coextensive meanings

. Meanings are not extensions 

. Meanings are not extensions 

. Metaphysical detour: Outlandish worlds don’t help

. Meanings are not extensions 

. Polysemy redux

. Meanings are not extensions 

. Communication without extensional equivalence

implements or animal enclosures. And speakers who use this pronunciation to

. Meanings are not extensions 

as opposed to conceptual. Meanings provide a framework for a kind of communi-

. Meanings, natural kinds, and hard water

by the nature of the paradigms, as opposed to any associated appearances or

. Meanings are not extensions 

. Meanings are not extensions 

. Meanings as modest Begriffsplans

. Instructions that compose

. Meanings as modest Begriffsplans 

. Meanings as modest Begriffsplans 

. A monadic basis

. Meanings as modest Begriffsplans 

I assume that unboundedly many Slang expressions correspond to monadic

expressions of a non-basic type, characterized in terms of abstracting entity-denoters

. Meanings as modest Begriffsplans 

. Modest relations

. Meanings as modest Begriffsplans 

. Idealizations idealize

“Where Midas might again his wish behold

“But let us not to own the truth refuse,

“Two Jews, a chosen people, can command

But our modern Jeremiah’s indignation is not altogether

“In my younger days they lent me cash that way,

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