The Social Foundations of Meaning

Introductory summary.- I Conventional meaning: The pretheoretical intuition.- 1 Conventional meaning vs. natural meaning.- 2 Conventional meaning vs. speaker's meaning.- 3 Conventional meaning and correct understanding.- 4 Correct understanding: The conventional result principle.- 5 Conventional systems evolving into languages.- 6 Communication: Redistributing situational roles.- 7 The strategy of language description.- II Compliance with rules.- 8 The weak Hart analysis of rule - guided behavior.- 9 Why dismiss the 'internal aspect'?.- 10 Hart attacks repelled.- 11 An attractive alternative: Lewis conventions.- 12 No rigid problem - solving.- 13 Choice rules.- 14 Knowledge of conventions.- 15 Can meaning sneak in via common knowledge?.- 16 Conventional make - ups and how to detect them.- III A case for utterance meaning: NIVEAU zero.- 17 A plea for case studies.- 18 The first utterance meaning rules.- 19 Background conventions and suspected signals.- 20 Strengthening the description.- 21 The meaning of circumstances.- 22 Theoretical fruitfulness.- IV Conventional utterance meaning.- 23 Language use: Conventional behavior calling for a special kind of description.- 24 Conventional utterance meaning defined.- 25 Neptune: Conventional perturbations and their best explanation.- 26 Expressions and expressive power.- 27 The diversity of language.- 28 The theoretical character of the speech act of reference.- V Against intentionalism.- 29 Preliminaries.- 30 Ignored motives for making constative utterances.- 31 Gricean intentions: Irrelevant and unlikely.- 32 Speakers' meaning and conventional meaning: Empirically connected.- 33 The Thomistic fallacy.- 34Genitives subjectivus and genitives objectivus.- 35 Declarations of meaning.- VI The same case for sentence meaning: NIVEAU.- 36 The new problem.- 37 Grouping signs by positing new entities.- 38 Some semantic features: Ambiguity, negation, anaphora.- VII Some results for sentence meaning.- 39 The point of having sentence