MEANING: INTERPRETATION AND INFERENCE 1. THEORIES OF MEANING AND FORMAL LANGUAGE SEMANTICS
Various broad 'theories of meaning' occur in current philosophy, some 'truth-conditional', others 'verificationist', some more ontologically oriented, others more epistemological. The purpose of this paper is to confront such grand perspectives, which often seem derived from a very limited stock of concrete examples, with the realities of recent work in logical semantics of natural language. Indeed, several presently predominant theories of meaning (for instance, the proof-theoretic approach of Dummett, Martin-LSf and Prawitz, or the game-theoretic one of Lorenzen and Hintikka -both repl,~sented at this conference) take their cue from pictures of meaning that work smoothly only for formal languages. In particular, on these approaches, certain formats of formal interpretation will be generalized (notably, Tarski's scheme and its later elaborations) so as to acquire universal validity. But also, certain theoretical features of formal language semantics tend to be adopted as regulative principles, such as the tight interconnection between rules of interpretation and rules of inference (observable, e.g., in Gentzen natural deduction calculi). This strategy does not necessarily result in error. For instance, also quite generally, there is a lot to be said for the idea that meaning is deeply connected with inference, i.e., proof, refutation, in short: deductive exploration. But, such a principle needs general argumen' tation, independent from its observed success in formal logic.
In this paper, while adhering to the above interconnection thesis, I shall criticize another feature of the formal language model of meaning, which might be called its unitary presuppositions concerning the assignment of meaning to linguistic expressions, as well as their manipulation in inference.
By and large, Tarski semantics for predicate logic has been the most influential model of the 'mechanism of interpretation' for formal languages. Of course, there have been many elaborations, for in-