In Chapter 6 I discussed the content of mental states: what states of mind mean. In this chapter I shall discuss the related question of meaning for pieces of language. Speech, writing and other forms of communication surround us and, since the “information revolution”, dealing with publicly accessible systems of representation is more important for more people than ever before. Language also influences many of the most important aspects of human life. Our ability to think in the way we do in the first place may to some extent depend on being exposed to language as infants and children; without language human relationships would not be able to have the character or richness that they do, and economies, societies and cultures as we know them would be impossible. It is difficult to overstate its importance to us.

Here are three questions about language to get the ball rolling.

1. How do words and sentences in a language get their meaning?

It cannot in general be by a pre-established agreement about what the words are to mean, since that agreement would presumably have had to be formulated in language and be mutually understood already. (Explicit agreements may well be possible for some artificial languages, like Esperanto or COBOL, but this is presumably not what happened with English or Sumerian).

2. How does the meaning or content of pieces of language relate to the meaning or content of the beliefs and desires of speakers?