The Trouble with Meanings*

¹ On p. 12, n. 13 of “The Logic of Sense and Denotation,” in Henle, Kallen and Langer, eds., Structure, Method and Meaning. This paper, incidentally, is, to my knowledge, at once the most sophisticated and most thorough treatment of the theory of “meaning” there is. I am not, however, convinced that it is successful. In particular, I suspect that the second of the two putative theorems given mid-page 21 is false, and I do not see what repairs could be made.

² “Notes on Existence and Necessity,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 40 (1943), pp. 113–27, reprinted in Linsky.

³ This has been called (was it by Ryle?) the “Phaedo”-Phaedo Principle.

⁴ In The Concept of Language, Toronto, 1959, and in “Substances without Substrata,” Rev. of Metaphysics, vol. 12 (1959), pp. 521–39.

⁵ These examples are offered in honour of Locke's heroic—and instructive—struggles with them in Part III of the Essay.

⁶ See Putnam, Hilary, “The Analytic and the Synthetic,” in Feigl, and Maxwell, , eds., Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. III, p. 378.

⁷ In the case of ‘man’ my Webster's Collegiate Dictionary lets me down, since it waffles away with unhelpful synonyms.

⁸ “Necessity and Criteria,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 59 (1962), pp. 647–58.

⁹ Or this example from a student's paper: “Poincaré was an unusually great man in that he was both a distinguished mathematician and a distinguished statesman.”

* A slightly expanded version of a paper presented to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association on December 27, 1963.