Introduction

Certain sequences of marks and noises have meanings, and that we human beings grasp those meanings without even thinking about it are very striking facts. A philosophical theory of meaning should explain what it is for a string of marks or noises to be meaningful and, more particularly, what it is in virtue of which the string has the distinctive meaning it does. A widespread idea about meaning is that words and more complex linguistic expressions have their meanings by standing for things in the world. Though commonsensical and at first attractive, this Referential Theory of meaning is fairly easily shown to be inadequate. For one thing, comparatively few words do actually stand for things in the world. For another, if all words were like proper names, serving just to pick out individual things, we would not be able to form grammatical sentences in the first place.