ABSTRACT
It may, however, be claimed that meaning and understanding are in a special position, and that to treat them as resting even in part on inner states will give rise to a special sceptical problem not extending to all aspects of our mental life, just because meaning is essentially communicable. That is to presuppose that inner states of consciousness such as sensations, by contrast with meaning, are (or may be) incommunicable. Yet we can quite intelligibly describe our sensations to others. Indeed, as we have seen, the meaning even of a word like 'blue', a term primarily predicable of observable objects, is tightly linked to sensory appearance. If the content of consciousness is incommunicable, then the meaning of 'blue' is incommunicable. There could be no opening for scepticism about sensations or inner states in general which did not automatically extend to meaning. There can therefore be no specific reason for rejecting the natural presumption that our speaking with meaning (rather than parrot-fashion) and our understanding what another says (rather than just hearing it) are both intimately bound up with modifications of consciousness. That is not to agree with Locke that ideal understanding comprises a succession of images neatly corresponding to the subjects and predicates employed in the speech understood. The present point is simply that, since no one but a philosopher would deny or even doubt that the conscious state of someone who hears or reads a sentence with understanding is thereby significantly different from the conscious state of someone for whom the sentence has no meaning, any philosopher who does so had better have a more satisfactory argument than the one under consideration.
