Topics Language

Question How can I be sure that I got the right meaning of what some TV reporter just said? Do I just go and check the dictionary? But what if some word isn't in the dictionary? What if the reporter used it in some different sense? And it sure looks possible that the dictionary is wrong. What if it just doesn't make sense to take it as it is in the dictionary? It seems a pretty difficult question... Are there any philosophical theories about this?

Accepted:
November 12, 2005

Comments

Yes, philosophers have worried about this kind of question. One place it surfaces is in a debate over whether the notion of a "communal language" needs to play some important theoretical role. Michael Dummett, for example, has argued that unless we all regarded ourselves as speaking a single language, and unless our so regarding ourselves imposed normative constraints on how we used our language, then we could never be sure what other people were saying and so that our beliefs that we understand one another would always have ultimately to rest upon some kind of faith. Others, perhaps most famously, Noam Chomsky, have disagreed. Have a look at the entry on Idiolects in the Stanford Encyclopedia. (Our fearless leader Alexander George has a couple very nice papers on this topic, by the way.)