Abstract

How should we go about identifying the particular non-semantic property of a given word that is responsible for its meaning? And what sort of property will that turn out to be? The use theory, as I want to develop it, offers answers to these questions. It begins with the observation that the meaning of a word is a common factor in the explanations of its various occurrences and proceeds to argue, on that basis, that each word means what it does in virtue of the acceptance conditions of certain specified sentences containing it. For the sake of concreteness here are some examples of the sort of meaning-constitution claims that may issue from UTM