Abstract

A basic theme of Winograd and Flores (1986) is that the principal function of language is to co-ordinate social activity. It is, they claim, from this function that meaning itself arises. They criticise approaches that try to understand meaning through the mechanisms of reference, the Rationalist Tradition as they call it. To seek to ground meaning in social practice is not new, but the approach is presently attractive because of difficulties encountered with the notion of reference. Without taking a view on whether these are insuperable, the present paper accepts Winograd and Flores'' challenge and attempts to lay aside reference and to base a conception of meaning directly in terms of co-ordination and consensus within a linguistic community.