An empirical case study is used here to analyze linguistic meaning as it is embedded in complex social behavior. The whole of a natural signalling system - its nonlinguistic conventions, pragmatics and semantics - is considered. Three sections analyze: the relevant conventional facts; conventional utterance meaning in terms of conventional facts; and, finally, sentence meaning in terms of conventional utterance meaning. Linguistic meaning is seen to be derived from meaningful social behavior rather than from goal-directed behavior of individuals. A number (...) of new results on pragmatic and semantic meaning are reached. (shrink)

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein contrues psychological facts as patterns exhibited by `weaves' which include a person's behaviour as well as her temporal and social surroundings. Avowals, in being linguistic elements of such patterns, come to be taken as expressing psychological facts in a way that given the general liberty in pattern description, is normal with all conspicuous elements of behavioural patterns. Speakers come to be taken to express psychological facts because avowals are semantically self-predicating (which is understandable in the (...) light of the normal ways they are learnt). That avowals come to be reliable expressions of their psychological facts is anything but surprising, given normal human capacities of learning to behave in patterns; furthermore, avowals can supplement incomplete patterns and thus define them because articulated sentences add high amounts of complexity. Though not intro-evidentially descriptive, avowals can be descriptions in the way that stating one's impressions of x can be a description of x. (shrink)