4.8—
Four Ways of Being a Signifier

Just as it is important to distinguish four senses of "being a marker," it is likewise important to distinguish four different senses in which a marker may be said to "have" or "bear" semantic properties, and hence four ways in which a marker may be said to be a signifier. In order to clarify these four senses, we shall employ another thought experiment. The great detective Sherlock Holmes has been called in to solve a murder case. The victim, a wealthy but unpleasant lawyer, has been poisoned. Before dying, however, he managed to write a single word on a piece of paper. The inscription is

PAIN

Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard has concluded that the deceased was merely expressing the excruciating agony that preceded his death. Holmes, however, makes further investigations and discovers that the victim's French housekeeper is also his sole heir. It occurs to Holmes that 'pain' is the French word for bread, and upon inquiring he discovers that the housekeeper did indeed do the baking for the household. Perhaps, reasons Holmes, the deceased was poisoned by way of the bread, and has tried to indicate both the means by which the poison was conveyed and the identity of his murderess by writing the French word for bread.

Which was inscribed on the dead lawyer's stationery—the English word 'pain' (meaning a particular kind of sensation) or the French word 'pain' (meaning bread)? To put it differently, what does the inscription mean —pain or bread? It should immediately be evident that this ques-

tion is very much like the question about the figure on the bilingual optometrist's eyechart. First, there is a sense in which what is on the paper is interpretable (under English conventions) as meaning pain . In this very same sense the mark on the paper is interpretable (under French conventions) as meaning bread . That is, the sequence of Roman letters on the stationery is used by English speakers to carry one meaning and used by French speakers to carry a different meaning.

Yet there is also a sense in which the inscription can be said to mean one thing and not the other, provided that one assumes that the victim intended what he wrote to mean one thing rather than the other. If Holmes's hypothesis is correct, for example, the lawyer meant to write the French word for bread and did not mean to write the English word for pain. Assuming that this was the case, there is a sense in which the inscription can be said to mean bread but not to mean pain.

This distinction between two ways a marker token can be related to a meaning should seem familiar, as it parallels the first two ways an object could be said to "be" a marker token—namely, interpretability and intended (or authoring ) interpretation .

(S1) An object X may be said to be interpretable as signifying (meaning, referring to) Y iff

(1) X is interpretable as a marker of some type T employed by linguistic group L , and

(2) there is a convention among members of L that markers of type T may be used to signify (mean, refer to) Y .

(S2) An object X may be said to be intended (by S) to signify (mean, refer to) Y iff

(1) X was produced by some language user S ,

(2) S intended X to be a marker of some type T ,

(3) S believed that there are conventions whereby T -tokens may be used to signify Y, and

(4) S intended X to signify Y by virtue of being a T -token.

Two observations should perhaps be noted about these definitions. First, neither of them is intended to correspond precisely to what is meant by the vernacular usage of the words 'meaning' or 'reference'. Indeed, the whole enterprise of specifying new terms such as these is necessary only because ordinary usage is ambiguous and imprecise. In as-

suming that the inscription meant pain, Lestrade was probably (implicitly) assuming both that the inscription was interpretable under English conventions as carrying the meaning pain and that the deceased had intended the inscription to mean pain. But his assumption would be implicit in that he has probably never made the distinction under discussion. It is only when someone like Holmes notices that the ordinary assumptions do not always hold that distinctions can be made, and at such a point it is of little interest to the specialist (be he detective or philosopher) to argue about whether interpretability or authoring intention or the combination of the two best captures the "real" (i.e., the vernacular, precritical) use of the term 'meaning' (or 'reference'). It is the new, more refined terms that are needed. The determination of vernacular usage may be left to the descriptive linguist.

Yet there is most definitely no intention here to imply that ordinary usage is irrelevant in the pursuit of philosophy. Attention to ordinary usage can often be of great help in solving philosophical problems, especially when those problems are themselves caused by an impoverished understanding of language on the part of the philosopher. The point here is that language points to the phenomena to be studied, and sometimes it points too vaguely and indistinctly to serve the purposes of the theorist. When this happens, terminology must be refined to capture distinctions the specialist needs but the ordinary person does not. The enterprise is far more risky when the process proceeds in the opposite direction—that is, when ordinary terms are extended instead of refined . The application of the terms 'symbol' and 'representation' to the contents of intentional states is a case in point. (This entire book is an examination of what has gone wrong in the extension of such ordinary terms as 'symbol' and 'representation'.)

The second observation about these definitions is that the definition of authoring intention allows for the possibility that the speaker is wildly idiosyncratic in his use of language. If, for example, Jones believes that the word 'cat' is used to refer to newspapers, and utters "The cat is on the mat" to express the belief that the newspaper is on the mat, we may nonetheless say that Jones intended to signify the newspaper. In particular, he uttered a token of the marker type 'cat', which he believed could be used to signify newspapers, and intended to signify the newspaper by uttering the word 'cat'. Of course, there is no convention of English that allows the word 'cat' to be used to signify newspapers. (Utterances of 'cat' are not interpretable, under English conventions, as signifying newspapers.) But Jones nonetheless intended to refer to the newspaper by

uttering the word 'cat'. And of course there could be subgroups of English speakers who employ semantic conventions that are not conventions of English, but only of a dialect of English (as, for example, some Baltimoreans refer to street vendors as "Arabs" [pronounced ay -rabz], or Bostonians refer to submarine sandwiches as "grinders"). And indeed one might even wish to speak of idiolects in terms of the special semantic conventions of a linguistic subgroup consisting of one member, in which case Jones correctly believes that there is a convention licensing the use of 'cat' to refer to newspapers, but incorrectly believes that it is a convention of English rather than of his own idiolect. One might wish to use the term 'convention' in such a case because there are beliefs and practices that can govern how a marker may be used. These beliefs and practices are, in principle, public and shareable, even though in fact only one person possesses them. (Because they are essentially public, and the fact that they are possessed by only one person is merely incidental, Wittgenstein's concerns about a private language do not arise here.)

Third, it should be noted that the semantic features to which these definitions are relevant are meaning and reference. The truth value of a signifier is undetermined by the relationships between the token, linguistic conventions, and the intentions of its speaker or inscriber. (There are some exceptions, such as analytic truths, but here the interest is in a general characterization of ways objects can be said to have semantic properties.)

In addition to interpretability (under conventions employed by some linguistic group) and intended interpretation, one may distinguish two additional ways in which a thing may be said to carry a semantic value. These correspond to the two remaining ways that a figure could be said to count as a marker token: namely, actual interpretation (by someone apprehending the signifier) and interpretability-in-principle . Regardless of what the deceased lawyer intended his inscription to mean, it is nonetheless the case that it was interpreted by Lestrade as meaning pain and interpreted by Holmes as meaning bread. These actual acrs of interpretation are, indeed, independent of whether the lawyer intended his inscription to mean anything at all —they would be unaltered if, for example, he had been scribbling random letters. The notion of actual interpretation may be defined for signifiers as follows:

(S3) An object X may be said to have been interpreted (by H) as signifying (meaning, referring to) Y iff

(1) some language user H apprehended Y ,

(2) H interpreted X as a token of some marker type T ,

(3) H believed there to be a linguistic convention C licensing the use of T -tokens to signify Y , and

(4) H construed X as signifying Y by virtue of being a T -token.

Finally, it is notorious that any symbol structure (i.e., any marker, simple or complex) can be used to bear any semantic interpretation whatsoever. Haugeland, for example, writes of a set of numerical inscriptions he supplies as examples in Mind Design that "formally, these numerals and signs are just neutral marks (tokens), and many other (unfamiliar) interpretations are possible (as if the outputs were in a code)" (Haugeland 1981: 25). And Pylyshyn writes of symbols in computers,

Even when it is difficult to think of a coherent interpretation different from the one the programmer had in mind, such alternatives are, in principle, always possible. (There is an exotic result in model theory, the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem, which guarantees that such programs can always be coherently interpreted as referring to integers and to arithmetic relations over them.) (Pylyshyn 1984: 44)

In the terminology developed in this chapter, what this means is that there is nothing about markers that places intrinsic limits upon what interpretations they may be assigned, and so it is possible for there to be conventions which assign any interpretation one likes to any marker type one likes. Now there are two different ways in which we might wish to formulate this insight. One way of formulating it would be to say that, for any marker type T and any interpretation Y , it is possible for there to be a semantic convention to the effect that Y -tokens are interpretable as signifying T . In terms of a technical definition:

(S4) An object X may be said to be interpretable-in-principle as signifying Y iff

(1) X is interpretable-in-principle as a token of some marker type T, and

(2) there could be a linguistic community L that employed a linguistic convention C such that T -tokens would be interpretable as signifying Y under convention C .

That is, to say of some X and some Y that "X is interpretable-in-principle as signifying Y " is to say (1) that one could, in principle, have a marker convention whereby X would be interpretable as a marker of some type

T , and (2) that one could, in principle, have a semantic convention C whereby T -tokens would be interpretable as signifying Y .

One might, however, wish to characterize semantic interpretabilityin-principle in a different manner. All that is necessary for an object X to be interpretable-in-principle as signifying Y is the availability of an interpretation scheme that maps X 's marker type onto Y . And all that this requires is that X be interpretable-in-principle as a marker, and that there be a mapping available from a set of marker types to a set of interpretations that takes X 's marker type onto Y . In terms of a technical definition:

(S4^* ) An object X may be said to be interpretable-in-principle as signifying Y iff

(1) X is interpretable-in-principle as a token of some marker type T ,

(2) there is a mapping M available from a set of marker types including T to a set of interpretations including Y , and

(3) M(T) = Y .

Definitions (S4) and (S4^* ) are extensionally equivalent for real and counterfactual cases. Under either definition, for any object X and any interpretation Y that one might specify,^[7]X is interpretable-in-principle as signifying Y . First, we have already seen that every object is interpretable-in-principle as a marker token of some type T . Now, according to definition (S4), all that is additionally necessary for X to be interpretable-in-principle as signifying Y is that one could, in principle, have a convention licensing T -tokens as signifying Y . But one could, in principle, have such a convention for any type T and any Y . Similarly, according to definition (S4^* ), what is necessary for X to be interpretable-in-principle as signifying Y (over and above X 's being interpretable-in-principle as a marker of some type T ) is the availability of a mapping M from marker types to interpretations such that Y is the image of T under M . Such a mapping is merely an abstract relation between two sets, however, and there is such a mapping, for any type T and any Y , that maps T onto Y . So both (S4) and (S4^* ) license the conclusion that every object is interpretable-in-principle as signifying anything whatsoever. This conclusion may seem bland in and of itself, but it is important to distinguish this sense of "having a meaning" or "having a referent" from

other, more robust senses. It is all the more important to do so since computationalists seem at times to be interested in this sort of "having a meaning," but do not always make it adequately clear what role (if any) it plays in their accounts of semantics and intentionality for cognitive states.