(image source: CINN)Meaning for Everyone
Semantic Minimalism, Pragmatics, and the Right to Understand
Knowledge is not the privilege of elite institutions. It is a human inheritance.
This post is written for students, teachers, independent thinkers, and researchers who were never meant to sit inside oak-paneled seminar rooms but who nevertheless think as rigorously as anyone who does.
Inspired by the work of Professor Emma Borg, this post defends a radical yet humble idea: that meaning is structured, shareable, and accessible, and that understanding language does not require social power, prestige, or institutional permission.
Preface
Elite universities did not invent ideas. They curate them.
For centuries, philosophy of language and semantics have been fenced behind paywalls, jargon, and prestige hierarchies. This post rejects that model. Semantic theory concerns the most ordinary human capacity, the ability to understand sentences we have never heard before. Any theory that cannot be explained clearly does not yet understand its own subject.
This post is written in plain language without sacrificing rigor. Its purpose is not simplification but democratization.
1: What Is Meaning, Really?
When people speak, they do many things at once. They state facts, imply intentions, signal attitudes, mislead, joke, threaten, and promise. Confusing all these activities under the single label “meaning” has been one of the deepest mistakes in the philosophy of language.
This section introduces a foundational distinction:
Sentence meaning: what a sentence means by virtue of language alone.
Speaker meaning: what a person intends to convey in a particular context.
Failing to separate these has led to theoretical inflation, where semantics is expected to explain everything, and ends up explaining nothing clearly.
2: The Minimal Job of Semantics
Semantic minimalism begins with a modest question:
What must a semantic theory explain in order to count as successful?
Emma Borg’s answer is deliberately restrained. A semantic theory succeeds if it can:
Assign literal meaning to sentences.
Explain compositionality.
Account for the productivity of language.
If a theory cannot explain how speakers understand new sentences instantly, it has failed, no matter how psychologically rich it sounds.
Minimalism is not thinness. It is discipline.
3: Why Literal Meaning Matters
Many contemporary theories treat literal meaning as an illusion, something always overridden by context. This chapter argues that this view misunderstands how language works in law, science, contracts, education, and moral accountability.
Literal meaning provides strict liability:
It is truth-conditional.
It is public.
It is non-negotiable.
Without literal meaning, there is no shared standard against which misunderstanding, lying, or error can be judged.
4: Semantics and Pragmatics Are Not Rivals
Semantic minimalism is often misread as anti-pragmatic. In fact, it is maximalist about pragmatics.
Pragmatics explains:
Implicature
Irony
Metaphor
Indirect speech acts
Contextual enrichment
But pragmatics can only operate if there is something to enrich. Semantics provides the anchor; pragmatics provides the navigation.
5: The Architecture of the Mind
This section defends a modular view of semantics:
Semantic processing is fast, automatic, and encapsulated.
It has limited access to world knowledge.
It delivers literal meaning before pragmatic reasoning begins.
Pragmatic interpretation, by contrast, is slow, abductive, and context-sensitive. Confusing these systems leads to inflated semantic theories that cannot explain processing speed or linguistic uniformity.
6: Meaning Must Touch the World
Semantic minimalism is externalist.
Words do not mean what they mean because of what individuals believe. They mean what they mean because they connect language to the world.
The word dog does not encode beliefs about friendliness, loyalty, or fur. It refers to a property in the world. Knowledge about dogs belongs to cognition, not semantics.
This distinction protects meaning from collapsing into personal psychology.
7: Simple Words, Powerful Systems
Against rich conceptual role semantics, this chapter defends atomic lexical meanings.
If word meanings were vast belief networks, no two speakers would ever mean the same thing. Communication would collapse.
Minimal meanings enable:
Disagreement
Learning
Correction
Translation
Complexity belongs to inference, not meaning.
8: Polysymy Without Panic
Words often appear to have multiple meanings. But appearance is not reality.
This section shows how many cases of polysymy can be explained through:
Minimal core meaning
Contextual modulation
Pragmatic inference
We do not need bloated lexicons to explain linguistic flexibility. We need better theory.
9: Analytic Truth and the Boundaries of Meaning
If everything associated with a word counted as its meaning, language would be unlearnable.
This section revisits the analytic/synthetic distinction to defend the idea that:
Some inferences are constitutive of meaning.
Others are contingent beliefs about the world.
Minimalism draws a principled boundary that prevents semantics from becoming sociology or autobiography.
10: Meaning Is Not Private
Languagesocial but but not subjective.
Semantic content depends on typical community competence, not individual quirks. This section discerns how objectivity in meaning is compatible with a mentalistic theory of language.
Shared meaning does not require identical minds, only shared norms.
11: Understanding Minds to Understand Meaning
Understanding language requires understanding people.
This section defends mental state attribution against purely behavioral accounts of social cognition. Humans interpret utterances by attributing beliefs, intentions, and goals, even when this happens automatically.
Mindreading is not optional. It is the engine of pragmatics.
12: Liability, Law, and Language
Why does literal meaning matter so much?
Because societies rely on it.
This section distinguishes:
Strict liability (what was literally said)
Conversational liability (what was implied)
Contracts, laws, and institutions depend on the former. Minimalism explains why.
13: Are Humans Really Irrational?
Behavioral economics paints a bleak picture of human rationality. But many so-called fallacies arise from ignoring pragmatics.
Re-examining classic cases like the Linda problem, this section shows that humans often reason communicatively, not illogically.
Rationality must be evaluated within language use, not abstract probability puzzles.
14: Folk Psychology Is Not Dead
Beliefs, desires, and intentions remain indispensable for explaining behavior.
This section argues that reports of folk psychology’s demise are premature, and philosophically confused.
Language, meaning, and rationality form a single explanatory system.
15: Knowledge Without Gatekeepers
The final chapter returns to the book’s ethical commitment.
Knowledge should not depend on accent, passport, or institutional affiliation. Semantic theory, at its best, reveals a profound truth:
Human beings share the capacity to understand infinitely many meanings from finite means.
That capacity belongs to everyone.
Epilogue: An Invitation
This post is not an endpoint. It is an opening.
Read critically. Disagree loudly. Teach freely.
Meaning grows when it is shared.
Read this post. Share it. Distribute it. Teach from it. Knowledge increases by being given away.
Professor Emma Borg on Semantics - Oxford University Linguistics Society
