page 5 of Perfect Speaker Theory

omniscient, like the IS: he just knows the Best Dictionary, which is finite and fallible, but reports at their completest the linguistic community's dry residue agreements over what expressions can be used to do. In knowing the meaning of 'water' the PS therefore knows that, in the latest state of chemical theory on earth, it is stuff of molecular structure H2O. And let us also introduce the twin-earth PS, who is by definition equally up to date. Then he knows that 'water' according to twin-earth chemistry is XYZ. In this idealised state of knowledge of meanings- that is, where a PS has at his disposal the linguistic community's best joint knowledge–we find that when he says 'water' he intends to refer to water, that is H2O, or in the case of the twin-earth PS, then to water XYZ; and so in either case the PS's grasp of the expression's meaning determines its extension, and the psychological state in which his grasp of the meaning consists is broad. But this is not because it is related, causally or in some other way, to water, but rather to theories about water, because he is speaking in conformity with the Best Dictionary, that is, with the fullest shared knowledge of meanings, in accordance with the best current theories held by the linguistic community.

The trick in Putnam's thought experiment is that the people talking about water are ignorant, in the way people are apt to be, as to the best current theories about the stuff. So we who know something more about H2O than, ex hypothesi, they do, can see the point as to what else is needed for them to achieve a successful reference: namely, to intend to refer to just that stuff, and not something that cannot be distinguished from it when one's level of knowledge about it is suitably impoverished. Putnam's thought experiment does its work because it premisses that the speakers on earth and twin-earth should be identically ignorant in respect of what their referential intentions would be if they were ideally, or just more, knowledgeable: that is, if they were, or at least approximated the status of, PSs. Now the third condition in PS-hood was epistemic caution. The suggestion here is that it is a corollary of being epistemically cautious that one be as well informed as one can be for the purposes of satisfying (1)-(2). The PS, in obedience to (3), knows (or carries around and consults) the Best Dictionary. So when he refers, he does not do so under Putnamiam epistemic privation of the kind suited to making the twin-earth case plausible.

I conclude now by drawing a couple of morals. The point of the PS model is claimed to be that by applying it to cases like the ones just canvassed, we get perspicuous accounts of what is being said and done, and they show that the problematic character of the canvassed cases is an artefact of failing to give full weight to considerations made salient by the pragmatics of Perfect Speaking. What helps with the problem cases is appeal to considerations of point and epistemic aptness; the PS is 'perfect' in his practice with respect to both–and in being so is such that the problems do not arise for him. This, my inference is, suggests that we should look to beliefs and intentions for the basis of a general account of meaning.

In the first two cases the problems were generated by incomplete determination of point in the formulation adopted by a putative ordinary speaker. In the second two cases the problems were generated by epistemic underdetermination in the cases; the putative ordinary speakers failed in achieving their intended targets of utterance precisely because of it.

A PS perspective on the cases brings a salutary reminder to our attention. It is that no non-idly employed sentence of natural language exists outside a pragmatic frame. For every non-idle use of a sentence the particularities–how things are in respect of the utterer, his intentions, his audience, the current state of the language, and the circumstances of its use – determine the meaning of what is said on that occasion.

It is these two thoughts together that suggest the third – at this juncture I do not claim they do more – namely that the conventional meanings of expressions in natural language are the precipitates of the linguistic community's tacit agreements to place the use made of certain signs under publicity and (relative) stability constraints, so that the ends of communication can be realised. These agreements are the conventions which dictionaries report. Any account of meaning so understood would have on this view to make essential reference to the pragmatic considerations–and central among them, point–which figure thus in its genesis.

Now it is widely held that–and I quote Searle–"meaning is more than a matter of intention, it is also a matter of convention" and in illustration he quotes Wittgenstein's remark in Philosophical Investigations, 'Say "it's cold here" and mean 'it's warm here"'. There is no inconsistency between agreeing with this and accepting what the PS theory says is central. For one thing, conventional meanings are, so the theory seeks to suggest, the precipitate of intentions anyway: what an expression means is what , in effect, it is intended to mean by the linguistic community. For another, nothing in PS theory excludes the obvious, which is that the point of a speaker's utterances, even a PS's utterances, cannot be individuated independently of facts about the conventional meanings of the expressions he uses, the context, the speaker's attitudes, and whatever other pragmatic features are required besides. But what it does do is to say that point figures centrally.

By way of conclusion, and even more briefly than in the familiar problem cases mentioned, I suggest that among the other things PST can offer is a simple solution to the question whether there is such a thing as 'the language' for any natural language. The thought that there is such a thing is held by some to play the role that naive realism does in theories of perception; it is the dumbo view, to be replaced by more sophisticated views such as that there are as many personal (so to speak) paroles as speakers, and that what we too loosely call communication is in fact a form of translation or, more accurately, interpretation. A natural desire to respond that at least a notional 'the language' is required to provide a norm–which among other things can be invoked to explain such phenomena as (say) the differing divergences of idiolects from majority intelligibility–might be met with the riposte that such norms are in fact constituted not by something which is genuinely 'the language' but by the family of idiolects of an historically favoured class of speakers (the currently rich, the currently powerful, the people currently in charge of the culture. There could be–after the revolution, say, there might be – quite different folk in these roles, speaking a different family of idiolects). And so the debate might proceed. But one thing that would help to give it shape would be to offer something that could count as a criterion of identity for 'the language' if there is such a thing. This is where PST comes in: for such a criterion is offered by saying: the language is what the PS speaks. And this genuinely does offer a normative conception across which mappings must fall if the very idea of an idiolect of some language is itself to make sense.

---------------------------------------------