Introduction: The Myth of Human Language

1.3 Terminology

I’ve already alluded to some of the following distinctions, but it will be useful to develop them in a bit more detail and set them out in one place. If you like, we can consider this exercise as being a way for us to modulate the meanings of these familiar terms so as to allow us to construct a microlanguage with the ultimate goal of facilitating the discussion in the chapters to follow.

1) Vagueness vs. Ambiguity
I understand vagueness and ambiguity to be prima facie distinct phenomena. Let’s focus on the word form ‘bank’ and consider the meaning associated with financial institutions and the meaning associated with river embankments. The distinction between those two meanings is an instance of ambiguity. Vagueness has more to do with uncertain boundaries. This is not to say that ‘bank’ isn’t vague. Once disambiguated, the two separated meanings remain vague (there are borderline cases of financial institution banks and borderline cases of river banks). So, ‘bank’ is both ambiguous and (once disambiguated) vague.
2) Vagueness vs. Variable Comparison Classes
The adjective ‘large’ is sensitive to comparison classes (large for an elephant vs. large for a flea) but this is not vagueness, as I understand it. Of course, ‘large’ is vague – once we fix the comparison class to elephants we still have unclear borders between the large elephants and not large elephants.
3) Meaning Underdetermination vs. Vagueness
Several years ago Sports Illustrated produced a list of the top athletes of the 20^th Century, to which they added the famous racehorse Secretariat. I was listening to a sports talk radio show when viewers called in to complain that horses can’t be athletes. Arguments ensued, but I didn’t take them to be arguments over a borderline case. Had Secretariat been a Centaur we might have had such an argument. These were rather arguments about whether ‘athlete’ should be defined in such a way as to admit horses.
We can, however, say that vagueness is a kind of underdetermination – it is underdetermination along a scalar dimension.¹¹ So for example, we can argue over whether I am bald, but in that instance the argument seems to be about whether I am far enough along on the baldness scale to count as bald (here assuming the border is underdetermined).
4) Meaning Underdetermination vs. Meaning Indeterminacy
Meaning Indeterminacy is of course the notion that Quine was introducing with his famous ‘gavagai’ problem. We parachute into an exotic culture and then a native says ‘gavagai’ when a rabbit hops by. Did the native mean rabbit by this expression, or did she perhaps mean rabbit stage, or rabbit parts, etc.
Meaning underdetermination is different from this because in this instance the behavior of the native is consistent with rabbit (or stage or parts thereof) being a clear instance of ‘gavagai’. Whatever she was gesturing at was clearly (to the native) part of the range of the expression. Cases of underdetermination arise when we point to something and ask, in whatever the native question intonation is, “gavagai?,” and our interlocutor is stumped or the natives begin arguing about the matter before resolving it. I’m not taking a stance here on whether meaning indeterminacy is a serious philosophical problem; I’m merely saying it isn’t the same thing as meaning underdetermination.

5) Meaning Underdetermination vs. Meaning Underspecification
Meaning underspecification typically involves the idea that it is not specified which of several determinate meanings are intended. For example, one way of treating ambiguity would be by saying that a term like ‘bank’ has a single lexical entry with an underspecified meaning because it hasn’t been specified which of the typical meanings are intended. That is, there are two quite clear meanings for ‘bank’, and the lexical entry for ‘bank’ is indifferent between them. Thus underspecification suggests that there is a candidate meaning out there, but that the lexical entry fails to pick one. The thesis of meaning underdetermination is different from this because it does not suppose that there is a meaning out there – the meaning is, as it were, yet to be established and never will be fully established.
Now clearly this point is controversial. One might, for example, argue that there are many possible languages (understood as abstracta) and it is underspecified which of them are intended (or perhaps all of them are) by our utterances. Meaning modulation would then be a process by which we change the set of possible languages. Narrowing a meaning would be to restrict the class of languages.¹²
I don’t think this strategy works. That is, I don’t think that there is a precise set of languages that represents the possible meanings of an expression. It will take some work to show this, however, and I will return to the topic in Chapter 4. For now I simply want to point out that, with provisos, underdetermination and underspecification are different things.

6) Open Contextual Parameters vs. Meaning Underdetermination
Some people think that verbs (and perhaps also nouns) have open variable positions or parameters, to be filled by time, location, agent, etc. So, consider an expression like ‘it’s raining’. On such a view, an utterance of this expression has open parameters for place and time. Whether or not it is a correct analysis, I consider these open contextual parameters to be distinct from meaning underdetermination. It is also often argued that indexical expressions like ‘I’ and ‘now’ have open contextual parameters – the meaning of ‘I’ depends on who is doing the uttering. Again, this does not count as meaning underdetermination.
On the other hand, this is not to say that expressions like ‘I’ are not underdetermined. Note that there is still underdetermination once the parameter is fixed. That is, if the speaker who utters ‘I’ is me, the parameter is set to me, but does that include my hair? Clothes? Glasses? Hands? A ball can “hit me” by hitting my shirt or hitting my hands, but I can still lose both my shirt and hands and still be me. Similarly, if I utter ‘now’ the time interval is fixed to the time of utterance, but is that this minute? This nanosecond? Today? This geological era? Again, I take this to be underdetermined.
7) Sharpening Meaning vs. Narrowing Meaning
It is my view that meanings are constantly being modulated (here I am borrowing a term from Francois Recanati, but am using it in a slightly different sense, since he thinks modulation only kicks in under particular circumstances; I believe modulation to be ubiquitous). Modulation is the mechanism by which meanings can be narrowed and broadened on a conversation-by-conversation basis. This is not the same thing as saying that the meanings are being sharpened and unsharpened. The reason is that we can narrow the range of things to which a term applies without sharpening the term; that is, we can narrow the range of things to which a term applies without making the borderline cases sharp. To follow up on our example from above, we can agree that horses cannot be athletes without thereby sharpening the definition of ‘athlete’ – there are still just as many borderline cases once horses are ruled out. The same holds if we broaden the definition of ‘athlete’ – for example to include grandmaster level chess players. This doesn’t make the definition of athlete less precise. It just means that the range of things to which the predicate applies has been broadened.
8) Being a Semantic Value of a Predicate vs. Being in the Extension of a Predicate
In the previous paragraph and elsewhere in this book I have been careful to avoid talking about the extension of predicates like ‘athlete’, and have spoken about being in the range of the predicate instead. I don’t intend ‘range’ to be another way of saying ‘extension’. An individual is a semantic value of a predicate just in case the predicate is true of that individual. As we will see below, what counts as a semantic value of a predicate (and what a predicate is true of) is underdetermined. I take an extension to be a fixed set of entities, but for reasons we will see below, I don’t think there is a determinate set of objects that are semantic values of natural language predicates.¹³
9) Explicifying versus Sharpening
Explicifying is my word for introducing an explicit definitional component to a word meaning. For example, we might stipulate that cars can’t be athletes. That doesn’t really narrow the meaning because no one actually supposed they were, nor does it sharpen the meaning because it doesn’t really help us with any of our borderline cases. Still, it adds an explicit definitional component to the meaning that we may or may not choose to take on. Obviously explicifying happens more frequently in institutional settings. It also happens in the beginning of academic publications – as in this section of this book.
I don’t mean to suggest that an explicification must be written or externalized. It could be common knowledge to discourse participants without being voiced. I assume that it if one has an explicification one can express it linguistically if called upon to do so.
10) A word on sharpening
Given what I have said about sharpening, it should be clear that I intend it to be a very context sensitive notion. To sharpen a meaning is to modulate it in a way that avoids borderline cases in that context. Thus a meaning that is sharp in one context with a few borderline cases could fail to be sharp in a context with lots of borderline cases.
Suppose we took a term like ‘tall’ and specified that it meant over six feet tall. Isn’t this a sharpening of the definition of ‘tall’? On my view it is certainly an explicification of ‘tall’ but whether it is also a sharpening depends on whether it helps us avoid borderline cases. In most cases it would count as a sharpening, but in a context where many people have a height near six feet tall within the range of error of our measuring device it is not a sharpening.
11) A word on definitions
I haven’t said much about definitions, but for the record I take a definition to be the result of the explicification of the meaning of a term. Typically, it is an agreed-to explicification or is at least proffered as something that can be agreed too.
12) A word on ‘meaning’
I haven’t offered a definition (explicification) of ‘meaning’ and I don’t intend to. Suffice it to say that there are numerous theories of what ‘meaning’ means. My view is that the meaning of ‘meaning’ is underdetermined and the goal of this book is not to sharpen that meaning but rather to offer a theory of how word meanings are modulated while at the same time being as neutral as possible on what one’s theory of meaning should look like. My hope is that the proposals made here will have uptake in a broad range of theoretical frameworks. For example, I would like this proposal to largely be neutral between approaches that take meaning to be largely semantic and those that take it to be largely pragmatic. Likewise it is neutral on how meanings are represented and even between accounts that traffic in wide content and those that utilize narrow content. The key point is that the account of modulation and meaning underdetermination will look very much the same from all these perspectives.