Allow me to remind you of a well-known example of Ducrot’s. The expression je suis le rognon (“I am the kidney”), uttered by a human being, is false (from the point of view of senses 3 and 4), but, when said in the context of a restaurant, accompanied by a gesture first pointing to the dish in the waiter’s hand and then to the speaker himself, it signifies unequivocally that the speaker is affirming that he is the one who ordered the kidney and not the one who ordered the sirloin steak.
17.4. The Identification of Meaning and Synonymy
In order to deny that semantics makes sense in sense 1, to affirm, that is, that words do not have meanings agreed upon by convention, it is customary to employ a quite fallacious argument. Meaning is identified with synonymy. Philosophers of language are more responsible for this fallacy than lexicographers. No sensible person versed in languages can believe that there are two synonyms that really do mean the same thing (and even the authors of dictionaries of synonyms offer their alternatives as possibilities faute de mieux, as stylistic variants to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, not as absolute equivalents). Once meaning and synonymy have been identified, however, the tendency is to demonstrate that, since there is no such thing as absolute synonymy (so much is obvious), there can be no meaning (which is not so obvious). This is the argument of those who hold that translation is an impossibility.
Let us consider a fairly curious text of Quine’s, “The Problem of Meaning in Linguistics,” which appears in his From the Logical Point of View. In it Quine speaks of lexicography and lexicographers, saying that lexicographers seem to be interested in the problem of meaning, and he is certainly correct. After which he opines that a lexicographer “differs from the so-called formal linguists only in that he is concerned to correlate linguistic forms with one another in his own special way, namely, synonyms with synonyms” (Bréal 1900). If by “lexicographer” we understand the author of a dictionary of synonyms, this is certainly what he does, though with all due caution, as we said before. But Quine seems to think that the only thing the lexicographer is interested in is deciding what linguistic forms are synonymous, that is, “alike in meaning.” This is not true. The lexicographer’s first task is precisely to establish why the same expression may have different meanings in different contexts. Rather than cultivate the myth of synonymy, a good lexicographer contests it.
If by “lexicographer” we understand someone who is writing a dictionary for tourists, and if he tells us “steak” is a synonym of bistecca, he may be taking advantage of the work of other lexicographers, but he is deliberately impoverishing it, though he may make it possible for an English-speaking tourist to order a bistecca if he happens to be in Italy. The good lexicographer is the one who explains that cagna is not a synonym of “bitch,” except in a few rare cases, so that in Italian I may define a lousy singer as a cagna, however impeccable her morals, but I could not call her a “bitch” in English without suggesting that she is of easy virtue (though her singing may be divine).
So lexicographers, real lexicographers, are indeed semanticists in sense 1, in that they endeavor to establish on what common bases we may legitimately use a word, but they are above all semanticists in sense 2 when they try to decide the nature of our lexicographic conventions, not in the caricatural terms of synonymy and homonymy, but on the basis of an inspection of the systems of content and basing their findings on a broad survey of previous texts and their meaning (sense 5).
When Quine says that lexicographers do not hold the monopoly on the problem of meaning, he appears to have in mind the authors of pocket dictionaries for tourists, rather than lexicographers who are scholars of structural semantics.
Just how debatable Quine’s ideas about lexicography are can be seen from the paragraphs which follow, in which he equiparates the work of the lexicographers to that of the phonologists who decide whether two phonemes are different according to whether or not the meaning of the word changes if we substitute one for the other within the same language. It is true that the phonologist decides that a given phoneme is different from another because, if we substitute one for the other within the same syntagm, we obtain two words with two different meanings (ship and sheep, for instance), but, when he does so, the phonologist is not concerned with the notion of meaning. He simply assumes that the native speaker (of whom he himself is a reliable sample) perceives a variation in meaning in the passage from one phoneme to another. He merely registers a fact, he does not remotely presume to define what a ship or a sheep is. The lexicographer on the other hand takes as a given the proof of substitution provided by the phonologist and is concerned with defining the difference between a ship and a sheep.
17.5. Truth-Conditional Semantics
Let us go on to the fourth sense of semantics. It goes without saying that if we have such an impoverished notion of lexicography and meaning as that of synonymy, we are free to experiment with phenomena such as the substitution of apparently synonymous terms in opaque contexts (and clearly, someone who believes that Aristotle wrote the Metaphysics does not automatically believe that Alexander’s teacher wrote the Metaphysics). These are exercises of considerable importance for the study of logic, but not very important for understanding the way we speak. No speaker in his right mind, once it had been affirmed that “Giorgione” has three syllables, would affirm that “Barbarelli” too had three syllables.3 I am one of the first to admit how many things we would have failed to understand if we had not performed exercises of this kind, but they have nothing at all to do with at least four of the five senses of semantics that I am talking about.
Let us come now to the differences between sense 3 and sense 4. It is my conviction that a truth-conditional semantics has nothing to do with the problem of reference. The problem of reference has to do with our ability to designate objects and states of the world, to reach an understanding on this act of designation (and hence it has something to do with sense 1), and—eventually (but this is not a semantic but an epistemological and gnoseological problem)—to say whether the object or the state of the world we referred to exists or is taking place to the extent that we referred to it. In simple terms, if I say that it is raining today, we have to be agreed on the meaning of “rain,” we have to grant that the speaker is saying that water is falling from the sky, and that (another problem) water is actually falling from the sky.
Let us take a look at Tarsky’s truth criterion. Its concern is with how to define the truth conditions of a proposition, but not with how to establish if the proposition is true when used for acts of reference. And saying that understanding the meaning of a sentence means knowing its truth conditions (that is, on what conditions the proposition expressed would be true) it is not the same thing as proving the sentence to be true or untrue.4
Agreed, the paradigm is nowhere near as homogeneous as is usually maintained, and there are those who tend to interpret Tarsky’s criterion according to a correspondentist epistemology. But, whatever Tarsky may have thought,5 it is hard to read in a correspondentist sense his famous definition: