The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. , No.

ISSN

October

CRITICAL STUDY

HORWICH ON MEANING
B S S
Meaning. B P H. (Oxford UP, . Pp. xii + . Price . h/b,
. p/b.)
Paul Horwich has written an important book about meaning. It is provocative, but it
arguably contains as much truth about meaning as almost any other book on that
difficult subject (reader, beware: I share certain of its views). The book is written in a
lively and accessible style, although some of its accessibility is gained at the cost of
superficial arguments, or no arguments at all, for some of its most important claims.
Some of its views are presented in excessively casual and insufficiently developed
ways, and some strike me as false. On balance, Horwichs Meaning may be expected
to have the same required-reading status in the current philosophy of language
syllabus as its companion Truth.1
The primary purpose of Meaning is to advance what Horwich calls his use theory of
meaning, a picture of meaning ... inspired by Wittgensteins idea that the meaning of a
word is constituted from its use from the regularities governing our deployment of
the sentences in which it appears (p. ) (although readers may wonder how much
of Wittgenstein survives in the product he inspired). There is a need to separate the
more plausible from the less plausible in this theory, and to this end I shall proceed
in the following way. In I, I shall baldly state a partial theory of meaning, which I
shall call M*, and which I regard as the most plausible core of Horwichs use theory
of meaning. In II, I shall state what Horwich adds to M*. And in III, I shall
critically discuss that addition, ending in a slightly moralistic tone.
I. THE THEORY M*
M*, the most plausible core of Horwichs theory, makes the following claims, stated
here in my own terms without regard to who may endorse them or what recommends them.
1 st edn Oxford: Blackwell, ; nd edn Oxford UP, . Meaning and the nd edn of
Truth were published together by OUP and packaged as companion volumes.

The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, . Published by Blackwell Publishers, Cowley Road, Oxford , UK, and
Main Street, Malden, , USA.

STEPHEN SCHIFFER

. To have meaning is to be related to a thing that is a meaning.

. The meaning of an indicative sentence is, as a first approximation, something
that constrains the propositional content of a literal utterance of the sentence: the
meaning of a word is its contribution to the meanings of the sentences in which it
occurs.
. The propositional contents of literal utterances are (what we might call) Fregean
propositions. Qua propositions, they are abstract mind- and language-independent
entities that have truth-conditions, and have their truth-conditions both essentially
and absolutely (i.e., without relativization to anything). Thus the proposition that
snow is white is true iff snow is white, and this is a necessary truth, one that obtains
in every possible world. The contrast is with the sentence Snow is white, which is
also true iff snow is white, but has that truth-condition both contingently (it might
have had a different truth-condition) and only relative to a language or population
of speakers. Qua Fregean propositions, they are not individuated by the objects and
properties they are about but rather by what may be called concepts of those
objects and properties although this suggestive label is initially merely shorthand
for whatever the references of terms in that-clauses are when they are not
customary references. Thus the proposition that George Eliot adored groundhogs
the proposition that Mary Ann Evans adored woodchucks, notwithstanding that
George Eliot = Mary Ann Evans and the property of being a groundhog = the
property of being a woodchuck.2 Fregean propositions may be construed as structured entities whose basic building blocks are concepts of the objects and properties
our beliefs purport to be about. Nothing prevents a concept from being an objectdependent concept of the thing of which it is a concept a concept that cannot exist
apart from, and is partly individuated in terms of, that thing. Concepts, in the
present sense, are abstract entities that are irreducible to things that are intrinsically
identifiable in other terms.
. Subject to qualifications pertaining to the semantic paradoxes, instances of the
schemata
The proposition that S is true iff S
If X exists, then X falls under the concept of X
are conceptual truths necessary truths knowable a priori.
. A sentence token is true iff the proposition it expresses is true, and a token of
an expression refers to a thing iff that thing falls under the concept expressed by the
token.
. The meaning relation is intentionally irreducible; there is no non-intentional
relation R such that the fact that dog means and the fact that opera means
reduce, respectively, to the fact that dog bears R to and the fact that
opera bears R to .3
2 Horwich has chosen to use property in such a way that properties are identical to concepts. Thus on his use of property, the property of being a groundhog the property of
being a woodchuck. I do not think anything turns on this somewhat unorthodox terminological choice.
3 I follow Horwichs convention of using capitalized words to refer to concepts.

The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly,

HORWICH ON MEANING

. At the same time, there can be no intentional fact unless there is some nonintentional fact on which it supervenes in the sense of that notion according to
which p supervenes on q iff q metaphysically necessitates p.
. In general, the non-intentional fact on which a terms meaning supervenes will
include facts about the use of that term both in reasoning and in linguistic behaviour, non-intentionally described, and facts about the environment in which the term
is used, including how the terms use is causally affected by things in the environment. These supervenience bases will involve no relations of any sort to meanings
(e.g., the physical fact on which the meaning of + = supervenes will include
no physical or other relation to the proposition that + = ).
. A corollary of () is that for each meaning property M, e.g., meaning ,
there is a non-intentional property N such that a words having N metaphysically
necessitates its having M. It is a small further step to say that the entailment also
goes in the other direction, so that for every meaning property M there is a nonintentional property N such that, necessarily, a word has M iff it has N. In the first
place, it is reasonable to suppose there will be supervenience bases at a functional/
causal level that obviates worries about multiple realization. And in the second
place, the meaning-determining supervenience bases for many words for example,
colour will inevitably be disjunctive, and once disjunctive properties are let into
the picture, it is hard to deny that each meaning property will be associated with a
(possibly extremely complex) non-intentional property whose instantiation is
metaphysically necessary and sufficient for that of the meaning property.
I have called M* the most plausible core of Horwichs use theory of meaning. I
want to make two brief remarks about its plausibility before turning to Horwichs
addition to M*. First, whether it is plausible that Fregean propositions are the complete contents of utterances depends on ones theory of the concepts that compose
those propositions. I think this requires a rather special theory of them, one which
takes many concepts to be object-dependent (in the sense explained above) and
individuated by contextually-sensitive criteria for evaluating propositional-attitude
reports. I believe such an account both is available4 and coheres with Horwichs
own somewhat cryptic brief remarks on the individuation of concepts. Secondly, the
claim that all intentional facts supervene on non-intentional facts is problematic, for
the following reason. Anyone who takes intentional facts to supervene on nonintentional facts will also take the non-intentional subvening facts either to be physical facts or else themselves to supervene on physical facts. But it is to some extent
problematic that phenomenal, or qualitative, facts could be metaphysically necessitated by physical facts (zombies seem possible), and certain perceptual and other
beliefs have contents with an essentially phenomenal aspect. My present sense is that
there cannot be a determinate resolution of this debate, but that this should be seen
as no threat to anything one should really care about, once one gets clear about the
nature of the murky concept of metaphysical necessity.5 Horwich does not discuss
this aspect of the mindbody problem.
4 See my The Things We Mean (Oxford UP, forthcoming), and, for a sketch of relevant parts
of that theory, my Meanings, forthcoming in Inland Northwest Topics in Philosophy.
5 For more on this, see my The Things We Mean.

The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly,

STEPHEN SCHIFFER

So much for M*. I turn now to the ways in which Horwichs use theory of
meaning goes beyond M*.
II. WHAT HORWICH ADDS TO M*
My statement of M* takes the liberty of occasionally using glosses which are not
explicitly used by Horwich, but his use theory of meaning pretty straightforwardly
entails ()(). Most, if not all, of these entailments will be manifest in the restatements to follow. My focus will be on what Horwich adds to M*.
M* says that meaning facts of the form w means m do not reduce to nonintentional facts of the form w bears R to m, where R is a non-intentional relation to
which the meaning relation reduces. Here no special gloss is put on the notion of
reduction, mostly because the anti-reductionist claim is supposed to be true on any
way of understanding reduction. Horwich would not demur, but he does understand
the notion of reduction in a special way, one that allows him to say that while the
meaning relation the relation expressed by x means y is irreducible, nevertheless
each composite meaning property expressed by an open sentence of the form x
means such and such e.g., x means is reducible to a property that is not a
composite property either of the form bearing R to m or of the form bearing R to the
things that fall under m. We need to understand what Horwich means by reduction.
Typically when philosophers say that property reduces to property they mean
this in a sense that entails that = . This cannot be what Horwich means: the property of meaning cannot be identical to the use property to which it reduces, for
the first, but not the second, is the composite property of standing in the meaning
relation to the concept . In Horwichs sense, to say that the property of meaning reduces to the property U is to say that the meaning property is constituted by
U. But what is constitution? Usually when philosophers speak of one things
constituting another they are concerned with material particulars, and have in mind
the way, e.g., a bust of Wittgenstein and a lump of bronze can be distinct even
though the two things occupy the same place, and the physical properties of the bust
are determined by those of the lump. But what can it mean to say that one property
constitutes another?
When Horwich glosses the constitution relation without special regard for
meaning, he says that constitutes if (a) and apply to the same things, and
(b) facts about are explained by (a). In other words, constitutes when their coextensiveness is the basic explanation of facts involving [] (p. ). His example is
that the property of being water is constituted by the property of being made of
H2O molecules, as this explains why water is transparent, why it boils at C, etc.
This account of constitution, however, is not quite what gets applied when Horwich
turns to the way in which meaning properties are constituted. There are two
important differences, and both are in need of clarification.
(i) In his general gloss of the constitution relation, Horwich says that in order
for one property to constitute another, the first must explain facts that involve the
second. But when it comes to meaning properties, he says that what must be
The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly,

HORWICH ON MEANING

explained are not facts about a words meaning property, but rather facts about the
use of words that have that meaning property. This invites the question Which uses
need to be explained?. Horwichs answer is not as clear as it should be. In most of
his many glosses of what makes for a words meaning-constituting property, he says
that what must be explained is every use of the word. For example:
... the non-semantic characteristic to which the meaning property of a word reduces ... is the property that every use of the word is explained in terms of the fact that
we accept certain specified sentences containing it (p. ).
... the meaning-constituting property of a word should be identified with whatever
best explains the words overall deployment (p. ).
Thus for each word, w, there is a regularity of the form

All uses of w stem from its possession of acceptance property A(x)

where A(x) gives the circumstances in which certain specified sentences containing w
are accepted (p. ).

Every use? What if a certain soprano always warms up her vocal chords by singing
osseous ten times in succession? I dont think Horwich really means every use in
any familiar sense of use. His actual view, evidently, is that the uses of a word that
must be explained are the acceptances of sentences containing the word:
... the primary explanatory role of a words [semantic feature] is to account for the acceptance of ...
sentences containing the word (p. ; my italics).

(ii) Going by Horwichs general account of the constitution relation, one would
expect him to hold that a meaning property is constituted by, and thus reduces to,
the property that plays the requisite explanatory role. But this is not what Horwich
holds. Where N is the non-intentional property that plays the explanatory role with
respect to meaning property M, Horwich does not hold that M is constituted by, and
so reduces to, N, but holds instead that M is constituted by, and thus reduces to, the
property expressed by the open sentence
C.

When one accepts a sentence that contains w, the fact that one accepts that
sentence is at least partly explained by the fact that w has N.

Suppose N in (C) designates a specific property and that dog has (C). The reason
for taking (C), rather than N itself, to be the property that constitutes the property of
meaning is that there could be another word, v, whose basic [explanatory]
property is [the conjunctive property N-&-O], and in that case [holding that the property of meaning reduced to N] would compel us to conclude, wrongly, that
since [dog] and v both possess [N], then v means the same as [dog] (p. , fn. ).
As stated, this is not exactly right: all that would follow is that v would have two
meanings, and something else that included . Horwichs real worry, I am
sure, is that if v is, say, collie, we should not say that collie means both and
, and that seems right.
What we have so far of Horwichs use theory can be reconstructed thus:
The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly,

STEPHEN SCHIFFER

R. For every meaning property M there is a non-intentional property U such that,

necessarily, a word w has M iff
. w has U
. If one accepts a sentence that contains w, then that is partly explained by the
fact that w has U
. ws having U does not play its explanatory role by virtue of ws having some
other property that entails U
Corollary: if U is the explanatorily basic property with respect to meaning
property M, then let U+ be the property a word has when it has U and U plays
the role defined by ()(). It follows from (R) that M and U+ are metaphysically equivalent (i.e., it is metaphysically necessary that a word has M iff it
has U+)
R. M is constituted by, and thus reduces to, U+.

I propose not to make a fuss about (R); I shall simply regard it as stipulatively
defining technical senses of constitute and reduce. The substantive claim is provided by (R). But, as Horwich would no doubt agree, (R) must be qualified in two
respects; and we need to ask how we are to understand the technical notion of
accepting a sentence.
(R) must be qualified to accommodate ambiguity. If meaning
reduces to U+, we dont want to have to say that the fact that cape has U
explains uses of cape where it expresses . Revising (R) to
accommodate ambiguity may not be a trivial matter, owing to the fact that meaning
properties cannot be mentioned in the conditions that define the property to which
a meaning property reduces. Since I do not know how to solve this problem for
Horwich, I shall ignore it, in effect pretending that there is no ambiguity.
(R) must also be qualified to accommodate what Horwich wants to say about
partial mastery of a concept, as when arthritis means for Alfred, even
though he believes the conceptually false proposition that he has arthritis in his
thigh. Suppose that U is the explanatory property embedded in the property to
which the property of meaning reduces. Horwich does not want to say
that U explains Alfreds use of arthritis. Appealing to Hilary Putnams well known
idea of the division of linguistic labour, Horwich says (pp. ) that there are
experts whose use is explained by U, and the fact that arthritis means
for Alfred is somehow to be explained by his willingness to defer to the experts on
questions about the correct application of arthritis. Perhaps Horwich would qualify
(R) by replacing one in () by an expert (see p. ), but the result cannot stand as
the general account of meaning without an elaborate account of what is to count
as an expert in a general account of how meaning properties reduce to nonintentional properties. Since it is not clear to me how this revision is supposed to go,
I shall ignore it too, in effect pretending that no language-user is an Alfred.
We still need to understand Horwichs technical notion of acceptance. He is
well aware of this need and of the substantial constraint his own theory imposes on
him: since it is the aim of his theory to give a general account of meaning properties
through a non-semantic reductive analysis of them, it is essential to make it plausible
The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly,

HORWICH ON MEANING

that the psychological relation Person S accepts the sentence p can be explicated
in non-semantic terms (pp. ). His resolution is to say that acceptance is defined
by a functional theory that simultaneously characterizes acceptance, desire,
observation, and action (pp. ). He does not make use of the language-ofthought metaphor, but if he did, he would say that to accept a sentence is to have it,
or its Mentalese surrogate, tokened in ones belief box.
This brings us to the dnouement of Horwichs theory of meaning his characterization of the use properties that in fact explain our accepting sentences containing
words that have those properties. These, as already intimated in some of the
quotations, are what Horwich calls acceptance properties. The regularities of use,
Horwich theorizes, that constitute the meanings of words concern the circumstances in which specified sentences are privately accepted (i.e., uttered assertively to
oneself) (p. ). In other words, an acceptance property is a property expressed by
an open sentence of the form
A speaker is disposed to accept a w-containing sentence of kind K in circumstances of kind C.
It is his claim that for every word there is a unique acceptance property that is
explanatorily fundamental in the way indicated, and thus enters into the property
to which the words meaning property reduces. Horwich gives three illustrations of
such acceptance properties:
For and it is (roughly) [a speakers] tendency to accept p and q if and only if
he accepts both p and q
For red it is (roughly) the disposition to apply red to an observed surface
when and only when it is clearly red
For true it is the inclination to accept instances of the schema the proposition that p is true if and only if p (p. ).
There are other important claims Horwich makes about the nature of acceptance
properties. For example, he implies that the explanatorily basic acceptance properties that serve to reduce meaning properties are determined by an implicit
psychologicalbehavioural theory, $[w1, w2, ...], specifying the uses of our words, w1,
w2, ... , in relation to one another and to environmental and other circumstances
(pp. ). Evidently this theory will tell us the conditions under which any sentence
containing a word will be accepted, and will tell us this in a way that allows us to
identify for each word an explanatorily fundamental acceptance property. Since the
theory treats of all words together, there may well be groups of words whose
explanatorily fundamental acceptance properties can be specified only in tandem.
III. THE PLAUSIBILITY OF HORWICHS ADDITION TO M*
Horwichs use theory of meaning extends M* with its claim that every meaning property
is constituted by, and thus reduces to, an acceptance+ property where an acceptance+
property is any value of U+ whose embedded acceptance property satisfies (R). In
The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly,

STEPHEN SCHIFFER

other words (given that (R) above is stipulative and ignoring the ways in which (R)
needs to be qualified), Horwich extends M* with the claim that
H.

For every meaning property M there is an acceptance property A such that,

necessarily, a word w has M iff
. w has A
. If one accepts a sentence that contains w, then this is partly explained by the
fact that w has A
. ws having A does not play its explanatory role by virtue of ws having some
other property that entails A.6

There are at least two reasons for doubting (H).

(a) When Horwich introduces his thesis that meaning-constituting properties are
acceptance+ properties, he illustrates it as it applies to and, red and true, but he
never illustrates the thesis as it applies to examples such as dog, which by anyones
lights must be considered something of a challenge to his theory. It is not clear that
dog has an acceptance+ property. If it does, then there is a kind of dog-containing
sentence K and a kind of circumstance C such that a speaker for whom dog means
will be disposed to accept a sentence of kind K in circumstances of kind C, and
that fact will belong to the explanation of his accepting any other sentence that
contains dog. Yet, I submit, there are no plausible candidates for K and C. Dog
may mean for someone who is blind or who does not know what a dog looks
like, so it cannot be required that anyone who understands dog must be disposed to
accept Thats a dog when confronted with a paradigm dog. Dog may mean
for someone who is biologically unsophisticated, and so does not know that being a
dog has something importantly to do with the ability to breed with dogs. Dog may
even mean for someone who, for whatever reason, does not believe that dogs
are animals. It might be suggested that the blind and unsophisticated should be
given the secondary deferential status of those like Burges poor Alfred whose
mastery of a meaning is incomplete. But if we treat these people as meaning by
courtesy of their deference to dog experts, I wonder what concepts will be left for
ordinary people to grasp on their own. Would someone whose only acquaintance
with dogs was with large dogs require deference to an expert when confronted for
the first time with a Chihuahua? It is also not clear that there will be a single acceptance+ property for all the experts. No expert will need an acceptance property for
6 Horwich claims that it is a consequence of his theory that it is impossible to explain why a
given meaning property reduces to the acceptance+ property to which it happens to reduce.
His point, I take it, is that his theory precludes there being general premises such that when
one adds to them the premise that a word has such and such acceptance+ property one can
deduce that the word has the meaning property it has. That seems right; but why should it
preclude explaining propositions of the form M reduces to A+? Horwichs theory does allow for
the following derivation:
(H)
Some word has both M and A+
M reduces to A+.
Why should this not count as an explanation of the conclusion? The issue may be verbal, but
it bears on the vexing question of how, if at all, one can explain the fact that a given intentional property supervenes on a given non-intentional property.

The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly,

HORWICH ON MEANING

dog to explain his accepting Every dog is a dog, and if two experts disagree about
co-speciation, there may be no acceptance+ property that holds for both, even
though both continue to mean by dog.
(b) Horwichs use theory of meaning, as befits a theory inspired by Wittgenstein,
is explicitly about the meaning properties of public language expressions: the book
Meaning is focused on our ordinary conception of the meanings of terms in
common, public languages, such as English and Spanish (p. , fn. ). But no public
language meaning property reduces to an acceptance+ property. The fact that dog
means in spoken English surely has something essentially to do with communication,
with its use in communicative behaviour, with the speech acts speakers perform in uttering
sentences containing dog. But something could have an acceptance+ property even
though it had no use at all in communication. Perhaps it is not implausible that
acceptance+ properties determine the meanings of words in ones inner system of
mental representation, but meaning in a lingua mentis is quite different from public
language meaning, even if in some sense one thinks in the same language as one
speaks. It is instructive to think of the matter in the following David Lewis-inspired
way.7 Let us ignore indexicality and non-indicative moods and take English to be a
function from English sentences to the propositions they mean. Then it is a useindependent conceptual truth that dog means in English. The reductive task is
that of explaining what it is for English to be used in one way or another, and here
there will clearly be one account for English to be used as a public language of
communication and a quite different account for it to be used as a private language
of thought. With things put in this way, the meaning property of dog that Horwichs account seeks to reduce would not be the use-independent property of
meaning in English, but rather the property of meaning in the public
language of English-speakers. But this property cannot reduce to any acceptance+
property, since no acceptance+ property entails anything about use in a public
language of communication. Whatever the meaning-determining properties of
public language expressions are, they are not acceptance+ properties. (H) not only
fails to state something true about every public language meaning property; it fails
to state something true about any public language meaning property. How serious a
problem this ultimately constitutes for Horwich depends on how well he is able
to incorporate his acceptance+ properties into an account of public language
meaning.
The truth in Horwichs use theory of meaning, as it now stands, appears to be
exhausted by M*, if indeed that theory is true. One reason why this is significant
is that while M* asserts metaphysical equivalence between the semantic and the
non-intentional, it does nothing to support a reduction of the semantic to the nonintentional. Metaphysical equivalence is a two-way street; if all we know is that a
certain meaning fact is metaphysically equivalent to a certain non-intentional fact,
we have so far introduced no asymmetry that allows us to say that either fact reduces
to the other. Horwich was right to seek an account of reduction which entailed an
important asymmetry, but, I have argued, his asymmetry can be questioned.
7 See D.K. Lewis, Languages and Language, in his Philosophical Papers, Vol. (Oxford UP,
), pp. .

The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly,

STEPHEN SCHIFFER

As an ex-Gricean, I need to make another critical remark. When Horwich proposes that meaning is a relation between expressions and the things they mean, he
rightly points out that this raises two questions: What is the nature of these entities,
the meanings? And what is the nature of the relation of meaning in which terms
stand to the meaning entities? (p. ). He then says that the second of these questions is not as hard as the first one, and proposes the following as a rough account of
the meaning relation:
For any expression e and concept c, e means c iff the utterance of e indicates [i.e.,
justifies belief in, as when smoke indicates fire] the presence of c within some
mental state of the speaker.

This is consistent with Horwichs claim that the meaning relation does not reduce to
any non-intentional relation: first, indication is an intentional relation, and secondly,
indication properties do not constitute meaning properties in Horwichs technical
sense. Nevertheless the displayed analysis of meaning in terms of indication meets
straightforward counter-examples of a sort that make it doubtful that the analysis
can be refined into something that is true. Sallys utterance of dog may indicate the
presence of in some thought associated with her utterance, but that would do
nothing to show that dog for her meant , and an expression may be uttered for
all sorts of reasons without indicating the presence of its meaning in any of the
utterers mental states (the speaker may be speaking in his sleep or exercising his
vocal chords). The reason why I am doubtful that Horwichs definition of the public
language meaning relation in terms of indication can be successfully revised is that,
like (H), it completely ignores the use of language in communication.
In this review I have concentrated on the core theory of Meaning, but there is
much of excellence in the book I have not touched on, especially some illuminating
and thought-provoking critical discussions about analyticity and a priori knowledge,
normativity and meaning, and Kripkensteins paradox. Nor have I said anything
about Horwichs introducing Meaning as an attempt to extend the minimalist theory
of truth into a more general deflationary picture of the relation between language,
thought, and reality (p. vii), or about his publicizing his combined theory of Meaning
and Truth as semantic deflationism (p. ). I have not discussed whether his theory
really is deflationary, because it seems to me utterly profitless to do so. Terms like
deflationary are used for their commendatory force and have practically no freestanding descriptive meaning. Doubtless there are certain views to which such
emotive labels determinately apply or fail to apply, but there is a vast middle
ground, into which Horwichs views fall, where applying the terms reduces to an
exercise in persuasive definition. The application of labels like deflationary or inflationary never adds anything to ones understanding of a theory when one knows
what the theory is. Philosophers should just state and argue for their theories
without emotive rhetoric or at least confine it to their book jackets.8
New York University
8

I am grateful to Paul Horwich for his comments on an earlier draft.

The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly,