We tend to think that words refer to things in the world. We believe words latch on to parts of reality, and that these connections are the fundamental source of linguistic meaning. But linguist and philosopher Paul Pietroski argues this is a mistake and offers an alternative approach to meaning. Words do not refer to things, Pietroski argues, and meaning is instead determined by the construction of complex concepts from simpler ones.

Many animals can think about things. A horse can think intently about an apple that it sees in your hand. Humans can think and talk about lots of things that we can’t perceive. Consider dinosaurs, Shakespeare, the Earth’s metallic inner core, fairness, nuclear fusion, and next week. How can our minds reach so far, with such ease? Words surely help. But how?

A typical child acquires thousands of words. Acquiring ‘apple’ usually involves thinking about an apple that someone is talking about; but it’s hard to see how we could think about dinosaurs or weeks without having any words. We can think by “talking to ourselves;” but it’s hard to see how using words could let us think about things. To help organize the questions in this vicinity, I’ll sketch two pictures of how speech is related to thought, and then modify the first by stealing from the second.

1. Words as Vehicles for Personal Concepts

Often, things grab our attention. Thinking about something is a more creative mental action of using cognitive resources to represent or depict something. Such actions can be prompted by perceptions. Seeing something fall from a tree might lead to depicting it as an apple. But depictions need not be veridical. Perhaps the falling object was a red ball. Alone in the dark, one can generate lots of mental representations and think about things that aren’t there.

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Representing goes beyond mere noticing. To mentally represent something is to present it in some way made available by certain cognitive resources.

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Representing goes beyond mere noticing. To mentally represent something is to present it in some way made available by certain cognitive resources. Relatedly, a thing can be represented in many ways. Suppose that some dice are tossed with the result shown below.                     

Someone might focus on the die that came up two and think about it in that way. Someone else might think about the same die as the one that landed on the right. You might think about something as an apple, while a horse thinks about it as another one of those delicious treats. Following a long tradition, let’s say that thinking about things involves the use of concepts—e.g., concepts of being an apple, or concepts of landing on the right—that can be used to represent things in various ways. For each concept, there is a corresponding “application condition”—e.g., being an apple, or landing on the right. A concept applies to each thing that meets this condition, but to nothing else. Using small capital letters to indicate concepts, let’s say that a child can have a concept apple that can be connected with ‘apple’ or a similar word like ‘pomme’ in French.