Barry Stroud - Meaning, Understanding, and Practice: Philosophical Essays

(p.iv)

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• Barry Stroud 2000

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• First published 2000

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• British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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• Stroud, Barry.
• Meaning, understanding, and practice : philosophical essays / Barry Stroud.
• Includes bibliographical references and index.
• 1. Meaning (Philosophy) 2. Comprehension (Theory of knowledge) 3. Necessity
• (Philosophy) 4. Thought and thinking. 5. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 18891951. I. Title.
• B840. S872000 121.68dc21 99059017
• ISBN 0198250347

Barry Stroud

Collected here are thirteen essays published in almost as many different journals and anthologies over many years, more than half of them since 1990. I bring them together in the hope of making them more easily available in one place and providing each with whatever new light might be cast upon it by its juxtaposition with the others. They are arranged chronologically, and deal with different but related topics, with several themes or concerns reappearing throughout. Parts of some of the essays overlap with parts of others, in a few cases quite closely, but I have left them all as they originally appeared, hoping that each still contributes enough to stand on its own. I thank the original publishers for permission to reprint them here.

Five of the essays are exercises in the interpretation of the philosophy of Wittgenstein; at least that many others put ideas found in Wittgenstein to work in understanding philosophical issues of meaning, understanding, necessity, and the intentionality of thought.

Some of the earlier papers touch on questions about the nature and source of necessary truth, something I worked on for years in the 1960s and early 1970s. I thought I had come to see how and why none of the accounts of necessity then available could be right, but I had nothing better of my own to put in their place. Part of my interest had been in a priori knowledge, and on that question I think I did make progress. In papers presented in a number of places in the late 1960s I argued against the Kantian view that the necessary truth of something we know is a sure criterion of its being known a priori, and even against the view that we have any a priori knowledge at all. None of that was published, at least in print, while necessity remained unexplained. Advance of a different kind began when I found it increasingly difficult even to formulate a clear question about necessary truth which I could see I had been trying to answer.

In holding something to be necessarily so we regard its opposite as impossible. It might seem natural, then, to seek the source of the limits of our acknowledging something as a possibility, and to find it somehow in our clear understanding of the state of affairs we regard as necessarily so. Understanding something is a matter of having grasped correctly what it involves or what it means. So from necessity it is easy to move to questions of understanding and meaning. But how well do we understand those notions themselves? Can they bear the weight that would then be put upon them? Would a correct understanding of them explain the must with which one thing must be true if another is, or we must accept a conclusion if we accept premisses which imply it?

What can be expected of a philosophical account of one's understanding of the meaning of something is a question running through many of these essays. How far can we get in explaining the phenomena of meaning and understanding from outside them, as it were, without attributing intentional attitudes or supposing that anything means anything or is understood in a certain way to those whose understanding is being accounted for? This is basically a question of reduction, the prospects of which in this case seem to me hopeless. It that is so, what follows, both for our understanding of one another, and for human understanding in general? It seems as if even the very general contingent facts which make language and communication possible must themselves be understood in intentional terms in order to be seen to have that role.

For any words to have meaning, or to be understood as having certain meanings, some words must be used in certain ways, to do something or other. Sounds or marks do not possess meaning all (p.ix) on their own. Someone's meaning or understanding something by a certain word on a certain occasion could then perhaps be explained as the person's engaging in a certain practice or conforming to the way that word is used; without some such practice the word would have no meaning at all. But that would account for the person's meaning or understanding that word in a certain particular way only if the description of the general practice says or implies what that word is used to mean in the community in question.