Abstract

Language utterances are meaningful because they mean something to someone. This truism motivates regarding linguistic meaning as a response-dependent property of language utterances. But the properties called ‘response-dependent’ in the literature differ substantially. This paper discusses three kinds with respect to their metaphysics, calling them by their more precise bynames ‘judgment-dependent’, ‘response-dispositional’, and (genuinely) ‘response-dependent’. Looking at what it takes for something to have such a property, we can devise a test to determine which of the three kinds of property we are dealing with. This test is then used to corroborate Goldberg’s (2012) finding that Davidson’s two accounts of linguistic meaning, the Radical Interpretation (RI) account and the account from Language Learning (LL) by triangulation, while both response-dependent (in the broad sense), differ in kind. The test shows that (RI) is an account of meaning as a judgment-dependent property, (LL) as a response-dependent property. But whereas Goldberg argued for giving up (LL) and retaining (RI) in order to have a single account of linguistic meaning, this paper argues in favour of (LL) over (RI). It shows that (i) (RI) cannot exist without (LL), and (ii) (LL) covers more ground than (RI) because it can account for both speaker and listener meaning. So, while (RI) may evolve out of (LL) and has its place in some situations, (LL) is the basis we need in order to account for linguistic meaning.