Pat Hayes wrote:
>
>> b) From a natural language view, I might take "Pat is sleeping" to mean
>> something like, "please don't make to much noise, or you might wake him
>> up".
>
> That would be a mistake. It does not MEAN that.
> What it means is clear: that I am asleep. (01)
You may be making a serious mistake here. What does "xhifsh" mean? How
do you know? What does "He is doing that" mean? How do you know? How
do you know that "Pat is sleeping" means that you are sleeping? How
clear is that, really? How clear is it that 'Pat' means you? How clear
is it that 'sleeping' means sleeping? Do you presume some context --
e.g., that the sentence should be interpreted as a sentence in English
-- or does "Pat is sleeping" simply (non-contextually) mean that you are
sleeping? (02)
Why did you not have any idea what (that (rains)) meant, but it is so
clear what "Pat is sleeping" means? (03)
If I understood him well, Ingvar's distinction (whether it was his
original one or not) between sentence meaning and used sentence meaning
may be the right thing to mention here. Following that distinction
(Ingvar, please correct me if I go wrong), a sentence (not a
proposition, though) has a simple meaning -- *the* meaning -- and a
number of used meanings, meanings that depend on the actual context.
(However, I can't see how, in the context of natural language, a
sentence could have a simple non-contextual meaning, since every
sentence is spoken or written by some person, and heard or read by some
person, possibly the same, and each of those persons necessarily
interpret the sentence in a context -- the context of their
understanding of the elements of the language, for example. Even if you
claim that a sentence has a non-contextual meaning, you do it in the
context of your thinking so.) (04)
Back to the point: I would rather not say (05)
"From a natural language view, I might take "Pat is sleeping" to mean
something like, "please don't make to much noise, or you might wake him."" (06)
because it seems problematic to explain what the view of a natural
language is, but, for example, (07)
"From Pat's wife point view, "Pat is sleeping" might mean something
like, "please don't make to much noise, or you might wake him."" (08)
would be reasonable, I think. In natural language, most, if not all,
terms are opaque, and their meaning is context-dependent. ('Everybody'
is a good example from your recent post -- what is it that "everybody
loves my baby but my baby does not love anybody but me" *clearly* means?) (09)
vQ (010)
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