ACTUAL AND POTENTIAL EXPRESSIONS
MAX WEISS
By a “linguistic expression” I mean an expression of ordinary language: for
example, a word, a phrase or a sentence. An expression should be distinguished
from its occurrences, as the word “denoting” should be distinguished from some
ink on a Russellian manuscript. Occurrences come into and go out of existence,
and they are generally located at some place or other. But it is unobvious that
expressions themselves exist in time or space, or that they could come into or go
out of existence. The view of many philosophers is that expressions are abstract
objects, like numbers or geometrical figures.
What I mean by “occurrence” is roughly what others have meant by “token”
as distinguished from “type”. However, the traditional understanding is that types
are abstract objects, and this understanding is entrenched enough to take as definitional. If it turned out that expressions are not abstract objects, then expressiontypes would become doubtful posits. Because “token” gains color from the contrast
with “type”, I therefore use “occurrence” instead.
In this paper, I shall address three questions, listed here in descending order of
philosophical seductiveness.
(1) What is a linguistic expression?
(2) What makes something an occurrence of an expression?
(3) What generally characterizes the occurrences of an expression?
Attempted accounts of the metaphysics of language have been hindered by the
hasty importation of epistemological concerns. So, to emphasize: the above questions do not ask how we attain knowledge of words, nor do they ask what knowledge we use to recognize occurrences. Rather, they ask about expressions and
occurrences.
Question (1) is a flatfooted metaphysical question, akin to questions like “what
is a number?” or “what is a species?” One might think of such a question as asking
for an essence. But, the notion of essence is no less obscure than question (1)
itself. So, instead of using the notion of essence to explicate question (1), and
trying thereby to ground an inquiry into the nature of things of some kind, I hope
that the inquiry will shed light on the notion of essence.
While (1) may be held to concern metaphysical esoterica, question (2) concerns
matters of occasional interest to all competent speakers (particularly those who are
hard of hearing or sight). It is a matter of familiar fact whether, for example, a
speaker said “yes” or “less”. Question (2) requests an explanation of such facts.
How is it that the speaker did in fact utter the word she did? Understanding what
made it the case that she uttered that word, may lead to understanding what the
word is itself.
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MAX WEISS
The homely question (3) asks only for generalizations about occurrences. To
fulfill the request, we need to consider the phenomena, frame hypotheses, seek
counterexamples, and so on. Answering question (3) should help us answer (2), for
when seeking explanation of facts of some particular kind it should prove useful to
examine them. Let me solidify the link between questions (2) and (3) by casting a
form of generalization that is bound up in an account of what makes something an
occurrence of a given expression.
• Anything x is an occurrence of w if and only if x is such that Φ.
A proposed substitute for Φ I’ll call an “occurrence criterion”. Of course, we see
immediately several correct occurrence criteria, e.g. “x is an occurrence of w”, “x
is an occurrence of w and snow is white”, etc. But, for our purposes a criterion
will be adequate only if it is correct and nontrivial. My hunch is that absolute but
merely actual extensional correctness, together with nontriviality, may here lead us
to matters of essence.
Philosophers fall quickly for an answer to (1), that expressions are abstract objects. Like Peirce, they might take expressions to be sui generis Platonic forms.
Or like Russell, Quine, and Lewis, they may domesticate the Platonic conception
by reconstructing expressions as sets or as shapes. In any case, these philosophers
proceed from the top down. From the quick answer to (1) they derive an answer
to (2): something is an occurrence of an expression if it partakes of some form, or
belongs to some set, or bears some shape. Question (3) they spurn.
In §1 of this paper, I survey top-down approaches, and distill from them a common doctrine. In §2, I argue that the doctrine forecloses adequate explanation of
what makes something an occurrence of an expression. For it extrudes relata essential to any occurrence criterion that could be adequate.
That question (2) should prove resistant is puzzling. Usually a competent speaker
knows perfectly well whether or not a given object is an occurrence of this or that
expression. And when she doesn’t know, she knows how to find out, or knows
at least what would settle the issue. I contend that attempts at answering (2) are
corrupted by the quick answer to (1). We should reverse the order of approach, and
start from the bottom. Once we know what makes something an occurrence of an
expression, the nature of expressions themselves will become clear.
So after completing the critical part of this paper, in the third section I construct
a positive account. In §3.1, I state an adequate occurrence criterion for expressions
of a salient kind, namely words. The criterion leads, in §3.2, to an explanation of
what makes something an occurrence of a word. In §3.3 I hypothesize a sufficient
condition for a property to pertain to the nature of a thing, and then derive, from
this hypothesis and from the explanation of §3.2, a partial characterization of the
nature of words. The paper concludes with suggestions about how to extend the
account to sentences.
1. L INGUISTIC PLATONISM
In this section, I survey views found in writings of Russell, Quine, and Lewis. I
argue that these views entail commitment to the following theses.
ACTUAL AND POTENTIAL EXPRESSIONS
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(T1 ) A linguistic expression w is an abstract object that encodes or approximates
a property F .1
(T2 ) Satisfaction of F is a correct occurrence criterion for w.
(T3 ) The property F is intrinsic.2
According to such a view, for x to be an occurrence of an expression w is for x to
stand in a certain relation to w. However, whether or not x stands in this relation to
w can be determined by considering whether or not x satisfies an intrinsic property
F that w encodes or approximates. A pair of motivations underly the close link but
at least nominal distinction between F and w. The close link suggests how abstraction from occurrences of w may yield knowledge of w itself, and conversely how
knowledge of w may yield a capacity to recognize occurrences. The distinction
of F from w serves the ontological intuition that expressions are not themselves
properties but objects.3
1.1. Russell and Quine. Russell wrote:
A word is a class of similar noises. Thus a person who asserts
“Socrates is Greek” is a person who makes, in rapid succession,
three noises, of which the first is a member of the class “Socrates”,
the second a member of the class “is,” and the third a member of
the class “Greek.”4
As it stands the account is incomplete, because nothing says when a given noise
belongs to the class that supposedly is “Socrates”. But here is a reconstruction.
Let ∼ be some similarity relation definable in terms of acoustic properties.5 Now
a word w is a class C such that: some particular noise, say x, belongs to C, and
anything y belongs to C iff y bears ∼ to x. Thus, belonging to C reduces to satisfying some acoustic, hence intrinsic property. So according to Russell’s account,
there is an intrinsic property F such that satisfaction of F is a correct occurrence
1The distinction of F from w is intended to accommodate a Fregean intuition that words, as objects,
are not themselves instantiable. Thus, w may be a “proxy object” of the sort to which Frege suggested
we refer by the phrase “the concept horse.” Readers without such scruples may take the encoding
mentioned in the thesis to be the identity mapping.
2It is notoriously hard to explicate the notion of an intrinsic property. Nothing special hangs on my
use of the word “intrinsic”. I mean only to indicate by it, for example, what pertains to the shape of
an inscription, or to the spectrogram of an utterance.
3The point of the above general characterization of linguistic platonism is to allow the sweeping
refutation in section 2.1 of a range of particular views. The characterization can be widened to
accommodate weakenings of T3 which might also be read into the authors to be considered.
4
Appendix C to the second edition of Principia, (Whitehead & Russell 1925, 661). In the 1919 paper
“On propositions: what they are and how they mean”, Russell also writes: “a word is a class of
closely similar noises produced by breath combined with movements of the throat and tongue and
lips” reprinted in (Russell 1919, 290)
5For example, we might imagine assigning a severity measure to deformations of spectrograms.
Then, x ∼ y holds iff an ideal spectrogram of y results from an ideal spectrogram of x by sufficiently
gentle deformation.
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criterion for “Socrates”. The word “Socrates” itself approximates this property by
containing all and only its instances.6
W. V. Quine avers the Platonist view more baldly than Russell: “a sentence is not
an event of utterance, but a universal: a repeatable sound pattern, or a repeatedly
approximable norm” (Quine 1960, 191). More specifically:
We can take each linguistic form as the sequence, in a mathematical sense, of its successive characters or phonemes. A sequence a1 , a2 , . . . , an can be explained as the class of the n pairs
ha1 , 1i,ha2 , 2i, . . . , han , ni. . . . We can still take each component
character ai as a class of utterance events, there being here no risk
of non-utterance. (Quine 1960, 195)
Quine’s account therefore has two stages. Like Russell’s words, a Quinean phoneme
is a class of events which are its occurrences. So the class-cum-phoneme, together
with an acoustic similarity relation, determines an intrinsic property that decides
whether a given noise is an occurrence of the phoneme. Other expressions, like
words or sentences, are sequences of phonemes so construed. Presumably, Quine
introduces the sequential structure to represent the contiguous temporal succession
of its terms.7 Now if F and G are intrinsic properties of events, then so is the property: consisting of an F followed immediately by a G. It follows by induction on
the length of the sequences that a given expression encodes an intrinsic property
F ; satisfaction of F is the occurrence criterion for that expression.8
It might be that Russell and Quine are committed only to a weaker form of
T3 . Call “phonetic” a property that refers not just to acoustic features but also to
features of the mechanical process by which a noise is articulated.9 Then, it might
be that Russell and Quine are committed not to T3 but instead to
(T30 ) The property F is phonetic.
Such a view I’ll call “phoneticist.” The weakening of T3 to T30 may allow us to show
that occurrences of an expression cannot be produced by whistling of the wind.
But, for noises produced by a human vocal tract, the weakening may make little
difference, since probably, the acoustic profile of such a noise largely determines
the articulatory process required to produce it.
1.2. Lewis. According to David Lewis, a language is “something which assigns
meanings to certain strings of types of sounds or of marks.” Furthermore,“[t]he
6Russell’s attitude to classes warrants a couple of qualifications. First, for Russell, classes are mere
“logical fictions”, and apparent reference to classes, hence also to words, is to be eliminated contextually (Whitehead & Russell 1925, 187ff). Second, the Russell of the 1910s thinks that practically
everything is a class. So, it is not clear that Russell at this stage thought that words were any more
abstract than, e.g., persons. The feature of his view I wish to emphasize is that expressions are
individuated by their acoustic or otherwise intrinsic properties.
7It might perversely be taken e.g. to represent positions in an overtone series.
8For a clear discussion of Quine’s view of the nature of expressions, see (Dreben 1994).
9This then records some recent history, but no features of the speaker’s intentional states beyond
those required by the mere fact that she goes through those motions required to produce an instance
of the phoneme.
ACTUAL AND POTENTIAL EXPRESSIONS
5
entities in the domain of the function are certain finite sequences of types of vocal
sounds, or of types of inscribable marks; if σ is in the domain of a language L, let
us call σ a sentence of L” (Lewis 1975, 3). A language L is used in a population P
if there prevail in P certain conventions of “trust and truthfulness” defined relative
to L (1975, 7). Although Lewis says that a sentence is a string of types of sounds or
of marks, he doesn’t say what makes something an instance of a type.10 However,
he excludes two possible factors. First, he suggests that a name is an indexical
whose denotation in a context depends on the causal history of its occurrence in
that context (1975, 15). So, causal history is a parameter of the semantic value
that some language happens to assign to the expression, rather than a feature of
the expression itself. Furthermore, Lewis says that an expression bears a meaning
not by itself, but only relative to a language or a population (Lewis 1975, 16).
Thus, utterances and inscriptions are typed independently of their semantic values
as well. So for Lewis, the occurrence criterion for the types themselves can appeal
neither to historical nor to semantic facts. It is therefore likely that the criterion
for the occurrence of an expression w is satisfaction of some intrinsic property—
namely, having the fuzzy shape or spectrogram with which w may be identified.
2. O BJECTIONS TO LINGUISTIC PLATONISM
In this section, I pose three problems that undermine occurrence criteria that rely
heavily on intrinsic or phonetic properties. These problems show that linguistic
platonism, as encapsulated in T1 − T3 , is untenable.
2.1. Homophony. The first problem is that platonism conflicts with the existence
of distinct but phonetically indistinguishable expressions. Or at least, it conflicts
with the possibility that something be an occurrence of one such expression, without being an occurrence of another. For example, consider the word “yen” that
means craving, and that derives from Chinese; and consider the word “yen” that
means a unit of currency, and that derives from Japanese. Let’s call them c and j.
I assume that c and j are phonetically indistinguishable in a strong sense: for each
occurrence x of c, it is possible that there be an occurrence x0 of j phonetically indistinguishable from x. Furthermore, I assume that no single occurrence of a word
must disturb that word’s occurrence criterion. Now suppose x is an occurrence of
c, and let x0 be a phonetic duplicate of x that is an occurrence of j. Then, where
F is a phonetic property necessary and sufficient for being an occurrence of j, x0
has F . Then x has F , and so x is an occurrence of j. It follows that something
is an occurrence of the one word “yen” iff it’s an occurrence of the other. This
undermines the motivation for considering “yen” and “yen” to be distinct words at
all.11
10The fact that Lewis says “types of sounds or of marks” rather than “types of sounds or marks”
suggests that there are disjoint kinds of sentences, the spoken and the written. But this is pretty close
reading.
11Of course, one may just accept that there are no distinct but phonetically indistinguishable expressions. See for example, Cappelen (1999).
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MAX WEISS
2.2. Aberrancy. The second problem is that although we may expect occurrences
of a word to have a certain sound or shape, they do fall short in various ways. But
we might think they are nonetheless occurrences, especially when we recognize
the extent of the phenomenon. To sign one’s name is to produce an occurrence of
it, even if curlicued and elliptical. Handwriting often exploits features of textual
context to facilitate recognition of particular words. For example, in a handwritten
draft of this paper, I might write the first few occurrences of “occurrence” clearly,
and then afterwards elide more and more of the pattern. Typing the paper on a
computer, I might just spell it “occ.”, and eventually run a macro that converts this
to the normal spelling. In speech, such effects are perhaps more dramatic. Small
children and drunk people may utter a sentence despite mispronouncing most of
the words in it. Of course, the more we weaken the criteria to accommodate such
scruffy or lazy occurrences, the worse the troubles with homophony.
2.3. Formal diversity. Some variety among the productions of an expression should
not be called aberrant but instead ascribed to the diversity of forms that a given language may take. Such formal diversity is distinguished from aberrancy in that its
variation is more or less regular. For example, when people whisper, they systematically replace phonemes with non-vocalised counterparts. When they speak
quickly, “because if” becomes “kzif”. More dramatically, if occurrencehood were
about intrinsic features, then why should it seem natural that an expression can
be not just spoken but written?12 Furthermore, the physically impaired may adopt
special means for producing and consuming expressions: consider Braille, or fingerspelling, or for that matter the paralyzed man who spells out French with blinks
of the eye. In order to account for such formal diversity, one will have to keep
adding theoretical disjuncts. And it seems hopeless to try to specify a priori the
totality of forms a language may take.
Now, one might reply that although we cannot construct in advance an adequate criterion accommodating all possible forms of the language, the existence
of such a criterion follows trivially from some unrefuted metaphysical hypotheses. For example, suppose that it turned out, as a general metaphysical truth, that
any two things are intrinsically discernible. Then, each particular past, present or
future occurrence of w would be intrinsically discernible from everything else in
the world. The disjunction of complete intrinsic descriptions of occurrences of w
would then be satisfied by all and only the occurrences of w, and hence constitute a correct occurrence criterion appealing only to intrinsic properties. And the
set of occurrences of w would encode this criterion. But such an approach yields
no explanatory progress whatsoever. It simply diverts the question “what makes
something an occurrence of w?” into the question “what makes some set be the
expression w?”, which we could hardly then answer by saying that it is the set of
w’s occurrences.
12I take it as obvious that expressions can be both spoken and written. For reading aloud involves
uttering expressions inscribed. And writing is no mere proxy for speech, since writing that involves
e.g. technical symbolism may be practically unpronounceable.
ACTUAL AND POTENTIAL EXPRESSIONS
7
3. A NOTHER APPROACH
In this section, I climb the list of three questions drawn at the outset. First
I motivate and assert an occurrence criterion, and derive from it an account of
what makes something an occurrence. Then, I suggest an account of the nature of
linguistic expressions.
Some intimations of what follows can be read into early contributions to the
theory of direct reference: for example into Kripke’s explanation of how it comes
about that an utterance of a name refers to the bearer of that name (Kripke 1980).
So far as I know, the most explicit formulation of this sort of view of expressions is
that of Kaplan’s visionary paper “Words” (1990). But it is a little shy on the metaphysics. And, like the early contributions to direct reference theory, it is inspired
mainly by proper names. It needs supplementation to handle, for example, verbs
and sentences. Here I begin by treating systematically the case of words. Then I
suggest how to extend the treatment to sentences.
3.1. A new occurrence criterion. Nearly every sentence that a speaker utters or
writes is composed entirely of words with which he is acquainted. This truism
suggests a response to the difficulties in the views canvassed in §1. Such views
incline us to suppose that an occurrence might emerge spontaneously from the
mouth of the speaker, or from a collision of ink and paper. We should do well to
inspect the speaker or the collision carefully, to see how the word might have got
in there in the first place.
If an occurrence of “contumely” emerges from a collision of ink and paper, then
it stands at the end of a chain of causally dependent occurrences along which we
can trace a path back to the knowledge of “contumely” in some speaker. We may
trace the occurrence of “contumely” on a copy of Waverley to an occurrence on
a printing plate, through a process of typesetting, to an inscription in the hand of
Scott.
If an occurrence of “contumely” emerges from the mouth of a speaker, then she
can usually be said to know the word “contumely”. For example, she may have
seen some mark which she recognized as an occurrence of a word. She recognized
it as an occurrence of a word because it took a form she knows is typical of such
things. Perhaps it was a juxtaposition of inkmarks assuming shapes typical of occurrences of letters of the alphabet on a page of Waverley. Such acquaintance with
occurrences as occurrences normally causes knowledge of a word.13 This knowledge involves the ability to recognize further occurrences as occurrences of that
word (rather than merely as occurrences of something), and the ability to produce
new occurrences oneself. However, it need not involve knowledge of the word’s
meaning.
13In the case of “contumely” the speaker likely perceives it to be a word in some such way, because
she is already more or less a speaker of the language. There is another kind of case, where she is not
already a speaker of the language, or indeed of any language. In that case, she does not learn words
by first perceiving them to be words, but rather simultaneously acquires the ability to recognize them.
Further speculation on this case is reserved for philosophers with kids.
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MAX WEISS
I take a speaker’s knowledge of “contumely” to involve a kind of mental occurrence of that word, together with some general capacities for recognition and
production of expressions. Even in a speaker with such general capacities, not
every mental occurrence need entail such knowledge: for example, one might remember a rhythm heard without knowing it was “contumely” tapped out in Morse
code. Rather, the mental occurrence involved by a speaker’s knowledge of a word
must be usable by these general capacities for linguistic recognition and production. Of course, I do not suppose that a mental occurrence somehow resembles
an inscription or utterance of the word—it may better resemble whatever realizes
somebody’s capacity for tying their shoes. Perhaps mental occurrences, digital occurrences, and so on differ in status from the uttered and inscribed, because due
to their form, they cannot be recognized immediately as such by a normal speaker.
We might wish to mark the difference by tagging the former “latent” and the latter
“active”.
What matters now is that for many a word w, nearly every occurrence x of w
has a special causal dependence on one or more other occurrences of w. Call such
an occurrence of w a “repeat” occurrence of w.
There are two kinds of occurrence that are not repeat. First, somebody might
say “prescinding” without having heard or read it before and yet without coining
it. They need only have heard, say, “prescinds”. Such occurrences, which I’ll call
“derived”, are like repeat occurrences in that the speaker knows that what they
utter is a word. However, the speaker knows it not by acquaintance with previous
occurrences, but rather, we might say, by a grammatical inference. I treat this in a
bit more detail below.14
Second, some words are coined. It is hard to give a neat characterization of
coinage, because the beginnings of words are messy. But we can say that a coinage
of a word w is not relevantly related to any previous occurrence of w. And a coined
occurrence is in general caused by a speaker, perhaps over a bowl of alphabet soup.
However, we should feel resistance to saying that the speaker knows, as they speak,
that what they coin is a word. They may speak with the intention of creating a word.
Or, they may believe they are uttering a word, but on faulty grounds. Especially in
the latter case the noise may not be an occurrence of a word without the support of
subsequent repetitions. So the present notion of coinage is pretty loose. A coinage
may be unintentional, as with catchy spoonerisms and witless bastardizations.
There are borderline cases between coinage and repeat occurrence: one word
may become another by accumulating corruptions, in which case the coining is
diluted over consecutive repetitions. Baptism demands a decision or distinction:
we might individuate proper names narrowly, so that baptism creates a new name
for a person, in which case it is coinage; or we might let two people have the same
14It might be better to distinguish inflection from derivation as operations that generate a word or
word-form from input expressions. Inflected occurrences count as repeat occurrences if words are
coarsely individuated, so that “prescinding” is the same word as “prescinds”. Although probably,
the morally correct view is that words are to be coarsely individuated, for present purposes I individuate words finely, taking them to be particular word-forms. Thus inflection becomes a species of
derivation.
ACTUAL AND POTENTIAL EXPRESSIONS
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name, in which case baptism is usually repetition.15 And there are borderline cases
between coinage and derivation, as with unsanctioned grammatical inference. We
should pursue a degree of precision appropriate to the subject matter at hand.
Now it is hard to think of an occurrence of a word that is neither repeat, nor a
coinage, nor derived. So, I assert an occurrence criterion. For any word w,
(O) a thing x is an occurrence of w if and only if either x is a repeat occurrence
of w, or x is a derived occurrence of w, or x is a coinage of w.
Of course the disjunction should be taken to include borderline cases. Note, by the
way, that O is not intended as itself explanatory but rather as a generalization from
which the explaining is to begin.
3.2. Explaining occurrences. In this section, I will explain what makes something an occurrence of a word by explaining, for each kind of occurrence mentioned in criterion O, what makes something an occurrence of that kind. Nearly
all occurrences are either repeat or derived, and these, as we will see, have robust explanations. Furthermore, although coinage is a messy business, most of it
can naturally be explained as a species of intentional and convention-bound action.
Inadvertent coinage is mostly reserved for leaders of the free world.
Occurrences inhere in media. An inscription occurs in paper and ink, an utterance occurs in the air, a vocabulary-entry occurs in a speaker’s mind or body. Now
a repeat occurrence x of w comes about by an interaction that transmits w from
the medium of y to a new medium. The interaction belongs to a family of transmission mechanisms that language for us involves, along with speaking, recording,
transcribing, digitizing, encrypting, uploading, downloading, decrypting, printing,
reading and hearing. Propagation through such interactions explains the repeat
occurrences of a word.
To explain derived occurrences we need a further notion. I characterized a derived occurrence of w as an occurrence which is not repeat, but still such that its
producer knows that w is a word. They know this by an inference, maybe like this:
“prescind” is a verb of type t; the result of suffixing “-ing” to a verb of type t is
a word; so “prescinding” is a word. Of course, they don’t actually execute that
inference, rather the inference explains the attribution to them of the knowledge
that “prescinding” is a word. What does happen is that, at some point, they apply
a transformation to an occurrence of “prescind”, whose output is an occurrence of
“prescinding”. It is an empirical question how and when and where such transformations take place. But a derived occurrence is to be explained as the result of a
transformation applied to some occurrences of other expressions.16
15Cf. Kaplan’s distinction of “proper” and “generic” names (Kaplan 1990). Here I assume without
argument that baptism creates the name.
16It is plausible that, as Kaplan suggests, the occurrences of a proper name can be represented as
the vertices of a tree whose nodes represent the moments of the name’s transmission from medium
to medium. But the analogous map of “prescinding” would look like a bunch of mysteriously unsupported branches. However, each of the unsupported branches will begin with an occurrence that
is derived from an occurrence of e.g. “prescind”. This suggests that we can reveal an underlying
arboreal integrity by fusing the map of “prescinding” to the map of “prescind”, so as to anchor the
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Full-blown acts of coinage are informed by intricate special conventions. For
example, the introduction of technical terms in mathematics is subject to canons of
logical hygiene. Baptism requires water, or at least the end of some fraught prenatal
deliberation. However, some coinage is inadvertent or unintentional. These cases
are more difficult. It seems that “misunderestimate” could become a word thanks
to a trend of ironic deference, particularly if the scare quotes begin to recede.17
This raises the question whether an occurrence in coinage ever depends on subsequent social acceptance. Genuinely attempted baptism rarely fails to produce a
name of the kid, but this may be only because the conventions are easy to follow
and so arranged that to follow them without mishap practically ensures success.
I suspect that often, successful coinage must lead to enough repeat occurrences.
This seems to entail a puzzle: for if the word doesn’t come to exist without subsequent repeat occurrences, then at the moment of coinage there is no word for the
starring vocable to be an occurrence of. But in the same way, someone could be
an earliest member of a tribe, even if over the whole course of their life there were
no tribe for them to belong to. Furthermore, nothing about that person’s origin and
life need distinguish them as a member of the tribe. It would be up to their descendants to make them so. And likewise to become an earliest occurrence of a word,
something need be a vocable, or a string of letters, or otherwise word-like. But that
alone does not make the thing an occurrence of a word, for it does not bring a word
into being. At least sometimes, more depends on posterity. In the case of coinage,
the facts of occurrencehood are sometimes future-dependent.18
Coinage aside, it seems clear that normally, something is an occurrence of an
expression regardless of whether somebody later takes it as such. Words uttered
normally need not be heard and repeated. Nonetheless, we might be inclined to
think that every occurrence of a word leads to some repeat occurrences at least
potentially. For as of yet, we cannot explain why not every mere effect of an occurrence need also an occurrence. Why isn’t the sound of my typing “dog” just
another occurrence of “dog”? We might have been inclined to think that it is an
occurrence, had we and our keyboards been such that as a matter of course we
could make out the word by listening. But, among the family of word transmission
mechanisms that language does involve for us,19 there does not exist any practical
way of transmitting the words from their supposed occurrence in the typing noise
back to received linguistic media, like speech or writing. The noises are not linguistic because we cannot practically recognize the words in them. This suggests
orphan branches of the “prescinding” map to the vertices of the “prescind” map from which they are
derived. It furthermore suggests a rationale for individuating words coarsely, despite a stipulation to
the contrary above.
17Zoltán Gendler Szabó leans in the same direction here, and attempts an example of this sort of
case: “When Lewis Carroll wrote “‘Oh, frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”, he chortled in his joy’ he
presumably did not expect that ‘chortle’ would survive as a word any more than ‘frabjous’ would”
(Gendler Szabó 1999, 162). But Gendler Szabo overreaches, since Carroll uses “chortle” himself
while putting “frabjous” in the mouth of a character.
18Conventions often help mitigate this dependency, as with baptism.
19Or at least for those of us who don’t belong to the CIA.
ACTUAL AND POTENTIAL EXPRESSIONS
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the following general hypothesis: a transmission mechanism is linguistic only if
there corresponds in the family a mechanism, or composition of mechanisms, that
is its inverse. Where some marks are the output of some linguistic transmission
mechanism, the existence of an inverse of that mechanism maintains the potential
recognizability of those marks that is a practically necessary condition for occurrencehood.20
3.3. The nature of words. As I said at the outset, an account of expressions can
presuppose no clear common understanding of essence or nature. Perhaps many
people will agree that their own essence includes being human, and does not include wearing a hat. But there is little agreement about cases in between, nor about
methods of decision. However, I suggest that one can begin to approach these issues by considering the way in which a thing persists. By this I don’t mean to
consider necessary and sufficient conditions for the identity of a thing across time,
but rather, those activities and processes that a thing must do or undergo in order
that it continue to exist. For it seems that a thing persists by activities and processes
that are distinctive of things with a like nature. So for example, a rock persists by
the coherence of a bunch of molecules, a wave by the transmission of vibratory energy, a plant by photosynthesis, a species by reproduction. According to the present
conception, it pertains to the nature of a thing to do or undergo those activities and
processes that participate in the thing’s mode of persistence. Conversely, the nature
of a thing tends to omit features that conflict with its mode of persistence. So to
be painted yellow cannot pertain to the nature of a plant, because a plant that is
painted yellow must either die or produce new unpainted leaves.21
20This might provoke worries about an imagined paralyzed patient who can still hear and understand,
but cannot communicate. For in such a case, words go in and cannot get out again, and nonetheless
he does hear and understand. But, insofar as we assume the words do get into him, so that they occur
in his mind as they do in the mind of any ordinary listener, then there exists a mechanism for getting
those occurrences back out into speech: namely, that by which ordinary speakers repeat what they
hear. Likewise, words occur in a letter that is already smoldering in the fire. In both cases, there still
are occurrences of a form to which some transmission mechanism would apply, but it so happens
that the application is blocked by accidental circumstances. Of course, the patient’s case is not so
extreme as that of the letter, for what he hears may reoccur in his thought.
21I do not intend that participation-in-persistence characterize a thing’s nature exhaustively, and in
particular do not propose it as a necessary condition. At the very least, I suspect that an exhaustive
characterization must also invoke what would participate in the thing’s generation or destruction. But
even such an enrichment would not suffice to explain the nature of numbers. I focus on persistence
here, because as discussed in §3.1, the origins of words are so diverse and disorderly—for example,
many words arise by the perpetuation of error.
Furthermore, I do not assert this sufficiency thesis absolutely. Instead, the goal here will be to prove
a conditional: that the sufficiency thesis yields a certain characterization of the nature of words.
Thus, anyone who wants to reject this characterization must also reject the sufficiency thesis. Conversely, the sufficiency thesis will receive inductive confirmation to whatever degree the resulting
characterization produces enjoyment.
Finally, it should be noted that “participation” is a matter of degree. For a human being, eating
pineapple participates to a lower degree than does eating, and eating to a lower degree than does
living. In the central case at hand, I think that the activities and processes to be considered will be
granted to participate to a very high degree.
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I suggested above that a word propagates through the generation, by its occurrences, of repeat occurrences via certain mechanisms of transmission. We may
now take such propagation as the word’s mode of persistence, and so take it to
indicate the word’s nature. Since the word’s mode of persistence then involves
its transmission between diverse media, the word’s nature omits whatever features
conflict with this transmissibility. So for example, the nature of a word omits the
properties that it be loud, or yellow, or smell like bananas, contain sugar, bounce up
and down, be a half inch-wide or tattooed on my arm. The rigors of transmissibility
thus help to explain the appearance that words are abstract.
What features could pertain to the nature of a word? In §3.2 I suggested that
the format of any occurrence must be such that, accidental interference notwithstanding, it is practically possible to transmit the word from that occurrence to
some other medium and format—for example, into speech or writing. The purpose of this was to respect the intuition that a word occurs only in formats that
permit its eventual recognition by a speaker. So the mode of persistence of a word
must sustain its recognizability. Systems of norms relative to media, for example,
of pronunciation or cursive writing, serve in practice to satisfy this requirement.
But why couldn’t a word persist unrecognizably? Since it is speakers who do the
recognizing, this reduces to the question why a word should depend on speakers.
The obvious answer is that without speakers who care about its uses, a word could
not continue to exist as it does. Their activities drive its propagation and thereby
support its continued existence. If the word falls out of use, it is on thin ice. And if
we cease to tend to its traces, so that they dissipate irrecoverably, then the word is
gone.22
These considerations show that our activities as speakers participate centrally in
a word’s mode of persistence. But what are these activities, really? Or, what is
the same, why in general do we do them? People teach a word to enable someone
to use it and to share in their concern for its uses. People record and duplicate
some use of a word because of their concern for the speaker’s purpose in so using
it. More generally, it is interest in the purpose for this or that use of the word that
lends purpose to all those activities upon which the word’s persistence relies. And
so the word’s mode of persistence involves the purpose of using the word. But what
is the purpose of use? Ordinarily, a speaker uses a word because it means what it
does, because by that use they can say what they want to say. So for example,
a speaker utters “contumely” because it means contumely. The audience records
the utterance because of their interest in the speaker’s purpose in using it. It is the
fact that a word means what it does, that explains directly or indirectly all those
activities on which the word’s mode of persistence relies. Consequently, what
participates most centrally in a word’s mode of persistence, and so what pertains
to its nature, is the fact that it means what it does.
The crucial premise of this argument is that normally, a speaker uses a word
because it means what it does. Of course there might be further circumstantial
reasons for some use of “contumely”, e.g., that it gratifies a milieu, or rhymes with
22See “Vigil for the vanishing tongue”, in The New York Times, 23 September 2007.
ACTUAL AND POTENTIAL EXPRESSIONS
13
“gloomily”. But these are secondary and accidental, and in most cases, to justify a
use by such a reason alone would be flippant. One might also object that there are
words like “as” that we use not so much for their meaning, as for the role they play
in forming some larger expression. Though it is hard to say just which words are
like this, such cases would indeed be natural exceptions. Similarly, the persistence
of “prescinds” as distinct from “prescind” obviously depends on syntax.
To the crucial premise one might also object that there is another case: the
speaker’s reason for uttering “contumely” might be that it means mirth. But then
the speaker should be chastised. And we tend to record such a use only if we are
specially interested in the fact that the speaker would make that mistake. For the
use then obscures what the speaker wants to say, and therefore undermines the normal value of recording it. If, as with “I’ll be back momentarily”, the speaker’s intention is plain despite the mistake, then bastardization looms. Whether we would
then have another word depends on the details of the case.
The reader may wonder how a word could change its meaning if the meaning
pertains to its nature. According to the present conception, the nature of a thing is
not insulated from the vagaries of history but expresses them. To say what some
word is, we must say what it means, and thus describe the history of the practice
of using it. This suggests that lexicographers were all along in the business of real
definition.
3.4. Sentences. There have been words that no longer have any occurrences, and
there will be words that have never yet occurred, but nearly every English word
does have occurrences.23 So it is tempting to suppose that a word consists of these
occurrences. But for sentences there can be no such temptation, because practically
every sentence has no occurrences at all.
Among the occurrences of a sentence s, many stem by natural or automatic propagation from some previous occurrence of s—for example, an occurrence of s in
some copy of a book. Thus the notion of a repeat occurrence extends to sentences.
An occurrence of s which is not repeat, is instead generally produced by a speaker
in saying something.24 Furthermore, the speaker knows that s is a sentence. This
kind of occurrence therefore resembles the derived occurrence of words. But here
there emerge special-scientific and philosophical subtleties that I cannot yet handle. It does seem likely that the persistence of a sentence involves the persistence
of each of the words it contains. Moreover, if a sentence has never occurred, then
its persistence should furthermore depend on the potential that some occurrence
of it be generated. Now there is no general reason to suppose that for a sentence
which happens to have occurrences, these occurrences play some crucial role in
the persistence of that particular sentence.25 So I would suggest that ordinarily,
the mode of persistence of a sentence involves the potential that some occurrence
23The counterexamples I have in mind are words whose existence follows from the general accep-
tance of some derivation rule: e.g., a result of suffixing “-ian” to some philosopher’s surname.
24Some cases fall between these categories, and raise interesting difficulties: for example direct
quotation, and natural language automation.
25Perhaps an exception would be an English sentence like “honi soit qui mal y pense.”
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of it be generated. Such potential may be realized by a speaker’s knowledge of
language, or perhaps by some sufficiently detailed and usable records.
ACTUAL AND POTENTIAL EXPRESSIONS
15
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