Principio De Expresibilidad

This is a manuscript version. Please quote only the published version. In: Acta Philosophica Fennica 69 (2001), 191-212

The Principle of Expressibility and Private Language
Frank Kannetzky
Abstract: Searle’s principle of expressibility states: “Whatever can be meant can be said.” (Searle 1969, p. 20) The aim of this paper is to show in what sense the principle of expressibility might bereasonable rather than to interpret what Searle ‘really’ meant by it. The principle articulates a foundation of philosophy after the linguistic turn. It contradicts the assumption of a private language. It should be related to an “open language” that has space for what Searle calls “inexact language use”.

The problem of meaning and saying and the principle of expressibility Philosophy of languagedistinguishes between the meaning of a sentence and of an utterance, between what is said and what a speaker means or intends to say by uttering a sentence or expression. ‘Linguistic or literal meaning’, respectively ‘utterance meaning’ refers – as “contextually adapted” literal meaning – to the first case. In the second case we speak of ‘speaker’s meaning’. In the following considerations, theterms ‘to say’ and ‘to mean’ are used in the sense of this general differentiation. The differentiation would be pointless if there were no differences between saying something and meaning it. Generally, one could say that ‘to mean something’ is only used when something has gone wrong with what was said or when the expressions have not been used in the normal way. The general form of such cases is:“You said that” – “But I meant this”. These cases can be subdivided into two main groups: The first group consists of “accidental” differences between saying and meaning. They are “accidental” because they are not cases of systematic misunderstanding (as it is in the case when speaker and hearer speak different languages). There may be mistakes, slips of the tongue or incompetence on the side of aspeaker. A speaker may miss the literal meaning of an expression or he may confuse an expression with another. Speaker and hearer can also associate ‘different meanings’ with the utterance, that is, they differ with respect to the possible inferences and/or the fulfillment conditions of the utterance. This is a frequent case, as indicated by common formulas that are used in order to clarifymisunderstandings. We often say things like “I meant x with y” in order to give the meaning of the initial utterance. What has been said by uttering y? The answer is normally: That what competent hearers are able to understand. This claim becomes clearer if we consider indirect speech. What a (competent) hearer reproduces as meaning of y, i.e. what was said by uttering y in a given context, depends on howhe has understood the utterance y. This dependence points to the following fact: ‘saying something’ is tied to a common language and is not a matter of ‘lonely monologues’. It depends on the cooperation of speaker and hearer. Thus, ‘to say something’ and ‘to mean

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something’ can coincide only if the corresponding utterance is comprehensible for (potential) hearers. Uttering something thatcannot be understood by anybody is to say nothing. I will return later to this point. Accidental differences can also be caused by an apparently improbable content of the utterance. The hearer believes, for example, that he has understood the utterance but not the intentions of the speaker. Consequently, he regards the apparent meaning of the utterance as improbable. Common formulas for clearingup such differences are questions like: “Are you serious?” or “Did you really mean this?” The second group of differences between meaning and saying consists of only one type of systematic differences: The literal meaning of the uttered expression must not match what was meant, even if the speaker is competent and does not make any mistake. There is a familiar distinction in the philosophy of...