Abstract: The aim of this work is to demystify linguistic meaning—to characterize the underlying nature of this phenomenon in such a way that its familiar attributes become intelligible. To that end, one must consider whether a word's meaning derives from what it refers to, from the way it was defined, from some associated mental image, from its evolutionary function, from a prototype structure, from an inferential role, or from something else. The basic strategy adopted here for answering this question is to scrutinize a range of general features of meaning that have often been thought to provide clues to its origin—facts concerning the relationships between meaning and understanding, truth, a priori knowledge, complex expressions, what ought to be said, and actual word usage. It is a striking result, however, that only the last of these characteristics proves to be capable of guiding us towards a theory of how meaning arises: namely, that all our particular applications of a given word result, in part, from what we mean by it. This characteristic is explained—and can only be explained—by the theory presented here, whereby meaning properties are reduced to law-like regularities of word use. More specifically, the theory is that each word means what it does in virtue of the fact that a certain ‘acceptance property’ of the word is explanatorily fundamental vis-à-vis its overall deployment (where an ’acceptance property’ specifies conditions in which designated sentences containing the word are held true). This proposal is forced to confront a formidable barrage of objections; but in each case an adequate reply is shown to be available.

Keywords: acceptance, Paul Horwich, inferential role, meaning, philosophy of language, reference, truth, understanding