Today, I've been exploring a possible blind alley.

One theme I thought I would follow up during my research leave was whether a 'contractual' or 'promisory' account of meaning could be developed - specifically, an account which made meaningfullness of a statement depend upon a committment to the truth of some further statements (which weren't just trivially equivalent to the original).

The blind alley was the jurisprudence of contract law. It's an interesting blind alley, but it didn't help me much.

The inspiration for this approach is the self-conscious operational aspect of commercial language use. In a commercial exchange, what we do by what we say has a significant weight - often more significant than what we mean. In an academic exchange, meaning and truth (ideally) dominate. This doesn't render the commercial exchange degenerate - in fact the academic model is probably more alien to most language users, and is often much more operational than it pretends (how much has been written in pursuit of research funding rather than insight?).

One of the important things that we do in a commercial exchange is to contract - to obligate ourselves. It occurred to me what we contract to arrange is that certain things will be true in the future, and that it will be possible for all interested parties (under reasonable circumstances) to agree when this is the case. This can break down in a variety of ways, of course - both with respect to what we do, and with respect to whether the appropriate agreement can be reached.

In a meaningful exchange, of course, we commit ourselves to certain statements being true in the future - we commit ourselves to our present statements not being vacuous.

It's easiest to explain this by illustration: even simple empirical statements must commit us to more than their own bare contents. I might say "It's raining", for instance, but then try to deny that this commits me to, for instance, "You'll get wet if you go out without an umbrella" or "That should be good for the garden" etc. The more I deny, the more puzzling, and meaningless "It's raining" becomes. The contingency or disputability of these committments isn't important - but there need to be some further committments for the statement to mean anything.

Obviously, I can be accused here of confusing natural with non-natural meaning (Grice), but this is a debate I will defer. (Not indefinitely).

Anyhow, thinking about committment, I looked at contract ... and found debates about the nature of a legal promise. I need to look elsewhere.