The essay will be in three sections. In the first, I shall try to sketch three kinds of correspondence which one might be justified in looking for, or even demanding, when thinking about thought, the world, and language. I hope this will provide some sort of a framework within which to set views about meaning; it may in fact offer some sort of impetus toward this or that view. In the second section, which will again involve an attempt to fit things into a wider framework, I shall provide some discussion of what I once called the distinction between natural and nonnatural meaning. Here I am interested not so much in the existence of that distinction, which has now, I think, become pretty boringly common ground (or mutual knowledge), but rather in the relationship between the two notions, the connections rather than the dissimilarities between them. I shall announce the contents of the third section when I come to it; we'll keep it as a mystery package.

I. Language, Thought, and Reality

The first of the three correspondences which one might expect to find when thinking in largish terms about the relationships between reality, thought, and language or communication devices, is a correspondence between thought and reality: what I shall call, for some kind of brevity, psychophysical correspondence. This has obvious connections with the general idea of truth in application to beliefs or analogous notions describing physical states. The point I want to get at is that it is not just that there are such correspondences, or that it is intuitively plausible to think there are, but rather that their presence is needed, or desirable, if one looks at the ways in which human beings and other sentient creatures get around and stay alive, as well as perhaps doing more ambitious things than that. This leads to a view, which I have held for some time, of a battery of psychological concepts which we use both about ourselves and about what one might think of as lower creatures, as having the function of providing an explanatory bridge between the appearance of a creature in a certain kind of physical situation and its engaging in certain sorts of behavior.

For instance, suppose we have a creature C that is in the presence of a certain object, let's say a piece of cheese, and we get a situation in which the creature eats the object. In certain circumstances, we might want to invoke the contents of a psychological theory in order to explain the transition from the creature's being in the presence of the object to its eating it. The "bridgework" which would be done in these terms can be put in a rather schematic and unrealistic way, which again does not worry me since I am not trying to provide a proper explanation, but merely a rough idea of what the pattern of a proper explanation would be.

First, let us suppose that the creature believes (or thinks, if it is not advanced enough to have beliefs) that the object is a bit of cheese, and that it also believes that the object is nearby. Second, let us suppose that the creature believes, or thinks, that cheese is something to eat; and third, that the creature is hungry, that it wants to eat. All this looks relatively unexciting, just as it should. Then by virtue of what I would think of as a vulgar, vernacular, psychological law, the operation of which is the reason for the introduction of the concepts of believing and wanting, we get our first psychological law for the creature or type of creature in question. This is that for any particular object X and for any feature F and for any activity or type of behavior A, if the creature C believes that the object X both has the feature F and is nearby, or within reach, and that things of type Fare suitable for activity A, then the creature wants to A with respect to the object

X. In other words, the law harnesses the object to the type of activity.

Applying the law to the three initial premises given above, we reach a further stage: namely, that the creature C wants to cat the object X, that is, the piece of cheese. We might then invoke a second psychological law for this creature, this time a psychophysical law: that for any type of activity A, if a creature C, wants to A with respect to some particular object X, and if it is not prevented in one or another of a set of ways which might or might not be listable, then creature C does produce the activity A with respect to X. And with the application of the second law, we get to our final step, which is that the creature C cats the object X. We now have our explanation, a bridge between the initial situation, the creature's being in the presence of a piece of cheese, and the final behavior, the creature's eating it.

The laws I have mentioned are vulgar laws. The kind of theory in which I think of them appearing would not be a specialist or formalized psychological theory, if indeed there are such things; I am perhaps not very comfortable with the word "theory" being applied to it. It would be the rough kind of system with which we all work, and the laws in it are to be thought of as corrigible, modifiable and ceteris paribus in character. Now the creature C may be frustrated if certain psychophysical correspondences do not obtain. For instance, if C believes wrongly that the object in front of it is a piece of cheese, or thinks wrongly of cheese as being from its point of view something to eat, then at the very least, C may get indigestion when it consumes the object. For this reason, psychophysical correspondences are required (things like beliefs have to be true, and so on) for the operation of the psychological mechanisms which I have sketched to be beneficial to the creature in question.

In a similar way, if the creature's desire to eat the object is for some reason not fulfilled, the creature stays hungry. Here again we need some kind of correspondences, parallel to those between beliefs and reality, between desires, wants, states of will and so on, and reality.

Desires, etc. need to correspond to reality in order to be fulfilled: that is, in order for the psychological mechanism to operate in a beneficial way.

Finally, if C is a rational or reflective creature (which I have not so far been assuming), it may recognize the kind of facts about itself that I have just sketched, may recognize that correspondences between psychological states and the world are in general required for the psychological mechanism to be useful, and may also recognize that subject to this proviso of correspondence, the psychological mechanism is conducive to survival or to the attainment of other of its objectives.

If it recognizes all this, then it will presumably itself think of such correspondences as being desirable things to have around from its own point of view: that is, the correspondences will not only be desirable but will be regarded by C as desirable.

In the first place, then, we have psychophysical correspondences, and they seem to be the kind of things that one would want to have.

But there are further correspondences too. There is, as it were, a triangle consisting of reality, thought, and language or communication devices, and we now have, I hope, one hookup, berween thought and reality. However, I think there is also a hookup of a different kind, which would also be desirable, between thought and communication devices. This would again involve correspondences of a relatively simple and obvious kind, along the following lines.

First, the operation of such creatures as I have been talking about is at least in certain circumstances going to be helped and furthered if there is what one might think of as shared experience. In particular, if psychological states which initially attach to one creature can be transmitted or transferred or reproduced in another creature (a process which might be called -transmission), that would be advanta-geous. Obviously, the production of communication devices is a resource which will help to effect such transfers.

If one accepts this idea, then one could simply accept that for the process to be intelligible, understandable, there will have to be correspondences between particular communication devices or utterances on the one hand, and psychological states on the other. These correspondences may be achieved either directly, or (more likely) indirectly, via the types to which the particular utterances belong: the sentences which the particular utterances are utterances of, the gesture-types which the particular gestures are productions of, and so on. Whether direct or indirect, the correspondence would be between utterances or utterance-types on the one hand, and types of psychological states on the other, where these would include, for example, the belief-types to which the beliefs of particular people belong: not Jones's belief that such-and-such, but a belief that such-and-such.

If there exist these correspondences between utterances or utter-ance-types on the one hand, and psychological types on the other, we can say that it is in general, and subject to certain conditions, desirable for there to occur, in the joint or social lives of creatures of the kind in question, sequences of the following sort: a certain psychological state ' in certain circumstances is followed by a certain utterance U, made in certain circumstances, which in turn, if the circumstances are right, is followed by a particular instance of a further psychological type $°, a state not now in the communicating creature but in the creature who is communicated to. And it might be a matter of desirability for w' and 4 to be states of one and the same, rather than of different sorts, so that when these sequences 4', U, occur, they involve utterances and psychological states between which these psycholinguistic correspondences obtain.

Of course, transfers can occur without these correspondences ob-taining. A creature may choose the wrong utterance to express its psychological state, and then there will probably be a misfire in the utterance, and the psychological state induced in the second creature will not be the same as the one present in the first. Alternatively, the first creature may operate all right, but the second creature may, as it were, misunderstand the device that was produced, and so pick up the wrong belief or desire, one that does not correspond to the utterance produced by the first creature. The general condition, or at least the most salient general condi-tion, for the desirability or beneficial character of transfers of this sort is connected with the obtaining of the first kind of correspondence.

That is, if all these transfers were to involve the transmission of mistaken beliefs, it is not clear that one would regard this communication mechanism as beneficial, even if the appropriate psycholinguistic correspondences held. I do think it is in some sense inconceivable that all the transfers should involve mistaken beliefs, but at least such a state of affairs can be contemplated. So a general condition would be that soul-to-soul transfers, so to speak, are beneficial provided that the states transmitted are ones which correspond with the world.

It looks now as if we have got to a point at which we have in outline, presented in a sort of general, semitheological way, a rough prototype of a notion of truth in application to beliefs and such-like things. That would give the first kind of correspondence. In the second kind of correspondence, we have what is at least a promising candidate for being a rough prototype of the notion of meaning, for it looks as though it is not implausible to suggest that to explain, with respect to some particular utterance or utterance-type what type of psychological state it corresponds to, in such a way that transfers of this kind are characteristically a feature of creatures lives, would be a first approximation to explaining the meaning of the utterances or utterance-types in question. We have thus hooked up all three cor-ners: corner number one, reality, has been hooked up with corner number two, thought, and we have hooked up thought, corner number two, with language or communication devices, corner number three. This of course yields a derivative link between corner number three, utterances or sentences, and corner number one, reality, via the beliefs or other psychological states with which they are themselves connected. But it is perhaps also worthwhile to ask whether in addition to such an indirect connection between language and reality, one which proceeds through the intermediation of psychological states, there is an arguable possibility of a direct link: a direct line between language and reality as well as a line through thought. And I think it is at least arguable that there is, though of course one of a kind which we will have to harmonize with the links that have already been introduced.

If I ask the question "What are the conditions for a specified belief (for instance a belief that snow is white) corresponding with the world?" I can give answers for individual cases without much diffi-culty. For instance, I can say that a belief that snow is white will correspond to the world just in case snow is white, and I can say that a belief that cheese is blue will correspond to the world just in case cheese is blue; and you can see perfectly well what the rather dreary routine is that I use in these particular cases. However, it has been noticed by philosophers that there are difficulties about explicitly generalizing the individual bits of communication of which I have just spouted one or two samples. That is because to generalize from them would presumably be to omit reference to the particular objects and the particular beliefs, and to state in general what the conditions are for beliefs corresponding to objects. That is to say, a general condition of correspondence between beliefs and the world would have to begin something like: "For any item which one believes, that item corresponds with the world if ..."; but then how does one go on? in the particular cases, I had a sentence which I had cited or referred to in the antecedent on the left-hand side, which I then produced on the right-hand side; but since I have eliminated all reference to particular beliefs or sentences, I no longer have a sentence available with which to complete the general condition.

It looks as if I should want to say something like: "For any item P, if one believes that P, then one's belief that P corresponds with the world just in case P." Unfortunately that involves difficulties, because by the ordinary account of quantification, 1 am talking about objects or items, so I might just as well use the letter x, characteristic of ob-jects, and say: "For any item x, if x is believed, then x corresponds with the world just in case x." But that seems rather like producing the generalization that if any object x is a pig, then x: and that is not an intelligible form of statement, because "x" is not a variable for which one can substitute sentences. In fact, something seems to have got left out somewhere, and we have not got an intelligible specification of truth-conditions. Moreover, this is difficult to remedy, because without getting into tortures over shifts between thinking of propositions or propositional expressions as sometimes like names (with the form of that-clauses) and sometimes like sentences (the result of detaching the word "that" from these that-clauses), it is difficult to know what to do.

It looks as though, to avoid this difficulty, if I want to produce a generalization of the idea of correspondences between psychological . states and the world which I have already in some sense provided for, I might well have to use some form like the following: "If a certain sentence S is an expression of a certain particular belief, then the belief which the sentence S expresses corresponds with the world just in case S is truc." That is to say, to remedy this difficulty in generaliza-tion, I now bring into play a notion of truth in application to sen-tences, and I do this in order to have a way of stating generally the conditions for the correspondence of beliefs and the world. Thus, in trying to safeguard the characterization of what it is for beliefs to correspond with the world, I have introduced another correspon dence, a correspondence between utterances or sentences and the world, signalized by the appearance of the word "true."

It looks, then, as if in order to achieve a characterization of the first kind of correspondence, between beliefs and the world, one has to make use of a parallel kind of correspondence between utterances or sentences and the world. Hence these latter correspondences may be not only possible but needed if one is to be able to state, in a general way, that correspondences of the psychophysical kind actually obtain.

However, though they may be required for expository purposes, as I have sketched, it might still be the case that in order to show that correspondences between sentences and the world were desirable, not just for purposes of theoretical exposition but from the point of view of creatures who operate with such utterances or utterance-types, one still has to bring in the psychological states in specifying the conditions of suitability, desirability, or whatever. That is, it might be that one can certainly formulate or characterize some notion of direct correspondence between utterances and the world, and this might have a certain limited teleological justification because it is needed to provide a general way of expressing the conditions for other types of correspondence, but if one wants to provide a more general teleological justification, one would need to make reference to beliefs and other psychological states. In other words, for a more general justification of the idea of truth in application to sentences, one might have to bring in all three corners, including the missing one.