My love for Welby: unconditional

Dale's footnotes are fascinating. As Whitehead said, "Metaphysics has been footnotes to Plato".

Dale notes:

"Langer is a good example of such a philosopher"

as we should consider.


"[Langer] speaks of "the ambiguous verb 'to mean'" and says of it that "sometimes it is proper to say 'it means,' and sometimes 'I mean.'" She continues, "[o]bviously, a word - say, 'London' - does not 'mean' a city in just the same sense that a person employing the word 'means' the place" (Langer (1942), p. 55). But though Langer notes the notion of speaker meaning, it is only to put it aside: "In the further analyses that follow, 'meaning' will be taken in the objective sense, unless some other is specified; that is to say, I shall speak of terms (such as words) as 'meaning' something, not of people as 'meaning' this or that" (Langer (1942), pp. 57-58)."

Dale's caveat:

"The fact that Langer didn't make use of a notion of speaker-meaning doesn't makes her work any less interesting, by the way. But Langer represents a clear case of a philosopher who identified something like a notion of speaker-meaning only to let it go. Welby did not do this."

from which I say that my love for her (the lady) is unconditional.