On words: An essay on beliefs, belief attributions and the ontology of language

The received view of words holds that words are concrete, physical objects such as marks on paper or sounds (patterns of moving air), and that these physical objects have the meanings they do solely as a matter of contingent convention. So, for example, the word 'cat' is a pattern of ink spots on this page, and although it happens to refer to the species Felis Domesticus, the received view holds that it could just as easily have referred to the family Homaridae (the lobster). This work argues that the received view, compelling though it appears at first, is false. Certainly there are marks on paper, or sound waves, and we establish conventions that contingently associate these marks with various meanings. And sometimes we even call those marks and sounds 'words'. I refer to such things as "thin words". But such thin words, I hold, are not the central objects involved in linguistic communication. Moreover, while such words enter into many of our thoughts, they are by no means the only words involved in our thoughts. Rather, I shall argue, languages are composed of what I call "thick words"---entities which have their meanings essentially. Since physical entities like sounds and marks are (intuitively) merely contingently associated with their meanings, it follows that thick words must be something more than such physical entities or physical entity-types. Thick words are instead, I argue, abstract objects with strong similarities to (albeit important differences from) abstract objects like numbers or properties.; I offer a two-pronged argument for establishing this radical claim. First, I argue that several notable puzzles about belief attributions can be solved by referring to the words that are involved in the attributions. But this solution requires a theory of thick words. Second, I argue that our common-sense intuitions about the individuation of words actually supports a theory of thick words. The final section of this work outlines a positive theory of thick words as well as its application to several issues in the theory of attitude ascriptions.