What does "What does X mean" mean?

Question

Many questions on this site are in the form of "What does X mean". Many times the answer is clear, but in the living language such as English some words meaning varies by region, societal group and/or time. In those cases, what does it really mean to say "X means Y", or perhaps more importantly "X does not mean Y"?

The comment that prompted this question was to this unrelated question 'In a strange twist, "liberal" means exactly what Wikipedia says it does - even though almost everyone abuses the term to mean nothing coherent'. I think this statement is definitionally wrong, in that if "almost everyone" uses a word to mean something that is different from a definition then the definition is wrong or incomplete. Perhaps a less controversial example is decimate, it used to mean kill one in ten, now it means kill most of. At what level of usage would it be correct to say that decimate means kill most of? What level of usage would it be correct to say it did not mean kill most of?

Answer 1

Meaning can be defined in relation to concepts, and cognitive science is struggling to get even a basic grasp on concepts. See any criticism of Jerry Fodor talking about helicopters, and you'll see that this will still be a problem when the citizens of Mars are grappling with overpopulation. A dictionary is of little help, when someone who doesn't know what a cow is can only find

a fully grown female animal of a domesticated breed of ox, kept to produce milk or beef

as a clarification.

Your specific question is likely resolved by adding a caveat that questions of the "What does X mean" need qualifiers, because there is rarely a generic or universal answer. "What does X imply to group Y on date Z when asked by group W" may begin to capture the complexity, and that is likely very easy to poke holes in.

Answer 2

This is an important issue in philosophy; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has entries for word meaning, definitions, and theories of meaning more generally.

This is a very large field, but one of the key disputes has been between "internalist" and "externalist" accounts of meaning. To quote one very small part of the entry on word meaning:

Since the early 1970s, views on lexical meaning were revolutionized by semantic externalism. Initially, externalism was limited to proper names and natural kind words such as ‘gold’ or ‘lemon’. In slightly different ways, both Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1970, 1975) argued that the reference of such words was not determined by any description that a competent speaker associated with the word; more generally, and contrary to what Frege may have thought, it was not determined by any cognitive content associated with it in a speaker’s mind (for arguments to that effect, see the entry on names). Instead, reference is determined, at least in part, by objective (“causal”) relations between a speaker and the external world. For example, a speaker refers to Aristotle when she utters the sentence “Aristotle was a great warrior”—so that her assertion expresses a false proposition about Aristotle, not a true proposition about some great warrior she may “have in mind”—thanks to her connection with Aristotle himself. In this case, the connection is constituted by a historical chain of speakers going back to the initial users of the name ‘Aristotle’, or its Greek equivalent, in baptism-like circumstances. To belong to the chain, speakers (including present-day speakers) are not required to possess any precise knowledge of Aristotle’s life and deeds; they are, however, required to intend to use the name as it is used by the speakers they are picking up the name from, i.e., to refer to the individual those speakers intend to refer to.

Answer 3

X can mean several things

Many words (or, more generally, lexical units) have multiple definitions some current, some obsolete, some archaic, and some newly minted. As you say, English is a living language: words change their meaning all the time and you have to look to context for what each word means.

Liberal can be referring to the philosophy of individual autonomy that emerged from the Enlightenment. Or it can be a term of abuse for people further left of you on the political scale. Context will tell you which.

Similarly, decimate does mean to kill one in ten if you are referring to the ancient Roman military punishment. Or it can mean to have a lot of people killed. Or it can mean no one was killed - “We were decimated on the rugby field” - this just means we were badly beaten, no one actually died playing the game (we can hope). Contact will tell.

My favourite of these is literally which means both exactly as described (“He literally died”) and also as an emphasis for something that didn’t happen (“He literally died”). You’re going to need some non-verbal context here to see the difference.