It is almost completely uncontroversial that meaning is not determined by the conscious intentions of individual speakers (the “Humpty Dumpty” theory is false). More sophisticated theories of meaning note that people want their words to mean the same as what other people mean by them (as otherwise they are useless for communication). So, bare minimum, knowing what a word means requires looking at a community of language users, not just one speaker. But there are more complications; people want to use their words to mean the same as what experts intend more than they want to use their words to mean the same as what the ignorant intend. Partly that may be just to make coordination easier, but probably an even bigger motive is that people want their words to pick out useful and important categories, and of course experts are more likely to have latched on to those. A relatively uncontroversial extension of this is that meaning needn’t precisely match the intentions of any current language speaker or group of language speakers; if the intentions of speakers would point to one category, but there’s a very similar, mostly overlapping, but much more useful and important category, the correct account of the meaning is probably that it refers to the more useful and important category, even if none of the speakers know enough to pick out that category. That’s why words for “fish” in languages whose origins predate any detailed biological knowledge of whales nonetheless probably shouldn’t be thought to have ever included whales in their reference.
So, people can use words without anybody knowing exactly what they mean. And figuring out what they mean can be a useful exercise, as it requires learning more about what you’re dealing with; it isn’t just a matter of making an arbitrary decision. All that being said, I admit to having some skepticism about some of the words my fellow philosophers use; I suspect in a number of cases there are no ideal, unambiguous meanings to be uncovered (indeed, there are probably cases where they don’t mean anything at all, as the Logical Positivists sometimes argued).
It is almost completely uncontroversial that meaning is not determined by the conscious intentions of individual speakers (the “Humpty Dumpty” theory is false). More sophisticated theories of meaning note that people want their words to mean the same as what other people mean by them (as otherwise they are useless for communication). So, bare minimum, knowing what a word means requires looking at a community of language users, not just one speaker. But there are more complications; people want to use their words to mean the same as what experts intend more than they want to use their words to mean the same as what the ignorant intend. Partly that may be just to make coordination easier, but probably an even bigger motive is that people want their words to pick out useful and important categories, and of course experts are more likely to have latched on to those. A relatively uncontroversial extension of this is that meaning needn’t precisely match the intentions of any current language speaker or group of language speakers; if the intentions of speakers would point to one category, but there’s a very similar, mostly overlapping, but much more useful and important category, the correct account of the meaning is probably that it refers to the more useful and important category, even if none of the speakers know enough to pick out that category. That’s why words for “fish” in languages whose origins predate any detailed biological knowledge of whales nonetheless probably shouldn’t be thought to have ever included whales in their reference.
So, people can use words without anybody knowing exactly what they mean. And figuring out what they mean can be a useful exercise, as it requires learning more about what you’re dealing with; it isn’t just a matter of making an arbitrary decision. All that being said, I admit to having some skepticism about some of the words my fellow philosophers use; I suspect in a number of cases there are no ideal, unambiguous meanings to be uncovered (indeed, there are probably cases where they don’t mean anything at all, as the Logical Positivists sometimes argued).