WORDS ARE TIED to reality when their meanings depend on a speaker’s commitments about the truth. But there is a way in which words are tied to reality even more directly. They are not just about facts about the world stored in a person’s head but are woven into the causal fabric of the world itself.

Certainly a word meaning depends on something inside the head. The other day I came across the word siderealand had to ask a literate companion what it meant. Now I can understand and use it when the companion is not around (it means “pertaining to the stars”, as in a sidereal day,the time it takes for the Earth to make a complete revolution relative to a star). Something in my brain must have changed at the moment I learnt the word, and someday cognitive neurosci-entists might be able to tell us what that change is. However a word is learnt, it must leave some trace in the brain. The meaning of a word, then, seems to consist of information stored in the heads of the people who know the word: the elementary concepts that define it and, for a concrete word, an image of what it refers to.

But a word must be more than a shared definition and image. The easiest way to discover this is to consider the semantics of names. What is the meaning of a name, such as William Shakespeare?If you were to look it up, you might find something like this:

Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), n.: English poet and dramatist considered one of the greatest English writers. His plays, many of which were performed at the Globe Theatre in London, include historical works, such as Richard II, comedies, including Much Ado about Nothing and As You Like It, and tragedies, such as Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. Syn.: Shakespeare, Shakspeare, Shakspere, the bard

And the definition would typically be accompanied by the famous engraving of a doe-eyed balding man with a very small moustache and a very big ruff. Presumably that is not too far from your understanding. But is that what William Shakespeare really means? Historians agree that there was a man named William Shakespeare who lived in Stratford-upon-Avon and London in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. But for 250 years there have been doubts as to whether that man composed the plays we attribute to him. This might sound like the theory that the CIA imploded the World Trade Centre, but it has been taken seriously by Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, and many modern-day scholars, and it rests on a number of damning facts. Shakespeare’s plays were not published in his lifetime, and authorship in those days was not recorded as carefully as today. The man himself was relatively uneducated, never travelled, had illiterate children, was known in his home town as a businessman, was not eulogised at his death, and left no books or manuscripts in his will. Even the famous portraits were not painted in his lifetime, and we have no reason to believe that they resemble the man himself. Because writing plays was a disreputable occupation in those days, the real author may have wanted to keep his or her identity a secret.

My point isn’t to persuade you that William Shakespeare was not the great English poet and dramatist who wrote Hamlet. (Mainstream scholars say he was, and I believe them.) My point is to get you to think about the possibility that he wasn’t, and to understand the implications for the idea that the meanings of words are in the head. Imagine that forensic evidence proved beyond doubt that the Shakespearean oeuvre was written by someone else. Now, if the meaning of William Shakespeare were something like the dictionary entry stored in the head, we would have to conclude either that the meaning of William Shakespeare had changed, or that the real author of Hamlet should be posthumously christened William Shakespeare, even though no one knew him by that name in his lifetime. Actually, it’s even worse than that. We would not have been able to ask “Did Shakespeare write Hamlet?” because he did by definition. It would be like asking “Is a bachelor unmarried?” or “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” or “Who sang ‘Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees’?” And the conclusion, “William Shakespeare did not in fact write Hamlet”, would be self-contradictory.

But these implications are bizarre. In fact we are speaking sensibly when we ask whether Shakespeare wrote Hamlet; we would not be contradicting ourselves if we were to conclude that he did not; and we would still feel that William Shakespeare means what it always meant – some guy who lived in England way back when – while admitting that we were mistaken about his accomplishments. Even if every biographical fact we knew about Shakespeare were overturned – if he was born in 1565 rather than 1564, or came from Warwick rather than Stratford – we would still have a sense that the name refers to the guy we’ve been talking about all along.

So what exactly does William Shakespeare mean, if not “great writer, author of Hamlet”, and so on? A name really has no definition in terms of other words, concepts, or pictures. Instead it points to an entity in the world, because at some instant the entity was dubbed with the name and the name stuck. William Shakespeare, then, points to the individual christened William by Mr and Mrs Shakespeare around the time he was born. The name is connected to that guy, whatever he went on to do, and however much we know about him. A name points to a person in the world in the same way that I can point to a rock in front of me. The name is mean-ingful because of an unbroken chain of word of mouth (or word of pen) that links the word we now use to the original act of christening. It’s not just names, but words for many kinds of things, that are rigidly yoked to the world by acts of pointing, dubbing, and sticking rather than being stipulated in a definition.

The tethering of words to reality helps to allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols. In this worry, the meanings of words are ultimately circular, each defined in terms of the others. As one semanticist observed, a typical dictionary plays this game when it tells the user that “to order means to command”, that to direct and instruct “are not so strong as command or order”, that command means “to direct, with the right to be obeyed”, that direct means “to order”, that instruct means “to give orders”; or that to request means “to demand politely”, to demand means “to claim as if by right”, to claimmeans “to ask for or demand”, to ask means “to make a request”, and so on. This cat’s cradle is dreaded by those who crave certainty in words, embraced by adherents of deconstructionism and postmodernism, and exploited by the writer of a dictionary of computer jargon:

endless loop, n. See loop, endless.
loop, endless, n. See endless loop.

The logic of names, and of other words that are connected to events of dubbing, allay these concerns by anchoring the web of meanings to real events and objects in the world.

© Steven Pinker 2007. This is an edited extract from The Stuff of Thought, to be published by Allen Lane on October 8 at £25. Preorder from Books First for £22.50 (inc p&p).

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

Times Recommends

• The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
• Burning is too good for them
• Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate by Kenan Malik