In his celebrated Essay on human understanding (1690), John Locke claims: The meaning of words being only the ideas they are made to stand for by him that uses them, the meaning of any term is then showed, or the word is defined, when by other words the idea it is made the sign of, and annexed to, in the mind of the speaker, is as it were represented, or set before the view of another; and thus its signification ascertained. In this way he clearly articulated what was, for many centuries, a predominant view of meaning; namely that meaning of a word is some kind of chunk of mind-stuff ("idea", in his words) glued to a word and animating it. This reinforces the Cartesian view that it is only some otherwordly stuff, res cogitans, which is capable of animating the mechanical, spiritless res extensa of that world through which we steer our bodies. I think that though now we should know better than Descartes and Locke, it is this kind of theory of meaning which still holds some of us captive1 . But I think that its attraction is merely a result of fallacious reasoning. It is true that it is only conscious beings that can make truly meaningful pronouncements. It is also true that meaningful pronouncements are usually accompanied by mental activity. And it is equally true that language can be used for communicating thoughts. But none of these premises, not even all of them together, gives us a conclusion that meaning is a mental phenomenon. The reasons, I think, are, in a nutshell, the following: Though it is true that only conscious beings can make meaningful pronouncements, it does not follow that an individual mind can endow an expression with a meaning. I think that it takes a complex collaboration of multiple...