![](\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Billie_Holiday_0001_original1-233x300.jpg\")
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Them that’s got shall get
\nThem that’s not shall lose
\nSo the Bible said and it still is news<\/p><\/blockquote>\nSo Billie Holiday sang<\/a>, probably alluding to Matthew 25:29<\/a> (\u2018For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them\u2019) or Luke 8:18<\/a> (\u2018whosoever hath, to him shall be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have\u2019), but that\u2019s irrelevant. The point is that the subject of the verb \u2018said\u2019 is \u2018the Bible\u2019, and as Joshua Harris objects<\/a>, the Bible cannot \u2018say\u2019 anything. It\u2019s \u2018an inanimate object, not an intellectual agent\u2019.\u00a0 Well, perhaps we can change that to \u2018it<\/i> says in the Bible \u2013 who then is the impersonal \u2018it\u2019? What about \u2018Matthew says that whoever has will be given more. What if Matthew didn\u2019t write that gospel? Would it then be false that Matthew says that?<\/p>\n
It is key to the theory of reference that I shall propose that we refer by means of the signs we use. Granted, it is through our will and agency that we produce signs: words and sentences that we utter or write,\u00a0 nods, winks,\u00a0shrugs and other forms of non-verbal signification. But once the signs are in public view, it is they which do the work, as David Cameron found to his cost<\/a>.\u00a0 Were intentions sufficient to make our meaning clear, there would be none of the\u00a0confusion, ambiguity and lack of clarity that fill every waking moment.<\/p>\n
Indeed, why should intentions or thoughts or stuff inside have anything to do with how we express what some text means or says? Suppose that the thought which Bob expresses by the words ‘Sinners will be punished’ is the thought that we would express by ‘hamburgers with relish are delicious’. So when Bob says ‘Matthew 25:46<\/a> says that sinners will be punished’, he thinks that Matthew is saying something about hamburgers. Now what he thinks<\/em> is false, but what he says<\/em> is perfectly true. Matthew 25:46 indeed says that sinners will be punished, or something like that. The stuff inside our heads is just not important at all, indeed, it is questionable whether the Bob example is even coherent. Are we supposing that\u00a0he has a kind of private language which, if there were a dictionary for it, would translate the\u00a0spoken word\u00a0‘sinners’ into the mental word ‘hamburgers’?<\/p>\n