Open this book expecting the Soviet philosophy textbook and you will be lost within a page. There is no genuflection to Lenin, no roll-call of Party congresses, no ritual counterposing of "bourgeois idealism" to the achievements of socialism. What there is instead is a close, technically demanding argument with the whole apparatus of twentieth-century analytic philosophy of language — Frege on sense and reference, Russell's theory of descriptions and theory of types, Carnap's programme for an ideal language, the two Wittgensteins, Tarski on truth, Quine on the indeterminacy of translation, Chomsky, Montague's intensional logic, Kripke and Hintikka on possible worlds, Searle on intentionality, Putnam on reference. Rolandas Pavilionis reads these figures in the original, at length, and on their own terms. Quine is named more than eighty times, Russell as often, Hintikka seventy, Montague nearly seventy, Kripke sixty, Frege fifty. By any honest measure this is a serious monograph in the theory of meaning, of a kind almost no one else in the Soviet philosophical world was writing — and it is one of the very last things the Progress imprint sent into the world before the state that owned it disappeared.
That last fact is not decoration. It is the key to the book, and it deserves to be set out precisely, because the date on the spine tells only part of the story. The Russian original, Значение и понятийные системы, appeared from the Moscow house Mysl in 1983. What Progress issued in 1990 is H. Campbell Creighton's English translation of a revised Russian text, and to that revision Pavilionis added a closing essay, "Second Thoughts", written — the dateline says so — in Vilnius in June 1989. So three moments are folded into one volume: a 1983 monograph by a philosopher then in his late thirties; a late-1980s revision; and an afterword composed in the Lithuanian capital in the summer the Baltic independence movements were cresting, a bare two months before the human chain of the Baltic Way. The book was then printed, as its copyright page states, "in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" — and carried to press in 1990, the year that Union began visibly to come apart.
Its author was at the centre of that coming-apart. Rolandas Pavilionis (1944–2006) was a Lithuanian, trained in philology at Vilnius and then in logic at the Academy of Sciences in Ukraine, who defended a higher doctorate in the philosophy of logic at the Sorbonne in 1981 and was made a professor at Vilnius University in 1982. He was, in effect, the man who brought the Western analytic tradition into Lithuanian philosophy. And his public life belongs entirely to the independent Lithuania that did not yet legally exist when this translation went to press. In 1990 — the year the book appeared, the year of independence — he was elected rector of Vilnius University, a post he held for a decade; he later sat in the Seimas of the restored republic, and from 2004 until his death he was a Member of the European Parliament. On 11 March 1990 the Supreme Council in Vilnius adopted the Act re-establishing the independent Lithuanian state, declaring the Soviet annexation of 1940 null; Mikhail Gorbachev pronounced the Act illegal and answered it with an economic blockade. That is the setting in which Moscow's own export house was, at the same moment, printing a Lithuanian professor's philosophy of language in English for readers in London and New York. A book manufactured by the Soviet state, by an author whose parliament had just declared that state an occupying power: one could hardly ask for a sharper emblem of the imprint's final phase, when the machinery of Soviet ideological export was still running while the ideology, and soon the state, drained out of it.
The commission is worth pausing on, because it is not the usual one. For most of its life Progress issued English titles to a settled formula — doctrinal manuals for Western Communist Parties, foreign-policy apologetics, potted histories that carried the current line. A dense monograph on Montague semantics and the causal theory of names fits none of those slots; it addressed itself, as Pavilionis says, to "a broad circle of readers" of "philosophers, logicians, linguists, psychologists, cyberneticists", the international academic audience for analytic philosophy, and it offered them no line to carry. That such a book was translated and exported at all is a fact about the late 1980s. Under glasnost the imprint's output diversified and softened; the catalogue of its last years mixes the old apologetics with genuine scholarship it would once have kept for a narrower domestic readership, and this volume sits at the far, most scholarly end of that drift. It is a Progress book only in the sense that Progress printed it — which, in 1990, was a category coming apart in the reader's hands.
It would be easy to make too much of the irony and too little of the book. The right emphasis is the reverse, because the book is genuinely good, and it is good in a way that the historical moment helps explain. This is, on the evidence of its own vocabulary, one of the least ideological volumes in the entire Progress catalogue. Across some hundred thousand words, "Marx" occurs once, "Engels" and "Lenin" not at all in the body of the text; "bourgeois", "capitalism", "imperialism", "class", "the Party", "the CPSU" — the load-bearing timbers of the standard Soviet monograph — are simply absent. Where a Brezhnev-era philosophy manual would open by deriving its method from the classics and close by convicting the West of decadence, Pavilionis opens on the problem itself: "Language, although the most natural product of the human intellect, is one of its creations that is least adequately known." What follows is philosophy, not catechism.
And it is philosophy with a thesis. Pavilionis's target is what he calls the "absolutising of language" — the assumption, running from Russell and the early Wittgenstein through Carnap and into the model-theoretic semantics of Montague and the possible-worlds machinery of Kripke and Hintikka, that meaning is a property of language itself, a self-standing "semantics of language" that can be formalised without reference to what speakers know and believe about the world. Against this he sets his own construct, the "conceptual system": a structured totality of a person's beliefs and knowledge, built up in cognitive experience, into which any sign — linguistic or not — must be interpreted before it can mean anything at all. "The fundamental methodological feature of modern semantic conceptions of natural language," he writes, "lies in their making an absolute of language." His counter-claim is that language "does not express any meanings in itself that exist independently of conceptual systems"; meaning is not lodged in words but constituted by the whole system of a subject's representations of the world, including a decisive pre-verbal layer that language presupposes and cannot generate. It is a holist, cognitivist theory, and it converges in interesting ways with the anti-formalist wing of the analytic tradition itself — with Quine's assault on the analytic/synthetic distinction, with Putnam, with Searle's later insistence that intentionality is more basic than language, that "the philosophy of language is treated as a branch of the philosophy of mind". Pavilionis knows this; much of the book's force comes from his turning the analytic tradition's own internal doubts against its formalist mainstream.
A single example conveys the register. Considering the old worry that natural language, because it can generate the liar paradox, is unfit for logic, Pavilionis quotes the logician John Kemeny's conclusion that "ordinary English is a language not suitable for logical arguments" — and then simply observes that "this example of argumentation was made in that same English language" which is supposedly unfit for it. The riposte is quick, exact, and entirely at home in the analytic idiom: he is not exposing Kemeny's class position, he is catching him in a performative contradiction. The same economy governs his handling of the deeper cases — Tarski on truth, Quine on the indeterminacy of translation, Kripke's causal theory of names, which he reads as the most instructive attempt yet to fix reference without a conceptual system and therefore as the most instructive failure. Throughout, his own positive construct does real analytic labour rather than standing outside as a verdict. Meaning, on his account, is generated by incompatibility — by the "distance", "gap" or "contrast" a conceptual system works to close, "any other kind of incompatibility (itself the source of meaning)" — and the closing essay pushes this from meaning toward value, to the point where "meaning becomes significance and the interpreting subject the evaluating, willing and acting subject". Whatever one makes of the theory, it is a theory, argued and developed, not a position assumed for the sake of the conclusion it licenses.
What is striking, and creditable, is how deliberately he keeps the ideological machinery switched off. He tells the reader as much. His method, he insists, will not "substitute selection of typical statements for analysis of the conceptions", nor "reduce it to a comparison of critical points of view and a simple counterposing of them to fundamental theses of Marxist epistemology" — which is a precise, and pointed, description of exactly the method most of his Soviet colleagues used. He goes further: "Other ideological, general philosophical precepts of the authors of these conceptions will not be specially discussed." A Soviet philosopher writing on Carnap or Chomsky was expected to expose the class standpoint concealed in the logic; Pavilionis announces that he will do no such thing, and keeps his word. The Western philosophers here are treated as people who might be right or wrong about meaning, not as symptoms of a decaying order. That is a quiet act of intellectual independence, and it is the reason the book has dated so much better than its shelf-mates.
None of this makes the volume a stranger to its origins, and it would flatter Pavilionis to pretend the Marxist frame is wholly absent. It is present, but it has shrunk to a thin methodological spine rather than a body of doctrine. The materialist commitment shows up as the language of "reflection" — the mind reflecting an objectively existing world — and as a single appeal to "dialectical-materialist epistemology, according to which it is unsound to examine the thought process out of context of the thinking, historically determined subject who is cognising the world". This is real diamat vocabulary; but look at what he does with it. He does not use "reflection" in Lenin's cruder copy-theory sense. He immediately qualifies it: "Knowledge of reality is not a mirror reflection of it, but an active process." The historically-situated, practically-engaged subject is not a slogan he salutes and leaves behind; it is the actual lever by which he prises meaning loose from the formalists' "semantics of language" and relocates it in the knowing subject. Even the one gesture toward method — the demand, "in accordance with the principle of dialectics", for "concrete analysis of a concrete situation" — is Lenin's phrase pressed into service as a rule of intellectual hygiene rather than a political incantation. The remarkable thing is that the materialism here does genuine work in the argument, precisely where the ritual invocations in the standard textbooks did none.
This is where the non-Russian periphery matters. Pavilionis was writing from Vilnius, in a philosophical culture with its own lines to Central and Western Europe — to Husserl and Heidegger, to the phenomenologists, and, closer to home, to the great Lithuanian-born semiotician Algirdas Julien Greimas, whom the afterword treats as a serious interlocutor. The Lithuanian language itself surfaces in the argument, and not by accident. When he lists what he means by "natural languages" his examples run "Lithuanian, Russian, English" — his own tongue first, the imperial language second. And when, in the afterword, he wants to show that the very words for meaning encode the idea of connection and of closing a distance, his clinching example is Lithuanian: "the two very indicative Lithuanian expressions prasme (meaning) and suprasti (to understand)". These are small things, but they are the fingerprints of a philosopher who did not think in the centre's categories, working in an imprint designed to project the centre's voice.
The afterword, "Second Thoughts: From Meaning to Value, or New Perspective of Analysis", is the most telling document in the book, because it is the part written last and written free. "The period since the Russian edition of Meaning and Conceptual Systems was published," it begins, "has permitted me to reconsider" — and what follows is a philosopher opening his own framework outward, toward hermeneutics and phenomenology, toward Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur, Davidson, and Greimas, asking whether the analytic and phenomenological traditions are as opposed as they look, and proposing to link meaning with value — with the interested, willing, acting subject rather than the neutral mirror. It reads like nothing so much as a European philosopher of 1989 thinking about where the field should go next. There is not a word of Marxism-Leninism in it. Dated Vilnius, June 1989, it is a small manifesto of intellectual glasnost — and, read against the calendar, of something more than intellectual.
So what is there to correct? On the usual sites where this series does its work — 1917 and Trotsky, the Left Opposition, collectivisation and the famine, the Moscow Trials, Spain, the Nazi–Soviet Pact, 1956, 1968 — there is nothing, because the book touches none of them. Its silence on the whole political history of the century is total, and for once the silence is not an evasion but the finding itself: here is a book of Soviet philosophy, printed by the Soviet state's own export house in 1990, that has quietly opted out of the ideological project almost in its entirety. The one substantive thing a critical reader should hold up to the light is the residual "reflection" epistemology — and even that, as we have seen, is handled with unusual care. The honest verdict is that Progress, in one of its last acts, published a real work of philosophy that its own founding purpose could not have predicted or contained.
It would be a poor tribute, though, to close without pressing the argument where it can be pressed, and the place to press is exactly the ground Pavilionis half-occupies. His deepest and best instinct is that meaning cannot be sealed inside language, that it presupposes a pre-verbal layer of cognitive experience — the acquisition of language, as he puts it, "presupposes, as a necessary condition, a preverbal stage in the forming of conceptual systems." This is true, and it is a genuine advance on the formalisms he criticises. But the "conceptual system" he builds on that pre-verbal ground is stubbornly individual: a single subject's private structure of belief and knowledge, into which the social enters only later, as the "intersubjective" sediment of what other competent subjects happen to accept. And here the tradition on whose margins he was publishing had a stronger card than he plays. For Marx and Engels, language is not first a private system that afterwards becomes social; it is, in the phrase from The German Ideology, "practical consciousness" — from its origin a social product, arising with and for cooperative activity, so that consciousness is "from the very beginning a social product". The Soviet psychology that grew from this soil — above all Vygotsky's demonstration, in Thought and Language (1934), that the child's concepts are internalised from social speech, that the "pre-verbal" and the "pre-social" are not the same thing — is precisely the resource that would have carried Pavilionis's own critique of the "absolutising of language" further than he takes it. The formalists err, on his account, by cutting meaning off from the knowing subject; but one can cut it off from society just as fatally by lodging it in a solitary conceptual system, and the sharper materialist answer is that meaning is neither in language alone nor in the individual mind alone but in the social practice that makes both. It is one of the mild ironies of the book that the most powerful reply to Montague and Kripke lay in a materialist tradition Pavilionis had every right to use and, in 1989, understandably preferred to leave on the shelf.
That preference is itself the historical evidence. A Lithuanian analytic philosopher, publishing his work in Russian in Moscow in 1983, watching it go out in English under the Soviet star in 1990, adding a Vilnius afterword that faces west while his republic breaks free of the east — this is what the last year of the imprint looks like from the inside. The ideology had thinned to a spine; the periphery had its own bearings; the philosophy was serious and would outlive the state that licensed it. Read as philosophy of language, Meaning and Conceptual Systems remains a substantial and rewarding book, one that repays the effort its author warned would be required. Read as a historical document, it is something rarer: a Soviet publication in which one can watch, in real time and in a single volume, the Soviet part quietly falling silent and the philosopher stepping out from under it into a country, and a Europe, that did not yet exist.