Meaning

A meaning is a set of thoughts that people take symbols to have. Meanings can do many things, such as provoke a certain idea, or denote a certain real-world entity.

Philosophical approaches

Philosophy is a linguistic activity. Many philosophers including Plato, Augustine, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, John Searle, Jacques Derrida, W.V. Quine have concerned themselves with the problem of meaning.

Related Topics:
Plato - Augustine - Gottlob Frege - Ludwig Wittgenstein - J. L. Austin - John Searle - Jacques Derrida - W.V. Quine

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Gottlob Frege

Modern philosophy of language began with the discussion of sense and reference in Gottlob Frege's essay Über Sinn und Bedeutung (now usually translated as On Sense and Reference). Frege noted that proper names present several problems with respect to meaning. Suppose, as one might casually say, the meaning of a name is the thing it refers to. Sam, then, means Sam. But what if the object referred to by the name does not exist? Is Pegasus, then, meaningless? Clearly not. There may also be two different names that refer to the same object: Hesperus and Phosphorus, for example, which were both once used to refer to the planet Venus. If the words mean the same, then substituting one for the other in a sentence will not result in a sentence that differs in meaning form the original. But in that case "Hesperus is Phosphorus" means the same as "Hesperus is Hesperus." This is clearly absurd, since you might learn something new by the former, but not by the latter.

Related Topics:
Sense and reference - Gottlob Frege

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Frege can be interpreted as arguing that it was therefore a mistake to think that the meaning of a name is the thing it refers to. Instead, the meaning must be something else—the "sense" of the word. Two names for the same person, then, can have different senses. Alternatively, the meaning of a name has two components: the sense and the reference. Each sense will pick out a unique referent, but one referent might be picked out by more than one sense. Frege argued that, ultimately, the same bifurcation of meaning must apply to most or all linguistic categories. Ironically enough, it is now accepted by many philosophers as applying to all expressions but proper names.

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Saul Kripke

Saul Kripke examined the relation between sense and reference in dealing with possible and actual situations. He showed that one consequence of his interpretation of certain systems of modal logic was that the reference of a proper name is necessarily linked to its referent, but that the sense is not. So for instance "Hesperus" necessarily refers to Hesperus, even in those imaginary cases and worlds in which perhaps Hesperus is not the evening star. That is, Hesperus is necessarily Hesperus, but only contingently the morning star.

Related Topics:
Saul Kripke - Modal logic - Referent

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This results in the curious situation that part of the meaning of a name - that it refers to some particular thing - is a necessary fact about that name, but another part - that it is used in some particular way or situation - is not.

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Kripke also drew the distinction between speaker's meaning and semantic meaning, elaborating on the work of ordinary language philosophers Paul Grice and Keith Donnollan. The speaker's meaning is what the speaker intends to refer to by saying something; the semantic meaning is what the words uttered by the speaker mean according to the language.

Related Topics:
Paul Grice - Keith Donnollan

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In some cases, people do not say what they mean; in other cases, they say something that is in error. In both these cases, the speaker's meaning and the semantic meaning seem to be different. Sometimes words do not actually express what the speaker wants them to express; so words will mean one thing, and what people intend to convey by them might mean another. The meaning of the expression, in such cases, is ambiguous.

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Meaning as use

Throughout the 20th Century English philosophy focused closely on analysis of language. This style of analytic philosophy became very influential and led to the development of a wide range of philosophical tools.

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J. L. Austin argued against fixating on the meaning of words. He showed that dictionary definitions are of limited philosophical use, since there is no simple "appendage" to a word that can be called its meaning. Instead, he showed how to focus on the way in which words are used in order to do things. He analysed the structure of utterances into three distinct parts: locutions, illocutions and perlocutions. His pupil John Searle developed the idea under the label "speech acts". Their work greatly influenced pragmatics.

Related Topics:
J. L. Austin - Locution - Illocutions - Perlocutions - John Searle - Speech act - Pragmatics

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At around the same time Ludwig Wittgenstein was re-thinking his approach to language. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he had supported the idea of an ideal language built up from atomic statements using logical connectives. Reflections on the complexity of language led to a more expansive approach to meaning in his Philosophical Investigations. His approach is often summarised by the aphorism "the meaning of a word is its use in a language".

Related Topics:
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus - Philosophical Investigations

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In the 1960s, David Lewis published another thesis of meaning as use, as he described meaning as a feature of a social convention (see also convention (philosophy) and conventions as regularities of a specific sort. Lewis' work was an application of game theory in philosophical matters. Conventions, he argued, are a species of coordination equilibria (see also Nash equilibrium).

Related Topics:
1960 - David Lewis - Convention - Convention (philosophy) - Regularities - Game theory - Coordination - Equilibria - Nash equilibrium

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Translation

W.V. Quine argued for the indeterminacy of translation; that is, that it is in principle not possible to be absolutely certain of the meaning that a speaker attaches to an utterance. All that can be done is to examine the utterance as a part of the overall behaviour of the individual, and to use these observations to interpret the meaning of any utterances. For Quine, as for Wittgenstein and Austin, meaning is not something that is associated with a word or sentence, but is one aspect of the overall behaviour and culture of the speaker.

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Quine's intellectual disciple, Donald Davidson, sought to find the meaning of an utterance in its truth-conditions. He proposed translating the sentences of a natural language such as English into first-order predicate calculus, and using the Truth-conditional semantics thus obtained as the definitive meaning of the utterance.

Related Topics:
Donald Davidson - First-order predicate calculus - Truth-conditional semantics

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