Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Hence, with a certain oversimplification, we can say that meaning was traditionally usually conceived of as a chunk of a mind-stuff glued to a word and animating it. This mentalist notion of meaning, tallying as it does with the common sense view of language, kept its intellectual appeal well into the twentieth century and, in some philosophical circles, it is still taken as almost self-evident.

The peculiar difference between a string meaning something and a meaningless chain of sounds or scribbles is obvious, and the metaphor that the former, in contrast to the latter, is animated appears to be peculiarly apt. The common metaphor of living (= meaningful) and dead (= meaningless) signs does render something intuitively very vital.

This move instantiated an undesirable ambiguity of the term meaning - we should now rather speak about meaningL, which is, in accordance with common sense, a matter of language alone, and about meaningW which is, in accordance with Frege, a matter of relating words to things5.

The Myth of the Structure One of the common way to avoid this ‘intractability of meaning’ is to move the concept of meaning to the periphery of one’s teaching and to concentrate on the word struture.

This might be understood as accepting the structural approach to language urged above - but usually it is not. The point is whereas what we have urged is an approach which sees meaning of an expression as the possitionof the expression within the network of language, the common way of engaging the concept of structure is based on the picture that an expression is like, say, a mineral: that it can be analyzed and examined with tools akin to microscopes up to the point where we see its structure.

The aim of the present paper is not only to survey the claims of what we have characterized as the structural approach to language; we would also like to document that such an approach is, contrary to common opinion, that of the most outstanding representatives of analytical philosophy.

There is little doubt that it is the semiotic view that accords with common sense; moreover, it seems that this view is also (consciously or unconsciously) adopted by many scholars.

A number is not one of the things it can be reduced to, it is rather what all of these things have in common, it 5 is a number .

And what can be said about numbers, can, more generally, be said about meanings: the meaning of an expression is not one or another definite thing conforming to our usage of the expressions within language; at most it may be said to be what all such things have in common.

And, in the first place, I observed, that the great certitude which by common consent is accorded to these demonstrations, is founded solely upon this, that they are clearly conceived in accordance with the rules I have already laid down In the next place, I perceived that there was nothing at all in these demonstrations which could assure me of the existence of their object: thus, for example, supposing a triangle to be given, I distinctly perceived that its three angles were necessarily equal to two right angles, but I did not on that account perceive anything which could assure me that any triangle existed: while, on the contrary, recurring to the examination of the idea of a Perfect Being, I found that the existence of the Being was comprised in the idea in the same way that the equality of its three angles to two right angles is comprised in the idea of a triangle, or as in the idea of a sphere, the equidistance of all points on its surface from the center, or even still more clearly; and that consequently it is at least as certain that God, who is this Perfect Being, is, or exists, as any demonstration of geometry can be.