Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Moreover, meanings are best seen not as things we describe when describing our language games, but rather as tools of our description, as the means of our representing the games and their rules.

In general, providing a diagram may encapsule one of two essentially different enterprises: providing a translation, or providing a description.

Providing a description elucidates the meaning to the extent to which it is the description of the meaning, or of that to which we hold the meaning to be reducible, e.g. the use of the expression, or a 'cognitive content' for which the expression is supposed to stand.

Restricting ourselves to the two most prominent reducienda of the meaning of an expression, namely the use of the expression and the mental entity ('cognitive content') 'behind' the expression, the following main possibilities seem to emerge as to what a diagram associated with a sentence, or, more generally, with an expression, can amount to: (i) a description of the meaning of the expression (ii) a description of the way the expression is used 6 (iii) a description of a mental entity associated with the expression (iv) a translation of the sentence into another language The first alternative seems to offer the most promising route: what could be a more direct realisation of the task of semantics than displaying expressions alongside with their meanings?8 However, this proposal is rather tricky; for what could count as a description of meaning, which, as we have concluded in the preceding section, is best seen not as a 'real' object, but rather as a value?

The most secure way to describe the meaning of an expression is to use the expression itself - to describe the meaning of, say every farmer owns a donkey we best use the description the meaning of 'every farmer owns a donkey' or, possibly, that every farmer owns a donkey.

So it seems that diagrams offered by semantic analysts cannot be taken as descriptions of meanings in a direct sense (in the sense in which a photo is the description of the bearer of a name).

We should investigate how our language actually functions, and how we can construct a workable systematic description of how it functions; the answers to those questions will then determine the answers to the metaphysical ones.

The description of analyticity as truth by virtue of meanings started us off in pursuit of a concept of meaning.

We still lack a proper characterization of this second class of analytic statements, and therewith of analyticity generally, inasmuch as we have had in the above description to lean on a notion of 'synonymy' which is no less in need of clarification than analyticity itself.

A state-description is any exhaustive assignment of truth values to the atomic, or noncompound, statements of the language.