Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

To say what an expression means is not to state how things are, but rather how they ought to be, namely how the expression is correctly used.

Can we see the talk about the rules of football, and about what ought or ought not to be done during a football game, as a mere metaphor (or shorthand, or loose talk) which could be translated into a talk about the movements of the players, or something else wholly susceptible to expression in terms of the language of natural science?

The linguistic meaning of a word is entirely constituted by the rules of its use. Of course, we must keep in mind that meaning in this sense is not a thing which is named or denoted or expressed by an expression, but rather something the expression embodies or instantiates.

This is harmless unless we fall into the trap of understanding this as a picture of a real relation of denoting between an expression and a concept.

To say that an expression means thus and so is essentially to say that it ought to be used in a certain way. Thus, meanings are 'beyond the natural, causal order', but, at the same time, are not 'supernatural' in any abstruse or esoteric sense.

MeaningW of an expression amounts to some causal or "intentional" link between the expression and an extralinguistic thing (a real thing, a 'content of consciousness' or something like that).

MeaningL, on the other hand, is the matter of relations between expressions; hence the meaningL of an expression is best seen as something like materialisation of the place of the expression within the system of language, or of its role within the actual language game.

However, an expression surely can be seen as fulfilling two distinct, however inextricably linked, functions: to cope with the world and to collaborate with its fellow expressions.

Anyway, it seems to be quite clear that what is in the province of a linguist or a philosopher of language is meaningL, not meaningW: the project of discovering who is the present king of France, required in order to determine the meaningW of the expression the king of France and hence belonging to the project of semanticsW, is clearly not a part of the semantic theory of English.

This implies that the meaning of an expression is not a thing to be discovered within the extralinguistic world, but rather something as the value of the expression, the materialisation of the role of the expression within the system of language and within the language games that we play.