Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Meaning as an imprint of the mind In his On Interpretation, Aristotle famously claimed that "spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words".

And look on the feelings, etc., as you look on a way of regarding the language-game, as interpretation."

To have an explicit rule means to have a sign that must be interpreted – hence to be able to follow this rule we need some rule for the interpretation of the sign, which leads us into a vicious circle: A rule stands there like a sign-post.

Thus, though it is the process of interpretation that is constitutive of meanings, this does not mean that getting hold of a particular meaning must always involve me in interpretation.

Hence the claim that there is no meaning without interpretation is different from the claim that every meaning-perception is the result of an inference – the former does not involve the latter.

However, it would be essentially wrong to interpret this structural indeterminacy as implying that we cannot know what the meanings of our expressions are. The right interpretation is rather that meanings are not definite in the sense presupposed by the semiotic view.

The interpretation we do not want is "How, causally, did you reach the result?" It does not matter what caused you to get the result; this is irrelevant.

The standard textbook accounts of language say that specific languages such as French or German consist of three components: a phonological component that determines how words and sentences are pronounced, a syntactical component that determines the arrangement of words and morphemes in sentences, and a semantic component that assigns a meaning or interpretation to words and sentences.

But this interpretation is more strained, and is inconsistent with the preceding two quotations, which simply identify the narrow language faculty with recursion.

I am sweeping under the rug questions of considerable significance, notably, questions about what in the earlier framework were called “surface effects” on interpretation.