Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Thus it seems that there is no interesting direct describing of the meaning of an expression which would not rest on finding an interesting translation of the expression into another language (or an interesting paraphrase of the expression in the same language); and providing (i) seems to be in this sense parasitic upon providing (iv)9.

It might seem that in this case we may be able to pick up some relevant 'content of consciousness' independently of any linguistic articulation; however, it is hard to see how we could identify contentful mental entities save by way of language; we cannot describe the mental entity 'beyond' the sentence 'Every farmer owns a donkey' save by saying that it is the thought (or idea, or whatever) that every farmer owns a donkey, or the thought that for every x, if x is a farmer, then x owns a donkey etc. What is worse, even if we could give an independent 8 9 See Chomsky (1967).

This indicates that the only real sense which can be made of formulas and diagrams as exemplified above is in terms of translating the analyzed language into another language.

Thus, for many theoreticians of language, meaning has come to coincide with something like the semantic structure; and semantic analysis with pinpointing this structure.

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 structures are obviously the results of studying language - which is, however, understood as studying mind, which is in turn postulated to be studying brain.

The thesis advocated here is that the structure of an expression is essentially a quite different kind - it is a theoretical construct which locates the expression within the system of the language to which it belongs.

We first reconstruct language as a rule-based system; and this reconstruction causes expressions to fall into certain categories.

If the rules which we consider are the rules of syntax (i.e. if they provide for the criterial reconstruction of well-formedness), then the resulting categories are known as syntactic categories (they express the expressions' behaviour from the viewpoint of constituting well-formed expressions and statements); if they are the rules of semantics (i.e. if they amount to truth, assertibility, or use in general), then the categories are meanings (they express the expressions' behaviour from the viewpoint of truth, or, more generally, from the viewpoint of their employability within language games).

And this is a holistic matter - the expression only has this kind of structure when considered as belonging to the system of language.