Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

While the traditional view was that in order to understand language and our linguistic practices we must explain meaning, the 'pragmatic turn' emerging within the writings of various philosohpers of the second half of the twentieth century caused a basic change of the perspective: the tendency is to concentrate directly on explaining the linguistic practices and leave the need for explaining meaning to emerge (or, as the case may be, not to emerge) subsequently.

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".

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 reason is that "meaning exists only where there is a distinction between Intentional content and the form of its externalization and to ask for the meaning is to ask for an Intentional content that goes with the form of externalization" (ibid.

Despite this, the philosophy of the twentieth century was marked by an unprecedented attacks upon this way of thinking about meaning.

It culminates in the writings of Jacques Derrida, where the rejection of psychologism and of the traditional conception of meaning is interconnected with the author's case against what he calls the "metaphysics of the presence" and "logocentrism", which inevitably leads to a very eccentric kind of philosophizing (of course, a center is no longer recognized .

Although some philosophers still wanted to account for meaning in terms of an apparently unexplainable faculty of human mind, many others strived either to discard the concept of meaning completely, or at least to explain it in an utterly non-mentalist way. Does this mean that meanings are destined to end up in the naturalist mill constructed to produce a unified scientific theory of the whole universe?

What Wittgenstein is urging here is that as our linguistic games are essentially cooperative, intersubjective enterprises, they cannot rest on anything that is purely subjective. If meaning were impeccably hidden within one's mind, then its presence or absence, from the viewpoint of the language game, would be bound to be irrelevant.

What Wittgenstein wanted philosophers to relinquish was the view of meaning which for so long had held sway – the view that our signs are animated by chunks of our minds, chunks normally hidden within the minds' depths, but which we somehow managed to bring to light by sticking them to the signs.

In order for it to mean something, it is not enough that each of them individually makes the association, he/she must also know that the others do the same, that he/she can use the word to intelligibly express its meaning in various public circumstances etc. Language is essentially public; and as such it cannot rest on private associations.