Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

It is the occurrence of certain particular events or entities (the occurrence of certain contents within the heads of speakers, or the occurrence of certain utterances of speakers) which establishes the meaning of an expression15.

It is precisely this fact which Quine (1960) took seriously to gain his well-known robust 'behavioristic' constraints of the theory of meaning, which then led to the indeterminacy theses and subsequent dismantling of the atomistic view of language.

I have indicated why I think this conception of a theory of language is futile: I have indicated why the mentalistic conception of meaning is problematic (only hinting at all the complexities discussed at length by Wittgenstein and his direct and indirect followers - in the American context especially by Sellars, Quine and Davidson); and I have also indicated that any theory worth its name must concern itself with public universals rather than with private particulars, and must envisage an intersubjectively understandable "form" or "structure".

Conclusion We must not try to resolve the metaphysical questions first, and then construct a meaning-theory in the light of the answers.

What makes the really fundamental difference is the way one views the link of an expression to its meaning.

The approaches we classify as semiotic rest on the assumption that the significance or meaning of an expression does not depend on whether the expression is a part of language or of some other system of signs.

The basic principle of the structural approach to language, on the other hand, consists in the conviction that any significance, or any meaning of an 71 expression comes to it from its being part of the system of language.

The meaning of an expression is, according to it, not a language-independent object casually linked to the expression, rather it is the value of the expression, its position within the system of language or within the language game to be played.

Frege (1892) recognized that if we identify the meaning of an expression with the real-world object which it is felt the expression normally stands for (the meaning of the expression Morning star with the planet Venus, for example), then we shall not be always able to recover the meaning of a complex expression from the meanings of its parts.

Meaning vs. Synonymy Semantics is by definition the matter of the vertical relations linking expressions to their extralinguistic meanings.