Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The peculiar difference between a string meaning something and a meaningless chain of sounds or scribbles is obvious, and the metaphor that the former, in contrast to the latter, is animated appears to be peculiarly apt. The common metaphor of living (= meaningful) and dead (= meaningless) signs does render something intuitively very vital.

True, a thing’s being put to a certain kind of use can give it a kind of significance, but is this the kind which is characteristic of meaningful words?

When we start to use a suitable piece of stone to drive nails, it undoubtedly gains, thereby, in significance; but it seems that the difference between a meaningful word and a meaningless sound or inscription is something worlds apart from the difference between a stone used for driving nails and one that is of no use. When we say that the former stone, in contrast to the latter one, means something to us, we would seem to be employing means in a sense which is totally different from the sense in which we are using it when we say that a word means thus and so. Is not saying that a word has a meaning in the sense that it is useful for some purpose something quite different from saying that the word has meaning in the sense of having a 'semantic value'?

The reason for this shift is that while we persist in seeing the quest for meanings as necessarily underlying and prior to any explanation of our language games, we are kept in the grip of a certain view of the nature of language – the view that a word comes to be meaningful only by being associated, within our mind, with some kind of entity.

Because it matters; meaningful stuff means something to us; words, in particular, are helpful for communicating, shaping and organizing our thought, recording knowledge etc., etc.

As it is always a sentence (or sometimes perhaps even a supersentential whole) that must be employed for a valid move within a language game and that is hence independently meaningful in this sense, individual meanings can only be the artificially individuated contributions which the individual words bring to the sentence's achieving the moves within the relevant games.

On the other hand, I am dubious about (2)6 – I think that the meaningful/meaningless distinction – and the related mind/body one – is something unique, something that our theories should – in some way – reflect.

Davidson, who follows Quine in many other respects, disagrees that meaning talk can be fully naturalized, and claims that to account for thinking beings and meaningful talk we have developed a battery of specific 6 See also Peregrin (2005).

What I want to suggest is that the difference between being meaningful in the sense of being a suitable means for a particular end (like a hammer) and being meaningful in the sense of being expressive of a meaning (like a word) can be elucidated in terms of the difference between those practices which are straightforwardly end-driven and those which are partly governed by deliberate rules.

What is the nature of our linguistic practices?; and then we have concluded that the distinctiveness of the way in which our words are meaningful can be traced back to the specific character of our linguistic practices – namely to the fact that they are rule-governed in the specific sense discussed above.