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Semantics without meanings?

Furthermore, I argue that the turn should not make us discard meanings, but only to reappraise them: to see them as the roles of expressions vis-à-vis the rules that govern our language games.

Fodor, thus, in general concludes that concepts, and hence, in effect, meanings are mental particulars which get associated with expressions.

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?

Note also that what makes the contents of minds unacceptable as meanings is their inherent non-shareability; thus an alternative approach might be to develop a theory of mind which would take mental contents to be not inviolably private3.

Hence if we were to follow Wittgenstein, we would have to clarify what peculiar kind of rulegoverned game can constitute a melting-pot from which genuine meanings can emerge.

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.

Quine therefore holds that to discover what meaning is, we must study how we acquire meanings, in particular which aspects of human behavior an adept of language must observe to learn what a word means.

But this, I think, is not the most important lesson (in fact, as I will try to indicate later, such an outcome is not so surprising given the pragmatic nature of the turn); a more important lesson is that meanings, at least as usually conceived, are perhaps less crucial for semantic theory than previously thought.

And it seems that this is what struck Quine. He realized that we want to know how language works, and therefore we set out to discover what meanings are; however, the best way to find out what meanings are is to investigate how language works.