Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

If people attach something to a word within their minds, then this is a fact of their individual psychologies, not capable of establishing the different fact that the word actually means something within their language.

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'?

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.

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.

To have an explicit rule means to have a sign that must be interpreted – hence to be able to follow this rule we need some rule for the interpretation of the sign, which leads us into a vicious circle: A rule stands there like a sign-post.

To say what an expression means is not to state how things are, but rather how they ought to be, namely how the expression is correctly used.

Given this, the genetic hardwiring becomes redundant, for the pattern is promulgated by 'social' means exclusively.

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.

No; for, of course, I am an interpreter myself, and though to find out what a word means I need to interpret its users, once I am acquainted with it, I may start to take the word as meaning what it does and in the end finally perceive it as the embodiment of the meaning.

Once I have learnt the meaning of a word, I no longer need to actually look at people using it to know that the word is governed by such and such rules and hence that it means thus and so.