Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

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".

Just as all men," he continues, "have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images."

This is a sketch of the picture that was taken for almost self-evident for many centuries thereafter: words gain their peculiar qualities by being somehow animated by human souls or minds; indeed they are crucial vehicles of the soul's revealing itself within the material world; and the way in which they are animated is that they become somehow attached to pieces of the soul – to mental contents, in a more contemporary idiom.

Intentionality is that property of many mental states and events by which they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world" (ibid.

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

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.

If meaning of a word were a mental content, then it would appear reasonable to try to discover it by taking the word in isolation and searching out the links leading from it into the mind.

Of course not (unless by meaning something by a word we understand furnishing the word with a mental content).

The propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions.

Restricting ourselves to the two most prominent reducienda of the meaning of an expression, namely the use of the expression and the mental entity ('cognitive content') 'behind' the expression, the following main possibilities seem to emerge as to what a diagram associated with a sentence, or, more generally, with an expression, can amount to: (i) a description of the meaning of the expression (ii) a description of the way the expression is used 6 (iii) a description of a mental entity associated with the expression (iv) a translation of the sentence into another language The first alternative seems to offer the most promising route: what could be a more direct realisation of the task of semantics than displaying expressions alongside with their meanings?8 However, this proposal is rather tricky; for what could count as a description of meaning, which, as we have concluded in the preceding section, is best seen not as a 'real' object, but rather as a value?