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".

Hence, with a certain oversimplification, we can say that meaning was traditionally usually conceived of as a chunk of a mind-stuff glued to a word and animating it. This mentalist notion of meaning, tallying as it does with the common sense view of language, kept its intellectual appeal well into the twentieth century and, in some philosophical circles, it is still taken as almost self-evident.

Thus, in his influential book John Searle (1983) claims that "the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of mind" (ibid.

As the traditional conception of mind slowly gave way to the overwhelming campaign of natural sciences, so the idea that the concept of mind was something beyond the natural, causal order began to appear inherently problematic, and definitely incapable of serving as an 'unexplained explainer'.

Tendencies arose to explain mind in terms of language, rather than vice versa (viz. the celebrated linguistic turn).

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?

What Wittgenstein is urging here is that as our linguistic games are essentially cooperative, intersubjective enterprises, they cannot rest on anything that is purely subjective. If meaning were impeccably hidden within one's mind, then its presence or absence, from the viewpoint of the language game, would be bound to be irrelevant.

Note that this does not mean that it cannot be relevant from other viewpoints, such as that of the psychology of communication – i.e. the study of what goes on in one's mind when one communicates.

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.

However, if not chunks of mind, what is it that does animate our words?