Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The meaning of an expression is, according to it, not a language-independent object casually linked to the expression, rather it is the value of the expression, its position within the system of language or within the language game to be played.

The answer, crucial for the structural approach, is that it is the sameness of position within the system of language, or the sameness of 'usability' within the language game to be played.

It is not even clear, granted meanings, when we have two and when we have one; it is not clear when linguistic forms should be regarded as synonymous, or alike in meaning, and when they should not. If a standard of synonymy should be arrived at, we may reasonably expect that the appeal to meanings as entities will not have played a very useful part in the enterprise.

Actually what made us say it is the ideal is a certain very complicated role it played in the life of people.

A good example of a cause for dissatisfaction which I might have, say, with the way someone is playing a waltz, is that I have seen the waltz danced and know how it should be played.

But if the linguistic as such involves no hookup with the world, if it is -- to use a suggestive analogy -- a game played with symbols according to rules, then what constitutes the linguistic meaning of the factual, non-logical expressions of a language?

In this respect it plays a role which is analogous to that played by the maze-learning behavior which leads a rat to form a "cognitive map" of its environment.

But the most striking fact about the original statement is the unusual role which is being played by the English word 'and.'

The role played by the observing subject in modern physics is in no way different from the role he played in Newton's dynamics or in Maxwell's theory of the electric field: the observer is, essentially, the man who tests the theory.

No one would have guessed a priori that this movement of a middle-aged man's body would cause fish to come out of the sea into his larder, but experience shows that it does, and the middle-aged man therefore continues to go to the City, just as the cat in the cage continues to lift the latch when it has once found it. Of course, in actual fact, human learning is rendered easier, though psychologically more complex, through language; but at bottom language does not alter the essential character of learning, or of the part played by instinct in promoting learning.