Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

In my view, here it is essential to pause and distinguish two different theses: (1) The primary target of semantic theory are linguistic practices (aka language games).

Part V I would here willingly have proceeded to exhibit the whole chain of truths which I deduced from these primary but as with a view to this it would have been necessary now to treat of many questions in dispute among the earned, with whom I do not wish to be embroiled, I believe that it will be better for me to refrain from this exposition, and only mention in general what these truths are, that the more judicious may be able to determine whether a more special account of them would conduce to the public advantage.

The semiotic view is based on the assumption that it is the vertical relations which are primary.

It is thus the horizontal relations between expressions which are primary; and the vertical relations associating expressions with their meanings are derivative. De Saussure writes: '.

It is sameness-of-meaning and difference-in-meaning that are primary according to this view; meanings are mere reifications of these relations.

It is the language itself and the way we use it that is primary; meanings (as well as other linguistic abstracta) are only our means of representing these primary facts, of 'making sense' of them.

The semiotic view is based on the assumption that what is primary are the vertical relations, and that the horizontal relations of synonymy or of likeness and difference in meaning are mere auxiliaries which help us speak about those that are vertical.

However, the structural approach recognizes that this is not an assumption adequate to the real functioning of language: what is ultimately primary ('Urphänomene') are the similarities and differences between the usability of expressions, and the concept of meaning is our hypostatic means which facilitates speaking about these similarities and differences and making efficient theories from them.

What has been said here implies that associations, or at least some of them, need not be accounted for as primary phenomena, rather that they may be considered necessary implicit means of our making sense of oppositions, of our understanding oppositions, since understanding is finitistic and hence compositional.

The other development, consequent upon the first, was Russell's discovery of the concept of incomplete symbols defined in use. (1961)      This emendation would unquestionably have been welcome to Locke and Hume and Tooke, but historically it had to await an important reorientation in semantics -- the reorientation whereby the primary vehicle of meaning came to be seen no longer in the term but in the statement.