Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Or should we rather conclude that the whole issue of meaning, including all our intuitions mentioned above, is illusory and that the only real matter are human linguistic transactions which can be accounted for analogously to how we describe all other kinds of transactions going on within our world.

The same would be the case, for that matter, if meanings were conceived as elements of the real or of a Platonist world christened by expressions.

This is harmless unless we fall into the trap of understanding this as a picture of a real relation of denoting between an expression and a concept.

The basic difference between such a man-made space and the nature-made 'real' space is in that the former, in contrast to the latter, is not a matter of making some courses of action impossible, but rather of making them merely improper.

The spaces may be also more or less embodied – i.e. their possibilities may to some extent depend on those of the real space.

A simple example: linguists sometimes like to explain words like necessary simply by referring to possible worlds, whose real nature they take as something they need not bother very much about, because it is explained by philosophers.

MeaningW of an expression amounts to some causal or "intentional" link between the expression and an extralinguistic thing (a real thing, a 'content of consciousness' or something like that).

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?

This indicates that the only real sense which can be made of formulas and diagrams as exemplified above is in terms of translating the analyzed language into another language.

It is futile to see the enterprise of semantics as secondary to that of some (real or would-be) metaphysics; to think that we must first clarify and formally depict the structure of the word and only then to pair expressions with the elements of the word thus depicted.