Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Moreover, meanings are best seen not as things we describe when describing our language games, but rather as tools of our description, as the means of our representing the games and their rules.

Their original point was that we cannot take the representing capacities of language at face value, that in order to treat of things - which cannot be done save with the help of words - we must first treat of words and make sure which of them are really capable of treating of things.

For if it happened that an individual, even when asleep, had some very distinct idea, as, for example, if a geometer should discover some new demonstration, the circumstance of his being asleep would not militate against its truth; and as for the most ordinary error of our dreams, which consists in their representing to us various objects in the same way as our external senses, this is not prejudicial, since it leads us very properly to suspect the truth of the ideas of sense; for we are not infrequently deceived in the same manner when awake; as when persons in the jaundice see all objects yellow, or when the stars or bodies at a great distance appear to us much smaller than they are.

De Saussure, the father of structuralism, and Wittgenstein, the great dissenter of logical positivism, are personalities representing the structural approach to language most consistently and consequentially (and it is quite surprising how close the opinions of these 2 two otherwise so different scholars in this point are ).

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 task of an expression may - in a particular case - be seen as representing an object, as being a name; in such a case its value may possibly be identified with the object.

Declarations have both directions of fit simulataneously because they make something the case by representing it as being the case.

In these cases we have the double direction of fit, because we make something the case, and thus achieve the world-to-word direction of fit, by representing it as being the case, that is by representing it with the word-to-world direction of fit.

We need to distinguish between those communicative acts that involve intentionally representing a state of affairs in the world and those that simply express (in the original sense of pressing out, of giving vent to) an animal’s internal state, where that expression may convey information about the world but it does not do so by representing that something is the case, or by representing other sorts of conditions of satisfaction.

What is the difference exactly between representing and expressing?