Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

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.

When we start to use a suitable piece of stone to drive nails, it undoubtedly gains, thereby, in significance; but it seems that the difference between a meaningful word and a meaningless sound or inscription is something worlds apart from the difference between a stone used for driving nails and one that is of no use. When we say that the former stone, in contrast to the latter one, means something to us, we would seem to be employing means in a sense which is totally different from the sense in which we are using it when we say that a word means thus and so. Is not saying that a word has a meaning in the sense that it is useful for some purpose something quite different from saying that the word has meaning in the sense of having a 'semantic value'?

That these alternatives are wrongly conceived is shown by the game of chess: here we are not dealing with the wooden pieces, and yet these pieces do not represent anything – in Frege’s sense they have no meaning.

As it is always a sentence (or sometimes perhaps even a supersentential whole) that must be employed for a valid move within a language game and that is hence independently meaningful in this sense, individual meanings can only be the artificially individuated contributions which the individual words bring to the sentence's achieving the moves within the relevant games.

And it is important to see that the indeterminacy of individual meanings is not an indeterminacy of semantics: semantics is a matter of the ability of our linguistic tools to serve as various kinds of vehicles of various language games, and though such an ability is vague in the sense that it is usually not a yes-no 6 matter, it is not indeterminate (indeed it is not even clear what it would mean to call it so).

On the other hand, furnishing individual words with values which would compositionally add up to the determinate abilities of the significant wholes can surely be done in more than one way – hence meaning assignment in this sense is indeterminate almost trivially.

What I want to suggest is that the difference between being meaningful in the sense of being a suitable means for a particular end (like a hammer) and being meaningful in the sense of being expressive of a meaning (like a word) can be elucidated in terms of the difference between those practices which are straightforwardly end-driven and those which are partly governed by deliberate rules.

What is the nature of our linguistic practices?; and then we have concluded that the distinctiveness of the way in which our words are meaningful can be traced back to the specific character of our linguistic practices – namely to the fact that they are rule-governed in the specific sense discussed above.

The linguistic meaning of a word is entirely constituted by the rules of its use. Of course, we must keep in mind that meaning in this sense is not a thing which is named or denoted or expressed by an expression, but rather something the expression embodies or instantiates.

Many modern interpreters thus see Frege as taking predicates to denote concepts in the sense of standing for them.