Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

As Quine showed, the holistic character of language makes it impossible to distribute the relatively clearcut boundary between semanticsL and semanticsW to individual statements and expressions in any unique way; and this makes the boundary between meaningL and meaningW of an individual linguistic item rather illusory.

If the rules which we consider are the rules of syntax (i.e. if they provide for the criterial reconstruction of well-formedness), then the resulting categories are known as syntactic categories (they express the expressions' behaviour from the viewpoint of constituting well-formed expressions and statements); if they are the rules of semantics (i.e. if they amount to truth, assertibility, or use in general), then the categories are meanings (they express the expressions' behaviour from the viewpoint of truth, or, more generally, from the viewpoint of their employability within language games).

The opposition between truth and falsity means simply a function that assigns truth to the true statements, and falsity to the false ones.

There is no possibility of characterizing true statements without specifying the meaning of some basic expressions and specifying how meanings of wholes depend on meanings of their parts.

And expressions are synonymous only if they contribute in the same way to truth, i.e. only if they are intersubstitutive salva veritate (or, more generally, if they are intersubstitutive with respect to the usability of language statements in various language games).

Truth as a property of statements is a compositional property (for there is, strictly speaking, no 'real' noncompositional property), and as a compositional property it rests on meaning.

Statements to this effect can be found in the writings of Aristotle and Kant as well as in those of the modern philosophers from Husserl (1900/1) and Carnap (1928) on.

In the same vein we hear analytic statements defined as statements whose denials are self-contradictory.

This formulation has two shortcomings: it limits itself to statements of subject-predicate form, and it appeals to a notion of containment which is left at a metaphorical level.

Once the theory of meaning is sharply separated from the theory of reference, it is a short step to recognizing as the business of the theory of meaning simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements; meanings themselves, as obscure intermediary entities, may well be abandoned.