Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The harbingers were especially two scholars of rather different interests: the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1931), seeking a foundation for linguistics and arriving at his structuralist theory of language; and the logician Gottlob Frege (1892a), struggling to fortify the foundations of mathematics and consequently divorcing semantics from psychology and wedding it to mathematics instead1.

Although some philosophers still wanted to account for meaning in terms of an apparently unexplainable faculty of human mind, many others strived either to discard the concept of meaning completely, or at least to explain it in an utterly non-mentalist way. Does this mean that meanings are destined to end up in the naturalist mill constructed to produce a unified scientific theory of the whole universe?

Note also that what makes the contents of minds unacceptable as meanings is their inherent non-shareability; thus an alternative approach might be to develop a theory of mind which would take mental contents to be not inviolably private3.

Frege's idea could be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of 3 Such a theory of mind might seem self-contradictory; however, it has been proffered, e.g., by Davidson (2001).

But this, I think, is not the most important lesson (in fact, as I will try to indicate later, such an outcome is not so surprising given the pragmatic nature of the turn); a more important lesson is that meanings, at least as usually conceived, are perhaps less crucial for semantic theory than previously thought.

What else is a semantic theory than a theory of meaning?

Well: what does it mean to be a 'theory of meaning'?

So semantic theory, apparently, need not be defined as the theory of meaning, but rather as the theory of meaningfulness of words.

Quine himself is unambiguous: for him meanings are decoys, misguiding our attention from the true subject matter of semantic theory.

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).