Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.

If so it would not be used as the name of a thing.

The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.

No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

To indicate the kind of answers Wittgenstein has to these worries, let me quote him at length: Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning.

True, a thing’s being put to a certain kind of use can give it a kind of significance, but is this the kind which is characteristic of meaningful words?

In this way, Quine's original idea that in order to understand what meaning is we should study linguistic behavior (especially within the setting of radical translation) slowly mutates into the idea that the truly important thing is the behavior itself – if studying it brings us also the understanding of the concept of meaning, 7 very well; if not, the worse for the concept of meaning and we should simply throw it by the board.

Hence are we to denounce meanings as red herrings which divert us from concentrating on the important thing – the linguistic behavior?

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.

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).