Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Meaning as an imprint of the mind In his On Interpretation, Aristotle famously claimed that "spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words".

This is a sketch of the picture that was taken for almost self-evident for many centuries thereafter: words gain their peculiar qualities by being somehow animated by human souls or minds; indeed they are crucial vehicles of the soul's revealing itself within the material world; and the way in which they are animated is that they become somehow attached to pieces of the soul – to mental contents, in a more contemporary idiom.

To know English is to know, for example, that the form of words 'there are cats' is standardly used to express the thought that there are cats; and that the form of words 'it's raining' is standardly used to express the thought that it's raining; and that the form of words 'it's not raining' is standardly used to express the thought that it's not raining; and so on for in(de)finitely many such cases."

However, if not chunks of mind, what is it that does animate our words?

Here Wittgenstein is arguing that, despite appearances, words may become, and in fact are, animated in a way very different from a chunk of mind being stuck to them.

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?

Concentrating on this issue led Quine to develop his much discussed thought experiments with "radical translation" – the situation where a linguist faces an utterly unknown language and must learn what its words mean by studying the behavior of its speakers.

Because it matters; meaningful stuff means something to us; words, in particular, are helpful for communicating, shaping and organizing our thought, recording knowledge etc., etc.

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

However, if the meaning is rather the role of the word within our language games, then the only way to grasp it is to investigate the word's interaction with other words and with the world within the relevant games.