Relation to truth· Truth, language and sciencedifficulty
The meaning of words
Where do words get their meaning?
Depending on whether meaning comes from the thing named, from shared usage, or from the speaker's intention, a misunderstanding has a different source, and translating from one language to another becomes possible or hopeless. To take a position is to say what, at bottom, lets us understand one another, and why we sometimes fail to.
Referentialism
0A word's meaning is what it refers to in the world: a name designates an object, a sentence describes a state of affairs. To understand is to know what one is talking about.
Explore this position →No figure stands here, in this slice.
Use theory
4A word's meaning is not a thing it stands for but its employment: meaning is use. We learn what a word means by seeing how it is used in the language games of shared life.
Explore this position →Wittgensteinexplicit
The young Wittgenstein took the meaning of a name to be the object it stands for; the later Wittgenstein overturns this "Augustinian picture" of language: a word gets its meaning from the role it plays in a rule-governed practice, a . Yet Wittgenstein keeps his caution: he does not make it a general theory of meaning, "for a large class of cases, though not for all", faithful to his refusal of theses.
Philosophical Investigations, §43; §7, §23 (language-games); §§65-67
Show more (3)
Charles Sanders Peirceinferable
The whole of pragmatism is born of a rule about meaning: to make a conception clear, ask what its object would have, for meaning resides nowhere but in those effects. To say a diamond is hard is to say it would resist being scratched; an idea from which no conceivable difference of experience could be drawn simply has no meaning. The move breaks with the referentialism that lodges meaning in the named object: Peirce places it in regulated conduct, the habit of action the idea engages, which brings him close to a theory of meaning as use, while keeping an experimental anchorage that sets him apart from a . It is a weapon against verbal metaphysics, those disputes where one believes oneself to be thinking though no practical difference is at stake.
How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878)
Pragmatisminferable
Two ideas between which we could imagine no difference of practical effects have, for Peirce, exactly the same meaning: such is the pragmatic maxim, a rule of clarity more demanding than the « clear and distinct ideas » of . To fix a concept's meaning, one lists the whole set of sensible or practical consequences one would expect from it, and nothing more: that inventory of conceivable effects exhausts the meaning. Its bearing is polemical: a metaphysical dispute whose outcome would make no difference to experience is thereby reduced to a verbal conflict with no object. This is the current's founding gesture, from which both its conception of truth and its dismissal of pseudo-problems derive, and which sets it apart from a referential semantics where meaning would precede all use.
Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear; James, Pragmatism
Zhuangziinferable
Words do not picture things: they serve to catch them, as the fish trap serves to catch the fish, and "the fish caught, one forgets the trap." Their meaning lies in their use and in what they let one do, not in a fixed correspondence with a referent, so that the logicians' disputes about names spin idly. This instrumental, pragmatic conception of language, in which one may "forget the words" once their office is done, leans toward a use theory with a tint of intention.
Zhuangzi, ch. 26 (the trap and the fish) · Zhuangzi, ch. 2
Speaker's intention
0Meaning lies in what the speaker seeks to get recognised: to communicate is to give another the means to grasp our intention. The conventional meaning of words derives from such intentions shared over time.
Explore this position →No figure stands here, in this slice.
See the problem map in the Atlas →
Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- DescriptiveReal problems or confusions
Are the great philosophical problems real questions, or knots of language to be dissolved rather than solved, at the risk of throwing out the questions that matter?
philosophical problemsThe point of philosophy
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.Charles Sanders Peirce · How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878)
The trap is for catching fish: once the fish is caught, the trap is forgotten. Words are for grasping the idea: once the idea is grasped, the words are forgotten.Zhuangzi · ch. 26
The meaning of a word is its use in the language.Wittgenstein · Philosophical Investigations, §43