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THEORIES OF MEANING. i db 493. The term “theory of meaning” has figured, in one way or another, in a great number of philosophical disputes over the last half-century.
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THEORIES OF MEANING idb 493
The term “theory of meaning” has figured, in one way or another, in a great number of philosophical disputes over the last half-century. • This term has also been used to mean a great number of different things on the basis of different approaches, conceptionsand fields.
Some Theories of Meaning • Referential Theory of Meaning • Verification Theory of Meaning • Use Theory of Meaning • Ideational Theory of Meaning • BehaviouralTheory of Meaning • Post-StructuralApproaches to Meaning • Freudian Theory of Meaning • Prescriptive Theory of Meaning, etc.
Under normal circumstances, we all know perfectly well what we say and what we intend to mean as we utter a word or a sentence. • That certain kinds of marks and noises have meanings,and that we human beings grasp those meanings without even thinking about it, are very striking facts. • The philosophical concern is to determine the explicit and coherent account of this ability.
A philosophical theory of meaning should explain what it is for a string of marks or noises to be meaningful and, more particularly, what it is in virtue of which the string has the distinctive meaning it does.
The theory should also explain how it is possible for human beings to produce and tounderstand meaningfulutterances and to do that so effortlessly.
For practical purposes, some writers focus on the most salient ones and classify these theories under the following headings: • Referential Theory of Meaning • Ideational Theory of Meaning • BehaviouralTheory of Meaning
However, besides these three, other additional classifications may go like this: • the Description Theory • The Proposition Theory • “Use” theories • Psychological theories: Grice’s program • Verification Theory • Truth-Condition Theories: Davidson’s program • Theory of metaphors
Referential Theory of Meaning • Thiscommon sense theory is that expressions have meanings,because they stand for things: they mean what they stand for. • A theory that is based on the assumption that language is used to talk about things outside language and claims that the meaning of a word is the object it denotes, and the meaning of a sentence is the proposition it expresses.
Every meaningful expression has meaning, because there is something that it refers to, designates, signifies , or denotes. • It is a symbol that stands for something other than itself. The theory is also called the denotative theory of meaning.
This construal of the theory of reference is traceable to GottlobFrege‘s(1848 – 1925) attempt to formulate a logic sufficient for the formalization of mathematical inferences.
Fregeis considered to be one of the founders of modern logic and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on the philosophy of language and mathematics.
GottlobFrege and Bertrand Russell argued powerfully that definite descriptions, at least, do not mean what they mean in virtue of denoting what they denote. • Rather, he contended, a sentence containing a definite description, such as “The woman who lives there is a biochemist,” has subject–predicate form only superficially, and is really—logically—a bunch of generalizations: it is equivalent to “At least one woman lives there, and at most one woman lives there, and whoever lives there is a biochemist.”
This Referential Theory of Meaning is attractively simple, but it has some problems. A variety of objections have been raised:
Problem 1 • Not every word refers to an actual thing. (a) First, some words don’t refer to anything that exists. “Pegasus” does not denote anything real, because there is no winged horse after all. Also, consider the sentence “I saw nobody.” But to what does “nobody” refer?
(b) Consider the sentence: «Ralph is fat» • What does “fat” denote? Perhaps it denotes something abstract, like the property of being fat. Or as Plato would have called it, The Fat Itself. So perhaps when we express «Ralph is fat» we mean that Ralph exemplifies the property of being fat. On this view, “is fat” means something like “has fatness.”
So maybe what we’re doing is joining together the name of a person (Ralph) with the name of a property (fat) by using “is.” But then what does “is” stand for? Perhaps it stands for the relation of “having.” So the sentence really means something like “Ralph bears the having relation to fatness.”
Now it looks like we need to explain what “bears” refers to. And this could go on into infinity, and we’d never be able to work out the referential meaning of the sentence.
(c) there seem to be nouns that do not name individual things or kinds of things or even abstract things like the property of being fat. • Think of words like “sake” and “behalf.” • Onemight do something on another’s behalf, but this “behalf” doesn’t seem to be a thing or even an abstract object. These nouns are meaningful, but they do not seem to get their meaning by referring to anything at all.
(d) if we consider words other than nouns, they often fail to refer to anything at all: “very,” “of,” “a,” “yes,” and “alas.” • These words don’t refer to anything, and yet they are meaningful.
Problem 2 • Referential Theory treats a sentence as a list of names for things to which the words refer. But a list of names says nothing: «Bob Jill Washington Phyllis» So how could we get meaning from a list of words that refer to things? There must be something else going on, too.
Problem 3 • There is more to meaning than reference. Some words can refer to the same thing but not share the same meaning, for example; «The president» and «Barrack Obama», etc.
Consider the following sentences: (1) Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States. (2) John McCain is the 44th president of the United States. • (1) is true, and (2) is false. Obviously, this difference in truth-value is traceable to some difference between the expressions ‘Barack Obama’ and ‘John McCain.’ What about these expressions explains the difference in truth-value between these sentences?
If the Referential Theory of Meaning is false, what theory is true? • There are other theories of meaning that surpass the Referential Theory, though they have their own problems.
Ideational Theories • John Locke (1632 –1704) seems to have held that the meanings of linguistic expressions are ideas in the mind.
Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. • Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. • Hemaintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.
On this sort of view, what it is for a string of marks or noises to be meaningful is for the string to express,or somehow significantly correspond to, a content-bearing mental state that the speaker is in, an idea, an image, or perhaps a thought or a belief.
If a string is meaningful in that it expresses an idea, one may then say that for two expressions to be synonymous is for them to express the same idea. • For an expression to be ambiguous is for there to be more than one idea that it could express, and so on.
And regarding the phenomenon of merely verbal disagreement, the ideational theorist may say: It is not that one party has onethought and the other has a different, conflicting thought; they both have the same thought, but are confusingly putting it in different words that soundincompatible.
Objection- 1 • If an ideational theory is to be precise enough to test, it must (eventually) specify what sort of mental entity an “idea” is. • andthen it will run into trouble. Mental imageswill not do at all, as a matter of fact, for images are more detailed than meanings.
A whole thought might do, as the meaning of a complete sentence. But not every sentence expresses anyone’s actual thought. And if “thought” is meant in a more abstract sense, as it was by Frege, then we are talking about a very different sort of theory.
Objection- 2 • As with the Referential Theory, there are just too many words that have no particular mental images or contents associated with them: • As with the Referential Theory, there are just too many words that have no particular mental images or contents associated with them: “is,” “and,” “of.” • Indeed, if imagesare what are on offer, there are certainly words that psychologically could nothave images associated with them, for example “chiliagon” or “nonentity,”
Objection- 3 • Meaning is a public, intersubjective, social phenomenon. An English word has the meaning it does for the entire community of English speakers, even if some members of that community happen not to understand that word. • But ideas, images, and feelings in the mind are not intersubjective in that way; they are subjective, held only in the minds of individual persons, and they differfrom person to person depending on one’s total mental state and back-ground.
Objection- 4 • There are meaningful sentences that do not express any actual idea or thought or mental state. • So there are sentences that are or would be perfectly meaningful but whose contents have never been thought by anyone or even occurred to anyone. Thus, there aremeaningful sentences that do not correspond to any actual mental entities.
Behavioural Theory of Meaning • Behaviorism rejects any account of the mental that requires positing inner and publicly inaccessible items and claims that overt behavior, construed in terms of a stimulus-response model, provides the basis for understanding mental life. • By applying this approach to analyze the concept of meaning, some philosophers suggest that the meaning of an utterance is the response it evokes in an audience in a particular context.
The forerunner of this tendency was John B. Watson. • The linguist L. Bloomfield put forward a simple version of such a theory that claims that meaning can be identified with regularly evoked behavioral responses. • Charles Morris , who assumed that every meaningful expression is a sign for something, elaborated a more sophisticated version of this theory, based on dispositions to respond rather than actual overt responses.
Although the behavioural theory of meaning claims to overcome the vaguenessof ideas in the mentalist view, it seems almost as problematic as the theory itopposes.
There is a plethora of different stimuli that elicit the same word, andthe number of different responses evoked by that word is equally high. Take, forexample, a word like jazz. • In some situations, a person might utter the word toindicate they would like to hear some jazz tunes. In other situations, they mightutter the word to approve – or disapprove – of the music they are listening to at thatmoment. And one odd person – not particularly familiar with different music styles– might even utter jazz when in fact they are listening to hip hop
Bloomfield himself acknowledges that «. . . the statement of meanings is therefore the weak point in [behav-ioural] language-study, and will remain so until human knowledgeadvances very far beyond its present state» (Bloomfield, 1933, p. 140)
