Theme
Language and meaning
10 philosophers, 3 traditions
How do words come to mean anything, and what is the relation between language, thought and the world? Chinese, Indian and European thinkers gave very different answers.
A theory of meaning may say what the expressions of a language mean, or explain what makes them mean it. Both questions are far older than the modern name. In early China, Xunzi held that names mean what they do by convention, and that a true ruler should fix them so that realities are distinguished and people can be guided. In India, Mīmāṃsā thinkers such as Kumārila argued that the bond between words and their meanings is primordial and language itself eternal, against Buddhists for whom words were fleeting sounds. The grammarian Bhartṛhari took the sentence, not the word, as the true unit of meaning, and identified language at its deepest level with brahman.
In the Latin West, Augustine treated language as a system of signs, part of a wider theory of signification. Modern philosophy of language took shape around 1900: Charles Sanders Peirce developed a general theory of signs, Gottlob Frege distinguished the sense of an expression from its reference, and Bertrand Russell used logic to expose the form hidden beneath ordinary sentences.
Ludwig Wittgenstein first explained meaning as picturing and later as use in human activity. W. V. O. Quine denied that meanings can be fixed sentence by sentence, and Jacques Derrida argued that no sign ever rests on the pure presence of what it means.
Through time
3rd century BCE
Xunzi
Names have no built-in fitness; they are fixed by convention. Their proper purpose is moral: a true king fixes names so that realities are distinguished and the people can be guided, and the sophists’ paradoxes serve no such end.
About 700 years later
4th century CE
Augustine
Language is a system of signs that speakers give to signify things or their own thoughts. Augustine separated natural signs, such as smoke for fire, from given ones, and seems to have been the first to fit language into a general theory of signs.
5th century CE
Bhartṛhari
Meaning is not assembled from sounds or even from separate words: the sentence is a single, indivisible unit of meaning (sphoṭa), grasped as a whole. At the deepest level language and consciousness are one with brahman, so understanding language leads towards liberation.
7th century CE
Kumārila Bhaṭṭa
Against the Buddhist view that words are passing sounds, the bond between words and what they mean is primordial, and language itself, like the Veda, is eternal. The universals that words express are real.
About 1200 years later
19th century
Charles Sanders Peirce
Meaning lives in signs, and every sign relation has three terms: an object, the sign that stands for it, and an interpretant that is itself a further sign. A concept is clear once we can say what practical effects its object could have.
Gottlob Frege
What an expression means is not exhausted by the thing it stands for. Each also has a sense, a way of presenting that thing, and only the difference between sense and reference explains how two names for the same object can differ in what they tell us.
20th century
Bertrand Russell
Ordinary grammar can hide the logical form of what we say. A phrase that seems to name something, such as “a golden mountain”, need not refer to anything for a sentence containing it to be meaningful, once logic reveals the sentence’s true form.
Drew on Gottlob Frege
Ludwig Wittgenstein
At first Wittgenstein held that a sentence means something by picturing a possible fact, so whatever cannot be pictured cannot be said. Later he rejected this: a word’s meaning is its use in the many “language-games” of human life.
Argued against Augustine; studied with, drew on and argued against Bertrand Russell; drew on and argued against Gottlob Frege
W. V. O. Quine
Meaning cannot be fixed one sentence at a time: sentences face experience as parts of a whole theory, and a language can be translated in rival ways that are equally correct yet not mere variants of one another.
Drew on Bertrand Russell
Jacques Derrida
Metaphysics ranks voice above writing, as it ranks essence above appearance, and deconstruction reverses such hierarchies. Meaning never rests on pure presence, since repeatability is built into every sign, a relation Derrida called différance.
Sources
- Jeff Speaks, Theories of Meaning, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy