Online research in philosophy

Information and Meaning are present everywhere around us and within ourselves. Specific studies have been implemented in order to link information and meaning: - Semiotics - Phenomenology - Analytic Philosophy - Psychology No general coverage is available for the notion of meaning. We propose to complement this lack by a systemic approach to meaning generation.

A speaker can say something without meaning it, by meaning something else or perhaps nothing at all. A speaker can mean something without saying it, by merely implicating it. These two truisms are reason enough to distinguish saying, meaning, and implicating. And that’s what we’ll do here, looking into what each involves and how they interconnect. The aim of this chapter is to clarify the notions of saying, meaning, and implicating and, with the help of some other distinctions, to dispel certain common misunderstandings.

Information and Meaning are present everywhere around us and within ourselves. Specific studies have been implemented in order to link information and meaning: - Semiotics - Phenomenology - Analytic Philosophy - Psychology No general coverage is available for the notion of meaning. We propose to complement this lack by a systemic approach to meaning generation.

MEANING: centrally, the feature(s) of an expression (over and above its form) that determine its contribution to what a speaker says in using it; also, the content of the communicative intention of the speaker in using an expression (even if that use departs from the expression's meaning). Accordingly, any discussion of meaning should distinguish speaker's meaning from linguistic meaning.

Meaning in philosophy, by K. Lehrer.--Meaning in linguistics, by A. Lehrer.--Theories of meaning, by W. Alston.--Of names, by J. S. Mill.--Of words, by J. Locke.--Of language, by G. Berkeley.--Signs and behavior situations, by C. Morris.--Meaning and verification, by M. Schlick.--Meaning and use, by R. Wells.--The meaning of a word, by J. Austin.--Meaning and speech acts, by J. R. Searle.--Meaning and linguistic analysis, by C. C. Fries.--The semantic compound of a linguistic description, by J. J. Katz.--Componential analysis and universal semantics, by J. Lyons.--Bibliographical essay (p. 213-216).

The verification theory of meaning aims to characterise what it is for a sentence to be meaningful and also what kind of abstract object the meaning of a sentence is. A brief outline is given by Rudolph Carnap, one of the theory's most prominent defenders: If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true then we would know what its meaning is. [...] thus the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is possible. [4: 420] In short, the verification theory of meaning claims that the meaning of a sentence is the method of its verification.

It has frequently been suggested that meaning is, in some important sense, normative. However, precisely what is particularly normative about it is often left without any satisfactory explanation, and the ‘normativity thesis’ has thus, justly, been called into question. That said, it will be argued here that the intuition that meaning is ‘normative’ is on the right track, even if many of the purported explanations for meaning’s normativity are not. In particular, rather that being particularly social, the normativity of meaning may follow from the more logical/epistemic relations between use and meaning. Because of this, some use-based theories we still be able to accommodate the normativity of meaning by allowing that while meaning supervenes upon use, the function from use to meaning is a normative one.

Malapropisms and slips of tongue represent ways in which expression meaning can come apart from speaker meaning. Another way is when a speaker engages in some form of implicit communication, conveying a meaning other than the meaning of the words or sentences she utters. Such implicit meaning can be intended either in addition to or instead of the explicit meaning. Some regard utterance meaning as a species of speaker meaning; others regard it as a distinct level of meaning. According to the speech-act centred conception of meaning, speaker meaning has priority over expression meaning. In contrast, the expression-centred conception regards semantic properties as intrinsic to expressions. This latter view is disputed by those who (like Grice) wish to reduce expression meaning to speaker meaning or who (like Searle) regard expression meaning as depending on a Background of human practices.

Literal meaning is often identified with conventional meaning. In A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs Donald Davidson argues (1) that literal meaning is distinct from conventional meaning, and (2) that literal meaning is identical to what he calls first meaning. In this paper it is argued that Davidson has established (1) but not (2), that he has succeeded in showing that there is a distinction between literal meaning and conventional meaning but has failed to see that literal meaning and first meaning are also distinct. This failure is somewhat surprising, since it is through a consideration of Davidson's notion of radical interpretation that the distinction between literal meaning and first meaning becomes apparent.

Perhaps you are wondering what I mean by ‘holism’. After all, everyone seems to use the term in a different sense. Even if we restrict ourselves to holism of meaning and content, we have many different holisms. Some take holism about meaning to be the doctrine that if you’ve got one meaning, you’ve got lots of them.2 On other views, to say meaning is holistic is to say that the meaning of each term depends on the meanings of all or most other terms.3 Others take meaning holism to be the doctrine that there is no real distinction between language and theory or between the “dictionary” and the “encyclopedia”.