What is Meaning?

Definition of “meaning” is perhaps one of the most amusing and withstanding mystery we as humankind are trying to answer. Be it a biologist, a linguist or even a philosopher, everyone has tried their hands to provide a constructive explanation of the same. Conceivably, having its roots in varied fields of science make this question even more compelling. For instance, philosophers usually attach the definition of meaning with the concept of mind (not the brain!) and try to explain it more holistically, independent of other factors such as time and evolutionary traits. On the other hand, biologists and psychologists stick to the more straight forward theories like evolution and physical functioning of the brain and usually keep themselves away from abstract concepts that include meta entities like the mind. More interestingly, linguistics observe the meaning through the lens of language. However, the major obstacle they encounter is the question “Does meaning exists without language?” which seems to be inclined towards an affirmative response. Though, it is the explanation of such answers what make linguistic approaches fascinating.

Varied Explanations, One Answer?

Many definitions of “meaning” have been proposed by experts hailing from pretty varied backgrounds. Although all the explanations have a significant degree of overlapping, each description has some idiosyncrasy to offer. In the following sections, my primary motivation will be to discuss two kinds of theories used to define meaning, namely, semantic theory and foundational theory. The difference between the two approaches is that both ideas are designated to answer different questions regarding meaning. However, this part of this series only sticks to a brief outlook of semantic theory. I will publish part 2 to discuss elements of foundational theory soon.

Semantic Theories

As the name suggests, such theories deal with the meaning of words and language belonging to some symbol system. Semantic theories are proposed to explain the meaning behind an expression. However, such theories’ primary challenge is to present a holistic approach to define meaning, given every language has a different structure (or semantics!). To deal with this issue, we will only focus on the general approaches to natural language semantics and avoid delving deep into some particular expression semantics.

More generally, with the help of semantic theories, people try to explain how the sentences are constituted with different meaningful parts, which in turn merged with the use of context. This gives rise to a proposition expressed by the sentence in that context. In semantic theories, it is assumed that a sentence’s proposition is not more than a true or false value. These value further depends on the encoded information in the sentence. In the sections to follow, we will discuss the conditions on which the proposition of a sentence depends, hence its truth conditions. To construct the theory of meaning using semantics, I will start with one of the most basic semantic theories, then adding the missing parts to form a well-grounded argument towards the end of this article.

Theory of Reference

The theory of reference suggests that a word’s meaning is precisely what it points out in the world. This argument is based solely on the assumption that all the sentence must have a truth value based on the reference presented in the sentences. For example:

[1] Brad Pitt is an actor.

[2] Brad Pitt is a painter.

In the above statements, the first one is true, and the second one is false. The trueness (or falseness) of the sentence in the above examples depends on the reference functions. The reference of “is an actor” is a function that gives an output “true” when provided with an object present in the list of actors. However, if we extend this theory to cover more examples for defining the truth values in sentences, things will start to get more complicated.

Let us take another example to emphasize the shortcoming of the theory of reference. Consider the following statements:

[3] All natural numbers are natural numbers.

[4] All natural numbers are whole numbers.

Observe that both of the above statements are true, and has the same reference function. Therefore, from the lens of the theory of reference, both the sentence express the same proposition. But, intuitively, this is not the case as both sentences have something different to offer. Therefore, examples like these hints at the requirement of a more evolved concept than truth-values needed to assign sentences to express their meaning.

Theory of propositions

Examples like [3] and [4] point towards some entities in sentences that relate to mental states’ concepts. For instance, entities that model feelings like belief or properties like a possibility. And in semantic theories, such entities are often regarded as propositions. People who follow the theory of propositions consider these additional entities while accepting the foundations laid down by the theory of reference. To put it more precisely, the theory of proposition put forward the idea that semantic theories should deal with more than just truth values present in a sentence. And, these additional entities are termed as “content” of the sentence. Therefore, a proposition is nothing but the collection of contents present in the sentence.

Before exploring the composition of contents, let’s lay down the relationship between reference and content in a sentence. For this, consider examples [3] & [4] and observe that although truth values for both sentences are true, the proposition they offer is different. Therefore, this demonstrates that the sentences’ proposition doesn’t need to be identical, given the same truth values. What about the reverse? That is, given two sentences with the same proposition have a different truth value. Well, intuitively, this seems implausible as the idea of two sentences having the same content with opposite truth value is incoherent. Therefore, it is quite evident that “content determines reference” and not vice versa.

Moving further in explaining content, another hurdle people face is the concept of context, as we are aware that a single word can have a different meaning given a context. We need a piece of machinery that takes the responsibility of contextual difference when dealing with sentences’ contents. Therefore, we need functions that determine the content when provided a context. We call such functions “characters” in the semantic theory of meaning. The relationship be-tween character, context, content and reference can be found in the following equation.

Character + Context → Content → Reference (1)

Following in a similar fashion, one may introduce more abstract notions of the circumstance of evaluation (which deals with the time frame and state of the utterance of the sentence) and intentions (which act as a function between circumstance and reference) as the need arises. However, what we saw so far is enough to understand what semantics theories have to offer for defining the meaning of expressions.

The main idea here is that semantic theories depend on the propositions and their constituents, which are the functions of various meta concepts, to deliver the meaning of an expression. Hence, semantic theories rely on a well-organized structure with semantic functions to derive meaning from a sentence.

Part Two (to be continued)

In the next part, I will discuss the foundational theories of meaning, which generally deal with the concept of meaning from a philosophical perspective. Foundational theories have their roots in questions like “Was concept of meaning there even before the advent of languages?” We will try to answer such questions in the next article. Stay tuned!

References

• Daniel C. Dennett. Beyond beanbag semantics. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 26(6):673–674, 2003.
• Jeff Speaks. Theories of Meaning. 2019