What is Meaning? — part two

An overview of foundational theories.

(Suggestion: please refer to the part one for better understanding.)

In part one of this series, we discussed the meaning of “meaning” with the help of semantic theories, which in turn were based on well-organized rules and functions. However, philosophers have their way to deal with semantics. Generally, semantics in philosophy is credited as the relationship between language and the world. As per Dennett [2],

‘Semantics . . . is where the rubber meets the road, where language gets all the way to the world and words refer to the things and events therein’.

This is contrary to pragmatics, which is more than often defined based on the relation between the language, its users and its contexts. ‘An investigation which refers explicitly to the speaker of the language — no matter whether other factors are drawn in or not — falls into the region of pragmatics. If the investigation ignores the speaker but concentrates on the expressions of the language and their designata, then the investigation belongs to the province of semantics’. (Carnap [3])

Regarding the conception of meaning and languages, many believed that meaning is present even before the advent of languages. Due to this assumption, it is valid to accept that the formation of meaning lies in mental representations. These representations can represent things, events, as well as the situation in the environment. Assuming that semantics is a bridge between language and world, there has to be one more entity to process the meaning in the absence of language. As per philosophers, this entity is the mind, which takes care of the abstract entities such as concepts, ideas, and thoughts. Usually, the mind is believed to play its role just between the language and world, or signals and meaning in the absence of language. This theory vouches for the idea that mental representations are phylogenetically prior to words and languages [4]. In the following sections, we will discuss two such foundational theories that aim to study the meaning beyond the barrier of semantics.

Mentalist and Non-Mentalist Theories

Rather than basing the explanation of meaning on semantic functions, foundational theories adopt a more fundamental approach to observing expressions. In simple words, foundational theories attempt to specify the facts in virtue of which expressions of natural languages come to have semantic properties [1] at first. Keeping the discussion linguistically motivated, one branch of foundational theories mainly deals with the mental state representation of expressions to study their linguistics representations. We call such theories “Mentalist Theories”, and people who appreciate such theories as “mentalists”. Since mentalists are mostly concerned about mental representations, many mentalists have their perspective depending on their mental representation.

Among various mentalist theories, one of the most common ones is given by Paul Grice. According to Gricean view [5], meaning can be explained in terms of the speaker’s intentions, thereby reducing meaning to the content of the speaker’s intention. Another alternative of Grecian’s view is to base the origin of meaning on beliefs instead of the intentions of the speaker.

Contrary to what mentalist believe, non-mentalists try to explain the meaning with the various aspects of the expression’s use, which assumes that there is a source of all the expressions that indeed is the fundamental bearer of content. For instance, in Naming and Necessity, Kripke suggested that the history of a name plays an essential role in determining the reference of a name. Another interesting non-mentalist theory emphasizes the importance of truth maximization. In simple words, the meaning of an utterance is the one that maximizes the truth of the subject’s utterance.

Conclusion

In this series on meaning, we have discussed two crucial theories of meaning, one of which is heavily dependent on the proper semantic construction of the language, the other being majorly inspired by the idea of meaning rather than defining it. Although, quite obviously, both the theories have their pros and cons. On the one hand, semantic theories try to explain the meaning of expressions with the help of abstract functions. The construction of such theories is very systematic in nature, which makes them easy to understand and follow. At the same time, easy implementation comes at the cost of limited expressiveness. Reliant on a particular set of rules, semantic theories find it hard to convince their users in complex cases.

On the other hand, foundational theories come in handy when readers are more concerned about the meaning’s expressiveness rather than the logic behind its construction. Being well equipped on the demonstrative end, foundational theories rely heavily on abstract concepts, such as the mind. Having too many abstract entities to define another abstract entity called “meaning” sometimes leads to more complex expressions, making things more difficult to understand.

Although, even after analyzing meaning with different perspectives, there are concepts that lie in a region where both theories overlap. Some of which is the context of the expression, intent and belief of the speaker and the importance of truth values. Nevertheless, I believe that the definitions of meaning still has many undiscovered facets which shall be unveiled in the near future. In the end, I would like to conclude this discussion with the most appropriate definition of “meaning” I came across, and that is:

The essence of meaning is its relational nature. Meaning is the relationship between the mind and the world [6].

References

[1] Jeff Speaks. Theories of Meaning. 2019.

[2] Daniel C. Dennett. Beyond beanbag semantics. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 26(6):673–674, 2003.

[3] Rudolf Carnap. Introduction to Symbolic Logic and its Applications. NewYork: Dover Publications, 1958.

[4] J.R. Hurford. The Origins of Meaning: Language in the Light of Evolution. Studies in the Evolution of Language. OUP Oxford, 2007.[5] H. P. Grice. Meaning. The Philosophical Review, 66(3):377–388, 1957.

[6] Dmitry Leontiev. The divine knot: A relational view of meaning. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 30(1):50–56, 2017.

[7] D.A. Cruse. Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford linguistics. Oxford University Press, 2000.