A path through philosophy
What is language?
How do words hook onto the world, and where does meaning come from?
We think in words, yet almost nothing is harder to explain than how a word means anything at all. Follow the question from the naming of things to the modern discovery that meaning may live in use, in logic, or in power — never quite where we look for it.
- 1
Asks whether names fit things by nature or only by convention — and concludes that words, however apt, are never the true objects of knowledge; the Forms are.
Responding tothe sophists' play with words
- 2
- 3
Language is a system of signs that stand in for things — yet we can only learn what a sign means if we somehow already grasp the thing it points to.
Responding tothe naming picture of words
- 4
Nominalism: universals are not things in the world but signs in the mind; general words like 'human' are names that stand for many individuals, nothing more.
Responding tothe realists about universals
- 5
Words are signs of ideas in the speaker's mind; their meaning is the idea they signify, which is why loose or empty ideas breed empty talk.
Responding toAristotle
- 6
Dreams of a 'universal characteristic' — a language so exact that disputes could be settled by calculation: 'let us compute'.
Responding tothe ambiguity of natural language
- 7
Splits meaning in two: an expression has a reference (what it stands for) and a sense (its mode of presentation) — and both belong to an objective realm, not private minds.
Responding toLocke's ideas in the head
- 8
The theory of descriptions: 'the present King of France' is meaningful though nothing answers to it, because logic reveals a structure the surface grammar hides.
Responding toFrege
- 9
First holds that language pictures facts and the rest is silence; then overturns himself — a word's meaning is its use in a shared 'language game', not a hidden picture.
Responding tohis own earlier picture theory, and Augustine
- 10
The indeterminacy of translation: nothing in behavior fixes what a word means — 'gavagai' could be 'rabbit' or 'undetached rabbit-parts' — so determinate meanings are a myth.
Responding tothe idea that words carry fixed meanings
- 11
Shifts the question from meaning to discourse: what can be said at all is governed by historical rules — and those rules decide who even counts as speaking the truth.
Responding tothe search for timeless meaning
The thread bends back on itself: the tools we would use to fix meaning — definitions, logic, translation — turn out to presuppose the very thing in question. Perhaps meaning is less a thing we have than something we keep doing together.