Page 168 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
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Philosophical reflection on meaning is as old as phil- osophy. Plato, confronted by the sophists, found that he needed to theorize about language and its meaning in order to escape from his opponents' sophistry (cf. Euthydemus, Sophist)', and he went on to open the debate concerning the extent to which language is conventional (cf. Cratylus). Aristotle took matters much further: in De Interpretations, he introduced a subject-predicate analysis of sentences, and in his logical writings this analysis is developed into a theory about the semantic roles of the terms that occur in sentences. The resulting theory provided the frame- work for most subsequent writing on the subject at least until the end of the medieval period. This included a great deal of sophisticated work on logic and the semantic roles (suppositio, appellatio) of terms. Many of the issues raised in these early investigations have remained in contention, but the focus for this article will be the subtle and varied developments in theories of meaning in postmedieval philosophy.
1. Ideas and Meanings
A central issue in philosophical debates about mean- ing concerns the relationship between semantics and psychology. One can obtain a route into these debates by pursuing the fate of the characteristic thesis of early modern philosophy-that, as Locke put it, 'Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them' (Locke 1698: 3.2.2). The presumption here was that the relationship between ideas and the world is straightforward, at least in the case of certain simple ideas; and that the relationship between language and the world should be explicated in terms of the former relationship. Thus, on this view, semantics is reduced to psychology.
One objection, stressed by Hegel, concentrates on the role of language in providing the essential means for the articulation of complex thoughts; Hegel had poetry primarily in mind, but one can equally think
of scientific speculation. Since these thoughts are dependent upon language, it is argued, the reduction of semantics to psychology cannot be carried out. But this objection is not decisive: even Locke held that certain complex ideas were only held together by the common use of language. He could allow this role to language because of his distinction between simple and complex ideas, and this exemplifies the route stan- dardly employed in responding to the objection: upholders of a psychologistic position argue that one can have simple thoughts without language, and that a language introduced on their basis then provides the means for the more complex thoughts which are language-dependent.
A different objection concerns the anxiety that, if meanings are merely 'ideas in the mind of him that uses them,' then they are subjective and perhaps idio- syncratic; the very idea of communication becomes problematic. Again, Locke anticipated this objection; but here his response is problematic. He suggests that as long as people agree in paradigmatic situations about the application of names for simple ideas, com- munication can proceed successfully even if indi- viduals' ideas are in fact quite different. This only provides a general solution to the problem if the ident- ity of all ideas is fixed via that of the simple ones; Locke took this view, though it commits him to a deeply implausible empiricist reductionism. But what is more worrying is that if he allows that com- munication can succeed despite differences in the ideas signified for speakers by words, it seems to follow that the theory of ideas does not have a central role in the theory of communication.
Locke's difficulty here is connected with a general difficulty that his approach faces, namely that of clari- fying what a simple idea is an idea of. Locke suggests that simple ideas are abstracted from sense- experiences in a way which implies that they have qualitative features which makes their content immediately available to introspection. But this con-
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Meaning: Philosophical Theories T. R. Baldwin