Page 353 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

in isolation, but on this score philosophers have different opinions, too.
According to the influential dictum of Frege (1884: Introduction), which states that the meaning of words should be studied within the context of a sentence, sentences are the primary bearers of meaning, so that the meaning of smaller units (words and morphemes) and of larger units (discourses and theories) should be derived from sentence meaning. This view can be called analytical: the meaning of a sentence is analyzed in terms of the contribution of its smaller units and the way in which they are combined.
In contrast, Quine (1961:ch. 2) defends the holistic viewthat'...intakingthestatement asunitwehave drawn our grid too finely. The unit of empirical sig- nificance is the whole of science.' According to Quine, only an entire language, varying from chatter to sci- ence and logic, can be said to be meaningful. In par- ticular, the empirical content of a language is spread over the maze of interconnections that happen to exist among its sentences. Consequently, all talk of the meaning of a sentence should be construed as a man- ner of speech. One such construction is based on the observation that each language L comes with an equivalence relation among its sentences: sentence 1is synonymous in L to sentence 2. Since this equivalence relation induces a partition of L's expressions, the meaning of a sentence S can be identified with a mem- ber of this partition, namely the class of expressions synonymous to 5. Quine strives to explain the syn- onymy-relation in a behavioristic fashion, in terms of language use and of dispositions to such use. The dispositions, in turn, are hoped to get a neuro- physiological explanation.
It should be noted that a sentence meaning induced by synonymy is highly language dependent since syn- onymy itself is. They are not the kind of objects to explain preservation of meaning under translation. But if Quine's controversial argument concerning the indeterminacy of translation is cogent, this is exactly what one should expect. Note also that this extreme version of a holistic view on language makes it unlikely that anyone could master a language in all its details. It must even be conceded that extensive parts, in par- ticular the more stable ones such as science and math- ematics, are unknown to most of us. One may thus wonder how the tiny fragments with which one is normally acquainted, suffice to form native speakers.
Another view on language which is not obviously molecular, is to be found in Wittgenstein's later writ- ings. In his 'Philosophical Investigations,' Witt- genstein aims to show that the meaning of a linguistic sign is its use. It is not entirely clear, though, whether
meaning and use are identical. The meaning of an expression should give sufficient ground for its correct use, but perhaps such use is only partly determined by its meaning. However, some of Wittgenstein's argu- ments make it hard to conceive of meaning as some- thing separate from the sign.
Wittgenstein is strongly opposed to the view that the meaning of an expression consists of a mental picture which is somehow correlated to the linguistic sign. This correlation should be given in terms of rules and, in order to bar an infinite regress, one must assume that the relation between a picture and its accompanying rules is at most partly dependent on other rules. But a picture in isolation does not show how it should be applied; its significance depends cru- cially on factors external to the picture (a picture which seems to contain its rules of application remains a picture). The famous private language argument sets out to show that in general these external factors are different from mental acts. Instead, a sign gets its meaning from conventions—we decide whether to use a particular sign for a particular purpose—and from customs which are entrenched in a wider context, a 'form of life' that makes them useful.
These arguments against meaning as mental pic- tures hold as well if such pictures are 'objectivized' one way or another. Wittgenstein often states that replacing the elusive mental pictures by more concrete objects does not make a crucial difference. If so, his arguments would hold against all theories that pro- pose meanings as things which are rather remote from the signs to which they are said to be linked. As soon as one separates meaning from a sign, there is no way to get them back together again.
See also: Intensionality.
Bibliography
Frege G 1892 Sinn und Bedeutung. In: Patzig G (ed.) 1962 Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Gottingen
Frege G 1918 Der Gedanke—Eine Logische Untersuchung. In: Patzig G (ed.) 1966 Logische Untersuchungen. Van- denhoeck und Ruprecht, Gottingen
Quine W V O 1960 Word and Object. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Quine, W V O 1961 From a Logical Point of View. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Wittgenstein L 1922 Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. Rout- ledge and Kegan Paul, London
Wittgenstein L 1953 Philosophische Untersuchungen. Basil Blackwell, Oxford
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