These two examples give us the clue
to discovering the basis for our agreement about meaning and
verification. This basis is twofold. On the one hand, we agree because
we have similar experiences.
[…]
On the
other hand, we agree because we find such agreement useful or
advantageous.
John Wilson;
Language and the Pursuit of
Truth; 1958; p85
MEANING:
1-
what is intended to be, or actually is, expressed or indicated;
signification; import:
the three meanings of a word.
2- the end, purpose, or significance
of something:
What is the meaning of life? What is
the meaning of this intrusion?
3- Linguistics.
a- the nonlinguistic cultural correlate,
reference, or denotation of a linguistic form; expression.
b- linguistic content (opposed to
expression).
Dictionary.com
Many philosophers believe that the meaning of a word is its use, or is at any rate somehow connected with its use.
This is taken to be both the germ of a theory of meaning and a methodological principle of philosophical analysis. As a
methodological principle its application consists in transforming any question of the form ‘What does W mean?’ into ‘How is W used?’
“Don’t ask for the meaning,” they say; “ask for the use.” But the difficulty with this transformation is that the philosophers who
employ it almost invariably confine their discussion of the use of W to the use of sentences of a simple indicative kind which contain W.
C. D. Rollins; ed.;
Knowledge and Experience; 1962; p32
We must say that a question is meaningful, if we can understand it,
i.e. if we are able to decide for any given proposition whether, if true, it
would be an answer to our question.
A genuine question is one for
which an answer is logically possible.
Moritz Schlick; Meaning and Verification; 1936
Meanings are mental existents.
Gustav Bergmann; Meaning and Existence;
1959; p135
Definition and
Meaning are two different facets of a term.
1.
[…] a sentence makes a cognitively meaningful assertion, and
thus can be said to be either true or false, only if it is either
(1) analytic or self-contradictory or (2) capable, at least in
principle, of experiential test.
2.0.
In the early days of the Vienna Circle, a sentence was
said to have empirical meaning if it was capable, at least in
principle, of complete verification by observational evidence […]
2.1.
Requirement of complete verifiability in principle: A
sentence has empirical meaning if and only if it is not analytic and
follows logically from some finite and logically consistent class of
observation sentence.
This criterion, however, has several
serious defects. The first of those here to be mentioned has been
pointed out by various writers:
(a) The verifiability requirement
rules out all sentences of universal form and thus all statements
purporting to express general laws; for these cannot be conclusively
verified by any finite set of observational data.
6.0. As a consequence, the empiricist criterion of meaning, like the result of
any other explication, represents a linguistic proposal which itself
is neither true nor false.
Carl Hempel; Problems for Empiricism; 1950; in Human Knowledge;
Paul K. Moser & Arnold Vander Nat; eds.; ch17; p228-29, 236
To grasp a meaning,
to understand, to identify a thing in a situation in which it is
important, are thus equivalent terms.
[…]
All knowledge, all
science, thus aims to grasp the meaning of objects and events, and
this process always consists in taking them out of their apparent
brute isolation as events, and finding them to be parts of some
larger whole suggested by them, which, in turn,
accounts for, explains, interprets them; i.e. renders them
significant.
[…]
All judgment, all reflective inference,
presupposes some lack of understanding, a partial absence of
meaning.
[…]
No object is so familiar, so obvious, so
commonplace that it may not unexpectedly present, in a novel
situation, some problem, and thus arouse reflection in order to
understand it.
[…]
A being that cannot understand at all is
at least protected from mis-understandings. But beings that
get knowledge by means of inferring and interpreting, by judging
what things signify in relation to one another, are constantly
exposed to the danger of mis-apprehension, mis-understanding,
mis-taking— taking a thing amiss. A constant source of
misunderstanding and mistake is indefiniteness of meaning. Through
vagueness of meaning we misunderstand other people, things, and
ourselves; through ambiguity we distort and pervert.
[…]
To
be clear or perspicuous a meaning must be detached, single,
self-contained, homogeneous as it were, throughout. The technical
name for any meaning which is thus individualized is
intension. The process of
arriving at such units of meaning (and of stating them when reached)
is definition. The
intension of the terms man, river, seed, honesty, capital,
supreme court, is the meaning that exclusively and
characteristically attaches to those terms. This meaning is set
forth in the definitions of those words. The test of the
distinctness of a meaning is that it shall successfully mark off a
group of things that exemplify the meaning from other groups,
especially of those objects that convey nearly allied meanings. […]
This use of a meaning to mark off and group together a variety of
distinct existences constitutes its
extension.
As definition sets forth
intension, so division (or the reverse process, classification) expounds
extension. Intension and extension, definition and division, are clearly correlative; in language previously used,
intension is meaning as a principle of identifying particulars;extension is the group of particulars identified and distinguished.
John Dewey; How We Think; 1910; c9.
Intension and Extension are properties of meaning.
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Meaning and Interpretation
