2. Theories of Meaning

A theory of meaning for a language, according to Tenisidi (2007) is a theory that attributes to each expression in the language its literal meaning. Such a theory would spell out what is known by speakers who understand the expressions; that is, their linguistic competence. Philosophers have adopted numerous approaches. It should be noted that many current philosophical theories of meaning do not presuppose a commitment to the existence of things called ‘meanings’. As a matter of fact most contemporary theorists of meaning deny that there are such entities. In their opinion, knowing the meaning of a sentence is not the same as knowing an object. Rather, it consists in having a complex set of abilities which are manifested in the appropriate use of the sentence in question. Philosophical theories of meaning can be grouped under the following headings: the ideational theory that meanings, as Locke’s view, are ideas in the head; the picture theory that sentences, as the early Wittgenstein’s view, are pictures of facts with which they share a form; the use theory that as the later Wittgenstein’s view to ask after the meaning of an expression often is to ask about its use; psychological or communicative-intention theories as Grice’s programme to reduce the meanings of sentences to the intentions of speakers uttering them via a notion of speaker meaning; truth-conditional semantics (including Frege’s account of how the truth values of sentences depend on the reference or denotation of their meaningful parts, Davidson’s theory of meaning as a theory of truth, and more recent versions of possible world semantics); inferentialist semantics which identifies meaning with inferential role; verification and assertibility theories that the meaning of a sentence, as the logical positivists’ view, is given by its method of verify-cation, and Dummett’s account in terms of the conditions in which one is warranted in asserting the sentence in question. Let us now go to each of theory of meaning as provided above in order to some extent learn about the meaning.

1. Meaning, Communicative-Intention Theory of

In these theories linguistic meaning is ultimately reduced to the communicative intentions of speakers; that is, to psychology. The founder of this approach in the 1950s was Grice, who attempted to reduce linguistic meaning to speaker meaning, and who offered an analysis of speaker meaning in terms of communicative intention. The speaker’s communicative intention which determines what the speaker means is (a) the intention to induce an effect, typically a belief, in the audience, (b) the intention that the first intention is recognised by the audience, and (c) the intention that the audience’s recognition plays a role in the explanation of why the effect was produced. As Tenesini (2007) pointed out that “Grice also argued that the linguistic meaning of a sentence is explained in terms of what speakers regularly or conventionally use utterances of that sentence to mean (their speaker meaning).” There are several problems for this account. First, it cannot easily attribute a meaning to sentences that have never been uttered. Second, it cannot easily explain the compositionality of meaning; that is, the fact that the meaning of the constituent parts determines the meaning of the sentential whole.

2. Meaning, Ideational Theory of

The view held by some early modern philosophers, like Locke, that the meanings of words are ideas in the mind. The view in itself would only postpone the problem of explaining meaning. Some of the same philosophers held that ideas have meanings by being pictures that resemble what they are about. There are many problems with this view. First, some ideas concern abstract notions for which no picture is forthcoming. Second, ideas cannot resemble in all respects what they are about. For instance, objects have weight and mass but ideas do not. The view requires that ideas resemble in all respects what they represent. Finally, and more seriously, as Wittgenstein has argued, merely having ideas in the mind cannot be what understanding the meaning of language is about. If I do not know what ‘red’ means or red is, it will not help to have colour samples, one of which is red, since I would not know which one is red. Similarly, just having coloured ideas in the mind does not furnish the word ‘red’ with a meaning unless I already know which is red, and therefore what ‘red’ means.

3. Meaning, Picture Theory of

The picture theory of meaning is the theory which is generally attributed to Wittgenstein in the Tractatus (1922). According to the theory, sentences represent facts in virtue of sharing the same pictorial form with them. Thus, sentences are not really different from diagrams or other pictorial representations of facts. Wittgenstein also argues that any attempt to state his theory was bound to end up in nonsense.

4. Meaning, Use Theory of

The view, according to Tenesini it is wrongly attributed to Wittgenstein, that the meaning of an expression is determined by its use. The view has contemporary supporters who subscribe to various sophisticated versions of dispositionalism. Arguably Grice’s theory of linguistic meaning is also a kind of use theory.

5. Meaning, Verification Theory of

The view endorsed by the supporters of logical positivism, and also by Quine, that the meaning of an a posteriori sentence is given by its method of verification. For example, the sentence ‘Feux is a black cat’ has a meaning which is given by the kind of observation which would be required to verify it conclusively. Logical Positivists relied on this theory to rule out sentences of metaphysics, theology or ethics as lacking any factual meaning.

6. Logical Positivism

Logical positivism was developed by members of Vienna Circe, such as Carnap, at the beginning of the twentieth century. They adopted a kind of empiricism and argued that a posteriori sentences were meaningful only if verifiable. They, thus, rejected the whole of ethics and metaphysic as meaningless. Logical positivists developed a verificationist theory of meaning according to which the meaning of a sentence is given by its method of verification. All the attempts to spell out a satisfactory version of this verification principle ended up in failure, however. Logical positivists also subscribed to a conventionalist account of necessity and a priori. All necessary truths in their view were tautologies. They were true simply in virtue of the conventional meaning of their constituent words, and said nothing substantive about reality.

7. Denotation

According to Trask (1999), denotation which is the central meaning of a linguistic form, regarded as the set of things it could possibly refer to. The study of meaning is a complex affair, and several quite different kinds of meaning have to be carefully distinguished before we can hope to make much progress. For example, when we say ‘The cat is scratching the sofa’ , we clearly have some particular, individual cat in mind, and the relation between the cat and that animal is one of reference. Now the word cat itself cannot normally refer to any particular entity in this way. However, one way of looking at the central meaning of cat is to see this as consisting of all the cats in the (real or conceptual) world; that is, as the totality of things to which the word cat might reasonably be applied. This interpretation is called the denotation of the word cat.

Denotation is a difficult concept to work with, since concepts like ‘all the cats in the world’ are almost impossible to pin down. Among ‘all the cats in the world’, should we include all those cats which have not yet been born, and all those which died millions of years ago? Nevertheless, denotation is often invoked in semantics, and formal versions of semantics often try to formalize denotation as what is called extension: the extension of cat is the set (in the formal mathematical sense) of all the entities in the universe of discourse (the totality of things we can talk about) to which cat can be applied.

Denotation is most frequently contrasted with connotation, but it has important similarities to sense, which is essentially a more directly linguistic way of interpreting the same kind of meaning.

8. Connotation

Connotation is term that is a non-central word meaning acquired through frequent associations. It is used “either as what determines what falls in the extension or as the function which assigns for each possible world an extension to a term in that world” (Tanesini 2007: 29). The word rugby, for instance, has as its central sense a particular type of football game, but, depending on our experience of rugby, it may also conjure up in our mind such associations as ‘large men’, ‘manliness’, ‘boorish and bawdy behaviour’, or ‘public schools’ (that is, expensive and prestigious private schools); it may remind us of our pride in our local or national team, or it may remind us of a present or former boyfriend. All these associations are part of the connotation of the word (Trask 1999).

Apart from purely grammatical words like of and strictly technical terms like thermoluminescence, almost all words carry connotations for us, and, as we can see, these connotations may vary substantially from person to person. Particularly emotive words like foxhunting, lesbian, multinational and even vegetarian may produce connotations for different people which are almost wildly different. For some words, such as pornography, the connotations may be so overwhelming that an agreed central sense of the term may be almost impossible to identify.

Most words, though, are less dramatic in their behaviour. Probably all of us agree at least roughly about the connotations of bunny as opposed to those of rabbit. Nevertheless, even a simple word like cat can have very different connotations for old Mrs Simpson, for instance, who has a house full of cats, and for Trevor, for example, who can’t stand the creatures and is moreover allergic to them.