Meaning (philosophy)
In philosophy—more specifically, in its sub-fields semantics, semiotics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metasemantics—meaning "is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they intend, express, or signify".[1]
This article is about the philosophical treatment of meaning. For the linguistic treatment of meaning, see Semantics. For the non-linguistic treatment of meaning, see Meaning (non-linguistic). For other uses, see Meaning.
The types of meanings vary according to the types of the thing that is being represented. There are:
The major contemporary positions of meaning come under the following partial definitions of meaning:
Any learnable language must be statable in a finite form, even if it is capable of a theoretically infinite number of expressions—as we may assume that natural human languages are, at least in principle. If it could not be stated in a finite way then it could not be learned through a finite, empirical method such as the way humans learn their languages. It follows that it must be possible to give a theoretical semantics for any natural language which could give the meanings of an infinite number of sentences on the basis of a finite system of axioms.
Giving the meaning of a sentence, he further argued, was equivalent to stating its truth conditions. He proposed that it must be possible to account for language as a set of distinct grammatical features together with a lexicon, and for each of them explain its workings in such a way as to generate trivial (obviously correct) statements of the truth conditions of all the (infinitely many) sentences built up from these.
The meaning of sentences and grammatical constructs is given by their assertion conditions; and
Such a semantics is only guaranteed to be coherent if the inferences associated with the parts of language are in .
logical harmony
Definitions of philosophy
Meaning (existential)
Semiotics
Semeiotic
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How to Do Things With Words
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