32. Meaning

Here I start a series of items on language and meaning. In particular, I will consider meaning change. 

What is meaning? It can mean different things. It may mean the purpose or importance of something, as in ‘the meaning of life'. The phrase ‘It means nothing to me’ can mean ‘I can’t grasp it’ or ‘I am indifferent to it’. Earlier in this blog I mentioned Austin’s distinction between locutionary statements that are intended to say something about the world, and illocutionary expressions that are intended to affect someone or his/her conduct, as in a request. Here I want to discuss something different. In philosophy a distinction has been maintained between semantics, as the logic of meaning apart from the practice of language, and pragmatics, as the theory of language use. I think that the separation cannot be maintained. But let me start with established semantics.  

A founding father of semantics, Gottlob Frege, made the distinction between reference (or denotation, or extension) and sense (or connotation, or intension). Reference is what an expression refers to. A name refers to the corresponding individual, a general concept, say ‘chair’, refers to the collection of all chairs. For a proposition, reference is its truth-value: true or false. Frege characterizes sense as ‘The manner in which it (reference) is given’. The usual interpretation is ‘manner of presentation’. I make something else of it: ‘the way in which we identify something as belonging to a class or being true’.

Now two things are important. First, in language use the features we use to recognize something are often highly personal, idiosyncratic. Second, what features are picked out depends on the context. Meaning is context dependent. Some of the tings I associate with a chair are: a professorial chair, the picture I once saw of someone ‘sitting in his (stuffed) cow’, and granddad’s chair with blue velvet upholstery and dark, polished, curved armrests. General concepts are assigned according to a particular feature, triggered by the context. An advertisement for an academic function triggers the professorial chair. I will not give the full argument here but I claim that this means that pragmatics trumps semantics: one cannot meaningfully discuss meaning without regarding language use.

Sense helps not only in identification but also in the process of dissemination of meaning. By showing how something can be recognized as belonging to a category one contributes to the spread of that category. If I am to attach any meaning to the ‘Higgs particle’, someone will have to tell me how it is identified. Sense connects cognition and reference.

In communication the ‘receiver’ tries to assimilate an expression in the totality of concepts and corresponding senses that form his/her ‘absorptive capacity’. In that, senses that are associated with the expression, and corresponding connections with other concepts, will never be identical to those of the ‘sender’. In fact, the terminology of ‘receiver’ and ‘sender’ is unfortunate because it suggests that in communication meaning remains unchanged, like an object that is transmitted along a ‘communication channel’. This is part of the ‘object bias’ in our thought that I discussed earlier.