Meaning (philosophy)
[12] Correspondence theory centres heavily around the assumption that truth and meaning are a matter of accurately copying what is known as "objective reality" and then representing it in thoughts, words and other symbols.
[15] For coherence theories in general, the assessment of meaning and truth requires a proper fit of elements within a whole system.
So, for example, the completeness and comprehensiveness of the underlying set of concepts is a critical factor in judging the validity and usefulness of a coherent system.
Some variants of coherence theory are claimed to describe the essential and intrinsic properties of formal systems in logic and mathematics.
[17] However, formal reasoners are content to contemplate axiomatically independent and sometimes mutually contradictory systems side by side—for example, the various alternative geometries.
[19] Other alternatives may be found among several proponents of logical positivism, notably Otto Neurath and Carl Hempel.
Constructivism views all of our knowledge as "constructed", because it does not reflect any external "transcendent" realities (as a pure correspondence theory might hold).
It is believed by constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality, including race, sexuality, and gender, are socially constructed.
Vico's epistemological orientation gathers the most diverse rays and unfolds in one axiom – verum ipsum factum – "truth itself is constructed".
[23] The three most influential forms of the pragmatic theory of truth and meaning were introduced around the turn of the 20th century by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.
Although there are wide differences in viewpoint among these and other proponents of pragmatic theory, they hold in common that meaning and truth are verified and confirmed by the results of putting one's concepts into practice.
"[25] This statement stresses Peirce's view that ideas of approximation, incompleteness, and partiality, what he describes elsewhere as fallibilism and "reference to the future", are essential to a proper conception of meaning and truth.
John Dewey, less broadly than James but more broadly than Peirce, held that inquiry, whether scientific, technical, sociological, philosophical or cultural, is self-corrective over time if openly submitted for testing by a community of inquirers in order to clarify, justify, refine and/or refute proposed meanings and truths.
In his paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" (now usually translated as "On Sense and Reference"), Gottlob Frege argued that proper names present at least two problems in explaining meaning.
Frege argued that, ultimately, the same bifurcation of meaning must apply to most or all linguistic categories, such as to quantificational expressions like "All boats float".
Logical analysis was further advanced by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their groundbreaking Principia Mathematica, which attempted to produce a formal language with which the truth of all mathematical statements could be demonstrated from first principles.
He hoped, ultimately, to extend the proofs of the Principia to all possible true statements, a scheme he called logical atomism.
In response Moore developed an approach ("Common Sense Philosophy"[30]) which sought to examine philosophical difficulties by a close analysis of the language used in order to determine its meaning.
He proposed simply translating natural languages into first-order predicate calculus in order to reduce meaning to a function of truth.
The practice of formalism is challenged by those who observe that formal languages (such as present-day quantificational logic) fail to capture the expressive power of natural languages (as is arguably demonstrated in the awkward character of the quantificational explanation of definite description statements, as laid out by Bertrand Russell).
Practitioners who were influenced by Wittgenstein's approach have included an entire tradition of thinkers, featuring P. F. Strawson, Paul Grice, R. M. Hare, R. S. Peters, and Jürgen Habermas.
He showed that dictionary definitions are of limited philosophical use, since there is no simple "appendage" to a word that can be called its meaning.
The philosopher Paul Grice, working within the ordinary language tradition, understood "meaning" — in his 1957 article — to have two kinds: natural and non-natural.
His guiding maxim was called the cooperative principle, which claimed that the speaker and the listener will have mutual expectations of the kind of information that will be shared.
As Chomsky himself has pointed out,[37] this conception of meaning is very close to that adopted by John Austin, Peter Strawson and the late Wittgenstein.
In contrast to Locke and Hume, George Berkeley and Ludwig Wittgenstein held that ideas alone are unable to account for the different variations within a general meaning.
Another way to see this point is to question why it is that, if we have an image of a specific type of dog (say of a chihuahua), it should be entitled to represent the entire concept.
Still another objection lies in the observation that certain linguistic items name something in the real world, and are meaningful, yet which we have no mental representations to deal with.
Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff have advanced a theory of "prototypes" which suggests that many lexical categories, at least on the face of things, have "radial structures".
Philosophers Ned Block, Gilbert Harman and Hartry Field, and cognitive scientists G. Miller and P. Johnson-Laird say that the meaning of a term can be found by investigating its role in relation to other concepts and mental states.
