Meaning

Mohanty

pp. 138-157

in: Jaroslav Peregrin, Doing worlds with words, Berlin, Springer, 1995

Abstract

The concept of meaning is grounded in our pre-theoretical feeling that to take a string of letters as an expression is to take it as standing for something. A proper name seems to be the paradigmatic example: it gets explicitly attached to a definite individual during the act of christening, its purpose thereafter being to point out the person to which it is attached. Other linguistic expressions then are imagined as getting attached to other kinds of objects — maybe to objects more obscure than people (e.g. ideas, facts, functions, representations, or whatever), and maybe in ways less explicit and unequivocal than christening (e.g. by some obscure stepwise processes taking place during the forgotten prehistory of mankind) — but in principale in the same manner. As Tichý (1992) puts it, language is a code and a theory of language thus has to consist in cracking the code.