Meaning, Analysis, and Exposition

Abstract

Bentham trained his intellectual energy primarily on law and political ordering, but he looked to every mode of inquiry available for analytic and normative tools with which to “rear the fabric of felicity.” Some he adopted and adapted from other thinkers (e.g., the Greatest Happiness Principle), but others he invented. The most important of his theoretical innovations, in his view, was his theory of meaning, the heart of which was his analysis of language in terms of “real” and “fictitious” entities (conventionally but misleadingly referred to as his “theory of fictions”). He sought to understand the way our language facilitates and misleads thought, reasoning, deliberation, and action. He devised a theory of meaning and the technology of thought in order to allow language the room it needs to do its essential work, while controlling its excesses. He devised a method of analysis—definition by “paraphrasis”—that enabled systematic ordering of thought. With this technology, Bentham sought to discipline potentially wayward language and thereby to deprive arbitrary power of one of its favorite weapons.