LINGUISTIC MEANING

The many theories that have been advanced to explain the nature of meaning in language can, despite individual nuances, be classed in three groups: (1) non-mentalistic, (2) mentalistic but non-conceptual and (3) mentalistic and conceptual. In the present study I propose to critically review the more important theories of each type in an attempt to clarify, once again, the meaning of meaning. My intention is not to decide what "meaning" ought to mean but rather to discover what it does mean in normal usage. Of the various kinds of meaning, I shall concern myself only with that which is symbolized by linguistic sound and, toward the end, with the closely related "speaker's meaning". Since graphemes do not directly symbolize meaning, I shall omit them from my discussion of language. Also excluded will be diachronic change and, except incidentally, the question of how meaning is learned. I shall mention and quote from a number of authors who have dealt with the subject, but only as they exemplify one approach or another. My treatment of the question, like the question itself, will consequently be synchronic, not diachronic. The non-mentalistic theories derive mainly from behaviorism, whose proponents have sometimes allowed their objectivity to be distorted by their desire for it. Anxious to avoid the supposedly unobservable depths of the human mind, they have gone so far as to pretend that mental phenomena either do not exist or are irrelevant to a scientific description of man's behavior. This approach has no doubt been salutary in some respects, but, as we shall see, none of the non-mentalistic theories provides an adequate description of meaning in its ordinary sense. The simplest of these and the one that first presents itself to most laymen is what we may call the naive referential theory. The view that meaning is an actual object with a linguistic label is quickly disproved, however, by the fact that some obviously meaningful utterances, such as