Meaning and Reference

Abstract

The purpose of this second chapter is to examine theories about the nature of language and about the conditions determining the meaning, reference and truth of propositions. By no means all logicians even mentioned such matters, let alone discussed them in detail, but the assumptions they obviously started with are indispensable for an understanding of the nature and scope of their investigations. Without exception they were concerned with an ordinary language, particularly Latin, whose units were meaningful, and whose indicative sentences were normally known to be either true or false. They did not start with an artificial language which could be viewed either as an uninterpreted or as an interpreted system, and no preliminary lines were drawn between syntactical and semantical questions. The results of this choice of starting point are clear. In the first place, normal semantic assumptions placed a constraint upon the kind of rules which were offered. Prior beliefs about the cases in which true premisses lead to a true conclusion determined the types of transformation and deduction which were allowed, and there was no suggestion that one could vary one’s interpretation in order to accommodate a different set of rules. There were, of course, such cases as those of propositions with non-referring subjects where no prior intuition could be appealed to, and these were decided in such a way as to avoid invalidating otherwise desirable rules. In the second place, no axiomatization took place. Since ordinary language as a whole was the basis for discussion, and no neater sub-system was ever isolated, no attempt was made to present a complete set of rules, or to treat one group of rules as axioms from which the rest could be derived. Obviously it was realized that the rules given had to be consistent with one another, and that some of them were clearly derivable from others, but no further steps toward a formal system were taken.KeywordsSixteenth CenturyTrue PropositionCommon NounMaterial SignificateFalse PropositionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.