The Past and Future of Meaning

For many centuries, a predominant view of meaning was that the meaning of a word is some kind of chunk of mind-stuff ("idea") glued to the word and animating it. However, while the traditional view was that we must first understand meaning, which enables us to understand language and hence our linguistic practices, a new approach to semantics that has emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, and which I see as marking the future of meaning, suggests that it is our linguistic practices on which we must concentrate from the beginning. In this paper I suggest a specific understanding of these practices, yielding the conclusion that meanings are reasonably seen as creatures of our activity of setting up certain systems of rules, thus opening up new kinds of virtual spaces which we can "enter". Meaning is what emerges within the intricately orchestrated space that we have somehow managed to bring into being by means of accepting the rules which are in charge of our language games, especially the game of giving and asking for reasons. References Brandom, R. 1994. Making It Explicit. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.). Carnap, R. 1934. Logische Syntax der Sprache. Springer, Vienna. English translation The Logical Syntax of Language, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1937. Carnap, R. 1947. Meaning and Necessity. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Chomsky, N. 1993. Language and Thought. Moyer Bell, Wakefield. Coffa, A. 1991. The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Davidson, D. 1996. ‘The Folly of Trying to Define Truth’. Journal of Philosophy 93: 263–278. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2941075 Devitt, M. 1994. ‘The Methodology of Naturalistic Semantics’. Journal of Philosophy 91: 545–572. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2940802 Frege, G. 1918/9. ‘Der Gedanke’. Beitr ge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus 2: 58–77. Kripke, S. 1963. ‘Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic’. Acta Philosophica Fennica 16: 83–94. Lewis, D. 2002. Convention. Blackwell, Oxford. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9780470693711 Locke, J. 1690. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Eliz. Holt, London. Machery, E. 2009. Doing Without Concepts. Oxford University Press, Oxford. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195306880.001.0001 Montague, R. 1974. Formal Philosophy: selected papers of R.Montague. Yale University Press, New Haven. Peregrin, J. 1998. ‘Linguistics and Philosophy’. Theoretical Linguistics 25: 245–264. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/thli.1998.24.2-3.245 Peregrin, J. 2001. Meaning and Structure. Ashgate, Aldershot. Per