This is the foundational problem of linguistic meaning, sometimes called the metasemantic problem: what about speakers and their practices gives an expression its particular meaning? Meaning as use answers by grounding the meaning of many expressions in their role within a language. This is distinct from asking which sentences are meaningful at all.
Philosophy of Language
The Grounds of Linguistic Meaning
What facts make a linguistic expression have the meaning that it has?
Positions
- Causal-Historical Reference
A term refers to what it does because of a causal chain running back to an initial naming, not because speakers associate a description that the referent satisfies.
- Meaning as Use
For a large class of expressions, meaning is their use in the language.
Held by Ordinary Language Philosophy
- Speaker-Meaning
An expression means what it does because of what speakers intend to communicate by it, so meaning in a language is built out of the intentions behind particular utterances.
Methods used to investigate this question
- Deconstructive Reading
Deconstructive reading follows a text's oppositions, exclusions, and unstable terms to show where its operation unsettles its apparent claims.
- Hermeneutic Circle
The hermeneutic circle interprets parts through a provisional understanding of their whole and revises the whole through closer interpretation of its parts.
- Ordinary-Language Analysis
Ordinary-language analysis examines how expressions work in everyday contexts to diagnose philosophical confusion and clarify the concepts at issue.
- Structural Analysis
Structural analysis explains an element through the system of differences, relations, and rules that makes it intelligible.