Saying and Meaning :: Philosophy of Language

Saying and Meaning The burden of this show will be to see how the terms we utter bear heart. We drill speech communication to communicate our intentional attitudes to others. On this basis, I propose to slightness meaning as that which is conveyed from a verbaliser to a attender. A naive model of the communication process will be used as follows. First, a speaker frames a sentence to convey an intentional attitude. encourage a listener attends to the sounds and comes to a meaning. The essence of human communication is that the listener comes to understand the speakers meaning. Both speaker and listener accomplish their tasks by processes of which they are unaware because they are non-conscious brain processes. But these species-typical processes for encode and decoding meanings result in the characteristic linguistic behaviours which we call speaking, listening, conversing, parameter and the rest. I shall maintain that to understand meaning we must not verbal expressio n at brain processes but at how we operate in the homo using diction. In moving to a conclusion I shall bespeak that, in many cases, as Wittgenstein put it, the meaning of a word is its use in the language. John Searle identifies two types of meaning in speech as sentence meaning or word meaning and speaker meaning. He defines sentence meaning as follows Sentences and words have meanings as part of a language. The meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of the words and the syntactical arrangement of the words in the sentence. On this basis sentence meaning is the conventional meaning of the words as they are usually used in a lexical sense. and so in the Case A below there is a recognise meaning. A woman observes a couple leaving a fellowship and comments to her partner, (Case A) Jim and his wife are leaving the (company*).The conventional or sentence meaning here is as follows two people, a man (Jim) and his wife are leaving the social function (as opposed to a po litical party*). But even in this simple example, the bracketed in castingation shows that the context of the vox is important in enabling the listener to reach the meaning think by the speaker. The speaker and listener are usually able to clunk out the word meaning appropriate to the particular occasion. This use of language in everyday social contexts is what Wittgenstein refers to as agreement in form of life.