Abstract
Bolzano was a tremendously important transitional figure in semiotics because he afforded a bridge between Locke-style idea theories of meaning and Fregean truth-oriented semantics. As in the former tradition, Bolzano takes signs to be connected to ideas. What’s more, the association of ideas is crucial to the total significance of signs. Nonetheless, signs also have both sense and reference, along the lines made famous by Frege. Bolzano’s crucial insight, required to sustain this bridge, is twofold: that subjective mental states can have objective content; and that signs, though they “designate” the former, “mean” or “refer to” the latter.
Text from: Berg, J. ed. 1973. Bernard Bolzano: Theory of Science. Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
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Lapointe, S. (2017). Bernard Bolzano. In: Cameron, M., Hill, B., Stainton, R. (eds) Sourcebook in the History of Philosophy of Language. Springer Graduate Texts in Philosophy, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26908-5_39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26908-5_39
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