Abstract
Objective meaning is the relation of a sign to the designated object. Charles Morris used the expression ‘existential meaning,’ but here that expression is unacceptable because of the restricted meaning of the term ‘existential’ in our theory. Semantic philosophers writing in English have used many terms for this dimension of meaning: ‘reference’ (as a translation of Frege’s ‘Bedeutung’), ‘indication’ (Russell), and ‘denotation’ (Mill), to name a few.
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Notes
Jean Piaget, La repr’sentation du monde chez l’enfant, Presses Universitaires de France; The Child’s Conception of the World, Kegan Paul, 1929.
Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, London, 1932, pp. 28–31.
“The man who in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a supernatural being, found only a reflection of himself, will no longer be tempted to find only a semblance of himself, - a non-human being - where he seeks and must seek his genuine reality” (Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction”, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. C. Tucker, II ed., W. W. Norton, New York, 1978, p. 53.)
“Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human being, inasmuch as the human being possesses no true reality. Thus the struggle against religion is an indirect struggle against that world, whose spiritual aroma is religion... Religion is the sigh of an oppressed being, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people” (Ibid., p. 54).
John Wisdom, ‘Logical Constructions,’ Mind, 1931, p. 202.
Gilbert Ryle, ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1931.
Alfred J. Ayer, ‘Verification and Experience,’ Ibid., 1936–7, also Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, London, 1947, p. 106.
Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, An Anthology, Northrop and Gross, (eds.), Cambridge, 1953, p. 538.
John Stuart Mill.,A System of Logic, B. I, Ch. II, Section 5, London, 1865, VI ed.
Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1903, Section 427.
See Urmson, Philosophical Analysis, Oxford, 1956, pp. 22–3.
Bertrand Russell, ‘On Denoting,’ Mind, 1905.
Gilbert Ryle, ‘The Theory of Meaning,’ British Philosophy in the Mid-Century, London, 1957, pp. 247–8.
Quine, From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, Mass., 1953.
Ibid., p. 9.
Ibid., p. 130.
Gilbert Ryle, ‘The Theory of Meaning,’ British Philosophy in the Mid-Century, London, 1957, pp. 248–9.
R. W. Ashby, ‘Use and Verification,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society VIII(1956), 140.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, 1953, Sections 199, 206, 241.
Ibid., Section 81.
Wittgenstein, op. cit., Section 66.
Ibid., Section 97.
Ibid., Section 2.
Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, London, 1940, p. 38.
Ibid., p. 79.
It is in this sense that Kant, proceeding upon the conception of mechanical law as the sole form of necessity, considered all the phenomena of life to be unavoidably accidental, asserting that, “nature viewed as a simple mechanism could have developed differently in a thousand ways...” (Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Berlin, 1922, Section 61).
Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, New York 1940, p. 25-6.
Tarski, “Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten Sprachen,” Studia Philosophica, Vol. 1, 1935, p. 261 – 405.
Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, 2nd ed., 1938, p. IX.
“What are invariant relations, what are propositional functions other than possibilities which are capable of being actualized but never require this in order to show their being?” (James Feibleman, A Reply to Bertrand Russell’s Introduction to the Second Edition of ‘The Principles of Mathematics,’ in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell. The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. V, Evanston, 1946, p. 161.
Op. cit., p. 159.
Ibid., p. 160.
Russell often asserted that mathematics and philosophy were sciences of a possible world. Wittgenstein made the statement for philosophy as a whole. Our investigation is not directed at phenomena but rather at what might be called the possibilities of phenomena. This means that we think about the type of statements we make about phenomena. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, 1953, Section 90, p. 42.)
“We can even go so far as to say that in all knowledge that can be expressed in words — with the exception of the words ‘this,’ ‘that,’ and several others whose meaning varies on various occasions – there are no names in the strict sense of the word: what appear as names in fact are descriptions.” (Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, 2nd ed., London, 1920, ch. XVI, p. 178.)
Op. cit., p. 97.
In the Introduction to Mathematics Russell devotes two chapters to an analysis of the definite article (op. cit., p. 95).
Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, p. 173.
Cf. Pap, Elements of Analytical Philosophy, New York, 1949.
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Marković, M. (1984). Objective Meaning. In: Dialectical Theory of Meaning. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 81. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6256-9_9
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