Meaning – in terms of meaning of linguistic expressions, rather than meaning of life – has always been a puzzling notion in philosophy (even though the meaning of life is an equally if not more puzzling notion). The central question to ask is, ‘what is meaning?’. If we choose to express the question differently, we would be asking ‘what does meaning mean?’. This seems to immediately collapse into a sort of circularity problem. How do we even begin answering the question of ‘what does meaning mean’? Since it is beyond my intellectual capacity to survey and analyse all proposed theories of meaning to date, here in this informal setting I attempt to draft an answer to this question by combining intuition and a couple of my own ideas.
Perhaps a good approach to finding out what meaning is would be to look at where meaning comes from. Whenever we utter any linguistic expression, we first form a thought relating to that expression in our minds. For example, before I say ‘I want that ice-cream!’, the thought of ‘I want that ice-cream!’ must precede it. Moreover, this preceding thought cannot be just any vague thought, but it should be the thought containing the intention to turn that thought into the corresponding linguistic expression. In this case, it would seem that meaning comes from the intentional thought that the linguistic expression is used to express. When the meaning of the linguistic expression is intended to be conveyed to an observer (assuming the person is not speaking to herself), the process of conveyance (some would call it ‘communication’) is only successful if the observer (be it a listener or a reader) can correctly infer or interpret that intended thought from the given piece of linguistic expression. With this view, even peculiar circumstances in communication such as the use of sarcasm can be explained.
One characteristic of this view is that it presumes private meaning to be possible. What I mean here by ‘private meaning’ is that the meaning of a linguistic expression does not need to depend (its ‘existence’) on there being any observer apart from the person expressing it. This notion is intuitive: people have always been known to ‘speak to themselves’ or write journals documenting their own thoughts. In the absence of any observers, the linguistic expression in question would still make sense (and hence be meaningful) to the speaker or the writer herself.
For an observer who doesn’t know any French, we would say that she doesn’t understand the meaning of the sentence ‘la neige est blanche’, as she would not have the means to infer the intentional thought of the sentence. In this formulation of ‘meaning’, to understand the meaning of a sentence is to be able to infer successfully the intentional thought of the sentence.
With hindsight, this theory resembles greatly what philosophers have called the ‘ideational theory of meaning’, which instead understands meaning as ‘ideas’. Amongst the many objections faced by the ideational theory of meaning, I find really interesting the objection which points out that there is an aspect of meaning which is inter-subjective and social, e.g. the meaning of the word ‘dog’ is common to all English speakers, but an idea is private and subjective. This is an objection which seems to also apply to the ‘intentional thought’ theory of meaning; but does it really hit? Since we cannot be completely sure that everyone shares the identical ‘thoughts’ of a ‘dog’, shouldn’t treating such thoughts as subjective (but inferable) a much more modest and prudent move?
