what is the meaning of meaning?
what is the meaning of meaning?
-John
Locke’s Ideational theory of meaning-
Ideational theory is a theory that the meaning of
a word is the idea produced by the word in the minds of speakers of a language.
The emphasis is that language is used to convey ideas and without ideas, there
is nothing words are good for. Ideas, however, are non-physical, imaginary and
transcendental. They are made concrete through the use of words or language.
Locke explains that words should be seen as
sensible mark of ideas and these ideas should be seen as the proper and
immediate significance of their corresponding words. Language is an instrument
of communication of thought. The mind focuses on idea while thinking and
speaking. The use, then of word is to be the sensible marks of ideas; and the
ideas they stand for are proper and immediate significance.
The assumption that thought exist independence of
language has been critiqued. The ideational theory of meaning can work only if
for every linguistic expression there is an idea which are regularly associated
with that expression. There is a sense of ideation which is not possible to say
that ideas are involved in any intelligible bit of speech. Ideational theory
will not work even for words that have an obvious connection with mental
images, e.g. dog, stove, book etc. in so far as the use of the word dog is
accompanied is accompanied by mental imagery, it is by no means the case that
the mental image is the same on each occasion the word is used in the same
sense. At one point it may be the image of bull dog, on another the image of a
dog sitting down, on another the image of a dog standing.
Another deficiency in the ideational theory stems
from the fact that we do not settle questions about meaning by looking for
ideas in the minds of speakers and listeners. The fact that we have public
consensus on what words mean strongly suggest that meaning is a function of
publicly observable aspect of the language situation.
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