Meaning for Radical Contextualists: Travis and Gadamer on Why Words Matter

Charles Travis and Hans‐Georg Gadamer both affirm radical contextualism, the view that natural language is ineliminably context‐sensitive. However, they offer different accounts of the role linguistic meaning plays in determining the contents of utterances. I discuss the differences between Travis's and Gadamer's views of meaning and offer an argument in favour of the latter. I argue that Travis's view assumes a principled distinction between literal and figurative speech that is at odds with his wider contextualist commitments. By contrast, Gadamer's view, on which meaning is ‘fundamentally metaphorical,’ makes no such assumption and thus avoids the difficulty.     

论意义理论中的两条路线

意义理论在上世纪后期曾经是哲学讨论的一个核心领域,并成为语言学、逻辑学、认知科学和心理学的交叉研究领域;但它是一个非常复杂而又混乱的研究领域。D.刘易斯在谈到意义理论时指出:我区分两个主题。首先,可以把可能的语言和语法描述成一种抽象的语义系统,藉此我们把语言中的符号与我们周遭的世界关联起来。其次,通过心理学和语言学事实的描述,任何抽象的语义系统都     

Meaning and the External World

Realism, defined as a justified belief in the existence of the external world, is jeopardized by ‘meaning rationalism,’ the classic theory of meaning that sees the extension of words as a function of the intensions of individual speakers, with no way to ensure that these intensions actually correspond to anything in the external world. To defend realism, Ruth Millikan (1984, 1989a, b, 1993, 2004, 2005) offers a biological theory of meaning called ‘teleosemantics’ in which words, without requiring any contribution from the speaker’s intensions, are supposedly matched directly with their extensions by external norms. But even if one granted as a theoretical possibility that word meaning might possibly be stabilized through an external process, nonetheless, realists who wish to appeal to teleosemantics for a semantic proof of the external world must be capable of identifying these external norms, something that Millikan describes as highly fallible. Furthermore, because they can be aware of these norms only as these are internally represented, it would also be necessary for realists to verify that these internal representations accurately reflect the norms as they occur in the external world. But given that this is virtually the same stumbling block to realism found in meaning rationalism, it is concluded that teleosemantics is not likely to restore faith in this worldview.

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The Phenomenological Dimension of Meaning: Words,Vowels, Phonemes As Ways To Sing The World,To Celebrate The World,and To Live It

This is commentary on Cornejo’s Intersubjectivity as co-phenomenology: from the holism to the being-in-the-world-with-others, co-phenomenology, in which meaning is defined as a construal of phenomenological experience, it is not an individual creation, but rather an intersubjective one. In this paper the basic question is how language expresses the world and things and, consequently, what vision of the world is expressed by language and what relationship it creates with the real. Language is a set of differences between signs and meanings. It lives for and by this constant aspiration to say the inexpressible, to capture the elusive. Language tries to express the driving inner movement of the real through references and interlacing, by multiplying the relational threads of meanings. For example, the phonetic gesture performs for the speaker and his listener a certain structuring of experience, a certain modulation of existence. This is a communicative dimension in which meaning is always a process. It is the situation of co-feeling between subjects, in which understanding is achieved, as defined by Cornejo in his essay.

Buddhist Thought and Several Problems in the World Today

Buddhism has not only produced an influence upon the ancient world culture but is also playing an important role in world affairs today. This article analyzes several important problems in the world today: world peace, disarmament, economic justice, human rights, environmental protection, and universal cooperation in world problem solving. The writer holds that, to solve these problems, we should study Buddhist theory and get some helpful ideas from it. Translated from Beida Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 5, Special Issue, April 2004     

Meaning Naturalism, Meaning Irrealism, and the Work of Language

I defend the hypothesis that organisms that produce and recognize meaningful utterances tend to use simpler procedures, and should use the simplest procedures, to produce and recognize those utterances. This should be a basic principle of any naturalist theory of meaning, which must begin with the recognition that the production and understanding of meanings is work. One measure of such work is the minimal amount of space resources that must go into storing a procedure to produce or recognize a meaningful utterance. This cost has an objective measure, called Kolmogorov Complexity. I illustrate the use of this measure for a naturalist theory of meaning by showing how it offers a straight solution to one of the most influential arguments for meaning irrealism: the skeptical challenge posed by Kripke’s Wittgenstein.     

Need for Meaning,Meaning Confusion,Meaning Anxiety,and Meaning Avoidance: Additional Dimensions of Meaning in Life

Two aspects of meaning in life have drawn much attention in previous research: presence of meaning and search for meaning. We proposed four additional aspects concerning individuals’ thoughts and feelings about meaning in life: need for meaning, meaning confusion, meaning avoidance, and meaning anxiety. We developed items to measure these dimensions. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the data fit the factors well. Convergent and discriminant validities of the four dimensions were demonstrated though their distinct patterns of correlations with other variables, such as personality traits, need satisfaction, personal aspirations, life satisfaction, anxiety and depression. Moreover, cluster analysis revealed that individuals could be divided into meaningful groups according to these dimensions, with each group demonstrating unique psychological features. Implications for future studies on meaning in life are discussed.     

Meaning and Significant Intention in G. Ryle's Logical Thought

In spite of the prima facie differences between Spinoza and Heidegger, I argue that Heidegger's views in his 1929 lecture. Was ist Metaphysik?, are both consistent with, and supplemental to, the basic premise of Spinoza's ontological argument in Part One of his Ethics. According to this view, being held out into the nothing, in Heidegger's sense, is a condition without which substance can not be adequately conceived, while at the same time, being held out into the nothing does not preclude the possibility that substance, defined as an infinite being without negation, does exist.     

Contradiction,Liturgy, and Freedom: Romano Guardini's Search for Meaning after the Cataclysm of World War I

This essay examines the early thought of Romano Guardini (1886‐1968). It focuses on his magisterial book The Spirit of the Liturgy and discusses its genesis, its historical, biographical, and intellectual context, and its theological and philosophical significance. In so doing, it shows how Guardini reacted to World War I and the cataclysm of his time in turning to the church and its liturgical life in order to provide a source of meaning to a disoriented generation.     

Death and Black Diamonds: Meaning,Mortality, and the Meaning Maintenance Model

The Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM; Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006 Heine, S. J., Proulx, T. and Vohs, K. D. 2006. The Meaning Maintenance Model: On the coherence of social motivation. Personality and Social Psychological Review, 10(2): 88–111. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) proposes that human beings innately and automatically assemble mental representations of expected relations. The sense of global meaning that these relations provide is regularly disrupted by unrelated or unrelatable experiences, which elicit feelings of meaninglessness. People respond to these disruptions by engaging in meaning maintenance to reestablish their sense of symbolic unity. Meaning maintenance often involves the compensatory reaffirmation of alternative meaning structures through a process termed fluid compensation. The MMM proposes a fundamental reinterpretation of the social psychological literature, arguing that meaning maintenance is a general mechanism that underlies a host of diverse psychological motivations, including self-esteem needs, certainty needs, and the need for symbolic immortality. In particular, the MMM stands in contrast to Terror Management Theory in that mortality salience is explained by the MMM to be one of many specific instantiations of threats to meaning that engenders fluid compensation.