Arecibo and Voyager: every design decision a bet about what carries meaning unaided.
Meaning
What a word, sentence, action or life signifies - and the question of what makes it signify that rather than something else.
- Theme
- Logic, language and interpretation
- Tradition
- Cross-tradition
- Term fixed
- 1892
In plain terms
Marks on a page mean things. Sounds mean things. Nothing about the marks or the sounds explains how.
The obvious answer - that a word means whatever it stands for - fails immediately. Plenty of meaningful words stand for nothing: and, unicorn, however, nobody. And two words can stand for the same thing while plainly differing in meaning.
The next answer is that meaning is in the head, an idea associated with the word. That fails too, because meanings have to be shared for communication to work, and nobody has access to anyone else's ideas. Which leaves the most promising answer and the strangest: that meaning is a matter of use - that a word means what it does because of what a community does with it, and that there is nothing further underneath.
As a philosopher would put it
Frege separates Sinn from Bedeutung and locates meaning in a public, objective sense rather than in private ideas. Russell's theory of descriptions shows how a phrase can be meaningful without denoting. The verificationist proposal - that the meaning of a sentence is its method of verification - was central to the Vienna Circle and collapsed under its own criterion.
Wittgenstein's later work supplies the dominant alternative. Meaning is use in a language game embedded in a form of life; the private-language argument shows that a term whose meaning depended on a private inner sample would have no distinction between correct and incorrect application, and so no meaning at all.
Grice adds speaker meaning - what a speaker means on an occasion, over and above what the words mean - and the machinery of implicature. Quine's indeterminacy of translation is the sceptical limit: no amount of behavioural evidence fixes a unique translation manual, so meaning may be less determinate than the whole enterprise assumes. Davidson's response is to build meaning out of a truth theory for the language, which is where much of the field still sits.
Where you meet it
The Arecibo message was broadcast in 1974 and the Voyager Golden Record launched in 1977, both intended to mean something to a recipient with no shared language, culture, biology or convention.
Every design decision was a bet about what could carry meaning without a prior agreement. Arecibo's 1,679 bits were the product of two primes, so that the intended recipient might arrange them into a rectangle. The Voyager record was engraved with a diagram of how to play it and a pulsar map locating the sun. Frank Drake's team debated whether an arrow could be understood by anyone who had never had projectile weapons.
Carl Sagan's own assessment was that the record was far more likely to be found by humans than by anyone else. What the exercise made visible is that almost nothing carries meaning on its own. Even the picture of a hand raised in greeting means greeting only to a species that greets that way - and the design team knew it, which is why the record is a monument to the problem rather than a solution to it.
What is actually disputed
Whether meanings are determinate.
The traditional picture treats a word as having a meaning that a good dictionary approximates. Quine's argument is that behavioural evidence underdetermines translation, so there may be no fact of the matter distinguishing two incompatible manuals - a conclusion most philosophers resist while finding the argument hard to answer. Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein on rule-following presses the same point about the individual: nothing in a person's history fixes which rule they were following.
The other live question is whether meaning is in the head. Putnam's Twin Earth argument concludes that it is not - that what your words refer to depends on your environment and your community's experts, not on your internal state. If that is right, then two people can be internally identical and mean different things, and a great deal of the philosophy of mind has to be rearranged around it.
Commonly confused with
- Reference 1905 What a word picks out and what it means are different. Words with no referent are meaningful, and words with the same referent can differ in meaning.
- Definition c. 330 BC A definition is an attempt to state a meaning. Most words are used competently by people who could not define them.
Defined against
- Reference Meaning and reference come apart in both directions, and keeping them separate is the first move in the modern subject
Philosophers
- Ludwig Wittgenstein Meaning as use, and the argument against private meaning
- Bertrand Russell Meaningful phrases that denote nothing
- Rudolf Carnap Meaning tied to verification, and the collapse of the criterion
- Willard Van Orman Quine The indeterminacy of translation
- Jacques Derrida Meaning as never fully present, always deferred
Works
- Philosophical Investigations Meaning as use in a form of life
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus The earlier picture, later abandoned by its author
- Language, Truth and Logic Verification as the criterion of meaning
- Of Grammatology Meaning as deferred rather than fixed
- How to Do Things with Words Meaning that is not description at all
Schools
- Ordinary Language Philosophy Where meaning becomes use
- Logical Atomism Where it is picturing
- Vienna Circle Where it is verification
- Post-Structuralism Where it is never settled
- Classical Pragmatism Where it is the practical difference a difference makes
Related concepts
Reference 1905 · Sense 1892 · Language game 1953 · Sign and symbol 1868 · Interpretation 1819
Meaning becomes a distinct philosophical subject with Frege in 1892; before that it is discussed inside logic, grammar and theology rather than as a problem in its own right.