DOCSLIB.ORG

“Meaning”: Philosophical Forebears and Linguistic Descendants

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
“Meaning”: Philosophical Forebears and Linguistic Descendants teorema Vol. XXVI/2, 2007, pp. 59-75 ISBN: 0210-1602 “Meaning”: Philosophical Forebears and Linguistic Descendants Siobhan Chapman RESUMEN Este artículo ofrece una visión general de las ideas que ayudaron a dar forma al pensamiento de Grice en “Meaning”, y considera también algunas de las respuestas más destacadas que dieron a Grice sus contemporáneos. Estos dos conjuntos de in- fluencias alimentaron el desarrollo de la teoría de la conversación de Grice, que ha te- nido un enorme impacto en el pensamiento posterior sobre el lenguaje en muchas áreas, particularmente en la disciplina lingüística conocida como “pragmática”. En las valoraciones de la obra de Grice, “Meaning” resulta a menudo ensombrecido por la teoría de la conversación, pero merece la pena volver sobre este artículo, ya que es el que establece los fundamentos generales de su filosofía del lenguaje. ABSTRACT This article offers an overview of some of the philosophical ideas that helped to shape Grice’s thinking in “Meaning”, and also considers some of the most salient re- sponses to “Meaning” from his contemporaries. These two sets of influences fed into the development of Grice’s theory of conversation, which has had an enormous im- pact on subsequent thinking about language in many areas, particularly in the linguis- tic discipline of pragmatics. “Meaning” is sometimes overshadowed by the theory of conversation in assessments of Grice’s work, but is worth revisiting because it sets out the foundations of his philosophy of language as a whole. I. INTRODUCTION Paul Grice’s “Meaning” is strikingly brief and deceptively simple- looking. At just twelve pages, it is the shortest of the five articles that appeared in volume 66 number 3 of The Philosophical Review. It was published there alongside articles with portentous and ambitious titles such as “Moral Worth and Moral Credit” and “On ‘What is a Poem?’”. In contrast Grice presented an argument that is packed with common-sense appeal and, like all philosophi- cal arguments that draw on common sense, can appear at first glance modest almost to the point of simplicity. It could be tersely summarised as: the mean- 59 60 Siobhan Chapman ing of an utterance is dependent on the intentions of the speaker who pro- duces it. Yet Grice’s attempt to take on board this intuitively plausible idea and give it serious philosophical treatment and expression has been hugely influ- ential on the study of linguistic meaning over the past fifty years. “Meaning” draws on a number of philosophical ideas and schools of thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although these can be diffi- cult to identify individually. This is because “Meaning” wears its scholarship lightly. To put it differently and more harshly, Grice displayed a rather cava- lier attitude to explaining his sources. In “Meaning” and elsewhere he paid scant regard to the usual academic requirements of citation and referencing. It was not that he was uninterested in past philosophers and philosophies. On the contrary, he argued explicitly for the value and importance of attending to previous work in a field, and his own work was always informed by a broad knowledge of what had been said before. But he seems always to have been more interested in pursuing an idea and searching out its possible implica- tions than in the laborious process of acknowledging its predecessors. This article will be concerned with the ways in which “Meaning” was informed by ordinary language philosophy, by founding work in semiology and by work on intentionality. It will also look at some responses to “Mean- ing” from Grice’s contemporaries, and at his own subsequent development of his ideas. 2007 is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of “Meaning”, but it is also the fortieth anniversary of Grice’s William James lectures at Harvard, in which he expounded his theory of conversation. This developed out of Grice’s battles with problems in “Meaning” and with responses to these from his crit- ics. The impact of Grice’s theory of conversation on linguistics, particularly in the field of pragmatics, can hardly be exaggerated. II. ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY AND “MEANING” Grice is often described as a philosopher of ordinary language. To lin- guists at least, Grice’s name is coupled with J.L. Austin’s as most readily as- sociated with the ordinary language philosophy (OLP) movement that dominated Oxford philosophy in the fifteen or so years immediately follow- ing the second world war. Austin’s theory of speech acts [Austin (1962)] and Grice’s of conversational implicature [Grice (1975)] are seen as the two great legacies of OLP to present-day linguistics. Certainly, Grice was working in Oxford throughout the ascendancy of OLP, and was a member of Austin’s carefully selected circle of close colleagues. He was sometimes a self- appointed apologist for the approach to philosophy largely founded by Austin and then dominated by him [for instance, Grice (1958)]. Grice used Austin’s methods in his own early work, and returned to them time and again through- out his life. But there were also features of OLP that made him uneasy, and ‘Meaning’: Philosophical Forebears and Linguistic Descendants 61 that he increasingly reacted against. The theory of conversation, in particular, could not have been produced if he had stayed with a rigidly ‘ordinary lan- guage’ approach. For the historian of ideas, one small part of the interest of “Meaning” is that it documents the beginnings of Grice’s slow distancing of himself from OLP. The date of publication is misleading. July 1957 might seem to be rather late in the day to have second thoughts. OLP was already in decline by then, and it was less than three years before Austin’s early death precipitated its end. But Grice’s paper was in fact completed, in more or less its final state, in 1948. He read it to a meeting of the Oxford Philosophical Society and then put it away. This was typical of Grice; he was notoriously reluctant ever to consider a piece of work finished and was too much of a perfectionist readily to offer work for publication. His colleague P. F. Strawson was more convinced than Grice of the merits of “Meaning”, and more concerned that the best of the philosophy being produced in Oxford should be disseminated to a wider audience. When Grice still showed no sign of publishing almost a decade later, Strawson procured the manuscript from him, edited it and sub- mitted it to The Philosophical Review. 1948 was early for one of Austin’s close colleagues to be challenging the assumptions of OLP. The movement was only just emerging from the hiatus in British philosophy caused by the second world war, and Austin himself was still in the early stages of develop- ing his ideas on performatives and on speech acts. Perhaps because of its peculiar history, “Meaning” reads more like a presentation to colleagues or a work in progress than a polished journal arti- cle. With no introduction, preamble or overview, Grice exhorts his readers to: Consider the following sentences: “Those spots mean (meant) measles.” “Those spots didn’t mean anything to me, but to the doctor they meant measles.” “The recent budget means that we shall have a hard year” [Grice (1957), p. 213]. He then precedes to list a series of properties of such examples that he later uses to categorise these uses of ‘mean’ as cases of ‘natural meaning’. This is distinguished from ‘nonnatural meaning’, exemplified in ‘Those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full’ and ‘That remark, “Smith couldn’t get on without his trouble and strife” meant that Smith found his wife indispensable’. Linguistic meaning is thus a subset of nonnatural meaning. Grice’s dramatic use of linguistic examples as a starting point to his philosophical argument was characteristic of OLP. Some years later Austin exhorted a philosophical audience to ‘proceed from “ordinary language”, that is by examining what we should say when, and so why and what we should 62 Siobhan Chapman mean by it’ [Austin (1956), p. 129, original emphasis]. In OLP, unlike some of its more formal predecessors in analytic philosophy, the everyday use of natural language was a legitimate focus of study. This was not just because natural language was an interesting topic in its own right, but also because it provided the best tool at the philosopher’s disposal. For Austin, the investiga- tion of any philosophical problem should begin with a careful accumulation and analysis of data from the ordinary uses of language that accompany the particular area of experience. This was not the type of data collection that would be recognised by many present day linguists. Empirical work using oc- currence analysis and sampling by use of questionnaires was being done else- where in philosophy at that time [for instance Naess (1949)] but not by the philosophers of ordinary language. To them consulting ordinary language meant compiling lists of natural-sounding uses of language that were pro- duced, validated and interpreted by intuition. In “Meaning”, Grice introduces his exposition by turning the methodologies of OLP on that most central problem of the philosophy of language: the nature of meaning. His division of cases of meaning into natural and nonnatural is based on two different types of use of the word ‘means’. Grice lists several defining distinctions between the two types that re- volve around a simple observation; in cases of nonnatural but not of natural meaning there is someone doing the meaning. In terms of the specific subset of cases of nonnatural meaning that involve the use of language, Grice intro- duced the notion of a conscious, intending speaker into his account of lin- guistic meaning.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Paul Grice: Philosopher and Linguist, by Siobhan Chapman
    Department of Linguistics CHRISTOPHER POTTS University of Massachusetts, Amherst Amherst, MA 01003 USA Paul Grice: Philosopher and Linguist, by Siobhan Chapman. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. vii + 247. H/b £45. Paul Grice seems to have led a quintessentially academic life — a life spent jot- ting notes, giving lectures, reading, talking, and arguing with his past self and with others. In virtue of his age and station, he remained largely at the fringes of the great battles of his day — World War II and the clash of the positivists with the ordinary language group. There are no grand family tensions a` la Russell, nor any deep psychoses a` la Wittgenstein. Just obstinacy, unfashionable dress, cricket, and periods of gluttony. It is not the usual stuff of high drama. But Siobhan Chap- man’s biography Paul Grice: Philosopher and Linguist tells a compelling story. It’s a story of surprising influences and gradual intellectual evolution. And it is well timed from the linguist’s perspective. Now more than ever, the boundaries of conversational implicatures, Grice’s most important designation, are being re- drawn. It is illuminating to return to their sources and track their development. Chapman organizes her biography chronologically, moving from Grice’s school- boy days in suburban England, up the ladder of academic positions at Oxford, to his tenure at UC Berkeley and his death in 1988 (with “as many projects on the go as ever” (p. 182)), and on into a final chapter on his intellectual legacy. But the events of his life — marriage, military service, illness — play only a minor role.
    [Show full text]
  • Pragmatics, Logic and Information Processing
    Draft Dec 1, 2007 Brian Skyrms Pragmatics, Logic and Information Processing LOGIC David Lewis wrote Convention in order to use game theory to answer Williard van Orman Quine’s skeptical doubts about the conventionality of meaning. Quine’s skepticism was directed at the logical positivists’ conventional theory of meaning in the service of a conventional theory of logic. According to the logical positivists, logical truths were true and logical arguments valid by virtue of the meanings of the terms involved. In a famous essay, “Truth by Convention,” Quine argued that Positivist accounts of convention (by explicit or implicit definition) required the pre-existence of logic. David Lewis replied that the existence of a convention can be thought of in a different way, as a strong kind of equilibrium or near-equilibrium in a signaling game played by a population. Lewis did not himself supply an account of how a population might get to signaling-system equilibrium – he did not think he had to in order to answer Quine – but the dynamics of evolution or of learning may supply such an account. Consider the simplest sender-receiver signaling game, of the kind introduced by Lewis in his book Convention. One player, the sender, observes which of two possible states of the world is actual. (Nature chooses the state with the flip of a fair coin.) The sender chooses one of two signals to transmit to the other player, the receiver. The receiver observes the signal, and chooses one of two possible acts. The sender and receiver have common interest in information transmission.
    [Show full text]
  • Stanley Cavell's Wittgenstein
    WITTGENSTEIN Stanley Cavell’s Wittgenstein By James Conant HE AIM OF THIS PAPER IS TO PROVIDE AN OVERVIEW OF ONE ASPECT OF Stanley Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein: his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s teaching concerning the relation between meaning Tand use. After furnishing a rough overview of this aspect of Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, I shall attempt to bring into focus what is most distinctive and elusive about it by illustrating, by means of some examples drawn from commentators on Cavell’s work, how easy it can be to miss Cavell’s and— if Cavell is right about who Wittgenstein is—Wittgenstein’s point. Now Wittgenstein has become quite famous in recent years for putting forward something that gets called a “use-theory of meaning.” Wittgenstein writes: For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.1 If you look at commentaries on Wittgenstein’s work, you will find that commentators have wildly different understandings of what Wittgenstein is saying in this passage. Here is what Cavell says: “The meaning is the use” calls attention to the fact that what an expression means is a function of what it is used to mean or to say on specific occasions by human beings. [T]o trace the intellectual history of philosophy’s concentration on the meaning of particular words and sentences, in isolation from a systematic attention to their concrete uses would be a worthwhile undertaking.
    [Show full text]
  • Two Models of Jewish Philosophy Submitted for the Degree of Phd in Philosophy at the London School
    Justifying One’s Practices: Two Models of Jewish Philosophy Submitted for the degree of PhD in Philosophy At the London School of Economics and Political Science Daniel Rynhold 2000 1 UMI Number: U120701 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U120701 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 773 ) Thesis Abstract Judaism is a religion that emphasises the importance of a set of practical commandments and in the history of Jewish philosophy various attempts have been made to rationalise or justify these commandments. In this thesis I try to establish a general model for the justification of practices through a critical examination of two such attempted rationalisations. However, the study is framed within the more general question of whether or not there can be such a thing as Jewish Philosophy as a genuinely substantive discipline. Thus, I take the particular topic of rationalising the commandments as a ‘case study’ in order to see whether we can do substantive Jewish philosophy at least in the practical sphere. In the main body of the thesis I look at the methods of rationalisation of Moses Maimonides and Joseph Soloveitchik and argue that despite being based on very different scientific models they share a central methodological presumption that I term the Priority of Theory (PoT).
    [Show full text]
  • Philosophy of Language in the Twentieth Century Jason Stanley Rutgers University
    Philosophy of Language in the Twentieth Century Jason Stanley Rutgers University In the Twentieth Century, Logic and Philosophy of Language are two of the few areas of philosophy in which philosophers made indisputable progress. For example, even now many of the foremost living ethicists present their theories as somewhat more explicit versions of the ideas of Kant, Mill, or Aristotle. In contrast, it would be patently absurd for a contemporary philosopher of language or logician to think of herself as working in the shadow of any figure who died before the Twentieth Century began. Advances in these disciplines make even the most unaccomplished of its practitioners vastly more sophisticated than Kant. There were previous periods in which the problems of language and logic were studied extensively (e.g. the medieval period). But from the perspective of the progress made in the last 120 years, previous work is at most a source of interesting data or occasional insight. All systematic theorizing about content that meets contemporary standards of rigor has been done subsequently. The advances Philosophy of Language has made in the Twentieth Century are of course the result of the remarkable progress made in logic. Few other philosophical disciplines gained as much from the developments in logic as the Philosophy of Language. In the course of presenting the first formal system in the Begriffsscrift , Gottlob Frege developed a formal language. Subsequently, logicians provided rigorous semantics for formal languages, in order to define truth in a model, and thereby characterize logical consequence. Such rigor was required in order to enable logicians to carry out semantic proofs about formal systems in a formal system, thereby providing semantics with the same benefits as increased formalization had provided for other branches of mathematics.
    [Show full text]
  • Herbert Paul Grice 1913–1988
    PAUL GRICE Copyright © The British Academy 2001 – all rights reserved Herbert Paul Grice 1913–1988 PAUL GRICE was born 15 March 1913 in Birmingham, the elder son of Herbert Grice, businessman and musician, and his wife, Mabel Felton, a schoolmistress. He died on 28 August 1988, in Berkeley, California. The salient facts of his career are easily stated. He was educated first at Clifton College, Bristol, where he was head boy and also distinguished in music and sports, and second, at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he was awarded first class honours in classical honour moderations (1933) and literae humaniores (1935) and of which he later became an honorary fellow (1988). After a year as assistant master at Rossall School, Lancashire, and then two years as Harmsworth Senior Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, he was appointed lecturer and in 1939 Fellow and tutor in philosophy at St John’s College, Oxford, and university lecturer in the sub-faculty of philosophy. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1966 and became an Honorary Fellow of St John’s in 1980. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Navy in the Atlantic theatre and then in Admiralty intelligence from 1940 to 1945. In 1942 he married Kathleen, daughter of George Watson, naval architect, and sister of Steven Watson, a St John’s colleague and historian. After the war he soon became known as a philosopher of great origin- ality and independence and was frequently invited to the United States where he held visiting appointments at Harvard, Brandeis, Stanford, and Cornell universities.
    [Show full text]
  • 8 Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976)
    8 Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) AVRUM STROLL Gilbert Ryle and his junior colleague, J. L. Austin, were the leading figures of post-World War II Oxford philosophy. Though their aims and methods were different (see below), both are correctly characterized as “ordinary language philosophers.” Unlike Austin, who published only seven papers in his lifetime, Ryle was a prolific writer. Much of what we know about his personal life derives from self-references in his numerous biographi- cal sketches and reviews, and especially from his autobiography. In these various essays he describes his interactions with, and assessments of, the foremost philosophers of the time, among them Wittgenstein, Moore, Collingwood, Carnap, Prichard, H. H. Price, and Austin. His autobiography is to be found in Ryle, edited by O. P. Wood and G. Pitcher (1970). Although it is only fifteen pages long, it is wittily self-deprecating, devastating in its depiction of the state of philosophy in Oxford in the 1920s and 1930s, packed with information, and instructive with respect to his philosophical development. About Oxford philosophy he says: During my time as an undergraduate and during my first years as a teacher, the philo- sophical kettle in Oxford was barely lukewarm. I think that it would have been stone cold but for Prichard, who did bring into his chosen and rather narrow arenas vehemence, tenacity, unceremoniousness, and a perverse consistency that made our hackles rise as nothing else at that time did. The Bradleians were not yet extinct, but they did not come out into the open. I cannot recollect hearing one referring mention of the Absolute.
    [Show full text]
  • Mentalism and the Gricean Program
    Mentalism and the Gricean program Jeff Speaks phil 93914 March 27, 2008 1 Mentalism . 1 2 The Gricean program . 3 2.1 The analysis of speaker-meaning . 3 2.2 Some counterexamples to clause (1) . 4 2.3 Counterexamples based on persuasive discourse . 6 2.4 Speaker-meaning without intended effects . 7 2.5 Meaning, speaker-meaning, & Moore's paradox . 8 2.6 Assessment of Grice's account . 10 1 Mentalism Let mentalism be the view that we can explain what it is for an expression to have a meaning in a language in terms of certain of the propositional attitudes of users of the language. According to most mentalists, not just any propositional attitudes will do. The back- ground motivation for mentalist is to display the priority of thought over linguistic mean- ing, and the class of propositional attitudes is very broad, and contains attitudes very closely linked to the use of language, such as saying, asserting, and telling. When mental- ists try to give an account of language in terms of the attitudes, they try to account for facts about meaning in terms of facts about what agents intend, believe, or judge, and not in terms of what agents say or assert by uttering sentences of their language. One way of distinguishing between the relevant classes of propositional attitudes is via distinction between action-entailing and non-action-entailing attitude verbs. In the case of action-entailing attitude verbs, we can expand an ascription pα V's that σq to one of the form pBy φing, α V's that σq, where `φing' denotes some action of the referent of `α.' This class of propositional attitude verbs includes, for example, \says," \means," and \asserts"; we can expand an ascription of the form pα said that σq to one of the form pBy φing, α said that σq, and an ascription of the form pα asserted that σq to one of the form pBy φing, α asserted that σq.
    [Show full text]
  • Recent British Philosophy Winter 2017 ER 1115 H
    UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR Department of Philosophy 0134-472-1, 0134-572-1 Recent British Philosophy Winter 2017 ER 1115 H. V. Hansen T, R 10:00 - 11:20 CHN 2169 SYLLABUS Outcomes: Students who follow the course itinerary and prepare for the lectures will receive an introduction to the main currents of analytical philosophy as it developed in Britain in the the 20th century. Methods and categories of analysis are at the fore in these philosophical works and students will find that the approaches examined have considerable purchase in other fields of study. However, for philosophy students, aside from the intrinsic value of the material, the biggest benefit is that armed with these modern concepts of analysis, they can now re-read the history of philosophy with increased acumen, and position themselves to begin the study of modern American philosophy and/or the philosophy of science. The course is offered both to advanced Philosophy undergraduate students and to graduate students in the Philosophy MA Programme. Graduate students will be held to a higher standard than undergraduate students. Those unfamiliar with formal logic will need to learn the basics. Irving Copi’s Symbolic Logic or Howard Kahane’s Logic and Philosophy are recommended as offering accessible introductions. Course Requirements: Jan 26 Test 1 (40 minutes) 15% Feb 16 Essay 1 20% March 21 Test 2 (40 minutes) 20% April 10 Essay 2 35% Preparedness 10% Essay 1: Mainly expository; to explain and clarify some philosophical view and/or argument in one of the readings covered to date. (Undergrads 750 - 1000 words + references; Grads 1200-1500 words + references).
    [Show full text]
  • Pragmatism and the Analysis of Meaning in the Philosophy of Giovanni Vailati
    Differentia: Review of Italian Thought Number 3 Combined Issue 3-4 Spring/Autumn Article 20 1989 Pragmatism and the Analysis of Meaning in the Philosophy of Giovanni Vailati Robert E. Innis Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia Recommended Citation Innis, Robert E. (1989) "Pragmatism and the Analysis of Meaning in the Philosophy of Giovanni Vailati," Differentia: Review of Italian Thought: Vol. 3 , Article 20. Available at: https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/differentia/vol3/iss1/20 This document is brought to you for free and open access by Academic Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Differentia: Review of Italian Thought by an authorized editor of Academic Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Pragmatism and the Analysis of Meaning in the Philosophy of Giovanni Vailati Robert E. Innis 1. INTRODUCTION Giovanni Vailati's premature death in 1909, at the age of forty­ six, silenced a distinctive and original voice in Italian philosophy. In his work, so different in tone and method from Croce's idealism and anti-scientism, we find reflected and developed most of the great problems and themes which have come to the fore in twen­ tieth-century philosophy and semiotics. In spite of his remarkable linguistic skills, encompassing both modern and classical Ian- This essay is taken from part one of my book, Giovanni Vailati: Pragmatismand the Analysis of Meaning, to be published in the Foundations of Semiotics series by John Benjamins in Amsterdam. The book will also contain translations of Vailati's most important essays on pragmatism and language theory.
    [Show full text]
  • 4210F: Survey of Philosophy of Language
    THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY Course Outline Philosophy 4210F/9xxx and Ling 9453L: Survey of Philosophy of Language Summer Term 2020 Instructor: R. Stainton Intersession May 11- Jun 26 StH Room 3126 Day and Time: Wed, Fri 12:30-3:30 Office Hours: TBA Classroom: STVH 1145 E-mail: [email protected] PREREQUISITE Philosophy 2260F/G DESCRIPTION A survey of foundational and highly influential texts from 20th Century Analytic Philosophy of Language. Emphasis will be on twin topics of special interest to contemporary linguistic theorizing: 1) contrasting conceptions of linguistic meaning, including Frege-Russell-Davidson style truth-conditional approaches; Ordinary Language Philosophy’s use-oriented approaches; and the mentalist semantics familiar from Grice and generative grammar. 2) The contrast between semantics vs. pragmatics and attempts to trace a boundary between them. This latter section will conclude with a detailed case study on definite descriptions, indexicals and singular reference. Authors include: Austin, Davidson, Donnellan, Fodor, Frege, Grice, Kaplan, Kripke, Russell, Searle, Strawson and Wittgenstein. TEXTS Robert J. Stainton (2000). Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language. Peterborough: Broadview. Paul Elbourne (2011). Meaning: A Slim Guide to Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. • Note: Kripke’s “Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference” and Kaplan’s “Demonstratives” will be made available online OBJECTIVES - To overview key issues in contemporary philosophy of language and semantics/pragmatics. - To fine-tune students’ ability to read, think and write at the most sophisticated level. READINGS I. The Formalist Tradition • Gottlob Frege (1892), “On Sense and Reference” • Bertrand Russell (1919), “Descriptions” • Donald Davidson (1967), “Truth and Meaning” • Saul Kripke (1971), “Identity and Necessity” II.
    [Show full text]
  • Meaning Making Processes. International Journal of Educational Psychology, 1(2), 1 00-1 26
    Instructions for authors, subscriptions and further details: http://ijep.hipatiapress.com Vygotsky’s Analysis of Children’s Meaning Making Processes Holbrook Mahn 1 1 ) Department of Language, Literacy & Sociocultural Studies, University of New Mexico, United States of America Date of publication: June 24th, 201 2 To cite this article: Mahn, H. (201 2). Vygotsky’s Analysis of Children’s Meaning Making Processes. International Journal of Educational Psychology, 1(2), 1 00-1 26. doi:1 0.4471 /ijep.201 2.07 To link this article: http://dx.doi.org/1 0.4471 /ijep.201 2.07 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE The terms and conditions of use are related to the Open Journal System and to Creative Commons Non-Commercial and Non-Derivative License. IJEP – International Journal ofEducational Psychology Vol. 1 No. 2. June 2012 pp. 100-126 Vygotsky's Analysis of Children's Meaning Making Processes Holbrook Mahn University ofNew Mexico Abstract Vygotsky’s work is extensive and covers many aspects of the development of children’s meaning-making processes in social and cultural contexts. However, his main focus is on the examination of the unification of speaking and thinking processes. His investigation centers on the analysis of the entity created by this unification – an internal speaking/thinking system with meaning at its center. Despite the fact that this speaking/thinking system is at the center of Vygotsky’s work, it remains little explored. This article relies on Vygotsky’s writings, particularly Thinking and Speech, to describe his examination of the speaking/thinking system. To analyze it he derives the unit – znachenie slova – “meaning through language.” In Thinking and Speech Vygotsky describes the origins and development of znachenie slova as a unit of the speaking/thinking system.
    [Show full text]