meaning

["John E. Clifford" <pcliffje@CRL.COM>]

             "Meaning" is one of the most highly ambiguous words in
        English; not only does it have a large number of meanings
        (heh,heh), they often occur in virtually indistinguishable con-
        texts.  So, it is not that logicians and linguists and all have
        not done a good job dealing with meaning or have not settled on a
        clear notion of it, it is just that they have done good jobs on
        several notions and then haven't decided which one they all
        should use -- or on a set of different names for their different
        concepts.
             Logic has, by and large, take the simplest route and identi-
        fied meaning with reference as nearly as possible.  The reference
        (denotation, Bedeutung) of a name is the object named, of a
        predicate the class of those things which are correctly said to
        be that sort of thing, and so on.  In other words, the meaning of
        a term is the extension of that term, the things to which it
        correctly applies.  This cuts out a lot of psychology (why people
        apply this term to this thing and agree that the application is
        correct) and a lot of metaphysics (properties,essences, etc.). It
        also seems a little unsatisfying, for what we take to be essen-
        tial characteristics of some kind of object are, on this view,
        indistinguishable from incidental ones: the four-leggedness of a
        dog is no different from its habit of barking.
             When we get on to intensional logics, which look like they
        might do a bit better, we find that they do so only by extending
        the notion of extension.  The meaning of a term in a world is
        still just its extension in that world, but the meaning of a term
        absolutely is the function on worlds that gives that extension in
        each world.  This does allow differentiation between essential
        and accidental properties, since the essential ones will coincide
        in every possible world (we have to leave out the impossible
        ones, since one -- perhaps the main -- way to be impossible is to
        separate just those essential properties, to allow married bache-
        lors, for example).
             This last then gives an adequate guide for proper defini-
        tions, one of the two practical interests in meanings for Lojban.
        The other is, of course, translations and that most immediately
        for definitions again.  Of course, it is not a very practical
        guide, but it does amount to saying "Could we imagine a case
        where one expression applied and the other did not and, if so,
        what are the distinctive features of the case?"  In this way we
        can gradually build to a pretty full definition and thus at least
        a sketch of a meaning (obviously in some other sense first but,
        with a little empirical help, also in the reference sense).
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