Page 22 - Critical and Cultural Theory

CHAPTER

MEANING

What is the relationship between language and reality? Between
words and things? Between words and ideas? How do words come
to convey certain meanings or concepts? Does language embody
universal principles? Does it express what the world 'is' or what
we 'take' it to be? Can we mean something without saying it? Can
we say something without meaning it? These and several other
related questions have haunted philosophers and linguists for
centuries. Many possible answers have been offered and, more or
less widely, accepted or rejected. The sheer diversity of such ques-
tions and of the responses they have elicited shows that the issue
of meaning is the object of ongoing debates. Just what meaning is
or how it comes about are, to a considerable extent, moot points.
Arguably, the search for meaning consists of the incalculably large
number of operations through which humans attempt to make the
world intelligible. The search, therefore, is virtually endless, for it
could only come to a halt if the very desire to know were to be
terminated.
This chapter does not aim at supplying answers to the questions
presented above. Its objective is to examine a representative selec-
tion of approaches to the issue of meaning put forward by Philo-
sophy of Language and Linguistics. The first part of the chapter
describes a range of philosophical positions spanning Classical
times to the twentieth century. The second part looks at the princi-
pal goals and methodologies of Linguistics.
Let us first of all consider a cross-section of approaches to the
relationship between words and concepts. Thought about
language is intertwined with thought about all the major philoso-
phical categories: knowledge, truth, meaning, reason. Its central

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