الصفحة 1
الصفحة 1
Meaning and Use
The second Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter was held in Jerusalem on April 25-28, 1976, The topic of the symposiumwas Meaning and Use. For Bar-Hillel, the question 'meaning or use?' was of great importance, one which he took as a question of priorities. Which approach to natural language is prior: the formal, semantical approach, which accords a central position to the truth functional concept of meaning and to the theory of reference, or rather the alternative approach which accords the central position to linguistic commu nication and prefers dealing with speech acts to dealing with Statements? Bar Hillel's answer to this question, in his later years, can be summed up by our title, meaning and use: neither approach deserves priority, each is equally necessary, and they both complement each other.
How to Think about Meaning
According to the dominant theory of meaning, truth-conditional semantics, to explain the meaning of a statement is to specify the conditions necessary and sufficient for its truth. Classical truth-conditional semantics is coming under increasing attack, however, from contextualists and inferentialists, who agree that meaning is located in the mind. "Technically exact, highly readable, and illustrated with valuable examples, ...here is a book to counterbalance decades of misdirected anti-psychologistic semantic dogma." Prof. Dale Jacquette, Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A.
