The Classical Empiricist Account of Meaning

This chapter presents a classical empiricist account of meaning and representation that may seem commonsensical and thus intuitively plausible. The Early-Modern empiricist conception of linguistic meaning has three main characteristics: the inessentiality of language, the subjective-mentalist account of meaning, and the primacy of the naming relation. The basic idea is that thoughts or mental ideas are the primary units of meaning or significance — meanings are identified with thoughts or mental ideas. Thoughts or ideas, then, are the real units of significance — they pre-exist and are independent of their expression in language. The chapter discusses very restricted portion of natural language that will introduce some different kinds of expressions and show the problems they create for this naming theory of meaning. The basic idea behind the technique of logical analysis is that the normal, ‘surface grammar’ of natural language conceals and distorts the true underlying logical form of its sentences and that this in turn leads to philosophical problems.