ABSTRACT
Modern philosophy is distinguished by the emergence of a new question: how philosophers give meaning to the expressions used in ordinary and philosophical discourse. Earlier philosophers simply inquired into the truth of this or that assertion, without troubling to raise the prior question as to what precisely such an assertion meant, or whether it really meant anything at all. The teaching of meaning may, with some pardonable exaggeration, be said to be the use of inadequate indications to achieve the more or less doubtful communication of a sense whose subsequent application is itself always doubtfully correct. The wholly correct use of an expression, and the wholly successful communication of its meaning, are in short Platonic paradigms like the meanings they presuppose. Whether a meaning has been put across satisfactorily is shown solely by the interpretability of a man’s subsequent use.
