ABSTRACT
The volume of writing on meaning since the appearance of Ogden and Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning in 1923 has been enormous. Unhappily much of it is dreary beyond description. The reason, in part at least, is that meaning has been conceived as the use of signs, and that such use has been conceived in terms of physical response. On this basis an entire science of ‘semiotic’ has been constructed with three grand divisions: ‘pragmatics’, which deals with the relation of signs to the user's history, ‘semantics’, which deals with the relations of signs and what they signify, and ‘syntactics’, which deals with the way signs are put together in statements and expressions. In the attempt to make the study ‘scientific’, the discussions have often been conducted carefully in such a way as to avoid any suggestion that in meaning something we ever think of it, since to think is to be conscious, and consciousness is not ‘publicly verifiable’; a sign A is said to mean B if its influence on behaviour is in certain ways similar to B’s. The paradigm of meaning is found in Pavlov's dog, which, being exposed simultaneously to a buzzer and to food, came to salivate when the buzzer was sounded alone; the buzzer then meant food since it produced a like reaction. We feel pretty sure that this is an oversimplified account even of the meanings of buzzers to dogs; and when we learn that all that distinguishes such meanings from those employed by Mr Eliot and Mr Whitehead, to say nothing of our sophisticated selves, reduces to differences in behaviour, we feel even more strongly that the new science is not all it might be.
