ABSTRACT
A selective treatment of Aristotle's view of meaning is likely to lead to a one-sided interpretation of his philosophical method. Some of its implications are organized as: sound, voice and symbol; ambiguity and types of meaning; definitional processes; and classification. Voice is sound that signifies or has meaning, and speech is the kind of linguistic occurrence that we are familiar with in human beings; Aristotle takes it to be peculiar to man. This chapter deals with Aristotle's treatment of semantics—at least in his way of handling the topic—may be identified largely with the problems of meaning. Nominal or purely conventional definition is recognized as "an account of what the name signifies or an equivalent denomination; for instance, it will explain what triangle signifies". The topics of definition and classification are of course intimately related, since a successful classification depends on discovering the correct defining marks for the class term.
