The Problem of Meaning: A Road to Linguistic Philosophy

Abstract

Quine first derives the theory of meaning from Aristotle's handling ‘essences', "Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object and wedded to the word”. Since Quine is strongly biased in his attitude to ‘metaphysics', we can understand that this ‘genealogy' of meaning makes him hostile to the categorical meaning; we will return to this point later. On the other hand, Quine admits that there are genuine semantic problems that stem from confusing "meanings with extensions”. So we need a theory of meaning, but its primary business should be "simply the synonymy of linguistic forms and the analyticity of statements”.