by Brian Bosse, Copyright June 14, 2010, all rights reserved. 657 views
In the last entry we described and illustrated the distinction between a sentence and a proposition. There is yet another distinction that is made called ‘linguistic meaning’. Linguistic is meaning said to be different from a proposition, and does not carry truth-value. One philosopher presented the following illustration on his blog here. He says…
Suppose a Spanish speaker learning English learns that ‘Mary loves Carl’ means the same as ‘Mary ama Carl.’ The Spanish speaker then fully understands the linguistic meaning of ‘Mary loves Carl’ but without needing to know any proposition, any truth or falsehood, that the English sentence has ever expressed. (See Castaneda, Thinking and Doing, p. 35) Therefore, the linguistic meaning of a declarative sentence is distinct from the proposition expressed by the sentence on some occasion of the sentence’s use.
The distinction being spoken of here recognizes that there is a type of meaning that allows one to translate a sentence in one language into a sentence into another language without considering propositional meaning. (Propositional meaning is the type of meaning that comes from the context within which the sentence is used.) As such, one can look at the English sentence ‘Mary loves Carl’ and without knowing any context and say that ‘Mary ama Carl’ has the same linguistic meaning. This illustrates a different kind of meaning than propositional meaning. Also, it is not the type of meaning that we can say is true or false because it is independent of context. We do not know who Mary and Carl are, and more importantly, we do not know if Mary does in fact love Carl. But we can say that in some sense ‘Mary ama Carl’ means the same thing as ‘Mary loves Carl’. This seems to establish this new distinction called ‘linguistic meaning’. Or does it? In the next entry I will argue why I do not think this distinction has been established.