From WouterBeek.com

There are, at least, three different notions of meaning:

1. The truth-conditional account, according to which the meaning of a sentence is the conditions that must hold in the world in order to make that sentence true.
2. The classical notion of the naturalistic philosophers, according to which meaning is a fact in the head.
3. The Wittgensteinian or Grician account, according to which the meaning of a sentence is its use in everyday life, and/or the role of such a sentence in a certain language-game.^[1]

Each of these three definitions has its respective pros and cons. View (1) allows a neat formalization of the concept of meaning to be made, and is thus the most rationally adequate of the three. View (2) has the closest adherence to our everyday, pre-theoretical notion of meaning.^[2] It also provides us with a medium in which we are able to implement any theory of meaning. The head seems to be a very good place indeed to position a successful theory of meaning, providing us with certain representational properties and calculatory and recursive devices that seem to be indispensable for such a complex system to operate. View (3) allows us to formulate an answer to a very broad number of, otherwise insurmountable, empirical and rational questions regarding the notion of language and meaning. It, for example, explains why language is used by communities of human beings and not by human beings in isolation. It furthermore allows for an explication of the, otherwise – again – incomprehensible, problem of the normativity of meaning.

A successful theory of meaning would thus have to try to incorporate these three partial theories in such a way as to maintain and bring into accordance with one another all of their individual advantages while – at the same time – trying to mitigate all of their particular disadvantages.

I shall now provide a very brief sketch for such a project. One would have to extend the formalizations in the tradition of (1) in order to incorporate the communal view (3). This could be done by describing the notion of meaning with respect to belief spaces of individuals instead of with respect to the world (i.e. the belief space of God).^[3] According to this merged view, the meaning of a sentence is defined in terms of the conditions that must hold in one’s representation of the world in one’s belief space – or, for those not in favor of an external world, simply: conditions that must hold in a person’s belief space – in order to make that sentence true (in one’s belief space). Of course bringing down the notion of truth conditions in the world to truth conditions in a person’s belief space is exactly what is needed in order to incorporate meaning definition (2). But at the same time this is clearly not enough for a sufficient incorporation of the third view on meaning. Since our model is still static, we are able to account for the dissent among people, but are yet unable to explain the essentially communal aspects of language such as the reaching of agreement, the understanding of one another’s words and the process of language learning (which is essentially communal). A dynamic theory of meaning, accounting for all of these obviously necessary characteristics of any serious theory of meaning, can be established by introducing certain influencing, shaping and correcting processes that operate between individuals (between these individual’s belief spaces that is). One would wonder what it is that is to be shaped or corrected by these processes. And indeed, when reading a lot of the work within the tradition espousing the communal view on meaning (3), one is entirely left in the dark with this.^[4] But since we already have a certain representational method, constructed in the spirit of tradition (2) and in terms of tradition (1), the problem of the what that is to be changed by the various processes of interaction that operate within a language community is sufficiently solved on an abstract level, and the only problems that remain are those of finding a representational method (or a set of such methods + cross-representational interaction procedures) that sufficiently suits the richness of everyday language use. This is surely not an easy task that will – ideally – be an active field of inquiry for many centuries to come.^[5] But there are no fundamental barriers that restrict such further inquiry, and most of the problems that one is likely to face in this context are already being treated of, although occasionally in very rudimentary ways, in the research field of machine learning.

References

1. ↑ For example [Wittgenstein, 1951, Philosophische Untersuchungen].
2. ↑ Where our everyday notion of meaning might of course have come to be influenced by the long tradition of this very notion of meaning that has characterized the scientific tradition of the Western world for many centuries now.
3. ↑ This fusion of views (1) and (3) is not merely an intermediary step in the attainment of our project of blending the three theories of meaning into one; it also solves a very fundamental problem of definition (1), which takes the problem of meaning to be identical with the problem of ethics. This problem has been extensively described in Rule-Following and the Cognitive Contiguity, §2.
4. ↑ An example of the mysticism surrounding some of the positions of the proponents of the communal view to meaning can be found in Kripkestein, as espoused in [Kripke, 1982, Wittgenstein on Meaning and Rule-Following], and is explained in Rule-Following and the Cognitive Contiguity, §3.2.
5. ↑ It might even never be completed entirely, because of its sheer complexity and the fallibility and imperfection of man.