2 - Augustine’s Picture of Language and the Referential Conception of Linguistic Meaning

Summary

Representation by Means of Language

When Wittgenstein turned to writing what became the Philosophical Investigations, he thought hard about how to begin the book. His primary theme was to be the nature of language and linguistic representation. In 1931, he wrote that he should begin his book with an analysis of an ordinary sentence such as ‘A lamp is standing on my table’ since everything should be derivable from this. What did he have in mind?

His concern was with how sentences manage to represent. Such a humdrum sentence as ‘A lamp is standing on my table’ is meaningful – it has a meaning. By using such a meaningful sentence, one describes a certain state of affairs. One says that there is a lamp on one's table, and what one says may be either true or false. How does a sentence in use, a sequence of sounds one utters, manage to do all this – to represent a situation, to describe how things are, to be true or false? – The question is odd, and it may well engender a feeling of bafflement. You may well feel that you can't really see a problem. You may be inclined to say that this is just what sentences in use do! — Let me try to show you that there is more that is puzzling about linguistic representation that comes immediately to the eye. I shall do so by means of a little dialogue between myself and an interlocutor, who I imagine as a thoughtful member of my audience given to asking good questions. I’ll set the ball rolling:

PMSH. When one says ‘A lamp is standing on my table’, one produces a sequence of sounds. A parrot may do that no less than you or I. But if a parrot squawks ‘A lamp is standing on my table’, these are just empty sounds. The parrot is not describing anything, and it understands nothing. It is just mimicking the sounds it hears. But if you or I utter the sentence in an appropriate context, it has a meaning – it signifies something, describes something. So how is this effected?