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Breaking the circle

المؤلف:  Nick Riemer

المصدر:  Introducing Semantics

الجزء والصفحة:  C1-P24

2026-04-08

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Breaking the circle

As pointed out by Quine (1961: 47), until the development of ‘a satisfactory explanation of the notion of meaning, linguists in semantic fi elds are in the situation of not knowing what they are talking about’. This is perhaps not such a dire situation as it sounds: after all, empirical investigation always aims to increase our knowledge of some unknown phenomenon, provisionally characterized using ordinary language. As the inquiry proceeds, we get a sharper idea of the nature of the thing being studied, and it may not matter that in early stages we have to rely on notions for which we cannot yet give any satisfactory explanation. Many fi elds of empirical inquiry begin with only hazy and imprecise conceptions of the real object of their investigation. The history of genetics is a case in point. Mendel, acknowledged by most historians as the founder of the fi eld, discovered the principles of inheritance without any understanding of either chromosomes or DNA, both of which later became central parts of the theory of cell biology. The fact that his advances were thus made in ignorance of the fundamental nature of inheritance does not in any sense discredit them: Mendel might not have known exactly what his discoveries were ultimately about, or what the mechanisms were that implemented the facts he observed, but his rigorous investigations meant that he was able to reach valuable conclusions which would only be fully characterized later. The fact that he could not have precisely characterized the nature of the phenomenon he was observing was not an obstacle to progress (see Gribbin 2002: 536–541 for discussion).

Still, to say the least, it would obviously be useful if we had some initial idea about what meaning is best thought of as being – of how, in other words, we can break the definitional circle. This preliminary idea will help us to formulate the best set of specific questions to ask in our investigation. In this section, we will consider several suggestions about how the definitional circle might be broken and the notion of meaning explicated in a way which might satisfy objections like Quine’s.