I originally became interested in the question “what do words mean?” when I read a book a few years ago on semantics: a modern, interdisciplinary field studying meaning in language. Last year, the Classics Club also held discussions on Socratic definitional dialogues, which challenged and expanded my previous understanding of word meanings, inspiring me to dig deeper. This essay recounts these experiences and changes in my thinking, and attempts to synthesize modern semantics’ answer to “what do words mean?” with classical philosophy’s answer.
Thoughts on Meaning: A Slim Guide to Semantics and Modern Semantics
A couple of years ago, I read the book Meaning: A Slim Guide to Semantics by Paul Elbourne after my sister gave it to me for Christmas because of my interest in linguistics.[1] She was taking linguistics classes at the time, and semantics was her favorite subfield. I wasn’t sure what to expect: I had a little prior knowledge of linguistics, but none of semantics specifically. Semantics (specifically, natural language semantics) is a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy. In this essay, I will focus on natural language semantics as applied to individual words.
The first chapter of Meaning discusses definitions and the difficulty of arriving at satisfactory ones. The book uses the word “chair” as an example. We might define a chair as an item of furniture, but that would be too lax—it would include things that are not chairs. Similarly, we could construct an overly strict definition that excludes things that are chairs. A definition could even be overly lax and strict at the same time. For example, if we define a chair as a blue item of furniture, it is both too lax in that it includes couches and too strict in that it excludes non-blue chairs.[2]
I remember reading this section and feeling, vaguely, that trying to define words was not only tricky but even an intrinsically ridiculous exercise. From my experience with linguistics, I knew that language is constantly changing and varies from situation to situation. So, what is a static definition even supposed to represent? Suppose I started calling a “table” a “chair.” Would this usage be wrong just because it conflicted with someone else’s definition? And if I wasn’t wrong, then what good would a definition do if it didn’t include all uses of a word?
To my relief, at the end of the first chapter, Meaning seemingly shrugged at the problem of definition and moved on to other things. It began to discuss frameworks that enable us to discuss language without having to define specific words first. In chapters two and three, it outlines two contemporary theories of meaning: referential and internalist. The referential theory proposes that “meanings of words simply are things in the world.”[3] The internalist theory proposes that “word meanings are internal mental structures.”[4]
One advantage of the referential theory of meaning is that it explains simple objects very efficiently. In this theory, when we say “carrot,” we simply mean the vegetable, which clearly exists in the world. However, if we say “happy” or “discombobulate,” what concrete things are we referring to? The answer: we are not referring to concrete objects, but rather to abstract objects, including properties. For example, red apples and green apples apparently share an abstract property of “appleness,” and Santa Claus apparently exists as an abstract object, both concepts removed from the physical world.[5]
The internalist theory, on the other hand, posits that each person has a mental lexicon that maps words to certain pieces of information. For example, for each word, one’s brain may store how it sounds, how it is used in a sentence, and what it means, among potentially other things. Because each word maps to multiple pieces of information, two people are likely to have at least slightly different concepts in their heads for the same word. For example, I might pronounce the word “tomato” as [təmeto] (tuh-MAY-toh), whereas a person with a British accent might pronounce it like [təmato] (tuh-MAH-toh). I might associate tomatoes with vegetables on the dining table, whereas a botanist might mainly think of them as fruits, a phenomenon that reflects nuanced differences in meaning in the minds of different people.[6]
Classics Club Discussions and My Reflections
My experiences engaging with the two theories articulated in Meaning also informed my participation in Classics Club discussions. I came into these meetings with a background in modern semantics and general linguistics, favoring an internalist view of meaning over the referential one. As we read excerpts from some of the Socratic definitional dialogues,[7] I realized that Socrates’ approach to the question “what do words mean?” differs significantly from modern semantic approaches and departs from both the referential and the internalist frameworks.
The Socratic definitional dialogues usually center on the definition of a certain virtue, such as piety in the Euthyphro and courage in the Laches. Rather than using the phrasing “what do words mean,” which I have discussed in the previous parts of this essay, Plato’s Socrates frames his investigation as “what is X?”[8] Throughout the dialogue, he pushes his interlocutor to present satisfactory answers to the question “what is X,” looking for counterexamples to invalidate his interlocutor’s claims.
But crucially, he seems to have used the definition of a word as a practical tool to make other arguments clear. In this usage, the meaning of the word itself is not necessarily central; rather, Socrates is using the word to describe the meaning of a concept, X, and so, in service of this, he must make it clear how he is using this word by marking off its use in the discussion’s context.[9]
So perhaps disappointingly, it seems that Socrates was not all that interested in word meanings per se. I will offer some final thoughts on what he was interested in. I attempt to consider: what exactly does discussing the meanings of individual words or concepts illuminate, and how does it compare to the general theories of modern semantics already discussed? I look at Plato’s Theory of Forms to help consider this question.
Plato argues that when we point out examples of big, good, or true things in the world, for example, we are implicitly assuming that there are concepts of bigness, goodness, and truth, which actually exist beyond space and time as abstract objects.[10] This sounds a lot like the referential theory of meaning in semantics, and indeed, the referential theory follows the philosophical tradition of the Theory of Forms when it incorporates the concept of abstract objects. The referential theory posits that not only are big things derived from the form of bigness, the meaning of the word big simply is the concept of bigness. The Theory of Forms, on the other hand, is interested in the definition of the Forms—the concepts underlying words like bigness—rather than the definitions of the words themselves.[11]
Conclusion
When considering the question “what do words mean,” classical philosophy and modern semantics differ in their interpretations as well as their answers. Specifically, classical philosophy tends to focus on the Forms to which words refer and attempts to define these Forms, whereas modern semantics focuses on the meanings of words themselves. The referential theory of meaning in semantics assumes the existence of Forms and takes the meaning of a word to be that of the Form it refers to. The internalist theory takes the meaning of a word to be the mental concept a person associates the word with; this approach allows for the relativity of a word’s meaning.
When interpreting a wide-reaching question such as “what do words mean,” which can be answered from multiple disciplines and schools of thought, I believe it is crucial to be very clear about exactly how one is interpreting and answering the question. If not, different disciplines and theoretical backgrounds will misunderstand each other and speak past each other, rather than collaborating to create more knowledge and understanding.
[1] Paul Elbourne, Meaning: A Slim Guide to Semantics (Oxford University Press, 2011).
[2] Elbourne, Meaning, 1-2.
[3] Elbourne, Meaning, 14.
[4] Elbourne, Meaning, 22.
[5] Elbourne, Meaning, 16-19. Examples about apples andSanta Claus are paraphrased from these pages.
[6] Elbourne, Meaning, 23. Examples are my own.
[7] It is worth clarifying that Plato wrote all the dialogues and featured Socrates as the main character. It is unclear to what extent the written dialogues faithfully capture Socrates’ engagement with his interlocutors.
[8] R. M. Dancy, Plato’s Introduction of Forms (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10-11.
[9] Dancy, Plato’s Introduction, 23-24.
[10] Richard Kraut, Plato, (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2022), Section 1.
[11] Dancy, Plato’s Introduction, 14
Bibliography
Dancy, R. M. Plato’s Introduction of Forms. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Elbourne, Paul. Meaning: A Slim Guide to Semantics. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Kraut, Richard. Plato. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2022.
