Waclaw Kusnierczyk schrieb:
>
> You may be making a serious mistake here. What does "xhifsh" mean? How
> do you know? What does "He is doing that" mean? How do you know? How
> do you know that "Pat is sleeping" means that you are sleeping? How
> clear is that, really? How clear is it that 'Pat' means you? How clear
> is it that 'sleeping' means sleeping? Do you presume some context --
> e.g., that the sentence should be interpreted as a sentence in English
> -- or does "Pat is sleeping" simply (non-contextually) mean that you are
> sleeping?
>
> Why did you not have any idea what (that (rains)) meant, but it is so
> clear what "Pat is sleeping" means?
>
> If I understood him well, Ingvar's distinction (whether it was his
> original one or not) between sentence meaning and used sentence meaning
> may be the right thing to mention here. Following that distinction
> (Ingvar, please correct me if I go wrong), (01)
Yes, you are going wrong. To me, you are using the term 'sentence' in
such a sense that it can designate only purely oral or graphical
entities, which then in different contexts get different meanings. This
is not what I meant by 'sentence meaning'. I took the context of an
English language community for given (in the sense Pat has done in
another answer to you). What happens in the move from 'sentence meaning'
to 'used sentence meaning' (in the cases under discussion) is that an
*assertive force* is added to a merely entertained semantic content;
think of Frege's assertion sign if you are not familiar with speech act
theory. (02)
Ingvar (03)
> a sentence (not a
> proposition, though) has a simple meaning -- *the* meaning -- and a
> number of used meanings, meanings that depend on the actual context.
> (However, I can't see how, in the context of natural language, a
> sentence could have a simple non-contextual meaning, since every
> sentence is spoken or written by some person, and heard or read by some
> person, possibly the same, and each of those persons necessarily
> interpret the sentence in a context -- the context of their
> understanding of the elements of the language, for example. Even if you
> claim that a sentence has a non-contextual meaning, you do it in the
> context of your thinking so.)
>
> Back to the point: I would rather not say
>
> "From a natural language view, I might take "Pat is sleeping" to mean
> something like, "please don't make to much noise, or you might wake him.""
>
> because it seems problematic to explain what the view of a natural
> language is, but, for example,
>
> "From Pat's wife point view, "Pat is sleeping" might mean something
> like, "please don't make to much noise, or you might wake him.""
>
> would be reasonable, I think. In natural language, most, if not all,
> terms are opaque, and their meaning is context-dependent. ('Everybody'
> is a good example from your recent post -- what is it that "everybody
> loves my baby but my baby does not love anybody but me" *clearly* means?)
>
> vQ
>
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> (04)
--
Ingvar Johansson
IFOMIS, Saarland University
home site: http://ifomis.org/
personal home site:
http://hem.passagen.se/ijohansson/index.html (05)
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