Topics Language

Question Is it true that all language is meaningless without context?

Accepted:
September 28, 2009

Comments

It depends on what you mean (!) by "meaning" and on what you mean by "context" (but surely you didn't expect a philosopher to say anything different, did you?).

If by "meaning" you mean "reference" (or "denotation", or "extension"), e.g., a thing in the world, and if by "context" you mean the world, then I would say that all language is meaningless without context. But that's not a very interesting claim in that case, because it's almost a tautology.

Similarly, if "meaning" means "sense" (or "intension", or maybe "connotation")--e.g., the word "unicorn" has no extensional meaning (because there are no unicorns), but it has a "sense" in the sense that it means a white, one-horned, horselike animal--and if "context" means something like a semantic network of interrelated senses, then, again, all language is meaningless without context (although in a different way from the previous paragraph). But again that's not very interesting.

I think a more interesting question is how linguistic meanings *vary* with context: For instance, sentences with indexicals (like "I", "here", "now") can be said to vary in meaning depending on how the context fixes the meaning of those indexicals. If I say, "I am hungry now", it can be said to mean something different from what it means if you say it.

Another way in which linguistic meaning can vary with context has to do with the different background knowledge that different people bring to their understanding of words and expressions. If you live in Paris and I've only visited there, then the sentence "Paris is lovely in springtime" will mean something (slightly) different to the two of us because that sentence may bring to your mind images of a gray, rainy day and it may bring to my mind images of a sunny day with lots of flowers in bloom.

There is also a lot of work that's been done by computational linguists and by reading educators on how people figure out a meaning for an unfamiliar term from a combination of the textual context (i.e., the words surrounding the unfamiliar term) together with their (differing) background knowledge. (See my paper on "What Is the 'Context' for Contextual Vocabulary Acquisition?")

Question Is it true that all language is meaningless without context? Accepted:September 28, 2009

Question Is it true that all language is meaningless without context?

Accepted:
September 28, 2009