H. P. Grice, "Modified Occam's Razor"

Modified Occam’s Razor: “Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” – H. P. Grice (WoW), sense, meaning, Fr. sens G. Sinn, Bedeutung, Gefühl, Empfindung, Grecian αἴσθησις, νοῦς, διάνοια, σῆμα,, It. senso Roman sensus, sententia, vis, intellectus, signification, Sp. Sentido. Time is the meaning (le sens) of life — ‘sens’ as one might say the direction or sense ‘sens’ of a current of water, of a sentence, of a fabric, of the sense (sens) of smell. That sentence of Claudel quoted by Cuvillier, “Vocabulaire philosophique,” s.v. “sens” suggests that the alleged polysemy of “sens” is not random. The alleged polysemy of the Roman “sensus” lies at the origin of those to be found in the Romance and Indo-European languages, in general. Fr. sens, It. senso, Sp. sentido, Eng. sense, Ger. Sinn. The semantic field of “sensus,” toward the end of the classical age, articulated three major meanings. First, sensation, sense perception. Second, understanding, intellectual perception. Third, signification. The articulation did not exist before then. In Grecian, the register of αἰσθάνεσθαι, to sense, to perceive, to notice, is absolutely distinct from that of σημαίνειν, to signify or mean. And yet it was under the rubric of Grecian νοῦς, emergent from the second usage of intellectual perception, that the church fathers, who rendered it as “sensus,” would unify the set. Moreover, the polysemy does not necessarily evolve in the same fashion later on. One observes two sorts of phenomena. On the one hand there are cases of contamination between the various uses of sense, something like a potentially unified semantic flux; this is all the more palpable in Fr. and, later on, in It. and G. in that “sense” takes on the additional valence of DIRECTION, so much so that Fr. “le bon sens” simultaneously denotes the right direction and common sense, which consequently end living beings; the exercise of that faculty, or perception; its distribution, linked or not to the organs of the senses each of the five senses, then, which, insofar as they are located in an organ are said to be αἰσθητήϱιον, but also the notorious common sense; finally, the affections or pathemes produced by the objects of the senses, the sensations. The synchrony of these uses — sensitivity, perception, sense, sensation — with the remarkable conjunction of the active and the passive is one of the effects of the definition of aisthêsis as a single act, μία ἐνέϱγεια, of the sentient-sensing “τοῦ αἰσθητιϰοῦ” and of the sensible-sensed aisthêton, cf. the double sense for us of the verbal adjective in -tos De An., 426a 1617, and as the active coinciding of the organ of sense “aisthêtêrion” and the sensed “aisthêton,” each of those two elements, like hearing and sound, or videns and visum, which will become subject and object, being identical to the other, though retaining their being and 425b 2628; Cassin, Aristote et le logos; in a crossing over that would not be lost on Merleau-Ponty, as read by Grice’s Play Group at Oxford. Then there’s the koinê aisthêsis and common sense. As H. P. Grice observes in “Some remarks about the senses,” “ϰοινὴ αἴσθηις,” which is rendered as common sense, designates in Aristotle not a sixth sense but rather the fact of feeling simultaneously at least two sensations αἰσθήσεις arriving through two distinct sensory channels αἰσθήσεις. This results in two extremely important consequences. On the one hand, a transversalization of the sensations specific to each sense, viz. colour, and this specific colour, for sight; and odour, and this particular odour, for smell. We thus arrive at a perception of what is commonly sensed, “ἴδια αἰσθητά,” which each of the senses has us sensing alone solely by accident. These include movement, rest, size, number, unity (De An., 425a 1416; cf. 418a). Above all, one arrives at a recognition of an object through a synthesis of impressions sensed in isolation by the individual senses, which are, for their part, always true. Such synthesis makes it possible to name things, but it also enables errors—yellow and bitter: is it bile? 425b 14; v. Cassin, Aristote et le logos. Whence the dual meaning of “sentirei” in Roman, to sense, “percipere,” and to judge  ”judicare,” which can be understood, e. g. , through Albertus Magnus’s commentary on De An.: “Odorare est sentire et judicare odorem.” quoted in Spinosa, Sensazione e percezione. On the other hand, sensation of sensation one realizes—in which we rediscover the Homeric sense of αἰσθάνεσθαι — that one senses, one senses that one senses, an auto-affection or consciousness of sensing, which can be called aperception v., in addition to De An., 425b 12 since we sense that we see and that we hear, De somno, 255a 15; cf. συναίσθησις in Alexander of Aphrodisia. It is to the extent that sensing is a The DHLF mentions “senteur” scent and, in game hunting, “sentement,” which designates the sense of smell of hunting dogs and the odour they detect. To sum up, such examples make manifest the merger or fusion between subject and object in sensation, a link thematized by Aristotle in aisthêsis. But the difference in paradigm between aisthanomai, which is initially auditory, and sentir to sense, which becomes olfactory, can also shed light on the the displacement effected from aisthêsis to nous when we move on to the Roman “sensus.” Indeed, the Grecian “nous,” which Bailly proposes to translate in Fr. equivalents or cognates of intelligence, mind esprit, thought, sagacity, wisdom, common sense, intention, soul, heart, sentiment, will, desire omit the rather frequent tr. as intuition, which takes us this time to the paradigm of vision — Roman, “intueri,” to see.— which also informs Grecian theory or idea, is essentially linked to Fr. “flair,” the ability of dogs to smell; and it is precisely this olfactory sense that will give us “sensus.” Then there’s the system of hierarchies. That difference in model — ear or nose? — is complicated by a gnoseological hierarchy. The Aristotelian system gives us the lasting outline of the framework within which aisthêsis and nous could be differentiated, namely, a hierarchy of living beings and their faculties, which is deployed in De An. Aristotle distinguishes three types of living beings: vegetables, φυτά, which possess only the ability to nourish themselves τὸ θϱεπτιϰόν; animals, ζαῷ, which possess the faculty of sensing τὸ αἰσθητιϰόν, which opens onto that of desiring, τὸ ὀϱεϰτιϰόν (desdideratum); and man and — he says—any other similar or superior being, who possess in addition the ability to think, “τὸ διανοητιϰόν τε ϰαὶ νοῦς.” -- De An., 414a 29-b. The distinction between the dianoetic, discursive intelligence which moves through, διά, while scenting, and the noetic, intuitive intelligence which scents, is not pertinent at this level of descriptive generality, but nous is plainly the term of maximal scope and complexity, at once the final instance, subsuming all the others, and a separate and sovereign instance, linked to what is divine in man the nous that becomes all things and the nous that produces them all 430a. This is why aisthêsis and nous are structurally linked: the soul is analogous to the hand; for as the hand is a tool of tools, ὄϱγανον ὀϱγάνων, so the mind is the form of forms, “ὁ νοῦς εἶδος εἰδῶν,” and sense the form of sensible things, “ϰαὶ ἡ αἴσθησις εἶδος αἰσθητῶν,” -- 432a. But we touch here on a limit that calls into play the range not only of the notions of nous and εἶδος, but, more directly, that of the notions of aisthêsis and αἰσθητόν. Then there’s aisthêsis as the joint act of the sentient and the sensed. The amplitude of the aisthêsis is deployed and thematized in De An.. For us it is a function of the fact that within it the subjective/objective alternative is always already transcended. In fact, aisthêsis designates simultaneously a the faculty of sensing or sensitivity characterizing certain determined in each case by contrasting qualities. It is thus the breadth of “logos” that must be investigated. Indeed, aisthêsis-sensation “λέγει” ‘speaks,’ in the sense of adds up, evaluates, to the extent that it is nothing other than a singular proportion, an assessing, between contraries: as in gray, which I sense as being nothing but a logos of black and white -- De An., 1424a 17-b 3 and 426a 27-b 29; v. Cassin, Aristote et le logos. Thanks to the aisthêsis koinê, one can recognize and name (λέγειν) or conceptualise an object one senses while running the risk of being in error this yellow and that bitterness gives us bile. One thus obtains a descriptive statement (logos) that is close to a definition (logos) of the perceived object. But, to pursue our example, one does not for all that know of what bile is a sign (σημαίνει). On the other hand, we are in a realm of signals in the Homeric and pre-Aristotelian sense. Yellow ‘signals’ bile, at the risk of a misinterpretation. From another point of view, the relation between the aisthêsis in the sense of sensitivity/sensibility, and the discursive/semantic is constructed within the black box of the soul in De Int., which brings into relation sounds of the voice, states of the soul, and things of the world. Place is made for the intention and meaning of the nous as a sensus to be understood simultaneously as receptivity, intentionally directed at the object, and as emission, intending matter of judging that common sense will be conceived by Albertus Magnus, for instance as the first of the inner senses. Spinosa, Sensazione e percezione. In Aristotle, what is commonly sensed forms a well-defined list and is the effect of a perception mediated by at least two simultaneous senses, and is, as a result, vulnerable to error. In Plato, where the phrase “common sense” does not appear, the possibility of comparing and grasping what individual senses have in common (τὸ ϰοινὸν λαμϐάνειν πεϱὶ αὐτῶν; Theaet., 185b) is related directly to the soul, without the mediation of any sense organ, as a faculty exercised through the ‘tongue’ (ἡ διὰ τῆς γλώττης δύναμις; 185). In each case, there does not exist a common sense that can be isolated from the other senses and linked to its own organ sensorium commune. But we can, without doubt, understand on that basis a “sensus communis” as a common manner of sensing and appreciating Cicero, De Or., 12; 68, which can be vulgar and in error or replete with good sense and a sense of what is fitting -- Seneca, De beneficiis, 13, and linked to ordinary language as the expression of a “consensus.” An intersection with “semainein”? Is there, in our journey, no point of contact between the register of sensitivity/sensibility and that of signification? The semantic is touched on with the description of sensation as a relation, λόγος, which is Aisthêton. It is not easy to render Grecian philosophical texts dealing with sensation, despite the terminological equivalences that appear to be imperative. Such is the case of sensible in Fr. for αἰσθητόν, of visible for ὀϱατόν, etc. The reason for this is in fact less a matter of the expression than syntactical. Grecian tends to transform verbal adjectives or participles into nouns with great ease and disposes of a singular or plural neutral for designating without any more precision than that which it is discussing. In addition, the verbal adjective in “-tos” generally marks possibility, like Roman adjectives in “-bilis,” – ‘sensibilium,’ predicabile,’-- but it occasionally retains from its origin the meaning of a passive past participle cf. Lat. “audi-tus.” This yields particularly concise formulations, which lead translators to issue glosses in order to be clear, at the risk of philosophical anachronisms. They are frequently tempted to restore to sensible its adjectival status by having it modify the word thing or, worse yet, object, thus introducing surreptitiously into ancient thought a distinction between subject and object that would not appear until our classical age. In Aristotle—and he would be widely followed in this—it is the sensible that acts on the senses and realizes them in imitation of itself. The sensible is thus defined through the sensation it affords and the sense through the sensible offered by it sight by the visible, hearing by sound, in keeping with a conceptual circularity that dispenses with opposing subject to object. Fr. extricates itself from such concision through a certain roughness of style and one or two additional elements. In “De sensu et sensibilibus,” 440a 1819, R. Mugnier renders ὥστ’ εὐθὺς ϰϱεῖττον φάναι τῷ ϰινεῖσθαι τὸ μεταξὺ τῆς αἰσθήσεως ὑπὸ τοῦ γίνεσθαι τὴν αἴσθησιν as: “par suite, il vaut mieux déclarer sur-le-champ que c’est l’intermédiaire indispensable à la sensation qui, par le mouvement reçu du sensible, produit la sensation.” At Oxford, translation appears to be more difficult. Beare feels obliged to abandon “sensible” and to resort to paraphrase. “So that it were better to say at once that visual perception is due to a process set up by the perceived object in the medium between this object and the sensory organ.” It appears that the difficulty is increased by the current meaning of “sensible,” which ordinarily does not refer to an immediately sensory register. Sensible designates either a reasonable person (Fr. sensé) or even, with reference to clothes or shoes, to practical things in which one feels good. One has to force one’s language if one is to translate the Grecian word by word, or else be resigned to paraphrase, as Grice was at Clifton, but he hoped not at Christ Church! And such is also the case for Fr. sensible in the sense of what is given to be felt or sensed, which is hard to convey in Oxonian. Refs.: Aristotle. On Sense and the Sensible. In The Works of Aristotle, Tr. J. I. Beare. Oxford: Clarendon. De sensu et sensibilibus. In Petits traités d’histoire naturelle, tr. RMugnier. : Les Belles Lettres, sensum Domini aut consiliarius eius fuit? Τίς γὰϱ ἔγνω νοῦν Κυϱίου ; ἣ τίς σύμϐουλος αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο; Who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor?. In Asclepius, the hermetic work, on the other hand, sensu/snous designates the intellect, the superior human faculty that allows humans to partake of the divine: Sed De An. libus cunctis humanos tantum sensus nous ad divinae rationis intelligentiuam exornat, erigit atque sustollit.” “Of all living things, consciousness equips only the human, exalts it, raises it up to understand the divine plan.” Copenhaver, ed., Hermetica, ch.6. The text continues. “Unde efficitur ut, quoniam homo est ipsius una compago, parte, qua ex anima et sensu nous, spiritu pneuma atque ratione divinus est velut ex eolementis superioribus inscendere posse videatur in caelum, parte vero mundane, quae constat ex igne et terra, aqua et aere, mortalis resistat in terra. “Whence, though mankind is an integral construction, it happens that in the part that makes him divine, he seems able to rise up to heaven, as if from higher elements— soul and consciousness, spirit and reason. But in his material part—consisting of fire and earth water and air—he remains fixed on the ground, a mortal.” ch.10. We can similarly compare the following. “Gratias tibi summe, exsuperantissime condonans nos sensu nous, ratione, intelligentia: sensu ut te cognoverimus; ratione, ut te suspicionibus indegamus; cognitione, ut te cogniscentes gaudeamus,” “άϱιν σοὶ οἴδαμεν χαϱισάμενος ἡμῖν νοῦν ον γνῶσιν νοῦν μὲ, ἵνα σὲ νοήσωμεν, λόγον α σὲ ἐπιϰαλήσωμεν, γνῶσιν ἵνα ἐπιγνώσωμεν.” “We thank you, supreme and most high god, by whose grace alone we have attained the light of your knowledge by giving us the gift of consciousness, reason, and understanding: consciousness, by which we may know you; reason, by which we may v.k you in our dim suppositions; knowledge, by which we may rejoice in knowing you. ch.10, l. 41 This usage would subsequently spread to the Grecian and Roman church fathers: Saint Irenaeus Adverses haereses, 2, ch.13, 3, Tertullian Adversus Praxean, ch.6, or Saint Jerome S. Hieronymus presbyteri opera, ch.3, l. 54 On the basis of the sensus-nous-intellect correspondence, the overall affinity between the semantic fields of “sensus” to submit to the convention of meaning as it is put in place on the basis of the principle of non-contradiction in Book Γ of the Met. to speak is to say something that has a meaning and only one, for oneself and for others. But the entire complex is surely not constructed around a single term that we might translate as “sense,” given the present scope of that word for us. Then there’s the Unitary Polysemy of Sensus: Triple Sense and Semantic Flux. The polysemy of “sensus” is linked to the Grecian terms aisthêsis, dianoia, nous, and the tendentially unitary semantic flux characterizing it is the expression of the philosophical debate over the relations between sensation and knowledge. The three registers determining the sense of “sensus” are organized according to four levels of analysis that long remained implicit: the physiological level, the psychological level, the gnoseological level, and the conceptual level. Sensus, as sensation, sense perception, thus includes at the physiological level the sense of sensation as the biological functioning of a sense organ, the passive motion of the organ under the impulse of external objects, and the sense of sense organ. At the psychological level, sensus additionally includes the meaning of faculty of the senses senses of sight, of hearing, etaisthêsis. Sensus, as comprehension, intellectual perception, participates in the gnoseological level and includes the meanings of consciousness, intention, sentiment, opinion, Lat. sentential, which is also derived from sentire – cfr. Grice on ‘sentence’ as a ‘value-paradeigmatic’ expression -- and of thought, judgment, mind, and intellect, implying a second phase of mental elaboration of the data furnished by sensation. Sensus, as signified, signification, is situated at the conceptual or expressive level and includes the senses of idea, concept, mental concept, to the extent that every sense perception that involves the intellect entails an interpretation of sense data as well as the attribution of mental concepts to data furnished by sensation and expressed through the mediation of an expression of a concept. Then there are the sites of polysemy Tr.s and commentaries of Grecian texts of late antiquity and the Middle Ages are quite revealing as to the polysemy of “sensus.” In the Epistles of St. Paul New Testament, Roman tr., fourth-fifth centuries and in the Roman Asclepius c. fourth century, the correspondence between sensus and nous, as intention, thought, mind, intellect, leads to the acknowledgment of an overall semantic similarity within the Graeco-Roman couple. Thus Paul, referring to the reprehensible thoughts in which God has plunged the pagans, says, “tradidit eos Deus in reprobum sensum,” “παϱέδωϰεν αὐτοὺς ὁ θεὸς εἰς ἀδόϰιμον νοῦν; Rom 1:28: then, referring to the peace of God that “surpasses all understanding,” et pax Dei quae exsuperat omnem sensum,” “ϰαὶ ἡ εἰϱήνη τοῦ θεοῦ ἡ ὑπεϱέχουσα πάντα νοῦν; Phil 4:7; or, further on, referring to the thought of God and his counsel: Quis enim cognovit Et ad hoc dicimus, quod odorare non est absolute pati a sensibili percepto, sed potius odorare est sentire et judicare odorem, quod est secunda sensus perfectio, et non est tantum pati, sed etiam operari aliquid.” “We say to this that apprehending an odor is not absolutely to suffer from what has been perceived by the senses, but more exactly that to apprehend an odor is to sense and judge the odor, which constitutes the second perfection of sense, and that it is not only to suffer but equally to effectuate something.” Albertus Magnus, De An.; cf. Aristotle, De An., 1424b. The soul as form of the body is what guarantees the sensory contribution to knowledge, according to Aristotle’s moderate empiricism, within which Albertus Magnus articulates explicitly the notion of sensus as sensory perception, which had remained implicit in the Aristotelian aisthêsis. In the medieval version of Plato’s Phaedo, Enricus Aristippus of Calabria, twelfth century, translates “aisthanomai” not only as “sentire,” but also as sensu percipere and sensu concipere perceive/ conceive through the senses, with the intention of emphasizing the purely instrumental role of the corporal sphere in sensation. The translator thus contributes to making manifest the Platonic reduction of sensation to a sensory perception that, in this case and as opposed to Aristotle, is the prerogative of a purely spiritual soul, which is temporarily linked to a radically heterogeneous and inferior body through whose intervention the soul cannot be in any way altered. In keeping with the situation of sensation in Plato, the soul, on the one hand, makes use of the bodily organs as instruments for conserving the body and perceiving the sensory world; but, on the other hand, sensation is never anything but a stimulus that awakens in the soul the memory of intelligible realities that it has previously known: Possibile enim hoc eciam apparuit, sensu percipientem quid aisthomenon ti vel videntem vel audientem vel aliquem alium sensum sumentem, diversum quid ab hoc animo concepisse, quod oblivione deletum erat, cui hoc assimilatum est simile existens vel cui dissimile. Here indeed is the possibility that has clearly appeared to us: when someone perceives through the senses, sees, hears, apprehends a thing through some other sense, he conceives, based on that thing, something else that had been erased by forgetting, and which is brought in contact with the first, whether it resembles it or not. Plato Romanus: Phaedo, 76a 14. Then there’s the dianoia, sensus interior, and sensus litteralis In the tripartite division of the faculties of the human soul in the image of the divine Trinity, J. Scotus Erigena distinguishes two faculties in the motus compositus of sense as set forth by Maxim the Confessor. The first— “sensus exterior,” aisthêsis, sensation and sensory perception or sensus —is foreign to the divine image in man, since it is an intermediary between the soul and the body. The second—“sensus interior,” dianoia, intellectual perception or sensus —is nothing other than reason and intellect: it is the organ and nous can be observed. The two terms are, in fact, articulated according to the different uses of ‘sense’: sense perception, intellectual perception, signification, to the extent that they express in general the complex and articulated world of humans in relation to the world, a person endowed with body and mind facing a world both available to the senses and intelligible. “Sensus” and “nous” diverge according to a polarized semantic outcome, sensus coming to signify principally sensory perception and signification, and nous, intellectual perception and signification. The perceptual and consequently immediate nature of cognitive understanding obtained through sensory as well as intellectual perception which is thus distinguished from abstract and discursive — or non-intuitive — knowledge remains the connotation common to both terms. The tripartite polysemy of sensus is indicated in the earliest Scholasticism: in an anonymous commentary on Asclepius, dating from the twelfth century Vat. Ott lat. 811. “Sensus corporei, intellectus, signification,” and in the Dictionary of the Bible of Alanus of Lille twelfth century; Dictiones dictionum theologicarum, in PL, v. 210, col. 941B intellectus, significatio. Semantic continuity via the cognitive value of the senses The triple meaning of sensus -- sensation, comprehension, signification — is articulated in keeping with an essential semantic continuity, which is the expression of fundamental doctrines, both ancient and medieval, about the cognitive value of the senses. Those doctrines are in turn themselves conditioned by different conceptions of the nature of the human soul. Sensus, as passive corporeal sensation 1a, entails a reduction of knowledge to sensation characteristic of the sensualist and materialist tendencies of antiquity the atomism of Democritus, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and, in part, the Sophists, for which the corporeal nature of the soul, whatever its subtlety, reduces the cognitive process in its totality to a contact between bodies. Sensus as sensory perception 1b but also as intellectual perception names different ways of reducing sensation to an act of the soul, a reduction with differing connotations for Aristotle and Aristotelianism and for Plato and the Neoplatonists, according to the status of the human soul, which is at times the form of the body, at others a spiritual substance. Medieval commentaries, tr.s, and texts offer clear evidence of this semantic differentiation, which, from the perspective of terminology, is articulated in two phases: a a rendering explicit of the polysemy of Aristotelian and Platonic aisthêsis along with sensus communis; and the Neoplatonic notion of dianoia with J. Scotus Erigena, ninth century and sensus interior, opening onto sensus litteralis and the third meaning of sense. Aisthêsis and sensus communis The commentary on Aristotle’s De An. composed by Albertus Magnus, thirteenth century, underscores the simultaneously passive and active nature of Aristotelian aisthêsis: passive modification, but also an acquisition of potentiality, consciousness of sensing, sensory judgment above all in the koinê aisthêsis. set underwent constant reorganization, with predictable instances of interference between the third gnoseological and fourth logico-linguistic levels. It was only when networks were established that contrasting values attained a measure of precision. The evolution of the two derivatives of “sentire” is delicate. The term “sensus” gradually came to supplant “sentential” during the Roman era, in the sense of mental disposition, taking on a generic value, while the specialization of “sententia” in the lexicon of law sentencing and political advice given to the Senate explains its use as authorized, profound, authentic signification. In the philosophical tradition, “sententia” is chosen to translate the Grecian “dianoia,” and occasionally “λεϰτόν” as well, to denote a thought insofar as it can be expressed in a composite linguistic sequence, whence the extension of the term to the sequence itself. That choice contributed to the disappearance of the difference between Stoic and Aristotelian terminologies Nuchelmans, Theories of the Proposition. “Sententia” is used systematically when it is a matter of the expression of a complete meaning (“sententia perfecta, plena”) whether to define a logical proposition cf. Varro: “Pro-loquium est sententia, in qua nihil desideratur,” quoted by Aulus Gellius, Nott. Att., 18 or a grammatical sentence cf. Priscian’s definition, “Oratio est ordinatio dictionum congrua, sententiam perfectam demonstrans,” “An oration is a a correct sequence of words, manifesting a complete meaning” -- Grammatici Romani, vol. 2, p. 53, l. 28. “Sententia” could be applied more broadly to ideas that constitute a speech, to an opinion expressed in which it translates the Grecian “δόξα,” or to whatever constitutes the substance or deep meaning of a text or of a sentence or a word—although this last use was less frequent as of the time of the Empire and rare in the Middle Ages, the sense, as well, to be probably attributed to a text in opposition to the one assigned to it by an adversary cf. Cicero, Rhetoric to Herennius, 1. It is in this sense that it can be opposed to the letter of the text scriptum, littera and also to the sensus most immediately associated with it. A “sentential” thus being the reading to be retained of a passage or a text. Boethius, e. g. , speaks of “sententia Aristotelis,” or Bérenger of “sententia catholice ecclesie,” —the term designates by extension an authoritative text, resulting in those collections of systematically organized excerpts, anthologies of sententiae such as those of Petrus Lombardus in theology, which would elicit comment throughout the Middle Ages. The different meanings of “significatum,” —the act of indicating, indication or mark of approval, above all, signification, meaning—parallel those of “significare,” and “signare,” from which it originated a compound of “signum” and “facere,” to indicate through a sign, to make known, to announce or presage, and to mean. Starting from what was originally (contra Grice, ‘consequentia’) an INTRANSITIVE use, as in Plautus, for instance to make a sign, ‘signare’ and ‘significare’ become transitive, taking a ‘that’-clause as its object the content intended by the sign to be a sign of. If Roman possessed “signare” in the use of to make a mark, it creates a verb that is not modeled on any Grecian term for ‘transitive’ usage, even if “significatum” surely benefited from the of the division of nature, since, in an Aristotelian manner, it divides and rejoins — and even distinguishes and reorganizes—images of natural specific objects, effects and signs of universal causes, channeling them to the unity of causes by way of reason and intellect. “Et si quis intentius graecae linguae proprietatem perspexerit, duorum sensuum in homine proprietatem reperiet. In ea enim NOUS intellectus dicitur, LOGOS ratio, DIANOIA sensus, non ille exterior sed interior; et in his tribus essentialis trinitas animae ad imaginem Dei constitutae subsistit. Est enim intellectus, et ratio, et sensus, qui dicitur interior et essentialis; exterior vero, quem corporis et animae copulam diximus, AISTHÊSIS vocatur.” “But, if one examines more closely the semantics of the Grecian language, one discovers that the expression is not univocal and that it encompasses two distinct meanings. For in the Grecian language, the intellect is called nous, reason logos, and sense dianoia, and this expression does not at all designate external sense, but inner sense; and it is in those three components that the essential trinity of the soul, created in the image of God, subsists. The trinity of the soul is thus composed of intellect, reason, and sense, which is called the inner and essential sense, whereas the outer sense that we have defined as the conjunctive link between body and soul is called aisthêsis. Erigena, Periphyseon, bk. 2. In Erigena, sensus interior is thus situated entirely in the higher sphere of the soul and is purely spiritual, and it is also dianoia by virtue of the semantic affinity with nous in the sense of signification sensus In the biblical hermeneutics of the Grecian church fathers, dianoia is indeed the sensus litteralis, the sense of Scripture. It is thus the case that in Origen, the sense sensus of Scripture is the νοῦς τῶν γϱαφῶν, in conformity with the Christian doctrine with the four meanings of Scripture cf. Origen, De principiis, 3, sub indice. Then there’s the Exuberance of the Roman Lexicon of Signification. Against the backdrop of this unitary flux, the Roman lexicon of the third usage of sense would undergo exceptional diversification. When the question of meaning or significatum became an object of specialized study, medieval thinkers would attempt to specify each of its aspects primary and secondary sense, lexical and grammatical sense, etc., and traditional terms were redefined by the place they occupied in a network in which new terms were being forged e.g., significatum vs. suppositum or vs. consignificatum. This specialization was linked to problematics that would make a significant reappearance in analytic modernity. Then there’s sensus, sententia, vis, significatio, intellectus “Sensus” is caught up as one in a set of nouns bearing the idea of signification sententia, vis, significatio, intellectus, related as it is to a series of verbs – “sentire,” “valere,” “significare,” “intellegere” -- that are frequently difficult to distinguish. Then there’s the different meanings of texts The Roman vocabulary of exegesis was established gradually in Christian patristics, then in medieval Scholasticism, while borrowing from Hellenistic and Jewish exegeses the Refs.: is abundant, v. Dahan, Exégèse chrétienne. Although the opposition between the letter and the spirit grounds a distinction between two moments of the reading of a text, the content of the distinction and the terms that express it are far from unambiguous. Already in the patristic era, “littera” e. g. , could either refer to the explicit or manifest content of the expression which might, moreover, not have any or include the figurative or metaphorical sense, the “figura” (schema) which can elsewhere form part of spiritual exegesis; v. Bureau, LitterLitterae thus designates for Augustine both the letters of the alphabet and letters, that is, the text to be read divinas litteras, whence the analogy between the two apprenticeships of reading: that which teaches how to understand Scripture is similar to that which teaches the letters similis est tradenti litteras, that is, to the master who teaches how to read De doctrina christiana, prooemium In the beginning of the twelfth century, Hugh of Saint Victor presented in a precise and enduring manner the distinction between “littera,” which corresponds in the strict sense to the analysis of the text, sensus, which takes the historical context into account, and sententia, which derived the theological teaching of the passage; he explained that every text was to have at least two of those three senses, and certain have three. “Illa narratio litteram et sensum tantum habet, ubi per ipsam prolationem sic aperte aliquid significatur, ut nihil aliud relinquatur subintelligendum. Illa vero litteram et sententiam tantam habet, ubi per ex sola pronuntiatione nihil concipere potest auditor nisi addatur expositio. Illa sensum et sententiam habet, ubi et aperte aliquid significantur, et aliquid aliud subintelligendum relinquitur quod expositione aperitur.” Only the letter and the sense are possessed by the narrative in which, through its mere utterance, something is signified sufficiently clearly for nothing ambiguous to subsist. The narrative which has only letter and signification is one of which nothing can be understood when it is heard as merely articulated, unless an explanation is added to it. Finally, the narrative possessing sense and signification in which one thing is signified clearly and another left as an implication to be revealed after an explanation. Didascalicon, 8. The work of exegetes is situated at three levels: labor of comprehension, of exposition, and also of criticism, since even as they render the text before their eyes explicit, they are obliged to judge and evaluate it in terms of correctness congruitas, ultimately deciding whether to complete its letter, to rectify its apparent meaning, in order finally to declare its true meaning. In point of fact, the littera is not necessarily complete or perfect perfecta; it can also be superabundant or elliptical, and even incomprehensible or incorrect incongrua if it is not resolved in another letter Didascalicon, Moreover, even if the signification of its words is clear significatio aperta, the sensus can be correct or incorrect congruus, incongruus or be revealed to be unbelievable, impossible, absurd, false, e. g. , in Psalm 79:7, They devoured Jaco. On the other hand, the sententia divina is never absurd, never false, and contrary to the sensus containing many contradictions, does not admit any incompatibility repugnantia; it is always correct/coherent congrua, always true ibid.. The littera, or sensus litteralis, in the broad sense, comprises three levels of meaning littera, sensus, sententia and is massively opposed to spiritual interpretation which is also called mystical, or allegorical, in the broad sense. In fact, T. Aquinas says, whereas scientific texts depend on men, who have at their disposition only words, God has the power to make use of a dual mode of signification; he can simultaneously call on words and realities duplex significatio, una per voces, alia per res quas voces significant, and, for that reason, Scripture will have several senses plures sensus: The signification significatio through which words signify concerns the literal or historical sense sensus litteralis seu historicaus; the signification through which the realities designated by words designate still other realities concerns the mystical sense sensus mysticus In Epistolam ad Galatas, in Opera omnia, 21:230. Exegetes generally recognize in the latter three levels of meaning: the moral or anthropological sense, which transmits moral teachings; the allegorical sense the term being taken here in the narrow sense, which refers to truths of faith relative to the church; and the anagogical or mystical sense, referring to future life. Those three levels of meaning, which determine the spiritual sense, thus constitute, along with the literal sense, what are called the four senses of Scripture. The sacred text is thus characterized by this accretion or stratification of levels of meaning, the essential opposition being the distinction between the literal and the spiritual sense conveyed by numerous images e. g. , the nut and its shell: the debates between exegetes deal with the domains covered by each, the primacy to be accorded to one or the other, the relations they entertain with each other continuity or discontinuity, the nature of the hermeneutical leap allowing one to pass from the first to the second, to move beyond what the text says to attain a truth lying beyond words. Refs.: Bureau, Bruno. Littera: ‘sens’ et ‘signification’ chez Ambroise, Augustin et Cassiodore. In Conceptions Romanes du sens et de la signification, ed. by Marc Baratin and Claude Moussy, 2133 : Presses de l’Université Sorbonne, . Dahan, Gilbert. L’exégèse chrétienne de la Bible en Occident médiéval, XIIeXIVe siècle. : Cerf, . Hugh of Saint Victor. Didascalicon. Ed. by Charles Henry Buttimer. : Catholic University of America Press, 193 Lubac, Henri de. Medieval Exegesis. Tr. Mark SebanGrand Rapids, MI: W. Eerdmans, . Valente, LuisUne sémantique particulière: La pluralité des sens dans les Saintes Écritures XIIe siècle. In Sprachtheorien in Spätantike und Mittelalter, ed. by Sten Ebbesen, 123 Tübingen: Gunter Narr, .meanings of “semanein”: to make a sign, to reveal, to manifest, to denote, meanings that are found again in philosophical Roman, particularly when the subject is divination. In that perspective, the act of significatum can be as much that of the sign, to which animistic or divine ‘intentionality,’ a predisposition to indicate, to point toward something, is attributed, as that of an individual seeking to manifest that intentionality by means of a sign cf. Brachet, Réflexions sur l’évolution. In medieval Roman, that double valence, which is NOT found in the Fr. “signifier,” was preserved, including in has efficacy to the extent to which it is able to affect a recipiens; De dial., ch.7, 1 In the thirteenth century, Henry of Ghent, in his reading of this passage, would further emphasize this connotation. “Vis verbi est qua agitur quantum valet.” This nuance of efficacy would be quite marked in texts of the Middle Ages when, particularly in the context of sacramental theology, “vis” (from a root meaning ‘sinew’) and “virtus” would be occasionally interchangeable, when the vis or virtus significandi of a word its signifying value or force would mesh with the vis or virtus sacrificandi of the sacramental sign its sanctifying value or force, defined as doing what it says. For the grammarians, the vis was the semantic force of a word—whether it is signifier or consignifier as in the case of conjunctions—which explains its constructive potentials, with different cases, e. g. “intelligere,” originally meaning to comprehend, appeared frequently in Cicero, then underwent a slippage in its passive form, “intelligetur,” toward to understand, to communicate, to mean, ‘to give it to be understood.’ What is understood – INTELLECTUM -- by an expression can be not only its obvious sense but also something that is connoted, implied, insinuated, IMPLICATED, as Grice would prefer. It is always a matter of the sense received—or that one should receive if one follows the authorized interpreter. The passive innuitur was a further step toward the implicit, since the verb was often used in the Middle Ages in a theological context when a word applied to a divine reality was analyzed as the bearer of a supplementary value in relation to its ordinary sense.The noun intellectus first took on the meaning of sense, signification with Seneca Naturalis quaestiones, 50. Boethius uses “intellectus” as an equivalent of “passiones animae,” “παθήματα τῆς ψυχῆς” of the first chapter of De Int., I. “Voces [Signa] quiden significant intellectum, ipsas autem voces litterae significant. Sunt autem intellectus passiones.” “Sounds of the voice signify intellections, but the letters signify those sounds themselves. And the intellections are the passions of the soul” -- whence the triad: voces [signum], intellectus, res. The term intellectus would thus designate simultaneously the intellection of a word or sign or expression, and the concept without any linguistic connotation until the introduction of “conceptus,” and also the intellectual faculty, the intellect. The polysemous nature of the word was well perceived in the Middle Ages. An intellection is never mechanically produced by an expression; An intellection implies an activity indicated by the term intelligere. Then there’s the technicality of the medieval semantic lexicon. The developments of “semantics” produce an entire range of technical terms, with precise meanings, arrayed in three different directions. Meaning/reference. First, a distinction was established between meaning and reference, an opposition absent as such in antiquity, as is plain from the undifferentiated use of “significare,” “ostendere,” or “designare,” or from the imprecision of “res” as the object of those verbs, at once signified and referent v. Roesch, Res et verbum. As of the end of the eleventh century, it was linked to a reflection on paronyms, which was pursued on the basis of Aristotle’s Cat., and on the “nomen appelativum,” a designation for the common noun in treatises of semantics, a situation well expressed in an anonymous treatise of logic – his name was possibly Griceianus Halbornensis -- from the end of the twelfth century. “ “Significare” applied to an expression and to the person using it (utens) is not the same thing, as it is habitually said, by my friend Austinus. When one says that such a person expresses a thing through an expression “significant rem per vocem,” this means: uses a sign and a mark of the thing with the intention of producing a sign concerning the thing – “utitur signo et nota rei CUM INTENTIONE faciendi signum de re.” And “significare” predicated in this sense is in a way to “act,” – mean isn’t – intending isn’t – unless functinalistically read -- considered in relation to the person forming the expressions. But when it is said of this or that expression, ‘significare’ surely does not predicate an action! Rather, it predicates a relation or a similarity, and a fitting of the sign, in so much as it is a sign, in relation to what it signifies relatio signi ad signatum. To say, metabolically, of an *expression* that it ‘signifies’ the thing (“vocem significare rem”) is to say that the expression makes a sign of the thing (“vocem facere signum de re”). Here to make does not mean to act, ‘agere,’ but to make a sign, ‘signum facere,’ i. e., to be a mark, ‘notam esse.’ (“A sign is a sign is a sign”). As a result, to signify is not the same thing for the user as for the expression. Indeed to signify, with reference to the emissor, announces the so-called action of expression, the relation or mutual fit of sign and signified. Tractatus de proprietatibus sermonum, in Logica mod., 2. “Significatum” is the term that appears to have been used in a technical way to address the intrinsic semantic properties of a word or an expression, more rarely of a sentence or speech in which cases there is a preference for “sentential” or “sensus,” e. g. , of its polysemy significatio duplex or of the evolution in meaning it has undergone. “Vis” served as a tr. of the Grecian δύναμις in speaking of the virtue of a plant, the effectiveness of a remedy, the value of a coin, and, by analogy, the meaning of a word or a sentence — it is a noun apparently linked to the verb “valeo,” which renders as the Grecian “δύναμαι.” Cicero frequently used the expressions vis verborum and vis verbi for the value or meaning of words, which would be the subject of an extremely precise development in Augustine’s De dial.: the word is instituted as a function of a certain immediate or mediate relation to the thing; its pronunciation will thus provoke a sensory impression in the recipiens, which will induce an intellectual impression dependent either on the nature of the word the softness or harshness of its sound, for instance, on the thing it signifies, or on both. Thus it is, according to Augustine, that the force proper (“vis”) of words is constituted De dial., ch.7, 14, a force that can be impeded as a result of obscurities or ambiguities that Augustine would describe in minute detail. A word’s “vis” can be understood only to the extent that the word is a sign, the sign of something for someone. It is thus a function of its ability to move the recipiens. The “vis” thus retains its dynamic connotation, since it is not the significatio associated with the word that is important, but its force and consequently what it produces as meaning in the recipient. “Vis verbi est qua cognoscitur quantum valeat autem tantum quantum movere audientem potest.” “The force of a word is that whereby the extent of its efficacy is learned.” It on the basis of a consideration of polysemy: significatio is stable, fixed by imposition; suppositio is variable, dependent on contextual elements; “canis” sea dog/constellation is an ambiguous expression since different meanings are a function of different impositions, whereas “homo” in the statements “Homo est species,” man is a species, “ “Homo”” est nomen,” man is a name, “Homo currit,” a man is running is univocal, the semantic variations being contextually determined and with constant signification. Primary meaning, proper sense vs. secondary sense. Second, a network of terms was introduced in order to think through the distinction between what a term signifies primarily and what it implies or connotes secondarily. Then there’s signification vs. modes of signifying. The distinction between signification and the way of signifying developed as part of speculative grammar and theology. It allowed for a new way of thinking about the relations between being, thought, and language, as well as the different questions they raise, in particular that of the arbitrary, conventional, or natural character of language. The linguistic unit “homo” is analyzed as being constituted by 1 a lexical signified significatum speciale; 2 a general signified significatum generale or essential general mode of signifying, which accounts for its categorization as a part of speech a noun; 3 specific essential modes of signifying, which account for its categorization as a type noun, a common name; and 4 accidental modes of signifying, establishing its accidents masculine, nominative, etc.. . The opposition between modes of signifying and signifieds is deployed in speculative grammar on four levels: on the ontological level: the mode of signifying refers to by the grammarians, ending up for the grammarians and for Anselm in De grammatico, with the distinction between “significatum” and “appellatum.” “Grammaticus non significat hominen et grammaticam ut unum, sed grammaticam per se et hominem per aliud significant. Et hoc nomen quamvis sit appellativum hominis, non tamen proprie dicitur ejus significativum; et licet sit significativum grammaticae non tamen est ejus appelativum.” “Grammarian does not signify man and grammar in a single unit, but it signifies grammar by itself and man by something else. And that name, even though it is what a man is called, does not, however, properly speaking, signify him; and although it may signify grammar, it is not what grammar is called. Anselm, De grammatico. The proper object of the Categories, Anselm concludes, is to show what terms signifiy and not what they call or name. The grammarians and the logicians would use the doublet significatum and nominatum: the noun man names the substance and signifies the quality, whereas the pronoun has solely the function of nomination, since it can be applied to all referents ad omne suppositum pertinet. It names a substance in so far as it is determined by the quality of rationality and mortality. Similarly, “album” names the body by signifying whiteness; it signifies principally whiteness and secondarily the body. Such analyses vary according to whether one is a realist or a nominalist: depending on whether or not one admits the existence of the universal whiteness, one will accept either the proposition that the name names such whiteness or that it merely signifies it v. Rijk, Log. Mod., and Fredborg, Speculative Grammar. The distinction would be stabilized by logicians with the couple significatum and suppositum. The sources of the notion of mode of signification. The notion of mode of signification has several distinct sources, which, before converging, combined to create several terminological confusions. “Modus significandi” is initially the general characteristic of a part of discourse: the use has its origin in the “Institutiones grammaticae,” in which Priscian explains that parts of discourse are not distinguished by formal properties such as case, but by properties of signification, that is: general semantic characteristics e.g., a name or noun signifies substance and quality. “Connotatum,” then “modus significandi,” would later be used to designate what would subsequently be designated more precisely as “modus significandi accidentalis,” on the basis of the Aristotelian notion that the verb consignifies time, grammarians very early on had the idea of defining most accidents as secondary significations to be added to the principal signification e.g., person, mood, etc. In a different register, modus significandi—which would be better rendered as manner of signifying — is what distinguishes two terms with the same semantic root and different endings, and specifically paronyms: thus white and whiteness signify the same thing whatever the ontology invoked but differ in their manner of signifying, since they signify in an abstract or concrete mode. In all these cases, and as is the case for consignification, the mode or manner of signifying refers to a signification that is not the principal or lexical signification but rather is either an additional signification “significare cum”: homo signifies man and at the same time one or another property or a manner of signifying, “significare sic”: white signifies whiteness insofar as it exists in a particular case. It will be noted that in these two cases, what are at stake are second-order or metalinguistic properties, but in another case, first-order or semantic properties. between “proprietas essendi” and “proprietas dicendi.” “Deus vere est, sed non vere esse dicitur.” “God is in truth, but he cannot be said to be in truth.” The principle of the correspondence between thought and language, “sicut intelligitur, sic significatur” can be turned into a non-correspondence grounding a negative theology: just as we cannot think God, we can not speak him either “sicut non intelligitur, ita nec significatur.” That non-correspondence, initially analyzed in terms of distinct connotations e. g. , just, if said of God, connotes the cause; if said of man, it connotes the effect, was subsequently theorized in terms of signifying modes: we signify God, said Saint Bonaventure to choose an example, not as he is, but as we conceive him, the modes of signifying corresponding to those modes of understanding and knowing. Starting with the reading of Pseudo-Dionysius and the idea that perfections, which are precontained in God, exist in him in a certain mode and are received by each creature commensurately with what it is, in keeping with its measure of intellective receptivity, the notion will be inflected: Albertus Magnus, then Tomasso Aquinas, could thus distinguish in the name designating perfection e.g., bonitas between the thing signified “res significata,” which is perfection itself, and its mode of reception, on which the name’s signifying mode is dependent. Nouns of perfection are thus improper at the level of signifying mode quantum ad modum significandi, since, being invented by men, they correspond to their mode of thought and to things as they are able to conceive of them; at the level of the thing signified quantum ad rem significatam, they are suited specifically to God, since justice is first of all, per prius, in God before existing, per posterius, in man. For Tommaso Aquino, as for other theologians, these signifying modes characterizing creatures are marked, inscribed in names themselves: verbs and participles, for instance, imply a temporality intrinsic to their signifying mode, but that temporality does not at all concern the thing signified as such. Modern Convergences between the Three Senses of Sense. Three privileged witnesses allow us to understand how the three senses of sense have been articulated in the modern period. Descartes and the degrees of meaning. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Descartes, in his Replies to the Sixth Objections to the Meditations, article 9, still felt the need to distinguish three degrees, three meanings of sense, in order to be able to evaluate their degree of certitude with precision. In order to do so, he restricted the true and proper notion of meaning, and, consequently, its infallible character, to the first two degrees, viz.: the first, the movement of the bodily sense organ under the pressure of external objects; and the second, the perception of sounds, odors, colors, pleasure, and pain, which stems from the union of body and soul in the mind. Descartes, on the other hand, reserved for the intellect alone the third degree, which was commonly attributed to the senses and included an evaluation, a cognitive judgment as to objects of the the property or mode of being of the thing, the signified to the thing; on the semantic level: the modes of signifying ground the grammatical properties, the signifieds, the lexical properties—whence the idea of a double articulation, or institution, of language, the first, through which the vox becomes a signifying word dictio, and the second, through which it becomes a co-signifying part of speech, endowed with a mode of signifying; on the epistemological level: grammar deals only with modes of signifying, logic with signifieds; finally, it is the linguistic order that justifies: grammatical properties explain the construction and congruence of statements, the object of grammar; signifieds are the foundation of truth, the object of logic. The Modists sought to justify the notion of modus significandi philosophically: every modus significandi corresponds to a property of things, or modus essendi, and to a conceived property, or modus intelligendi. The Aristotelian triad voces/ passiones/res was duplicated in this system of three modi: significandi, intelligendi, essendi. This was true only for certain authors, for whom the modes of signifying were signs of modi intelligendi, which were signs of modi essendi. Others, inspired by Avicenna, supported the identity of modes: the same common nature e.g., the property of movement could exist in three different forms—as existing, as conceived, and as signified. In all cases, the modes of signifying, corresponding to modes of being, were quite distinct from the signifieds, which corresponded to things themselves. A single thing pain might exist in reality, might be conceived, and might be signified, being associated with either the property of movement the verb: doleo or the property of repose the noun: dolor. The question of arbitrariness was thus thought through again: there was no relation of motivation or dependence between the grammatical category of a word or of any of its accidents and its lexical signified, since in theory any thing could be signified on any mode. The question of arbitrariness, moreover, underwent a kind of proliferation: it became imperative to simultaneously think about the relation between the various formal components of a linguistic unit its modes of signifying; the relation of those components to the properties of the things on which they were grounded; and the relation of the grammatical components to the semantic components, etc. Whereas, in the Aristotelian tradition, voces represented the realm of convention and variation, and intellectus and res the realm of what was identical for all, the Modists staged the coup of positing within language modi significandi that were substantially identical for all, any difference being situated at the mere accidental level of vocal expression, thus affirming that a genuine science of language, endowed with a universal subject, could exist. The nominalists of the fourteenth century would reproach them for that claim. In theology, the notion of modus significandi was used as of the twelfth century to characterize simultaneously the semantic behavior of nouns and the mental operation corresponding to the use of nouns. Used for the analysis of speech about God, the notion of the signifying mode allowed one to think about the disparity between being and language, between what God is and what can be said of Him, a distinction already strikingly articulated at the end of the twelfth century by Alain de Lille when he distinguished pure sense, all the while recalling the materialism of the Epicureans, for whom thinking was sensing or feeling, and the empiricist psychology of the Aristotelians, who considered that the human mind perceives only by way of the senses ibid.: “An igitur, quia antiqui Italiae philosophi opinati sint mentem humanum nihil percipere nisi per sensus, ut Aristotelaei; vel eam non nisi sensum esse, ut Epicuri asseclae; vel rationem sensum quendam aethereum ac purissimum, ut Platonici Stoicique existimarunt? Et vero Ethnicarum sectarum nulla, quae mentem humanam omni corpulentia puram agnorunt. Et ideo omne mentis opus sensum esse putarint; hoc est quicquid mens agat vel patiatur, corporum tactus sit.” “Accordingly, is this because the ancient philosophers of Italy were of the opinion that the human mind perceives nothing except through the senses as was deemed the case by the Aristotelians; or that it is nothing but sense as was deemed the case by the followers of Epicurus; or that reason is a kind of ethereal and most pure sense as was deemed the case by the Platonists and the Stoics? Indeed, there was no pagan sect which acknowledged the human mind to be pure of all corporeality. And the reason for this is that they regarded the operation of the mind to be entirely a function of sense. To this pagan metaphysic of sense, Vico opposed his own Christian metaphysic. “Sed nostra religio eam prorsus incorpoream esse docet: et nostri metaphysici confirmant, dum a corporibus corporea sensus organa moventur, per eam occasionem moveri a deo.” “But our religion teaches that the mind is absolutely incorporeal, and our metaphysicians confirm that when the bodily sense organs are moved by bodies, through this occasion the mind is moved by God. Clauberg and the rereading of the aisthêsis/dianoia relation. It was during the modern period that the central importance of the relation between aisthêsis and dianoia would be confirmed, and it would occur, not at all by chance, in Cartesian circles, for the seventeenth century was also characterized by a renewed interest in the investigations of psychophysiology and the debate over the limits and conditions of human knowledge through an examination of the faculties of the soul. But the reconsideration of aisthêsis and dianoia occurred in this case through an interesting rereading. In his systematic commentary concerning Cartesian doctrine on the three degrees of sense for Descartes. J. Clauberg specified that the term sensus must be understood as the second of the three meanings indicated, viz. the perception of the soul united with the body. “Atque ego tibi assentior et addo, hanc mentis perceptionem, quae toto genere differt a corporis motu praecedente, proprie stricteque sensum nuncupari.” Senses expressed during sensory impressions, a judgment that could be true or false. The Cartesian distinction refers implicitly to three of the four different levels of analysis v. above, II that had long been superimposed and crisscrossed in the historical debate surrounding the nature and validity of sensations. With regard to those three levels, Descartes still felt a need for clarification, and he assigned them respectively to the realms of the physiology of sensation, to the psychology of sensation, and, finally, to the gnoseological aspect of the question. Vico and the sensus/sententia link There emerges from the texts a semantic flux revealing a continuity, in some respects unexpected, linking the principal meanings of sensus: sensation and sensory perception, intellectual perception, signification. Light is cast on this by linguistic analysis via the sensus/sententia nexus. Sensus is successively a sense organ, a faculty, the act of feeling, consciousness of feeling and thus sententia, opinion, cognitive judgment bearing on what has been sensed. Vico understood the full historical and philosophical import of philologico-linguistic analysis. Even as he attributed, in radical fashion, a fundamentally empiricist attitude to all the thinkers of antiquity including the Platonists, Vico properly recognized in the sensus/sententia derivation the linguistic expression of a very precise school of thought bearing the sensualist stamp, in contrast to the occasionalism of Malebranche and deriving from the Platonic-Augustinianism to which Vico adhered. The Romans, Vico observed with implicit reference to the degrees of sense distinguished by Descartes, understand by “sensus” not only external senses, such as sight, and inner senses, that is: those of the soul, such as pleasure, pain, and boredom; but they also name sensus judgments, deliberations, and desires De antiquissima Italorum sapienti. Proof of this is offered by certain linguistic expressions in which sententia is used for judgment or opinion. “Romani sensus appellatione non solum externos, ut sensus videndi, ex. gr., et internum, qui animi sensus dicebatur, ut dolorem voluptatem, molestiam, sed judicia, deliberationes et vota quoque accipiebant: ita sentio, ita judico; stat sententia, certum est; ex sententia evenit, uti desiderabam; et in formulis illud: ex animi tui sententi.” “Under sense, the Romans included not only the external senses e. g. , the sense of sight and inner sense such as pain, pleasure, and worry which they called animi sensus sense of the soul, but also judgments, deliberations, wishes; so in Roman, to say, ‘Ita sentio,’ ‘I sense that it is so’ ‘means’ that I *judge* that it is so; to say stat sententia my sentiment holds that means I am certain that; to say it turned out ex sententia it turned out in keeping with my sentiment means it turned out as I desired. And among their legal formulas is the expression ex animi tui sententia in keeping with your soul’s sentiment. Vico links the Platonists with the Stoics by virtue of their conception of reason as an ethereal and extremely fundamental article Uber Sinn und Bedeutung. The Sinn of a sentence or word is a distinct public entity belonging to or associated with a statement, whereas the “Bedeutung” is the reality designated by the sentence or word. Although Frege’s doublet structures much of the reflection on signification, it does not allow easy translating within the Graeco-Roman classical tradition that is dominant at Oxford. It is crucial to recall that analytic Phil. had its inception, from the beginning of the century, in a tr. into Eng. of a distinction formulated in a non-classical language, G. . The Eng. “mean,” like the Fr. word signification, is ambiguous, at times meaning Sinn, at others Bedeutung, and the fraught nature of ordinary usage is such that the word endlessly overrides the distinction. The massive transfer of the Phil. of language and theories of signification from G. to Oxonian Phil. brings all the dimensions and discussions of sense and reference to bear on the notorious “mean” and thus transformed the linguistic question of signification in its double valence sense and reference into the central and single philosophical problem of analytic Phil. From empiricism to Sinn/Bedeutung. The vague sense of meaning before Frege. The problem of a distinction between sense and reference is not posed in a framework in which language is assumed to refer to mental objects or ideas. Meaning is a relation between words and objects that can be either external or internal. It is of little consequence under such circumstances to know whether a palaeo-Griceian philosopher such as Hobbes had a referential or ideationist theory of signification since, in a sense, he didn’t have any at all, the sign-relation he evokes being a non-linguistic relation mental discourse produces verbal language, put into words Leviathan, pt. 1, ch. i. Meaning is a vague term, mental in cast, that designates the relation between words and objects or ideas designated as much as those objects or ideas themselves, as in Locke, for whom significations are ideas, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk. 4, ch.2, 4, It is not surprising that all of the Phil. of language following what is known as the linguistic turn seeks to criticize this notion of meaning defined as idea in order to reconceive it in terms of language. More dubious are those readings that project a theory of signification sense, reference in the contemporary sense onto those classical thinkers or, worse yet, who discover in them arguments for rementalizing sense v. Griceian author Hacking’s justified critique, “Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?” One should not, however, neglect the fact that there is a sense of meaning at the very heart of Oxonian empiricism that is not that far removed from contemporary usage — a properly linguistic—but also critical—sense. Hume thus envisaged in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding 2, a means for discounting the sense-laden use of a philosophical term. The term that would not have any would be impossible to derive from an impression. The link between the two senses of sense — sensation and meaning — may well have been forged here, not between mental idea and signification, but between impression sensation and signification sense. It would seem that only a critique, which is central in Hume, of what Quine would call the idea idea From a Logical Point of I am in agreement with you and I add that such perception of the soul, which differs absolutely from the movement of the body preceding it, is properly and strictly termed sense. De cognitione Dei et nostril. To sense is thus, properly speaking, to perceive, “Sensum proprie esse ac dici quam diximus perceptionem,” sense proper and properly speaking is what we have called perception; ibid., to think “clarissime intelligo, quomodo recte philosophantibus sentire sit cogitare” “I understand as clearly as possible that for those who philosophize correctly to sense is to think; ibid.; and, in support of this Cartesian thesis, he affirms that according to Physicus Strato of Lampsacus, aisthêsis and dianoia coincide. Clauberg writes: “Idem esse dixerit Strato Lampsacenus aisthêsin kai dianoian, id est, sensum et cogitationem mentis.” “Strato of Lampsacus has said that aisthêsis and dianoia are one and the same thing, that is, the sense and thought of the mind. Strato, Theophrastus’s successor at the head of the Lyceum, interpreted Aristotelian thought in an empiricist and naturalist sense and cast himself as the theoretician of sensory demonstration, ἀπόδειξις αἰσθητιϰή, developing a psychology of the reciprocal dependence of sensation and intellect v. Repellini, Il Liceo e la cultura alessandrina. Clauberg, for his part, tended to read Strato’s affirmation in the Cartesian manner: as a reduction of sense to thought. The question of the Cartesians was, Are seeing and sensing the province of the eye or of the mind? “Sitne mens quae videt, an oculus, an aliud quid?” Is it the mind that v.s or the eye, or something else?; De cognitione Dei et nostri; and the reply was as follows: to sense is the domain of the mind in unity with the body, for to sense is to perceive, entailing attention, apprenticeship, on the part of the mind, in the movements provoked in the brain by the action of external bodies on the sense organs. Wherein we note the ascendancy of the Platonic-Augustinian doctrine: Et maxime illud Aristotelis Probl. 33 sect. 11 “unde dictum Mens videt, mens audit.” This is above all what Aristotle says in the Problems where it is said that the mind v.s, the mind hears; ibid.; or further still. “Hunc secundum gradum sensus dico esse apprehensionem atque attentionem mentis, in ea cerebri parte, ad quam omnes externorum sensuum motus deveniunt, immediate residentis atque operantis.” “I say that this the second degree of sense is the apprehension or attention of the mind, which resides and operates in immediate fashion in that part of the brain where all the movements of the external senses finally arrive; ibid.. V. Sinn/Bedeutung, Meaning, Sense. The rest of the story autonomously develops the lexicon of the third sense of sense — a complex story implicating analytic Phil. as well as phenomenology and hermeneutics. The contemporary break is owed to Frege and the invention of the Sinn/Bedeutung difference, in which the contest between G. and Eng. is joined. We can, in fact, date the emergence of the concept of sense, Sinn, which, from its inception, was distinguished from reference, Bedeutung or denotation, as Claude Imbert translated it into Fr. in , to Frege and his View could open the path to a clear concept of signification. One finds in this passage in Hume the outline of a critique of the statements and terms of Met. via the criterion of signification to be charged with or stripped of meaning that would be brought to completion by Carnap. Similarly, but by virtue of a different approach, Berkeley, in his introduction to A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, criticizes abstract general ideas by advancing this argument: There is no such thing as one precise and definite signification annexed to any general name, they all signifying indifferently a great number of particular ideas. There emerges here the critique of what Quine would call “the myth of meaning,” the problem being not only to define meaning but also to isolate and fix it. Import/sense, meaning, signification. Eng. has at its disposal many more words than Fr. for conveying what Fr. calls sens and signification: “sense,” signification, meaning, appellation, and import. Every sentence or proposition has a sense or meaning, which may vary from one individual to another, or from one community to another. Sense is dependent on import, but cannot be confused with it, since import is more objective than sense. Import, not discourse, as Bentham put it laconically Essay on Language. As with the importation of a commodity or a service into an economic system, the import is at once the entry of a sign into a linguistic system and the drift that is initiated within it once that inaugural event occurs and that it is possible to retrace in a relatively objective manner. Entry and drift may be overlooked by meaning and sense, which are entirely synchronic in orientation; on the other hand, import cannot be discussed without implying an awareness of the diachrony of meaning. What etymology v.ks to reactivate is plainly the import, a term that is almost untranslatable in Fr. other than by the expression sens etymologique, which is an overtr.. The economic and dynamic sense of import. However original it may be, English, like all languages, is composed of borrowings from other languages: In the stock of words of which the Eng. language is composed, a very considerable, not to say the largest, portion, are borrowed from some one or other of several foreign languages; in some instances at a very early date, in others at different points of time from the remotest down to the most recent. Bentham, Essay on Language. The import dynamic consists of a more or less forced entry into a system and the provoking of a perturbation—with the ongoing necessity of reequilibrating the system. The import is also the transmission of that initial shock, to the extent that it can be preserved. The import is what is conveyed within the language; it is, in a tr., what one v.ks to transfer from one language to another, without, however, any hope of guaranteeing the absolute identity of what is being transferred. The diachronic dimension of the import. One thus perceives the difference that exists between import, on the one hand, and sense or meaning, on the other: the philosophers, who speak in the language that they study and in which they conduct their analyses, strain to achieve awareness of the import, which is radically forgotten by those who, being mystified or hypnotized by the object, imagine they are grasping a meaning that they forge without knowing or mastering it. The import is what philosophers attempt to retrieve through their etymological labor, which reverses the historical order, since, in starting with a fiction, which always has sense and meaning, they aim at the actual entity from which it is derived. Import and original are constantly linked by Bentham: whatever the case for originality, the import can be grasped only indirectly, by questioning the immediate meaning. In every language, words are found in clusters growing out of the same root. Whatsoever be the cluster to which the word in question belongs, the comprehension a man has of its import is comparatively imperfect, if it includes not a more or less general acquaintance with the whole cluster to which it belongs. Essay on Language. It is that path, both logical and historical, that philosophers must be able to retrace if they are to fulfill the task that J. S. Mill assigned to intellectuals, that of knowing the sources of the words with which they speak: To common minds, only that portion of the meaning is in each generation suggested, of which that generation possesses the counterpart in its own habitual experience. But the words and propositions lie ready to suggest to any mind duly prepared the remainder of the meaning. Such individual minds are almost always to he found; and the lost meaning, revived by them, again by degrees works its way into the general mind. A System of Logic, bk. 4, ch.4. Bentham subtly distinguishes between what he calls logical history, which ideally reconstructs the order in time as well as the logic of removes, that is, the order of fictive entities in their degrees of distance from real entities, and chronological history, which designates the far more chaotic course of time but which philosophers should also understand if they are intent on grasping the reality of the import rather than submitting to what fallaciously appears of it in meaning: Language has its logical and its chronological history: its logical history shows what must have been the order of formation among the elements of language— shows it from the nature of man, shows it from the circumstances in which all men are placed, shows it from circumstantial evidence. The chronological history of language shows what has actually been. Essay on Language. It may be said that the notion of import, as developed in these remarks, stems from Benthamian, rather than from the English, language and derives its meaning only within a thematic specific to Bentham. In actuality, Mill mentions it as well e.g., in A System of Logic, bk. 1, ch.5, in order to deal with the meaning of propositions and is familiar with the problematic, although continued reestablish the bond between the first and second philosophies of Witters. Another source of confusion and slippage is the Wittgensteinian distinction between unsinnig and sinnlos which are translated respectively as nonsensical and without sense. Tautology and contradiction are deprived of sense: they are sinnlos, but not nonsensical, unsinnig. They do not present a state of things but are nonetheless part of language. In various interpretations of Witters by the Vienna Circle, sinnlos became what was radically derived of sense and consequently to be excluded from language. In Overcoming Met., Carnap thus makes the transition from the absence of the Bedeutung of the term no empirical content to the absence of the sense of its statements impossible linguistic constructs. In reducing the distinction between sense and denotation, thought and empirical content, one obtained a kind of hybrid for which the term meaning which would become signification in philosophical Fr. worked rather well. Meaning thus became the criterion for distinguishing between statements deemed acceptable or not in the framework of a scientific Phil. . Every problem of knowledge became translatable as a problem of meaning. The basis for such a criterion for distinguishing between statements endowed with meaning or not resides in what has been called a verificationist theory of meaning, which defines the meaning of a proposition with Schlick as the method of its verification. That concept of meaning was now in turn a curious retr. of a proposition in the Tractatus, tr. by English emotivist C. K. Ogden tr.: “Einen Satz verstehen, heisst wissen was der Fall ist, wenn er wahr ist.” “To understand a proposition is to know what the case is when it is true. In point of fact, Wittgenstein, far from suggesting a method of verification, was affirming the effective bond between meaning and truth. E. g. 022: Des Satz zeigt seinen Sinn. “Der Satz zeigt, wie es sich verhält, wenn er wahr ist.” The proposition shows its sense. The proposition shows how it is, when it is true. Frege’s invention The distinction introduced by Frege created an objectivist break within a rather confused semantic field. Indeed, neither Bedeutung denotation or reference, the object designated nor Sinn the meaning of the proposition, the thought it expresses was defined by Frege in terms of ideas or mental content v. the text Der Gedanke Thought, 191 Frege was not content to transform or perfect the concept of sense: he invented it, breaking with the entire philosophical tradition of determining meaning in mental—or, in any event, prelinguistic—terms. He objectified Sinn as he did thought, Gedanke, with whose definition he is associated as absolutely independent from the thinking or speaking subject. The introduction of Sinn along with that of Bedeutung thus effected a depsychologization of questions reRomang to language—that may have been subsequently attenuated by tr.s of Sinn as meaning/sense or sens/signification in Fr. . A further difficulty, of which Frege was aware, was then raised by the universality of sense and its independence of specific languages. Sinn original Sinn in the pun much appreciated by a few philosophers in the s was originally defined as the common endowment of languages and a cultural invariant, thus bearing the seeds of its own critique within itself, specifically by way of the problematics of tr. and, more generally, of linguistic difference and relativity. Wittgenstein’s new distinctions and the confusion of the Eng. tr.s In the tradition initiated by Frege, the critique of meaning in the mental or psychological sense would continue. Wittgenstein, in Tractatus logico-philosophicus, would take up and modify the Sinn/Bedeutung distinction. According to the Tractatus 3, only a proposition Satz has a meaning Sinn, a name or a primitive sign has a denotation Bedeutung and represents vertritt the object. The Eng. tr. of the Tractatus 1922 by C. K. Ogden employs “meaning” for Bedeutung, creating a lasting ambiguity. Russell, in his introduction, thus has meaning serve for both the sense of the proposition Satz-Sinn, and the denotation of the component sign. All those tr.s would contribute to a standard interpretation of the Tractatus, which has only recently begun to be cast off in order to he does not always articulate it with terminological distinctions as systematic as those found in Bentham. Curiously, like Hume, he utilizes it more often as a (‘diaphanous,’ in Grice’s use) VERB, or a part thereof, as in the past participle, ‘what is imported,, in the logical sense of entailing or implying. It should unfortunately be added that when Mill specifically retains the noun, the Fr. translator of A System of Logic, Peisse, pays no attention to it and treats “import” as though he were dealing with meaning; on occasion, he even overlooks the term completely and leaves it out—but it is not easy to proceed differently. Refs.: Bentham, Jeremy. Essay on Language. In vol. 8 of The Works of Jeremy Bentham. 11 vols. Edinburgh: Bowring, 18384 Reprint, : Russell & Russell, . Mill, J. Stuart. Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society. In vol. 10 of Collected Works of J. Stuart Mill, ed. by J. M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 9 . A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive. Vols. 1 and 2 of Collected Works of J. Stuart Mill, ed. by J. M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 9 Tr. L. Peisse: Système de logique. Brussels: Mardaga, “The Bounds of Sense,” an influential work devoted to Kant’s first Critique: P. F. Strawson introduced a “principle of significance” that transformed the problem of the limits of knowledge and “sensibility” into a semantic question: that of the limits of sense of the domain in which our questions make sense. His position, extremely influential in analytic Phil. , was given clear and radical form in the last sentence of that work, in which he affirmed the impossibility of according meaning to a question beyond the limits of our language: We lack the words to say how it would be without them. Strawson’s “The Bounds of Sense” thus represents a turning point wherein the empiricist theme of the limits of our sensibility shades into the logico-linguistic theme of the limits of our language and thus of meaning, what Strawson and later Quine would call our conceptual scheme. That history has recently been summarized by Hilary Putnam, who describes the transition effected by analytic Phil. from radical empiricism to semantic theories, followed by its more recent return to theories of perception and the senses in Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses. In point of fact, the dual sense of sense reflects the dual heritage of analytic Phil. and all the ambiguity of its constitution: it lays claim to the heritage of Oxonian empiricism for which, to borrow Quine’s pun, only sense makes sense Theories and Things, even as it remains the Oxonian continuation of what A. Coffa has defined as the “semantic” tradition stemming from Frege and Carnap, whose investigations focused on sentences or statements as semantic units. The efforts of historians currently underway on the origins of analytic Phil. and logical empiricism will perhaps result in an understanding of how that dual empiricist and semantic tradition, when added to the specifically tradition of pragmatism, succeeded in producing the multiplicity of theories of signification and in maintaining, in most cases, its twofold dimension. Superimposed on the entire complex, finally, is sense in the sense of good sense, rationality. An illustration may be found in the title of J. L. Austin’s “Sense and Sensibilia,” which refers to Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility translated into Fr. as “Raison et Sentiments.” Ogden and Richards and the meaning of meaning Reflection on the meaning of meaning runs through the entirety of analytic Phil. , as evidenced by the celebrated essay by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, “The Meaning of Meaning.” It is a v.that is somewhat forgotten at present or at least it was until a recent reedition with a preface by U. Eco but that exerted considerable influence in its day. Grice read it. Putnam, for instance, would take up Ogden and Richards’s title in his famous article The Meaning of ‘Meaning’  with the extra quotation marks making all the difference, in which he sketches out — as a critique of Frege’s Sinn — a causal theory of reference. Ogden’s and Richards’s essay, even as it situates itself in the Frege-Witters line of ascent, plays on the diversity of senses ascribable to meaning. For them, meaning designates both Frege’s Sinn and his Bedeutung. The Eng. tr. of Tractatus logico-philosophicus, by Ogden, uses meaning for Bedeutung and sense for Sinn. It is remarkable that this superimposition of meaning on truth on the possibility of being true or false should subsequently become a determination of meaning in terms of originary experiences, which is rather removed from the perspective of the Tractatus. Indeterminacy of the tr.s The ambiguities of meaning and sense The contrast between the distinction proposed by Frege, which has become classic, indeed structural, in analytic Phil. , and ordinary English, which is characterized by the flexibility with which meaning is used, is considerable. Sinn, like Bedeutung, fell prey from the outset to a certain indetermination in tr., being rendered on some occasions as “sense” or on others as meaning, or even as denotation or significatum. It may seem curious that meaning is utilized indifferently to translate Sinn and Bedeutung by philosophers. Russell is the most striking example who elsewhere take up on their own or at least are familiar with Frege’s distinction. It was only once DENOTATUM or RELATUM -- reference and denotation were imposed as tr.s of Bedeutung that a first clarification of the status of meaning was achieved. Meaning would partake rather of the realm of Sinn as in Quine. Imbert translated Bedeutung in Fr. as dénotation in order to bring into relief the full force of Frege’s gesture. The tr. did not really catch on in Fr. , which, following the most frequent usage in English, prefers référence in as much as some would distinguish between denoting and referring Bertrand Russell, P. F. Strawson. In an edition of Frege’s Nachlass, still other translators recently decided to translate Bedeutung as signification in Fr. and not as référence, which would be closer to standard Eng. usage. As P. de Rouilhan has noted, To be sure, what Frege designated in his day as Bedeutung is what we Fr. -speaking logician-philosophers today designate as référence. But what logico-philosophical G. designated in Frege’s day as Bedeutung is what we today designate as signification. It is not for us to rectify Frege’s deviations about which Husserl complains n relation to his own language by which we mean not a certain idiolect, but the language of a certain community. It befell us to transpose them into our own, and that is what we were able to do as simply as possible by translating Bedeutung as signification. Intro. to Frege, Écrits posthumes That choice, however, introduces a sens/signification doublet in Fr. , which seems insufficiently clear and scarcely differential. It was on the tr. of Sinn by sense in English and sens in Fr. that agreement was easiest to achieve. To be sure, the term itself was subject to an ambiguity, this time common to Eng. and G. , as well as to Fr. , viz. the semantic sense (SIGNATUM, COMMUNICATUM) and the sensory sense of sense (SENSUM). It is perhaps here, in the analytic field, that the origin of the verificationist definitions of meaning, particularly in the interpretation of the Tractatus by the Vienna Circle, is to be found. Evidence is provided by P. F. Strawson’s The Bounds of Sense.” wide fields of custom, of social psychology and of tribal organization which correspond to one term or another. We see that linguistic analysis inevitably leads us into the study of all the subjects covered by Ethnographic field-work. Malinowski, The Problem of Meaning. This anthropological dimension of meaning would be developed in the positions of Quine, positions based on a circumstance of radical tr. v. Ogden and Richards thus proposed a recasting of the notion of meaning, which can be associated in their work with the emergence of pragmatics. Their principal references for such a renewal, enumerated and described successively, are, in order, Husserl, Russell, Frege, Gomperz, and, finally, Peirce. The lectures delivered by Husserl, and particularly their abstracts in English, are cited to bring into relief his theory of meaning. That was obviously the tr. used by Ogden and Richards for Bedeutung when they presented several excerpts from Logical Investigations, a circumstance relevant to the extent that in those passages Husserl makes rather undifferentiated use of Sinn and Bedeutung. Here, too, it will be v.n how the use of meaning allows one to associate, as though naturally, the two dimensions distinguished by Frege and which the Eng. language had such trouble differentiating clearly. The adaptation of the vocabulary of Viennese empiricism, or how meaning slipped from Sinn to Bedeutung A crucial moment in the history of meaning in the twentieth century was the introduction of philosophers of the Vienna Circle expelled, of an entire lexicon belonging to Viennese empiricism. It was through Carnap, brought to the United States by Quine, who had met him in Vienna, that Frege’s distinction in the transformed version just evoked would be introduced. Quine, who had The Logical Syntax of Language translated into English, played a crucial role. In Logical Syntax, Bedeutung and Sinn are both rendered by meaning sense or meaning, 14, theorem 14- In presenting Carnap’s work and his project of Phil. as syntax, Quine called meaning Bedeutung and articulated the idea of a description of language that would have recourse to neither sense nor denotation which, along with Carnap, he would subsequently propose to call “intension” and “extension” but which both thinkers would continue to reject. Thus it was that meaning, from sense, became in a way, through the beginnings of the critique of the notion of signification, reference. Quine and the myth of meaning. In a series of theses that would figure at the center of Phil. Quine waged an assault on the myth of meaning. He was not aiming only at a certain confused use of meaning, in the manner of Ogden and Richards, but also proposed a more radical critique directed first of all at the meaning of ‘scientists of language,’ so-called ‘linguists.’ The Problem of Meaning in Linguistics, in From a Logical The Ogden-Richards v.claims to be simultaneously a presentation of the different meanings of meaning and a critique. But the essay does not always elude the objections it formulates against philosophical theories of meaning, notably in its elaboration of an emotive theory of signification, which was inspired by Witters and which would prevail in analytic—and particularly meta-ethical—Phil. In chapter 8 of their book, Ogden and Richards lodge a deflationary attack against the inflation of the different senses of meaning, of which they list at least sixteen uses. This omnipresence of the word meaning is for them a sign of inadequate reflection with regard to the functions of symbols, a clarification of which would be imperative in keeping with their will to found a semiotics which would serve to inspire C. W. Morris, one of the popularisers of the Vienna Circle. Among the uses that are classified and criticized in The Meaning of Meaning, two beside the well-known sense of importance are deserving of our attention. On the one hand, an “intentional” usage (COMMUNICATUM as INTENTUM), which is facilitated by the Eng. gerund mean-ing and which yields a noun-form of the verb to mean — as in “What *I* mean” -- is analyzed, designates both the signification and the intention of a proposition; that dual dimension of meaning enables an easier assimilation of theories of intentionality by the Phil. of language. On the other hand, a perceptual usage, which was criticized by Ogden and Richards for its imprecision, particularly in Sellars in an essay in Mind and in his “Critical Realism,” for whom meaning is added to the content of perception or serves to structure it. It is in this connection that Ogden and Richards note that the one inevitable source of misunderstanding and disagreement, the omnipresence of the term Meaning, was allowed to pass unchallenged. It seems to have been accepted without question into the vocabulary of Phil. , for use on all occasions of uncertainty. It was naturally in psychology that Ogden and Richards found the most misleading forms of that usage as well as of the meaning-perception association, but they also launched an attack on philosophers close to the analytic trend, such as Cambridge philosopher, G. E. Moore (“It is raining, but I don’t mean it”) and Dewey, who all have their own uses of the word, obvious yet undefined. Finally, they advanced for the first time a dimension of meaning that might be called anthropological. The term meaning is omnipresent in Malinowski, whose texts on meaning in anthropology are included in an appendix to The Meaning of Meaning. Meanings, in the plural, refers to cultural diversity pluralities of signification, expression, and language. Everything thus becomes a search for meaning in sociology and anthropology, Weber and Malinowski adopted an elaborated form of the concept of Sinn: All this shows the wide and complex considerations into which we are led by an attempt to give an adequate analysis of meaning. Instead of translating, of inserting simply an Eng. word for a native one, we are faced by a long and not altogether simple process of describing an intention? The problem of such meaning “meinen” was already raised in the Tractatus in relation to solipsism. “Was des Solipsismus nämlich ‘meint’ ist ganz richtig, nur lässt es sich nicht *sagen*.” What solipsism ‘means’ is quite precise, only it cannot be uttered. Tr. Ogden: what solipsism means. We are confronted here with a “meinen” that partakes of neither Sinn nor Bedeutung and that is well rendered by the Fr. “veut dire,” implicating, “mais non dit.” Wittgenstein’s meaning or vouloir dire is not an attempt to ‘say,’ otherwise than through ‘explicit’ language something that cannot be said clearly. For Wittgenstein, if an expression is without meaning, it has none anywhere. As Diamond puts it: There is not a thought shorn of sense that would be expressed by a proposition shorn of sense The Realistic Spirit. It is a point that Witterswould express in the Philosophical Investigations: When one says that a phrase has no meaning, it is not, so to speak, that its meaning has no meaning. This brought him to determine the meaning of our ordinary statements, and such is the question that opens The Blue Book. What is the meaning of a word? Therein lies the whole question of ordinary-language Phil. , which began with the second Wittgenstein, who proposed that meanings should no longer be sought elsewhere, outside language, but rather at our feet, as it were: in our daily usage. That emergence in the second Witters of a new concept of the verb “to mean” guided the choices of the Fr. translators of the last edition of The Blue Book, in which, for meaning, the translators proposed “sens” and for the verbal form, “vouloir-dire” instead of “signifier.” Thus was laid out an entire line of tr. of meaning altogether different from the previous semantic tradition and that would follow Wittgenstein’s celebrated indication: meaning = use. Meaning, or vouloir-dire in Fr. , would be determined by what I do with language. The whole of J. L. Austin’s method, which is a radical critique of the traditional analytic notion of signification first in his essay, “The ‘Meaning’ of a ‘Word’” then in his theory of the performative, was based on a new kind of inquiry into meaning as vouloir-dire; knowing what I mean is knowing what I say when, what our relation to a statement is in the complete discursive or conversational situation. In “Do I Mean I Explicitly Convey?” Stanley Cavell presses the question of intentional or unintentional meaning furthest. Cavell delves into the claim of the ordinary-language philosophers Witters and Austin to say and know what we say and what we mean. Cavell shows that such intentional meaning— vouloir-dire — can be determined only through a consideration of the language community and its judgments. I am he who explicitly convey what I mean, but who is this “I”, and what is it that grounds my relation to it? Cavell’s conclusion is radical. I am the only possible source of meaning, which emerges from my agreement to signify or to mean is übereinstimmen, to harmonize or resonate together and, in circular fashion, serves to found it and is founded on it alone. To accept to signify or mean is to accept that agreement and to be accepted by it. The question of meaning is thus transformed: it is no longer one of the boundary between sense and nonsense, of language’s capacity to mean something, but, on the contrary, one of the refusal of Point of View. Now despite the self-proclaimed fidelity of Quine to Frege, Quine’s critique challenged the founding father of analytic Phil. by attacking what had been one of the achievements of Frege’s semantics: the ideality of meaning. The celebrated thesis of the indeterminacy of tr. is a gavagi a rabbit? v. Word and Object, ch.2; vwas initially an attack against the meanings of the linguists, the significations of the mentalists, the semantics of Carnap, and even the Sinn of Frege: there is no more an empirical signification than there is analyticity, no more a mental meaning than there is a shared fixed point between languages. Thank Frege, it was all refuted by H. P. Grice in his “Defense of a Dogma.” But—and this is a consequence that Quine himself calls unexpected — his thesis no less calls into question reference itself, the matter of knowing what I am speaking about, with the thesis of ontological relativity and inscrutability or, to use Quine’s most recent expression, the indeterminacy of reference. The radicalism of this critique has not always been well received by post-Quinians, who have attempted to restore different ways of meaning e.g., Davidson, who attempts to reconstruct meaning on the basis of the concept of truth as defined by Tarski or to show that Quine’s thesis would be tantamount to making all language impossible Putnam. The confusion of dualities—intension/extension, sense/ reference—within meaning was thus paradoxically justified a posteriori or, at the very least, explained in the shared critique of those entities undertaken by the Phil. of language starting in the s. The extent to which these sceptical theses are currently debated is well known. It is therefore a matter of some oddity that it was in France and in Fr. that Quine first presented his thesis of the indeterminacy of tr. in 1958, at the Royaumont colloquium, under the title “Le mythe de la signification,” in which the word signification could, in fact, accommodate all the senses and also all the impasses of meaning. There remained a considerable difficulty: the relation between to mean and meaning. Must we mean what we say? The absence of a standard tr. of meaning in Fr. , and more generally the dual character as noun and verb of meaning, was highlighted in the following sentence by Quine: One can perhaps talk of meaning without talking of meanings. An expression, metabolically, ‘means’; meaning is what it does Theories and Things. Whereupon Quine made reference to Fr. , which he deemed superior: cela veut dire. But it is clear that the verbal, or active, character of meaning confers a supplementary dimension on the Eng. term as in the untranslatable expression to make sense as well. Moreover, the verb to mean is untranslatable in Fr. “Signifier” is too technical; “vouloir dire,” often inadequate, introduces an intentional aspect in certain contexts. Now all reflection on ordinary language in Phil. of language after Witters is centered on this dual use of mean and the immediate relation between mean and meaning, which is absent from Fr. and G. . To signify is to mean, but is every signification ‘intentional’? And is meaning—vouloir dire, wanting to say—always wanting to say something, expressing. Refs.: Albertus Magnus, Saint. De An.. In Opera omnia, ed. by Clemens Stroick. Münster, Ger.: Aschendorff, . Anselm, Saint. De grammatico. In Opera omnia, ed. by Francis S. Schmitt. Edinburgh: Nelson, 194 Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Tr.. Ed. by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton / Bollingen, . Ashworth, E. J. Studies in Post-Medieval Semantics. London: Variorum Reprints, . Augustine, Saint. De dialecticEd. and Tr. Darrell Jackson. Dordrecht, Neth.: D. Reidel, . Austin, J. L. Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Clarendon, . . Sense and SensibiliOxford: Clarendon, . Baker, Gordon P. Wittgenstein, Frege, and the Vienna circle. Oxford: Blackwell, . Bouveresse, Jacques. Dire et ne rien dire: L’illogisme, l’impossibilité et le non-sens. Nîmes, Fr.: Jacqueline Chambon, . Brachet, J.-Paul. Réflexions sur l’évolution sémantique de significare. In Conceptions Romanes du sens et de la signification, ed. by Marc Baratin and Claude Moussy, 293 : Presses de l’Université Sorbonne, . Carnap, Rudolph. The Logical Syntax of Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 193 Cassin, BarbarAristote et le logos. : Presses Universitaires de France, . Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Oxford , . . Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge , . Clauberg, J. es. De cognitione Dei et nostri. In Opera omnia philosophicHildesheim, Ger.: Olms, . First published in 169 Coffa, Alberto. The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap. Cambridge: Cambridge , . Copenhaver, Brian P., editor. Hermetica: The Grecian Corpus Hermeticum and the Roman Asclepius in a New Eng. Tr.. Cambridge: Cambridge , . Cuvillier, Armand. Vocabulaire philosophique. : Armand Colin, 195 expression and meaning, which is precisely that of scepticism. Why do we attach significance to any words and deeds, of others or of ourselves? How can anything we say or do count as doodling, be some form of nonsense; and why is all the rest condemned to meaning? Cavell, The Claim of Reason; and also, for the Aristotelian background, which often goes unnoticed. For Cavell, it is the repression of this dimension of meaning that may well have been accomplished by the whole of contemporary thought about sense, the various definitions and critiques of signification being but the masks donned by our refusal of expression. A fantasy of necessary inexpressiveness would solve a simultaneous set of metaphysical problems. For Cavell, what is thus repressed is plainly not the idea of intention or intentionality, whose past and present philosophical fortunes are well known, but the power of language itself to mean, making of me, so to speak, the bearer of its meaning. From this point of view, Cavell has pursued in his way the labour of de-psychologizing meaning inaugurated by Frege and Wittgenstein, continued by J. L. Austin, and occasionally voided in various contemporary determinations and even critiques of signification. Feeling A vast complexity in aesthetics, Phil. , and psychology, feeling evokes everything from physical sensation to emotional affect. Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling 1771 epitomized the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, an answer to scientific positivism, material economics, and military might. Romanticism gave feeling cognitive and philosophical heft. In a succinct essay On Gusto 1816, describing power or passion defining any object, W. Hazlitt argued for truth in feeling—this power and truth at once reorganizing rational epistemologies and purging for masculine aesthetics the stigma of feminine weakness and effeminate sensibility. The Hazlitt-admiring poet J. Keats equated feeling with knowledge itself: we read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the Author; if he bristled at W. Wordsworth’s poetic didacticism, he admired his poetic power in making his reader feel the ‘burden of the Mystery’ in his dark passages letter to J. Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May 1818, quoting Tintern Abbey. As he lay dying, he wrote of his feeling of my real life having passed and, paradoxically, of his still keen feeling for light and shade, all that information primitive sense necessary for a poem letter to Charles Brown, 30 November 181 Wordsworth blazoned a poetics of feeling in his preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads 1800, setting this as a principle opposite to narrative action, a value superior to rational understanding, a science in itself, and an antidote to the degrading popular appetite for works of outrageous stimulation. Careful to say that the poet is one who has thought long and deeply, he identified All good poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, and his poetry as one in which feeling gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling. This import and power are not uncontested. To Mary Wollstonecraft, women were degraded by false sentiments and overstretched feelings at the expense of salutary natural emotions and rational maturity A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 179 Coleridge argued that feeling was but one element for poetic imagination—a power revealed in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession, with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement. The genius of creating images modified by a predominant passion, moreover, requires remoteness from personal sensations and experiences; Shakespeare’s power entails the alienation the utter aloofness of the poet’s own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst Biographia Literaria, 181 This standard sustains T. S. Eliot’s high modernist maxim that Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; he wasn’t advocating emotional vacuity, only crucially personal emotions Tradition and the Individual Talent, 191 The question is never resolved. Beat poets would revivify the pulse of feeling, both in the extravagant shaping of poetry on the page and in energetic performances on the stage. Susan Wolfson Roesch, Sophie. Res et verbum dans le De Lingua Romana de Varrón. In Conceptions Romanes du sens et de la signification, ed. by Marc Baratin and Claude Moussy, 6580. : Presses de l’Université Sorbonne, . Rosier, Irène. Res significata et modus significandi. Les enjeux lingistiques et théologiques d’une distinction médiévale. In Sprachtheorien in Spätantike und Mittelalter, ed. by Sten Ebeesen, 1356 Tübingen: Gunter Narr, . Ruello, Francis. Les noms divins et leurs raisons selon saint Albert le Grand, commentateur du De divinis nominibus. : Vrin, . Schaeffer, J. D. 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