Means for Meaning

There are many different ways to use the term meaning. It is modified by such adjectives as subjective, objective, universal, referential, pragmatic, mathematical, context-bound, context-free, shared, and taken-as-shared, to name a few. Such modifying adjectives could lead one to suspect that the word meaning is not very meaningful or is even meaningless. From the Wittgensteinian (1977) standpoint, different meanings of meaning are connected to each other by a family resemblance, without their sharing any common core (such as in Wittgenstein’s famous example of the concept of game). For my part, I take the position that it does not make sense, in a general way, to ask a question such as, “What is meaning?” One might ask for the meaning of a specific term, such as for the number two. But even that question quickly leads everywhere and nowhere, because for any answer that can be formulated finitely, one can surely point out some aspect that has not been included yet. And, even more important, any relevant answer will refer to many other words or concepts and their meaning(s).