Ideas and Sentences

John Locke said: "God, having designed man for a sociable creature, made him not only with an inclination, and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind, but furnished him also with language, which was to be the great instrument and common tie of society. Man, therefore, had by nature his organs so fashioned, as to be fit to frame articulate sounds, which we call words. But this was not enough to produce language. It was farther necessary that he should be able to use these sounds as signs of internal conceptions, and to make them stand as marks for the ideas within his own mind, whereby they might be made known to others."

Ian Hacking comments: "The fundamental 17th century node occupied by 'ideas' is nowadays taken over by 'the sentence'.

Wilard Quine says: " The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences."

Frege is often quoted as saying that "it is only in the context of a sentence that a word has meaning." Michael Dummett precises that it is only by means of a sentence that we may perform a linguistic act, and the general notion of the sense posessed by a sentence must be capable of being explained without reference to the notion of the senses of constituent words or expressions. To grasp the sense of a sentence is to know the conditions under which that sentence is true, and the conditions under which it is false." [p5 Dummett on Frege]

Paul Grice: The distinction between meaning and use has found many applications in philosophy, linguistics and artificial intelligence. Both the analytic/synthetic distinction, which relies on a conception of truth by virtue of meaning, and the idea of a conversational implicature require for their full philosophical development a theory of meaning. Grice provided the beginning of a theory of meaning starting with his 1957 paper “Meaning” and elaborated in later papers (Grice 1968, 1969, 1982). The basic idea was to explain the timeless conventional meaning of a sentence type in terms of the occasion meanings of tokens of those sentences, i.e., what those sentence tokens meant when they were produced. In turn, sentence token meaning was to be understood in terms of what speakers intended when producing those sentence tokens. Thus ultimately the abstract notion of sentence meaning was to be understood in terms of specific intentions of speakers on specific occasions. [SEP]