Deutsche Gesellschaft
für phänomenologische Forschung

Series | Buch | Kapitel

194240

The nonsense of meaning

Wolff-Michael Roth

pp. 159-178

Abstrakt

The construct of meaning is a rather ambiguous one and, as semioticians have noted, it is a term used in very different senses. In one and the same essay, von Glasersfeld uses the term (a) in the sense of dictionary sense (Kant's German Vorstellung and Darstellung as two "meanings' of the term representation), which, by definition, can be found in a dictionary; and (b) in the sense of something that does "not travel through space and must under all circumstances be constructed in the heads of the language users." Drawing on everyday examples, I articulate—following such philosophers as the late L. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, but also more recent language philosophers such as R. Rorty, D. Davidson, and J. Derrida—a theoretical approach in which the difference between forms of language and the world in which they are used is undecidable. There is no meaning that people construct, of words or situations, there is only increasing familiarity of the places that we inhabit and in which we dwell.

Publication details

Published in:

Roth Wolff-Michael (2011) Passibility: at the limits of the constructivist metaphor. Dordrecht, Springer.

Seiten: 159-178

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-1908-8_9

Referenz:

Roth Wolff-Michael (2011) The nonsense of meaning, In: Passibility, Dordrecht, Springer, 159–178.