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meaning

In philosophy and linguistics, the sense of a linguistic expression, sometimes understood in contrast to its referent. For example, the expressions “the morning star” and “the evening star” have different meanings, though their referent (Venus) is the same. Some expressions have meanings but no referents (“the present king of France”) or referents but no meanings (“that”). The literal or conventional meaning of an expression may differ from what a speaker of that expression means by uttering it on a particular occasion; this is the case with similes, statements uttered ironically, and statements that convey various “conversational implicatures,” as in the following examples: “She entered the house and shot him” implicates that she shot him in the house after she entered it, though this is not part of the sentence's literal meaning; “John has three sons” implicates that John has no more than three sons, though again the sentence does not literally say this. Other non-literal aspects of meaning include the potential for carrying out various “speech acts” (see speech act theory); e.g., uttered in the appropriate circumstances, the sentence “I christen thee the Joseph Stalin,” constitutes the act of naming a ship, and the sentence “I am cold” constitutes a request to close the window. See also pragmatics; semantics.

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meaning

Philosophy

a. the sense of an expression; its connotation

b. the reference of an expression; its denotation. In recent philosophical writings meaning can be used in both the above senses

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Meaning 

the content linked with some expression (word, proposition, sign) of a certain language.

The meaning of linguistic expressions is studied in linguistics, logic, and semiotics. In the science of language, meaning is understood as the sense content of a word. In logic and semiotics the meaning (in Anglo-American philosophy, the reference) of a linguistic expression is understood as that object or class of objects that are designated (named) by the expression (the referential, or extensional, meaning), while the.sense (in Anglo-American philosophy, the meaning) of the expression (sense, or intentional, meaning) implies its thought content—that is, that information contained in the expression by means of which the ascription of the expression to some object (objects) occurs. For example, the referential meanings of the expressions “evening star” and “morning star” refer to one and the same object—the planet Venus—but their thought contents, or sense meanings, are different. Questions of the criteria for equivalence of meanings (senses)—that is, the criteria of synonomy of linguistic expressions—is one of the problems studied by logical semantics.