Bridging the Gap between the Meaning of Natural Language and Mental Content.

Since Frege, mental content (conscious content) has been separated from the meaning of natural language, with mental content not regarded as the meaning of linguistic expressions. This anti-psychological view severs the connection between linguistic meaning and mental content, leading to failures in solving problems of mind. The author argues that people attach meaning to symbols through communication activities when they have mental contents, thereby forming language—a process that also achieves psychological certainty. The relationship between linguistic meaning and mental content is similar to the interdependent relationship between monetary value and the use value of commodities: without the latter, the former loses its source, and the former also affects the latter. Based on these arguments and previous theories, the paper conceives a general model of the generation of linguistic meaning.

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Abstract

Since Frege, mental content (conscious content) has been distinguished from the meaning of natural language and not regarded mental content as the meaning of language expression. This anti-psychological view cuts off the connection between the meaning of language and mental content, giving rise to the failures in solving the problems of mind. Instead of thinking about linguistic meaning and mental content separately, philosophers of mind put more emphasis on mental content and even equate the meaning of linguistic expressions with it. Therefore, the issues that what the relationship between linguistic meaning and mental content is and how they are connected are not well answered so far. The author argues in this paper that: 1) People attach meaning to symbols through communication activities when they have mental contents, thus forming the language, which is also a process of achieving psychological certainty in turn; 2) the relationship between linguistic meaning and mental content is similar to the interdependent relationship between monetary value and the use value of commodities. Without the latter, the former will lose its source, and the former also affects the latter. Philosophers of mind pay little attention to the interplay between language and mental content. Based on the above arguments and previous theories, this paper conceives a general model of the generation of linguistic meaning.