Aristotle's Theory of Language and Meaning (review)

The four chapters forming Part 1 give a detailed exposition of Aristotle’s understanding of meaning in his De Interpretatione and show its relevance within his general views on language and knowledge. In Ch. 1, Modrak, a recognized scholar in the field, begins by suggesting that the context of Aristotle’s thoughts is Plato’s attacks against two contrasting philosophical theories of language in Cratylus, namely, that either words are conventional signs and have arbitrary meanings or they are natural signs, like smoke that signals fire. Aristotle offers a compromise: The relation between written and spoken words is conventional, as is the relation between spoken words and the mental state evoked by these words. But the relation between the mental state and its external object is natural and is the same for all humans. Hence different languages use different sounds for the same object. M then explains in Ch. 2 that Aristotle opts for a correspondence theory of truth. Thus sentences about extralinguistic objects are true if what they assert corresponds to the reality. Moreover, they are necessarily true if the corresponding reality is unchanging. Furthermore, as shown in Ch. 3, the meaning of words lies in their capacities to indicate objects. Ch. 4 describes how this ostensive definition of meaning perfectly accounts for Aristotle’s view that knowledge in sciences, that is, metaphysics, physics, and mathematics, is indicative of the physical objects or their properties or, in the case of abstraction, of other objects deriving from them.

The two chapters that constitute Part 2 examine whether the theory of meaning reconstructed above is consistent with Aristotle’s ontology as found in Metaphysics. Ch. 5 explains that for Aristotle, a verbal definition of an object gives an ostensive definition of its form (eidos). Subsequently Ch. 6 focuses on Aristotle’s ontological claims that forms exist in the empirical world and are accessible to human minds. Thus meanings find their intelligible essence in the real world. Much of the discussion in Part 2 assumes that more comprehensive treatises like Metaphysics can justifiably be used to elucidate and systematize various seminal insights developed in an earlier work like De Interpretatione.

Part 3 delineates the relation between cognition and meaning by scrutinizing Aristotle’s belief that the mental state (pathema) reflects external objects. Ch. 7 explains that imagination (phantasia) is the cognitive ability to use sensory contents to represent objects through mental images (phantasmata) which are themselves likenesses of the external objects. Furthermore, as made clear in Ch. 8, the conceptualization of such images constitutes meanings. Thus, the cognitive process of thinking and perceiving relates to external objects and shares the same structures. Ch. 9 recapitulates Aristotle’s theory of meaning and briefly concludes with some remarks on its common ground with modern philosophy of language. This highly instructive book is also a pleasure to read.