| The study of meaning serves as the central topic for the present dissertation, which aims to help construct Marxist theory of meaning and make it an integral component of the system of Marxist philosophy of language by firmly adhering to the basic positions of Marxism and critically absorbing the achievements of the various theories of meaning from the contemporary Western philosophy of language.I. PreambleThe study of meaning is one of those issues with the longest history in philosophy in that philosophers both in China and in the West started to inquire about meaning as early as some 2500 years ago. Following "the linguistic turn" in the Western philosophy of early 20th century, the study of meaning became the focal topic of (analytic) philosophy of language due to its extreme importance.The study of meaning is also noted for being a thorny undertaking. Being the creation of the social existence of mankind, meaning embodies multiple complex relations between man and the world. The word of meaning itself is used to express various abstract concepts that are difficult to define explicitly. The issue of meaning concerns almost all fields of human activities, thus being of great importance not only to philosophy but to many other disciplines. Different disciplines understand and interpret meaning differently because of disparity in their focus and perspectives of meaning inquiry. There is also noticeable difference in the objective and perspective as well as approaches of this inquiry even among philosophers themselves. All this adds to the difficulty of defining meaning. The complexity of meaning also stems from its many complicated features. How to view these features as well as to understand their dialectical relationships stands for the watershed between the view on meaning from Marxist materialism and those theories of meaning from idealism.II. A Critical Study of Major Classical Theories of MeaningThe complexity of the concept of meaning leads to the diversity and heterogeneity in the definitions and theories of meaning. Six influential theories of meaning are examined. (1) The referential theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of an expression is the thing it refers to. This theory seems to have supplied a ready answer to the question of how language relates to the world. Words get their meaning by referring to things in the world, and meaning in turn serves as the link between the language and the world. The referential theory of meaning emphasizes the relatedness of language to reality, but it equates meaning directly with the referent. Consequently, not only does the meaning of many non-referential expressions fail to be accounted for, but the complex meaning of referential expressions cannot be fully revealed. (2) The ideational theory of meaning defines meaning with the idea formed in the cognitive process of language users. The theory is believed to be able to remedy the deficiency of the referential theory of meaning to a degree by supplying account for those expressions without referents. But both these two theories reduce meaning to certain entity. Modern ideational theory can be traced to Hobbes' theory of denotation of names and was systematically developed by Locke, who advocated that the meaning of words representing corresponding ideas is the idea they indicate. The ideational theory stresses the function of cognitive ideas in dealing with meaning relations, which proves conducive to the comprehensive study of meaning. But it runs into predicament by reducing meaning to ideas one-sidedly. Meaning differs from ideas in that the former is public and social while the latter may be somewhat subjective and private. (3) The behaviorist theory of meaning defines the meaning of an expression as the stimulus that evokes the expression in concrete context or the response to it , or the combination of both. This theory of meaning is theoretically based on behaviorist psychology, which was introduced into philosophy by Pierce and Dewey and made use of in the study of meaning b...
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