On Katz’s Constructing The Third Research Approach Of Theory Of Meaning

In the history of analytic philosophy, theory of meaning is always its topical subject. With regard to the partition of theory of meaning, Katz’s was different from the general classification of the academic community. Regarding naturalism as the classification standard, we can reclassify the research approach of theory of meaning. Generally speaking, the first approach contains artificial language school except early Wittgenstein; the second approach includes early Wittgenstein, ordinary language school represented by later Wittgenstein and logical pragmatism. Using Katz’ s method of classification, we can simply equate the first approach with non-naturalism, and equate the second approach with naturalism. In the first place, this article simply discusses the main theories of meaning of representative personages in the two former approaches, and attaches importance to the introduction of the second approach. From another point of view, broadly speaking, we can equate naturalism with extensionalism, and equate non-naturalism with intensionalism. Thereinto, Katz subdivided intensionalism into Fregean intensionalism and non-Fregean intensionalism, that is to say, neo-intensionalism provided by Katz. The subdivision of intensionalism was of great significance.In the view of philosophical history, analytic philosophers must make an alternative choice between the two former approaches. However, there was a third approach. It selected the advantages of the two former approaches, took linguistic phenomena that belong to natural history as his starting point, and studied its latent grammatical form and problems of meaning under this premise and this background. In order to gain the third approach, Katz profoundly criticized the representative theories of the two former approaches. Specifically, Katz mainly criticized Fregean intensionalist theory of meaning, Wittgenstein’s and Quine’s naturalist theories of meaning, and critiqued logical pragmatism by taking ’The Domino Theory’ as the medium. Based on criticizing Quine’s theory of meaning, and utilizing The Domino Theory, then Katz successfully opposed the theories of meaning of Davidson, Putnam, Burge and so on. The Domino Theory was mainly composed of anti-intensionalist arguments of Quine, Davidson, Burge and so on. It maintained that these arguments were not independent but had a dependent relationship. In addition, the argument of Quine was undoubtedly most fundamental among them, therefore if Katz successfully criticized the theory of meaning of Quine, then theories of meaning of others would be favorably rejected.On the basis of criticizing each theory above, Katz constructed his own theory of meaning from the view of the third approach. Being similar to some aspects of naturalism was that Katz paid attention to the intuitive judgments about semantic facts in daily life, and took it as the starting point of constructing theory of meaning and the condition of judging whether a theory of meaning was right. Being similar to the research method of non-naturalism was that the step of constructing theory was in order of’from top to bottom’, and Katz held the Platonist view that’meaning’is some kind of abstract entity. In term of his purpose, he did not want to construct one kind of specific theory of meaning aiming at one language but tried to generalize such a theory’s form and structure. In other words, he made an attempt to provide one kind of meta-theory appropriate for all languages. Starting from this purpose, he firstly came up with the actuating range of theory of meaning, and determined the upper and lower bound of the theory according to the brief formula that’synchronic linguistic description minus grammar equals semantics’, which drew suitable boundary to study theory of meaning and avoided the risk of putting the phenomena belonging to other similar subjects into theory of meaning.After determining the range of theory of meaning, Katz specifically discussed and illustrated each element of theory of meaning in order, especially the content of dictionary entry and projection rules. Dictionary in the Katz’s sense was not acquired by the method of behaviorism, and he did not try to discover or construct a most perfect dictionary, but attempt to obtain a suitable dictionary that we can make use of to explain the meaning of sentences. Dictionary entry contains grammatical section and semantic section. In the meantime, in order to represent the structure and content of dictionary entry more briefly and explicitly, he divided two sections into three parts: the grammatical marker, the semantic marker, and the distinguisher. Katz found that one dictionary entry could have more than one path, which illustrated that there was the phenomenon of ambiguity in this level that was the source of ambiguity of higher levels; by bringing in selection restriction we could exclude ambiguity. Besides, by using the angle brackets that were behind the distinguisher, we can limit the combination between lexical items to explain the certain combination that many philosophers had discussed long before. Subsequently, on the basis of learning from Chomsky’s grammatical analysis of syntactic structure, and by virtue of some specific example sentences, Katz utilized the formalized symbols above to preliminarily locate, mark and select each element in the example sentences and applied projection rules to illustrate the combination between paths of dictionary entries and between its compositions in detail (this thesis specified the combination between adjective and concrete noun, between definite article and concrete noun, between transitive verb and concrete noun phrase, between concrete noun phrase and transitive verb phrase), which showed how the description of meaning of one sentence was formed. In the definition of the combination rule between adjective and concrete noun and the latter relevant details, Katz introduced his own definition of analyticity, which gave Quine’s criticizing analyticity back tit for tat and tried to recover the legitimacy of the traditional metaphysical proposition. According to its grammatical structure in the relevant sentence, each element formed an integrated description of meaning of the sentence. This process represented the Principle of Compositionality. Because Katz held that transformation rules did not have influence on the meaning of sentences, so type 2 projection rules dealing with the sentences got by the optional transformation of the kernel sentence were not something he had to discuss for himself. On this basis, by the illustration of formalized symbols, he defined all kinds of semantic facts (ambiguity, anomaly and paraphrase) on sentential level.In the end, this article simply describes the influence and appraisal caused by the third approach of Katz’s constructing theory of meaning on the inside and outside of this field. In addition, this thesis examined the possible problems in the enterprise of Katz, and provided doubts and some my own reflections about Katz criticizing Wittgenstein’s viewpoint that the study of language standard was not scientific, the legitimacy of the subjects in the thought experiment of Katz, and his means of subdividing semantic markers and so on.