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Full Idea
Leibniz seems to be the first modern philosopher to focus on sentence-sized units that he called propositions. The Empiricists among the moderns focused on word-sized units like ideas.
Gist of Idea
Leibniz was the first modern to focus on sentence-sized units (where empiricists preferred word-size)
Source
report of Gottfried Leibniz (works [1690]) by William D. Hart - The Evolution of Logic 2
Book Ref
Hart,W.D.: 'The Evolution of Logic' [CUP 2010], p.32
A Reaction
Historically, the sentential logic of the Stoics has a claim to have started this one. I find my initial sympathies to be with the empiricists.
Related Idea
Idea 20787 A proposition is what can be asserted or denied on its own [Chrysippus]
1773 | A sentence always has signification, but a word by itself never does [Zeno of Citium, by Diog. Laertius] |
13467 | Leibniz was the first modern to focus on sentence-sized units (where empiricists preferred word-size) [Leibniz, by Hart,WD] |
8646 | Words in isolation seem to have ideas as meanings, but words have meaning in propositions [Frege] |
7732 | Never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition [Frege] |
8446 | We understand new propositions by constructing their sense from the words [Frege] |
18705 | Words function only in propositions, like levers in a machine [Wittgenstein] |
21700 | Taking sentences as the unit of meaning makes useful paraphrasing possible [Quine] |
21701 | Knowing a word is knowing the meanings of sentences which contain it [Quine] |
8170 | Sentences are the primary semantic units, because they can say something [Dummett] |
19131 | We recognise sentences at once as linguistic units; we then figure out their parts [Davidson] |
3588 | Foundationalists base meaning in words, coherentists base it in sentences [Williams,M] |