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Full Idea
The new freedom that Russell confers by paraphrasis (of definite descriptions) is our reward for recognising that the unit of communication is the sentence and not the word.
Gist of Idea
Taking sentences as the unit of meaning makes useful paraphrasing possible
Source
Willard Quine (Russell's Ontological Development [1966], p.75)
Book Ref
Quine,Willard: 'Theories and Things' [Harvard 1981], p.75
A Reaction
Since many people hardly ever speak a properly formed sentence, I take propositions to be better candidates for this. However, I don't see how we can reject the compositional view (the meanings are assembled).
Related Idea
Idea 21699 Russell offered a paraphrase of definite description, to avoid the commitment to objects [Quine]
| 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] |