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Full Idea
The possibility of our understanding propositions which we have never heard before rests on the fact that we construct the sense of a proposition out of parts that correspond to words.
Gist of Idea
We understand new propositions by constructing their sense from the words
Source
Gottlob Frege (Letters to Jourdain [1910], p.43)
Book Ref
'Meaning and Reference', ed/tr. Moore,A.W. [OUP 1993], p.43
A Reaction
This is the classic statement of the principle of compositionality, which seems to me so obviously correct that I cannot understand anyone opposing it. Which comes first, the thought or the word, may be a futile debate.
| 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] |