more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
We can say that knowing words is knowing how to work out the meanings of sentences containing them. Dictionary definitions are mere clauses in a recursive definition of the meanings of sentences.
Gist of Idea
Knowing a word is knowing the meanings of sentences which contain it
Source
Willard Quine (Russell's Ontological Development [1966], p.76)
Book Ref
Quine,Willard: 'Theories and Things' [Harvard 1981], p.76
A Reaction
Do you have to recursively define all the sentences that might contain the word, before you can fully know the meaning of the word? He seems to credit Russell with the holistic view of sentences (though I think that starts with Frege).
| 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] |