Abstract

Philosophers sometimes approach meaning metaphorically, for example, by speaking of “grasping” meanings, as if understanding consists in getting mental hands around something.1 Philosophers say that a theory of meaning should be a theory about the meanings that people assign to expressions in their language, that to understand other people requires identifying the meanings they associate with what they are saying, and that to translate an expression of another language into your own is to find an expression in your language with the same meaning as the expression in the other language.