Abstract

To begin with a few remarks on the motto. Scholarly terms are multiplying. I randomly selected a sixteen-page article on the philosophy of language and I found more than one hundred and twenty of them. Two things prove that they are, in fact, terms: their repeated occurrence in the same meaning — sometimes a hardly precise one — and occasionally also their form, for instance ”non-truth-conditional meaning.” Sometimes they retain their form, but change their meaning, even when they come from the same producer; even more so when they begin to be used by other authors. Conversely, the same contents may be camouflaged under varying forms, i.e. different words. In this case, too, the producer may be one and the same. The phenomenon of terminological surfeit is more than easily discernible in scholarly literature. Take, for example, the meaning family: cognitive meaning, contextual meaning, context-independent meaning, communicative meaning, conventional meaning, descriptive meaning, expression meaning, linguistic meaning, literal meaning, sentence meaning, truth-conditional meaning, non-truth-conditional meaning, use-dependent meaning, utterance meaning, word meaning. Each of these terms are used by many authors.