Work · Analytic Philosophy
Language and Meaning
Meaning is fixed by the rules of a language; since different languages yield different, untranslatable pictures of the world, the choice of language decides which world picture we have – radical conventionalism.
Introduction
“Sprache und Sinn” appeared in 1934 in “Erkenntnis”, the journal of the Vienna Circle. Ajdukiewicz starts from the idea that to understand an expression is to be disposed to accept certain sentences under certain conditions: some because of their form (axiomatic rules), some because others have been accepted (deductive rules), some in the face of experience (empirical rules). The meaning of an expression is its place in this network of rules. In the companion paper “Das Weltbild und die Begriffsapparatur” he concluded that languages with different rules yield different world pictures that cannot be translated into one another, and that experience alone does not decide between them – radical conventionalism. He later abandoned the thesis; his rule-based account of meaning is discussed today as an early inferential semantics.
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