Meaning (philosophy)

For other uses, see Meaning (disambiguation).

In the philosophy of language, meaning "is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they intend, express, or signify". It is studied by semantics.

The types of meanings vary according to the types of the thing that is being represented. There are:

  • the things, which might have meaning;
  • things that are also signs of other things, and therefore are always meaningful (i.e., natural signs of the physical world and ideas within the mind);
  • things that are necessarily meaningful, such as words and nonverbal symbols.

The major contemporary positions of meaning come under the following partial definitions of meaning:

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