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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2009
One of the most influential objections to ideational theories charges that ideation does not have the independence needed to explain what meaning is in terms of ideation. The objection is that ideas are not conceptually, ontologically, or epistemologically prior to word meanings. Hence the postulation of ideas to explain meanings does not advance our understanding of meaning, because it is ad hoc, regressive, or circular. To explain meaning in terms of ideas is to explain meaning in terms of itself, or something that can only be known on the basis of itself.
The suggestion that, for a person wittingly to use a significant word, phrase, or sentence, there must antecedently or concomitantly occur inside him a momentary something, sometimes called ‘the thought that corresponds with the word, phrase or sentence,’ leads us to expect that this supposed internal occurrence will be described to us. But when descriptions are proffered, they seem to be descriptions of ghostly doubles of the words, phrases or sentences themselves.
(Ryle 1949: 295)The ideational theorist attempts to account for the significance of utterances by appeal to thoughts. Thoughts are taken to have a significance that simply gets transferred to the utterance. How thoughts come by their significance is not something these theorists spend much time on.… As it stands, the ideational theory of meaning is either circular or incomplete.
(Avramides 1989: 142)In [a dog-legged theory], words are thought of as reinterpreted into another medium, such as that of Ideas, whose own powers explain the significance words take on.[…]
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