Development of Theoretical and Terminological Foundations of Semantics in the Logic and Philosophy of the 21st Century

The article traces some principal points of the history of the development of terms and conceptions which served as the basis for German logical doctrines of semantics in the 1890s. The first part of the article considers the theory of signification inside English logic and the deformations it underwent when translated into German. Semantic issues were part of logic in the British tradition because the latter used to view the subject of logic as a reasoning, and language as the only bearer of that reasoning. In addition, the theory of signification was an important part of British modern philosophy. These approaches were incorporated into logic by Richard Whately, but with some modifications. He in fact reduced signification to denotation and, in order to explicate the nature of common names, introduced the notion of class into logic. It was John Stuart Mill who explicitly developed the logical theory of signification. He did not share Whately's radical nominalism and founded his theory not on class, but on the distinction of two kinds of signification: denotation, or direct way of representing an object, and connotation, which does the same work indirectly, via attributes. Along with signification, he introduced the concept of meaning into logic. When Mill's and classical British philosophers' works were translated into German, some terminological shifts crept in. The difference between signification and meaning disappeared in the German text of Mill's Logic, and between signification and denotation in the German translation of Berkeley. The second part of the article considers some treatments of the name theory in the school of Brentano. On the material of Meinong's doctoral thesis of 1877, the author traces how British issues were adapted in continental philosophy. Namely, he tries to intepret the British discussion of abstract ideas in terms of "Inhalt" and "Umfang", which were alien for British logic and philosophy. As a consequence, he came to a conclusion principally foreign for the latter: object and idea should be viewed as different sides of signification. On the material of Anton Marty's article on subjectless propositions, published in 1884, the author attracts attention to the possible influence of linguistic theories of meaning on the logical semantic theories. The principal idea of Marty's doctrine is that of a need in a mediating link between a sign and its meaning which he called "etymon". He describes the meaning as a secondary function of a sign while an etymon as a primary one. Different words with different etymons can have the same meaning. The sentence is a kind of a name; consequently, it has an etymon as well. Thus, there is an evident formal correspondence between Frege's logical semantics and Marty's linguistic semantics. Finally, the author gives some arguments for the idea that Frege was acquainted with the considered ideas of Meinong and Marty.

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