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date: 04 December 2020

Abstract and Keywords

The opening five lines of On Interpretation 1 contain Aristotle's influential account of the meaning of verbs and names, in which he describes them as signs of mental experiences that are in turn likenesses of actual things. The passage occasioned much comment from the ancient commentators, and among modern philosophers the resulting tradition has been criticized by Hilary Putnam. Many modern philosophers hold that thinking involves having representations, and there is discussion (e.g., Michael Tye) of whether these representations should be likenesses of what is thought, or rather some kind of symbols. On a view espoused by Jerry Fodor, the symbols constituting thought form a special language of thought, mentalese, which is different from any natural language, and on another (Norman Malcolm, Hilary Putnam), representations are not needed for thought at all. Where Aristotle stands on these issues depends on how the five lines are taken. The lines treat two things as symbols and one as a likeness. Images play an important role in Aristotle's account of meaning.

Keywords: Aristotle, meaning, On Interpretation, thought, experiences, likeness, symbols, images, representations, mentalese

Richard Sorabji

Richard Sorabji is Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He is the author or editor of 120 volumes. The 12 volumes authored include Aristotle on Memory; Necessity Cause and Blame; Time, Creation and the Continuum; Matter, Space and Motion; Animal Minds and Human Morals; Emotion and Peace of Mind; Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life and Death; 3 volumes of The Philosophy of the Commentators 200-600 AD, A Sourcebook; Opening Doors: The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji, and (forthcoming) Gandhi and the Stoics: Modern Experiments on Ancient Values. He is currently writing a history of the idea of Moral Conscience. He is the General Editor of the series Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, which celebrates its 100th volume in 2012, and he is editor or co-editor of 10 further volumes, including The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions.

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