2. The reader is referred to De Mauro (1965: ch. IV).
3. [Translator’s note: This characterization of Croce’s philosophy is that of fellow Italian Idealist and sometime collaborator Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944). The four words in question were aesthetics, logic, economics, and ethics.]
4. [Translator’s note: In his criticism Croce opposes poesia (= poetry), the term he applies to inspired art, and non-poesia (= non-poetry), which he also he calls allotria (= extraneous matter, padding), struttura, or simply, with negative implications, letteratura (= literature or intellectual confectionery). Croce’s dichotomy is famously hard on the structural elements in that most structured of works, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Croce and his disciples dominated Italian literary criticism in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond.]
17
Five Senses of the Word “Semantics,” from Bréal to the Present Day
The term “semantics” has a number of different meanings, several of which seem to be completely at odds with one another. This state of affairs is often a source of considerable embarrassment in dealing with our students, to whom we find ourselves having to explain that our discipline is a bit like the country where some people call “red” what others call “white” and vice versa. With the result that, every time we use the word “red,” we would have to assign it a superscript or subscript number, specifying that we mean “red1, in such and such a sense.”
Still, although the term “semantics” may have a number of meanings, those meanings are less irreconcilable than might at first appear.
In 1883 Michel Bréal (Les lois intellectuelles du langage: Fragment de sémantique) defined semantics as the science of meaning, but when he came to publish his Essai de sémantique in 1897 he gave it the more general subtitle Science des significations, and only in chapter IX, in which he proposed to examine “by what causes words, once created and endowed with a certain meaning, are induced to restrict, to extend, to transfer this meaning from one order of ideas to another, to raise or to lower its dignity, in short to change it,” does he say “it is this second part which, properly speaking constitutes Semantics or the Science of Significations.”1
Semantics, then, is the science of meanings, but, for Bréal, only insofar as they are subject to historical development. And this is not all. Each time Bréal has to deal with the meaning of a word he proves incapable of isolating it from the set of enunciates, or more extensive fragments of text, in which the word appears. To give but a single example, in the chapter on the laws of specialization, Bréal is less interested in defining the meaning of the French word plus than in the fact that it takes on different meanings in different expressions.
The notion of semantics, then, is born, historically speaking, in reference to that imponderable entity we label meaning, but only to a lesser extent is it concerned with the meaning of words, or, to put it differently, of terms in isolation. For this, what was needed was not a science but an empirical praxis, lexicography in its most hands-on sense, that is, the actual compilation of dictionaries. Still, we must not forget that the whole of lexicography is simply the description of a langue, and therefore of an abstract entity, and not of the practical use of parole by means of which the speaker “means” something.
17.1. Various Meanings of Semantics
I would argue that the more or less explicit semiotics of former centuries did not question the fact that terms expressed something, but they did not presume that a special science was needed to clarify what that something was. Knowing the signs implied knowing either the things they referred to or the ideas they brought to mind, or the definitions given them by common consent, according to which the Latin homo, for instance, signified “a mortal rational animal.” In any case, for Aristotle, providing correct definitions was a task either for logic (see the Analytics) or for the various natural sciences, as is seen in his definitions of animals.
If we examine Abelard’s use of terminology, we remark that a verbal expression (i) significat a mental concept, (ii) designat or denotat its definition or “meaning,” and (iii) nominat the thing.
What we have here are three notions of semantics: (i) as the study of cognitive processes, (ii) as the study of dictionary or encyclopedia definitions, and (iii) as the study of the truth conditions of sentences. Many of our current problems stem from these medieval perplexities (and they are indeed perplexities: what exactly does a vox significativa do—signify, denote, or name?). Furthermore, Abelard’s threefold division is missing a fourth dimension, not unknown to previous semiotics, that of the disambiguation of complex texts (see Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, which is concerned with the “meaning” of a text like that of Scripture). And, lastly, there is also a fifth dimension missing, whose absence in Abelard does not imply its absence in medieval thought. What is missing is what we would call today a structural semantics as a theory of content, already present in the binary system of the division of predicables as represented in the Arbor Porphyriana (see Chapter 1).
Let us go back then, or let us look forward, beyond Abelard and beyond Bréal, and observe that, in the course of the debates on meaning, five areas of investigation have been identified, sometimes proceeding independently of each other, sometimes contradicting each other, and sometimes one of them presupposing—however acritically—the other:
1. Semantics as the study of the meaning of terms removed from any context (for instance, Carnap’s theory of meaning postulates, much of componential semantics, and the various forms of semic analysis, not to mention lexicography of every kind and tendency).
2. Semantics as the study of content systems or structural semantics (Hjelmslev and structural approaches to semantic fields in general et similia).
3. Semantics as the study of the relation between term (or sentence) and referent, or as the study of reference (for instance, Morris, Ogden, and Richards, much of analytic philosophy, and in primis Kripke). Let me remind the reader, however, of the distinction I posited in Kant and the Platypus between (i) providing instructions to identify the possible referent of a term and (ii) the act of reference itself.
4. Semantics as the study of the truth conditions of propositions expressed by sentences.
5. Semantics as the study of the particular meaning that terms or sentences assume in context or in the text as a whole (this is a vast and variegated field that is concerned with the meaning of the same sentences in different contexts and circumstances, for which we may cite in first and foremost the later Wittgenstein, as well as the theory of different discursive isotopies, etc.).
Any student of semiotics is familiar with all these meanings of semantics, and yet it would be optimistic to claim that this awareness is shared by all students of language—not to mention the fact that the semioticians themselves, though well aware of the definition of semantics cited in 3 and 4 above, are often prone to reject it as nonpertinent, or to consider it as a single problem, whereas in fact it involves two quite different problems.