• German: Zuhälter (de) m, Gigolo (de) m, Schnorrer (de) m
• Hungarian: (pimp) strici (hu), futtató, kerítő (hu), (kept man) dzsigoló (hu), selyemfiú (hu)

Meaning is the essential content of this or that language expression (sign, word, sentence, text). In the logico-philosophical tradition, the concept of meaning is most often identical to the concept of meaning , however, at the same time, these concepts are often used as different (see Language, Statement, Meaning). Meaning in its various aspects is one of the fundamental concepts of philosophical anthropology and the humanities. As a multidimensional phenomenon, meaning is the subject of study of various theoretical disciplines: philosophy, logic, linguistics, semiotics, psychology, sociology, and others.

In philosophy, the category of meaning for the first time [implicitly] appears in Aristotle as the dominant in all his metaphysics “the idea of ​​the expediency of nature and the entire world process” (Asmus V.F. Metaphysics of Aristotle. – In the book: Aristotle. Works, vol. 1. – M., 1976, p. 32). Aristotle, apparently, is one of the first to express the idea that words are associated with human ideas, which, in turn, relate to things or even are caused by them: “… what is in sound combinations are signs of ideas in the soul, and letters are signs of what is in sound combinations. Just as the writing is not the same for all [people], so the sound combinations are not the same. However, the representations in the soul, the direct signs of which are that which is in sound combinations, all [people] have the same, in the same way, the same objects, the similarities of which are representations ”(Aristotle. Works. Vol. 2. – M., 1978. S. 93). Aristotle’s teleology largely arose on the basis of his doctrine of the expedient functions of the human soul and acquired the status of a universal cosmological principle – the unity of the goal of the world process, the initial cause of which goes back to God.

Logico-philosophical reflections of the Stoics contained a further development of the problems of meaning. In addition to the denoting (linguistic expression) and the real thing (object of designation), the Stoics also distinguished the signified in the sense of a conceivable or implied object (see, for example: Sextus Empiric. Works. T. 2. – M., 1976. S. 329). He was likened to an intermediary between the thing that causes the idea and the idea as a psychic or mental structure. These considerations of the Stoics, from whom Augustine later set off, contained an anticipation of what G. Frege much later called “the meaning of linguistic expression.” The dispute about universals in the Middle Ages mainly revolved around the triad “word – object – meaning” already formulated in Antiquity, the last element of which found a special justification in the so-called “conceptualism” of P. Abelard.

The substantiation of hermeneutics proposed by F. Schleiermacher as a universal theory of the interpretation of the meaning of texts was further developed in the methodological project of V. Dilthey, where the understanding of meaning became the fundamental method of the “sciences of the spirit” in contrast to the natural scientific “explanation” characteristic of the “sciences of nature”. In line with this approach, understanding psychology (W. Dilthey, E. Spranger) and understanding sociology (M. Weber and others) appear. In the philosophy of empiricism (F. Bacon, J. Berkeley, D. Hume and others), meaning was associated with the content of sensory experience, in one way or another connected with the world beyond consciousness. The question posed by a number of thinkers of the 19th century about the “meaning of life” of a particular person, realized in the process of his personal choice (S. Kierkegaard, L. N. Tolstoy and others), became one of the central motives of existential philosophy in the 20th century.

In the phenomenology of E. Husserl, the initial analysis of the semantic givenness of an object in acts of consciousness directed at it, different in their type, was completed in the concept of the world as a horizon of intersubjective meaning-settings. The phenomenology of meaning largely adopted the program of modern rationalism in its German classical version. The early Husserl, following J. G. Fichte, was convinced that the foundation of consciousness lies in the constitution of meaning. Perception turns out to be secondary in relation to meaning-making, since only an already meaningful whole is perceived (this position was immediately used by supporters of Gestalt psychology). In the act of constituting, along with meaning, the subject also posits the entire set of his semantic connections related to his actual and potential experience, that is, he posits a horizon. According to Husserl, meaning, or noema, is characterized by ideality and objectivity, which distinguishes it from a specific mental event, that is, from the act of meaning or comprehension, on the one hand, and from the transcendental way of positing meaning, or noesis, on the other.

Even before the formation of Husserl’s teaching, hermeneutics became the most important paradigm of humanitarian and scientific thinking, later partially merging with the phenomenological movement and assimilating its results. In its modern versions, two types of hermeneutical method are distinguished with respect to meaning: meaning unfolding and meaning reduction. A supporter of the first – general philosophical – is H.-G. Gadamer, based on E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, W. Dilthey and F. Schleiermacher. The second – special scientific – is represented by literary critics, jurists, psychologists, ethnographers, who come from the semiotic and linguistic-analytical tradition. So, E. Betty and E. Hirsch opposed the philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer with a special scientific, or “traditional” hermeneutic approach. While the task of special hermeneutic theories is formulated as methodological rules for the reconstruction and understanding of the author’s meaning of the text, the goal of philosophical hermeneutics is to analyze language experience as a special form of human attitude to the world (Lukov V. A. Theory of personal models in the history of literature. – M., 2006; Hirsch E. D. The Aims of Interpretation. – Chicago, 1976; Betti E. Allgemeine Auslegungslehre als Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften. — Tübingen, 1967).

Therefore, in philosophical (meaning-unfolding) hermeneutics, meaning appears as the content of complex semantic structures, which, according to Dilthey, can be attributed to some initial experiences. Understanding is a reverse translation of the semantic structure into the “spiritual vitality of its source”, that is, into the historical experience filmed by it. As in any process of translation for understanding, in addition to the condition of the completeness of the meaning of the message, the principle of hermeneutic distinctness (Lauterkeit) is valid, which implies the unity of pre-understanding of the author and the reader: the recipient must proceed from the truth of what was said if he wants to formulate a translation hypothesis or a rule of interpretation. Only after their subsequent inductive confirmation, it becomes possible to judge the content presented in the text, as well as the semantic difference between the language of the author and the reader. The means of eliminating errors of understanding is both the analysis of the intratextual context (H.-G. Gadamer) and the reconstruction of the situational context (K. Jaspers), which allows us to put ourselves in the place of the intended addressee. Oddly enough, but for phenomenology, as well as for positivism, meaning (noema) acts as something common that unites different linguistic phenomena – it is a characteristic of synonymous expressions that have different meanings (denotation).

The philosophy of positivism has inherited the empiricist formulation and solution of the problem of meaning: meaning is the universally valid mental content of the signs of language, which in some way relate to the observed reality; on the contrary, non-generally valid and non-sense-related mental contents are meaningless or insoluble (logically or physically). This position is quite clearly expressed, for example, by K. Aidukevich, speaking of the axiomatic and empirical “rules of meaning” (Ajdukevich K. Sprache und Sinn. – Erkenntnis IV. 1934. S. 100-138). In rationalism, in turn, meaning was associated with transcendent or transcendental reality, which, on the contrary, emphasized the non-empirical nature of meaning formation, which was raised to the supreme spiritual substance (God) or to the depths of human consciousness.

Analytical philosophy (see Analytic Philosophy) made it possible to distinguish between the general philosophical approach to meaning and the analysis of meaning in such particular contexts as “the meaning of a text”, “the meaning of action”, “the meaning of life” and others. This caused, on the one hand, greater clarity of reasoning, but at the same time reduced discussions about meaning to technical issues and formalization of concepts, largely removed from both the analysis of real scientific knowledge and meaningful life problems.

In modern logic (see Formal Logic), the distinction between meaning and meaning goes back to the theory of G. Frege, who distinguished the objective meaning (denotation) of a name and its meaning – the mental content contained in the name, the understanding of which is a condition for adequate perception of the given name (see .Name, Naming Theory). Based on the general provisions on the relationship of identity, Frege establishes that linguistic signs not only point to objects, but at the same time include the “way of being given” of the designated objects, or the way they exist (Frege G. Uber Sinn und Bedeutung. — Patzig G. (Hg.) Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung. – Göttingen, 1980 (1892). S. 41). He comes to the conclusion that in addition to the meaning of linguistic signs, that is, their relation to an object, there is also a semantic relation.

Thanks to G. Frege, intensionality (a later term by R. Carnap) of expressions in semantics was no longer understood as an individual essence, but as an intersubjective abstract objectness, which is accessible to a clear definition. It was recognized that the individual state plays some role only in the process of understanding the intensionality of expressions. However, problems arose almost immediately with the intensional content of single terms (proper names and designations) – their meanings are, according to G. Frege, individual concepts. The absence of such means the absence of intensional content. However, the fact that names sometimes have no meaning and only meaning can be explained today by the dominance of a purely logical view of the name over the epistemological and cultural ones. In fact, forgetting the meaning of a proper name is a problem of cultural dynamics. Initially, names had meaning due to the magical functions performed by the language, as well as the fusion of the name and the object. As soon as the meaning of the name was freed from objectivity and gained complete transparency, it was replaced by a technical “meaning”, began to be regarded as unchanged and general, and disappeared as unnecessary. In fact, not only proper names, but also any words often lack an unambiguous meaning, since the denotation is always surrounded by a cloud of connotations, and the empirical criterion for demarcation of denotation and connotation cannot be substantiated definitively. So, Quine’s well-known argument against the unambiguous definiteness of meaning follows from the hypothesis of linguistic relativity and the underdetermination of the concept by empirical index expressions, which is found in the study of the synonymy of terms and sentences (Quine W. Word and Object. – M., 2000). Only in the totality of sentences of a theory or language does each individual sentence acquire meaning (Quine W. Ontological Relativity. // Modern Philosophy of Science. — M., 1994). Quine’s thesis on the impossibility of a radical translation sharpened the “meaning or translation” alternative to the extreme. Thus, the boundaries of the “purely scientific”, or naturalistic, discussion of the problem of meaning were set, the fundamental unsolvability of which once again revealed its fundamental philosophical nature.

The desire to get rid of these problems caused another extreme – the rejection of the distinction between meaning and meaning in favor of the reality of the latter. A number of analytical philosophers, developing the program of physicalism in the philosophy of mind and language, actually abandon the concept of “consciousness” and, thereby, the concept of “meaning”. “Words mean nothing. It is only when a thinking subject uses them that they are worth anything and have meaning in a certain sense. They are tools” (Ogden C.K., Richards J.A. Die Bedeutung der Bedeutung. — F/M., 1974. S. 17). Along with this, numerous conceptions of meaning (mentalism, contextualism, externalism) capture certain aspects of the continuum that unfolds between “meaning” and “meaning”, from which both unjustifiably expansive and radically eliminativist interpretations follow.

In semiotics (see Semiotics), where meaning is considered as a concept that characterizes the content of linguistic expressions (see Language), it is customary to distinguish between the meaning and meaning of a sign expression, or sign (see sign). Meaning is the object or phenomenon that this sign points to in a specific sign situation (see Meaning). The same sign can indicate different things depending on the situation. But the sign not only points to something, it also “says” something about this something. This “statement” is the meaning of the sign, which introduces the indicated object or phenomenon into the general order of things and events. Thus, the act of designation is associated with the system of linguistic meanings, making it semantically legitimate.

In linguistic semantics (see Semantics), meaning is considered as a special entity, different from the text expressing this meaning, but determining the permissible references of the text – its ability to point to certain realities. In logical semantics (see Logical semantics), formal explications of the category of meaning (intension, designatum, and others) are introduced.

In psychology, Freud’s psychoanalysis, which became widespread at the beginning of the 20th century, introduces the practice of interpreting the hidden meaning of the contents of consciousness and behavioral manifestations, thereby opening up access to the contents of the unconscious, which serves as a source of meanings. The concept of meaning is one of the key categories in the individual psychology of A. Adler, who proceeded from the purposefulness of any behavioral acts and unconscious manifestations. The key to understanding the personality for Adler is the meaning of life, which is formed in the individual already in early childhood.

In the middle of the 20th century, the philosophical and psychological concept of W. Frankl, who considered the desire for meaning as the main human need and the leading force in personal development, became widespread. According to Frankl, the meaning is unique, it is in the world, in specific situations, and every time it needs to be searched anew, relying on conscience. The sense of loss of meaning – an existential vacuum – underlies many types of personality disorders and social pathologies.

In the second half of the 20th century, the concept of meaning is used as an explanatory concept in a number of psychological theories. In the theory of personality by J. Royce and A. Powell, personal meaning, understood as a subjective interpretation of life, forms the basis of the hierarchical model of personality. In J. Nutten’s theory of behavior, meaning is rooted in the relationship between motivation and situation, and behavior appears as meaning embodied in motor reactions. Meaning as a result of individual interpretation and categorization of the situation is considered in the informational psychoanalysis of E. Peterfreund, the psychoanalytic phenomenology of J. Atwood and R. Stolorow, the theory of personal constructs of J. Kelly and his school, the interactionist concept of the personality of D. Magnusson and his collaborators. The phenomenological approach to the analysis of meanings extracted from direct experiences is developed in the psychotherapy of Y. Jendlin. The theory of self-organized learning by L. Thomas and S. Harry-Augstein speaks, in particular, of joint meanings that arise in the space of dialogue. The comprehension of human actions in a broad social context is characteristic of the ethogenic approach of R. Harre, “social ecology” of J. Shotter.

Since the end of the 20th century, the field of empirical research has been expanding, especially in positive psychology (R. Baumeister, P. Wong and others), where the presence and expression of meaning is one of the main factors of mental and bodily health, as well as harmonious development.

In Russian psychology, L. S. Vygotsky, who posed the problem of the semantic structure of consciousness, was one of the first to address the concept of meaning. In the works of A.N. Leontiev and his school, the concept of meaning was developed as a specifically human mechanism for regulating the processes of activity and consciousness. F.V. Bassin considers meaning as a kind of “meaningful experiences”, which, in his opinion, are the main subject of psychology. In the transpersonal theory of consciousness of V.V. Nalimov, meanings appear as an endless unmanifested continuum, certain fragments of which are selected and shaped by a person immersed in this continuum.

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