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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Philosophy and the Vision of Language (routledge Studies in Twentieth-century Philosophy) NOTES [^1] Wittgenstein (1934), pp. 4-[^6]: [^2] A methodological directive for this clarification comes from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus [^6]:521: “The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.

(Is this not the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?)” [^3] In what follows, I use “meaning” or “linguistic meaning” to characterize anything that can be the answer to the questions “What is the meaning of ‘…’?” or “What do you mean by ‘…’?” where ‘…’ is a sign or sequence of signs.

By “meaningfulness” I mean whatever serves to answer the question whether such a sign or sequence has meaning (in a particular context and on a particular occasion of use). [^4] Within the logical space of structural views, it is possible to distinguish several sub-variants.

One variant -- what we might call "content-structuralism," – holds that the basic elements structured or organized by the logic of language are already contents before they are so structured or organized; these may be, for instance, the basic elements of phenomenal experience, which are sometimes thought of as having ‘intrinsic’ or non-relational content. (This kind of view was held, e.g., by Russell (1914) and Schlick (1932)).

These can be distinguished from views (like those of Carnap (1934) and Saussure (1913)) that hold that the basic elements only get or have their contents in virtue of their roles in the relational or differential structure in which they participate. Cross-cutting this classification is a distinction between reductive and non-reductive forms of structuralism. Reductive forms hold that structured elements are reducible to simpler, constituent ones.

Non-reductive forms, by contrast, hold that description of the structure of an element may be defined in terms of its relations of similarity or difference with other elements, but does not necessarily involve its decomposition into simpler elements.

[^5] The commitments of structuralism so defined are obviously closely related (especially if one brackets number 5) to some of the assumptions underlying the project of the analysis of generative and transformational grammar suggested by Chomsky (1957, 1965).