MEANINGS AS CONCEPTS/MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS
The referential/denotational theory of meaning broke the definitional circle by emphasizing the referent side of the sense/referent pair. Another way out of the circle is to identify meanings with concepts: the metal language definitions of an object language meaning, in this theory, are the names of the concepts associated with the object language term. The use of the term 'concept' in linguistics derives from philosophy, where it has a very long history of discussion and controversy. For our purposes, concepts can be seen as a way of talking about the basic constituents of thought. In the words of Prinz (2002: 1) 'without concepts, there would be no thoughts. Concepts are the basic timber of our mental lives.' As we will see later, many investigators think it is necessary to distinguish between primitive concepts and others. On this view, our stock of concepts is built up from a stock of primitive concepts, which cannot themselves be broken down into any constituent parts. This level of primitive concepts is the bedrock of the whole conceptual system; all other concepts can be analyzed into combinations of these simpler primitives, just as all molecules can be analyzed down into their basic component atoms.
If we imagine the process of thinking as a sort of internal conversation with ourselves, then concepts are the individual words and expressions of which this conversation consists. Concepts are implicated in practically every aspect of our mental lives. It is on the basis of concepts that we determine things' identity: if I want to know whether some animal is a mammal or a marsupial, for example, I subconsciously compare its properties against the properties of the concepts MAMMAL and of MARSUPIAL. Concepts are also needed to explain how we recognize objects in the world as themselves: if I know, when looking at a golf ball, that it is a golf ball, it is because the visual image accords with my concept GOLF BALL. Similarly, it is because of the involvement of concepts that our thought has continuity: if I am studying semantics, for example, I am progressively refining concepts like MEANING and REFERENCE with which I understand the functioning of language, and it is the same concepts MEANING and REFERENCE which are developed over the entire time I am studying. We have concepts corresponding to abstract words like democracy, possession or time, but equally for everyday ones like hand, red, go, hungry, anticlockwise, and up.
One very common way of describing language in the Western tradition, going back to Aristotle, is to see language as communicating ideas: on this understanding, we choose the particular words we use in order to achieve the closest fit with the particular ideas we have. And, indeed, as pointed out by Reddy (1993), we often talk, in English and many other European languages, as though the language was a receptacle into which we put ideas in order to transfer them to the hearer, as in:
There are a lot of ideas in that sentence. You can get the same meaning across in different ways.
I can put the same idea in different words.
Language, then, is often spoken about as though it was the 'conduit' for ideas. A natural extension of this common understanding of language is that what words actually mean are ideas or concepts. Thus, the meaning of the word 'tolerant' is our concept TOLERANCE: when we say 'Oliver is tolerant', we are attributing to Oliver certain properties which together define our concept TOLERANCE, like patience, kindness, respect for the opinions of others, and so on. These properties can be thought of as combined together into the concept TOLERANCE, rather like the different components of a definition of tolerance in a dictionary