Meaning. Are the tools of rhetoric useful in studying the matter?

Abstract

The discussion centres around two issues: the issue of meaning, and the question whether the tools of rhetoric viewed as the basic tool in interpersonal communication (be it everyday or specialist communication) can be helpful in reading and interpreting meaning. The author understands meaning after G. Frege: […] let the following phraseology be established: A proper name (word, sign, sign combination, expression) expresses its sense, stands for or designates its reference. By means of a sign we express its sense and designate its reference. The purpose of the discussion is also to answer a much more general question: whether through rhetoric can one say something important about the world, so do they define a philosophical thesis or only, from various perspectives, one searches for the most probable answer to a hypothesis. The presented assumption is a result of the suggestion of Willard van Orman Quine: Rhetoric is the literary technology of persuasion, for good or ill, and it entails something which Randal Marlin defined as referentially translucent expressions. Therefore, the hypothesis I shall try to prove is the following: can the sense of any expression be, using the tools of rhetoric, defined to such an extent so that it becomes a philosophical thesis and not a hypothesis? So that in terms of both the subject and the object the expression could be considered as true. Then and only then can one say that such an expression has/contains some (but not any) sense.

Keywords

• sense
• rhetoric
• communication
• science
• religion
• metaphysics
• thesis
• hypothesis
• g. frege
• i. kant
• r. marlin
• w. van orman quine