Ask what a word means, and you’ve already picked a side in an argument philosophy has never finished having.
“What does this mean?” sounds like a simple question, but philosophy of language treats it as one with no single settled answer — and the disagreement isn’t academic hair-splitting, it changes what counts as actually understanding something versus just being able to use it correctly.
Gottlob Frege split a term’s meaning into sense (the mode of presentation — how a term picks out its referent) and reference (the actual thing picked out), solving a puzzle about how two different-sounding expressions can refer to the same thing while meaning something different to the person using them. Ludwig Wittgenstein, later in his career, rejected the idea that meaning is fixed by reference at all, arguing instead that a word’s meaning is constituted by its use within a shared practice (a “language game”) — you don’t need a private mental picture of what a word points to, only the ability to use it correctly among other people who share the practice. A third tradition, truth-conditional semantics, ties a sentence’s meaning to the conditions under which it would be true, treating meaning as a formal, computable property of language rather than either a picture in the mind or a social practice.
These aren’t rival trivia — which one you assume shapes everything downstream: whether an AI language model can be said to “understand” meaning at all (if meaning is reference or truth-conditions, a model manipulating symbols with no world to refer to arguably can’t; if meaning is use, fluent use might be enough), and whether disagreements over scripture or law are really about facts or about which practice of use should govern interpretation.
Source: Klement, K.C. (2017). Frege and the Logic of Sense and Reference. Routledge. Kuusela, O. & McGinn, M. (eds.) (2011). The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein. Oxford University Press.