Meaning And Language In Plato's Cratylus

Nathan Vail

November 8, 2013

Dr. Reeve

Meaning and Language: Plato’s Cratylus

Plato was a pioneer in nearly all the topics philosophers have dealt with ever since the 4th century BCE. Language is no exception. Plato was perhaps the first person to tackle the philosophy of language in the Cratylus, a subject that, since the German philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege, analytic philosophers have been extremely interested in language. The dialogue doesn’t tackle all of the problems of language, but it directs its attention toward the questions: How to words get meaning? Do they exist a priori in nature or do we agree on the basis of convention? To answer this question is to show how words (or symbols) get their power to communicate and to establish something fundamental about what language is. The obvious starting point is that someone has to say that a sound represents a particular item. If I say, “Guhgaska,” that means nothing, it is gibberish. But if I say the name “Plato,” then that has meaning, especially if the listener knows what that sound/symbol is a reference to. In this paper I plan on showing that Socrates encourages Cratylus to adopt some of Hermogenes’ views, and vice versa, through a conversational dialectic that adopts both points for consideration (which are unmistakably sophist). What Socrates concludes the dialogue with is a mixture of naturalist and conventional claims, and nominalist and realist philosophies.

Cratylus was a devout follower of Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher who said that you can’t step into the same river once, and you can’t talk about things because they keep changing—you can only point at them with your finger. As we are introduced to Cratylus, we discover that he thinks a name is ...

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...(making them concede to certain points to the other’s argument), language is then naturalistic and conventional, and this, it turns out, is the most logical and pragmatic approach. There may be an arbiter of words and grammar, but not even she or he can stop words that spring naturally into existence. For example, every language has some form of onomatopoeia, but in different languages the sounds they are trying to imitate vary wildly. In one way, Cratylus is correct in assuming that words and symbols have a nature and attempt to represent objects in the external world. Yet imitation cannot match the original “form” of the object—so there is a degree of failure. The rest of the language is dictated by convention (numbers, grammar, etc.) and through the dialectic between Cratylus and Hermogenes, Socrates creates a marriage between nominalist and realist philosophy.