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Words are changing their meanings in natural language. A word can change its referent, and even when its extension remains the same, its connotation or intension may evolve. Similarly, a sentence can alter its meaning without changing the meanings of its individual words. These are curious but common phenomena that have been attracting the attention of both linguists and philosophers. However, meaning change is something more than a mere linguistic phenomenon because it sometimes reflects the transformation of the “world” itself – at least for us. Furthermore, it is highly relevant to what happens to those who use language to think and live.
 
In this book, I explore the change of meaning in a broad context, not only from the perspective of language but also from an analysis of what is happening in our minds. Although the semantic dimension has historically provided the foundation of contemporary philosophy, the objectivity of meaning is contradicted to some degree by its sheer changeability. It is therefore necessary to observe how the change of meaning is compatible with the objectivity of the semantic dimension – an observation that is inseparable from the question of what “meaning” is, as well as from the problems concerning the self, events, and facts.
 
Chapters 1 and 2 clarify the problem of meaning changes by exploring the concept of meaning in a broad context. According to the standard contextualist explanation, a sentence’s content is determined by its context of utterance, and its truth value is further determined by its circumstance of evaluation. This standard framework, notably with its focus on indexicals, cannot smoothly explain many cases of meaning change, such as the change in meaning in a predicate or the alteration that occurs in the inferential nexus. To understand these phenomena, I expand the perspective of the modern philosophy of language to merge it with the theory of emptiness in the East Asian Buddhist tradition. This must be considered as one of the original aspects of the book.
 
Based on this preparation, the following two chapters explain the meaning change through an analysis of the self. It has been shown that a thought expressed in a sentence undergoes substantial transformation whenever the meaning of its predicate changes, or when the inferential nexus itself is altered; however, this is a time when the world in which we live correspondingly changes. To illustrate this, I developed a theory of semantic determination to describe and explain how ourselves and the world simultaneously change – a theory that consists of such elements as perspective extension, epistemic restriction by our “mental walls,” and role-playing volition, all of which jointly constitute a multi-layered standpoint. In short, the constitution of a multi-layered standpoint allows for—and brings about—changes in meaning.
 

(Written by ASAKURA Tomomi, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2024)