1 A paper presented at an international conference with the theme Emergent Issues in Humanities in Africa in the Third Millennium, Organized by the Faculty of Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. April, 23 rd to 28 th , 2012 MEANING: A LOGICAL DERIVATION, FORMULATION I Jonathan Chimakonam Okeke, Department of Philosophy, University of Calabar. P. M. B 1115 Email: jonathansphilosophy@gmail.com Website: http:// www.jonathansphilosophy.webs.com http://www.unical-ng.academia.edu/jonathanokeke ABSTRACT Expressions, words and symbols without reference to something else which could be called their meanings are semantically helpless. But not all expressions and words refer; some even come with ambiguities and equivocations like Golden Mountain, Chimera etc., however, any symbol which does not refer could not properly be called a symbol. So because every symbol necessarily refers to something definite, it is not the case that ambiguities and equivocations would sneak into symbolic expressions. Hence, logic becomes that science which prefers symbolic or artificial or formal language to natural language. Therefore, since “meaning” or semantics is a central focus of logic together with syntax, we attempted in this work to obtain a logical derivation of it in the symbolic language of logic. Introduction Meaning can be defined as having a fixed sense or conveying a fixed idea or a fixed thought. This means that having a transitory or tentative sense does not qualify as having meaning. In philosophy of language meaning is very crucial for our words and sentences will be useless if they contain no meaning. But meaning is not something peculiar to words or sentences alone, it can in similar way be extended to symbols or whatever stands as symbol. In this same way also, we can distinguish between what is meaningful and what is meaningless since the existence of one portends the other exists. The question however is: how might we sort them out? To this day, the criteria remain the theories of meaning. And there are three of them namely: 1. Referential 2. Ideational 3. Behavioral theories of meaning The referential theory which has more pedigree as far as solving the problem of meaning is concerned states that an expression means what it refers to or designates (Ozumba, 51). Alson (1988) as quoted in Ozumba draws a thin line between naïve and sophisticated versions of this theory. While the naïve version holds that for a statement to be meaningful, it must refer to something other than itself which depicts words as symbols standing for something other than themselves; sophisticated version holds that the meaning of a statement is to be identified with the relation between the expression and its referent, i.e., the referential connection constitutes the meaning. On the whole, the referential theory avers that the meaning of an expression is that to which it refers. The problem however, is that there are names and words which do not refer; they are sometimes described as non-denoting (Taylor, 11). Frege regards such names as problematic (63), he insists that in a language suitable for the serious purposes of science and mathematics empty names can have no legitimate employment. Such names Taylor explains must in Frege’s