On Zhou Liquan's Theory Of Meaning

Zhou Liquan, a well-known Logician and philosopher in China, is one of the founders and inaugurators of studies in natural language Logic. Zhou's theory of meaning is in the core of his studying in Logic of natural languages.Zhou's theory of meaning is based on his very academic works and has its distinguished theoretic foundations. In terms of his critics on logical idealism, metaphysics and other inclinations of detaching form facts, Zhou suggests that we should integrate studying in formal logic with workings on expressing and metaphor of Chinese linguistics. It is this suggestion that causes his theory of meaning.In the first stage of fixing his theory of meaning, Zhou examines three significations of a natural language. They are meanings of expressing, representing, and emotions, respectively. Zhou analyses two relations. One is between specific contexts of a sentence and the meaning of it. The other is the relation between abstract and specific meanings of a language. In the second stage of the work, Zhou contends that the meaning of an expression is of three levels:referring, denoting and meaning. In the third stage, Zhou divides a discourse into four levels and brings forward his four-level meaning theory of discourses, which holds that the meaning of an abstract sentence is a proposition; the meaning of sentence is a kind of propositional attitude; the meaning of a discourse is a its reference; and that the meaning of a discourse in communicational context is the expressed meaning.Zhou's theory of meaning causes his works on contextual issues, and leads to both his thought of Logic of natural languages and his approach of general Logic. Furthermore, the theory has enriched the studies of logic in China. Especially, it has prompted the study in Philosophy of Language.There are two valuable points to be confirmed in this paper:its thesis and breakthrough point. There have not been any papers discussing Zhou's theory of meaning. This means that the paper will fix a new thesis. So far, we haven't found anybody studying Zhou's idea of Logic of natural languages or his Philosophy of Language in terms of his theory of meaning. Therefore, this will answer for a new breakthrough point of the issue. Aiming to show the original scenarios of Zhou's theory of meaning, this paper reviews Zhou's theory of meaning systematically, and tries to give a full study sticking to Zhou's original works. By this paper, we'd like to do some primary works for studying Zhou's thinking of Logic of natural languages.