Page:How we think (IA howwethink00deweiala).pdf/141

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MEANING
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ing to mark off and group together a variety of distinct existences constitutes its extension.

Definition and division As definition sets forth intension, so division (or the reverse process, classification) expounds extension. Intension and extension, definition and division, are clearly correlative; in language previously used, intension is meaning as a principle of identifying particulars; extension is the group of particulars identified and distinguished. Meaning, as extension, would be wholly in the air or unreal, did it not point to some object or group of objects; while objects would be as isolated and independent intellectually as they seem to be spatially, were they not bound into groups or classes on the basis of characteristic meanings which they constantly suggest and exemplify. Taken together, definition and division put us in possession of individualized or definite meanings and indicate to what group of objects meanings refer. They typify the fixation and the organization of meanings. In the degree in which the meanings of any set of experiences are so cleared up as to serve as principles for grouping those experiences in relation to one another, that set of particulars becomes a science; i.e. definition and classification are the marks of a science, as distinct from both unrelated heaps of miscellaneous information and from the habits that introduce coherence into our experience without our being aware of their operation.

Definitions are of three types, denotative, expository, scientific. Of these, the first and third are logically important, while the expository type is socially and pedagogically important as an intervening step.

We define by picking out I. Denotative. A blind man can never have an adequate understanding of the meaning of color and red; a seeing person can acquire the knowledge only by hav-