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Under CS are understood systems of true or false information reflecting epistemic—nonverbal and verbal, individual and social — experience of a NL speaker and relating to some actual or possible state of affairs (world). Building up a CS is characterized by such parameters: a) the continuity principle according to which concepts of CS serve as basis for constructing new concepts (conceptual structures) in CS; b) CS begin to be formed before NL is acquired. NL itself can be introduced but on the basis of some CS. However, because of its coding and manipulating concepts of CS, or syntactic, function NL is a means, a principal one, of forming new concepts and their structures in CS thus making it possible to trangress limits of the actual experience and to further, unprecedently, extend CS itself. Introduction of a verbal symbolism is at the same time a necessary condition of social communication, social orientation of individual CS. Hence understanding a linguistic expression is considered as its interpretation in a definite CS. The latter are looked upon as consisting of concepts (information) held true by an individual and concepts known to be true, making up respectively systems of belief and knowledge, reflecting epistemic experience of an individual on the level of everyday, quasiscientific, scientific, metaphysical etc. conceptions of the world. Regarding such concepts as ingredients of particular CS and thus relativizing analysis of meaning to the analysis of information contained in CS determines the way problems of meaning (including those of reference, criteria of meaningfullness, of belief and knowledge) are analysed in the book. 283 These problems are no longer considered in terms of the "semantics of NL" which is then taken for an abstraction from particular CS, no longer keeping to the absolutism of the traditional dichotomies of semantics and pragmatics, "semantical" vs. "pragmatical" information but fixing a new ground for systematically bringing together these theoretical and methodological polarities. It is because of GS that the notion of the context of use of a linguistic expression receives a substantial extension. NL speakers are considered as conceptually competent subjects interpreting linguistic expressions as well as situations of their use (and taking into account other subjects as partners of communication and owners of particular CS) on the basis of information contained in their own CS, these being more or less close one to another and to the objective world they reflect. Consequently, constructing a theory of meaning is held really constructive in so far as it leads to disclosing principles of organization and functioning of conceptual systems. — 212 —
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