Editing Intension (section)

==Overview==
The meaning of a word can be thought of as the bond between the ''idea the word means'' and the ''physical form of the word''. Swiss linguist [[Ferdinand de Saussure]] (1857–1913) contrasts three concepts:

# the ''signifier'' – the "sound image" or the string of [[Letter (alphabet)|letters]] on a page that one recognizes as the form of a [[Sign (linguistics)|sign]]
# the ''signified'' – the meaning, the [[concept]] or [[idea]] that a sign expresses or evokes
# the ''referent'' – the actual [[Object (philosophy)|thing]] or set of things a sign refers to. See ''[[Sign (semiotics)#Dyadic signs|Dyadic signs]]'' and ''[[Reference#Semantics|Reference (semantics)]]''.

Without intension of some sort, a word has no meaning.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Putnam|first=Hilary|date=1973|title=Meaning and Reference|jstor=2025079|journal=The Journal of Philosophy|volume=70|issue=19|pages=699–711|doi=10.2307/2025079}}</ref> For instance, the terms ''rantans'' or ''[[Jabberwocky|brillig]]'' have no intension and hence no meaning. Such terms may be suggestive, but a term can be ''suggestive'' without being meaningful. For instance, ''ran tan'' is an archaic onomatopoeia for chaotic noise or din and may suggest to English speakers a din or meaningless noise, and ''brillig'' though made up by [[Lewis Carroll]] may be suggestive of 'brilliant' or 'frigid'. Such terms, it may be argued, are always intensional since they connote the property 'meaningless term', but this is only an apparent paradox and does not constitute a counterexample to the claim that without intension a word has no meaning. Part of its intension is that it has no [[Extension (semantics)|extension]].  Intension is analogous to the signified in the Saussurean system, extension to the referent.

In philosophical arguments about [[mind-body dualism|dualism]] versus [[monism]], it is noted that thoughts have intensionality and physical objects do not (S. E. Palmer, 1999), but rather have extension in space and time.