Does meaning persist over time?
This thread branched from @Banno's thread on the ineffable.
Seemingly I am for the notion that meaning persists over time. Namely, if Plato's Dialogues translation, still conveys the same meaning as it did some two millennia ago, then why would anyone think that meaning doesn't persist over time.
Others would argue some notion of phenomenology consists in how meaning is conveyed; but, what does that even mean? Maybe I'm just not getting the phenomenological appeal to inner realm of meaning.
Isn't it true that meaning persists over time and everything else that happens in the meantime is separate and distinct from what language itself has to convey?
Seemingly I am for the notion that meaning persists over time. Namely, if Plato's Dialogues translation, still conveys the same meaning as it did some two millennia ago, then why would anyone think that meaning doesn't persist over time.
Others would argue some notion of phenomenology consists in how meaning is conveyed; but, what does that even mean? Maybe I'm just not getting the phenomenological appeal to inner realm of meaning.
Isn't it true that meaning persists over time and everything else that happens in the meantime is separate and distinct from what language itself has to convey?
Comments (58)
There appear to be folk who think of something like "the meaning of an utterance" as a platonic form, unchanging and eternal. For them, it is a surprise when the meaning of an utterance changes over time.
At the other extreme there appear to be folk who think that the meaning is some subjective response in their own mind, private an... dare I say it, ineffable.
Both views are somewhat mad.
The approach I've found useful is to drop the notion of meaning, were you can, and look instead to the use to which the utterance is being put.
Such considerations lead to something I take as undeniable, that we as a community manage to do things with words.
And we do manage to do similar things with words over time. Roughly speaking, meaning persist over time. We can still, say, make use of the allegory of the cave, or be impressed by Socrates' courage.
Quoting Shawn
Isn't that assuming that you can separate language from the culture and world from which it comes? Words change usage over time. Symbols come and go. Cultures change. The words may be the same for 1000 years, but we are not. Isn't it the case that the meaning of texts can depend upon prevailing ideologies and perspectives? The language itself may be static but the culture around it is not and since culture and language act together in producing meaning, meanings are modified over time.
I think we can adopt Davidson's argument in On the very idea of a conceptual scheme to this situation: roughly and briefly, if we recognise some behaviour as presenting a culture, then we mist be recognising that it has similarities to our own culture. And hence inversely, if some mooted culture were so different that it had nothing in common with our culture, we would have no basis to say that it counted as a culture...
Well, I think the discussion about culture and society can addressed more precisely by invocating the significance of history to language. In how large a degree does language and historicism apply? I think Hegel spoke fervently about dialectics and historicism in addressing this issue at hand. I think this topic can evolve in so many ways so I'll just sit on the sidelines to see what Banno and others say.
The cultural relevance of names and symbols in the interpretation of meaning belongs to the field of semiotics, which I am very shaky in also.
That's probably true and I wasn't arguing for that.
Quoting Banno
That's definitely a strong statement. I don't know if it is accurate but its sounds right.
Quoting Shawn
I'm not getting that fancy in my argument. I simply figure that when, for instance, Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire it was considered history. Now it is consider literature. For history of this period we now go elsewhere. Meanings and significance change as culture changes. You can see that simply by watching a very old sitcom. What was funny in 1958 may no longer be amusing and may even be rebarbative and cloying as tastes and contexts alter.
Yep.
Dolphins. Are pods cultural?
iPods are...
Is that really true or are you comparing social norms with the way we find meaning in what is said?
Sure, I mean that if culture is so important than isn't history of equal importance to give a view of what the contexts might have meant or how things fit into the context of the culture of question at the time?
I think I'm out of my depth here, so I digress. But, I would like to mention that history or what you put down as 'time' is of more importance rather than culture, no?
As Banno pointed out (i.e. remembering his Wittgenstein), meaning is use: its a simple principle, but it is really useful to remember when tackling questions like this.
So to ask whether meaning persists over time is to ask whether particular usages persist over time: do people use the term the same way. And although I'm not a linguist, I think its pretty safe to say that they do- there are usages which have persisted over relatively long periods of time (i.e. on the scale of human history), which is to say that there are linguistic communities that have maintained a particular usage for a given term/phrase/etc over a (occasionally quite long) period of time.
(on the other hand, at the risk of pointing out the obvious; meaning/use very often does change over time: different linguistic communities use similar terms/phrases/etc in different ways at different times at different places and for different purposes)
We're all out of our depth. :wink: I'm arguing that time amounts to culture and history. Think how US political culture was understood in 1935 and how it is understood today. That kind of thing. Think of the difference in tone and understanding between the movie Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and the US TV version of House of Cards (2013). It's like different countries. Both films about faults with Washington, but the world of the first looks like a utopia compared to the latter.
Quoting busycuttingcrap
A useful nuance.
As per @Banno and yourself, is it right to infer that to treat this as a bona fide case for conventionalism? I know Wittgenstein advocated that to even the formal languages of mathematics immutable to the effects of culture, society, history and time(?)
I would argue it is false. Meaning does not persist over time. Meaning is generated, so to speak, in an act of language, every time it is expressed or understood. The discrepancy in meaning between speaker and listener occurs because the meaning is generated at two or more different places, from two or more different perspectives, each furnished with their own levels of understanding. But meaning never breaches the skull; it doesnt persist in the symbols; and it is gone the moment the effort to generate it is over.
Understanding of what?
Quoting Shawn
That's a good approach. appears to think that there are two meanings to a given expression, that of the speaker and that of the listener, roughly the second response I described in my first reply here: "the meaning is some subjective response in their own mind". Nos says "meaning is generated at two or more different places, from two or more different perspectives, each furnished with their own levels of understanding", but what is happening is that the utterance is being used at two different places, for two different things. We don't have two distict uses, and a change in meaning, but just two differing uses. This should help dissipate the nonsense of "meaning never breaches the skull" and so on; no mysterious private mental substance that can't leak out of your ears - just what we do with words.
So, just to summarize what you and busycuttingcrap are saying is that conventions dictate how language use is utilized in writing or speech?
I suppose; if meaning is use, and use is a matter of social convention, then meaning is a matter of social convention. So, sure.
:up: Mysterious, magical, and invisible mental substances or entities: talk about a philosophical dead-end if there ever was one...
Some language use is a direct breach of convention, so I'd say that social convention is also a matter of use....
Yep. One can relate that to 's love affair with rugged individualism. It's all in his head...
The intended meaning persists (though maybe no one other than the first speaker knows what it is), the interpreted meaning doesnt (varies from person to person and across time).
Some people seem to be talking about intended meaning and some people seem to be talking about interpreted meaning.
Absolutely... And of course this is why, as you already pointed out, its not especially useful to invoke "isms" in such discussions, and especially when it comes to someone like W.
Quoting busycuttingcrap
One thing to keep in mind is that language use is highly fluid and diverse, and so these sorts of definitions or analyses always get you into trouble because there will always be exceptions: as Banno pointed out, language use can also deviate from or violate social convention (this is often how linguistic change occurs, and there absolutely is such a thing as creativity in language use: people are constantly coming up with novel ways to use familiar terms/phrases/etc, some of which catch on, and some of which do not).
And so thinking or talking about these things in terms of "isms" can lead you astray, and are especially inadvisable when dealing with unique thinkers like Wittgenstein: categorization may conceal or obscure more than it clarifies.
We'll it seems to me that convention is a quantifier over timespans of recent past. Whereas, foundationalist interpretations are constant.
So, referencing @busycuttingcrap I believe it wouldn't be pertinent to label Wittgenstein with being a strict conventionalist even though he advocated it even in cases with formal languages such as mathematics, where it may be easier to spot where the stipulation became commonly adopted.
Just for sake of saying it, I think Kripke addresses this issue with the causal chain of reference and the initial baptizing of a name, as not depending on its status as a fact, pace early Wittgenstein.
I do like Davidson a lot though even if I didn't read him much yet.
Quoting SEP The Gricean program
So that's not uncontroversial.
Quoting khaled What an author intends by an utterance can vary over time, as that utterance is put to other uses. Can't see how this helps.
Apparently. Didn't know who that was.
Quoting Banno
The problem seems to stem from "language use in thought" but I thought we were talking about utterances. Aka language use in communication. In that case the difference between intended and interpreted meaning seems clear no?
Quoting Banno
What the author intended at a certain instance of using an utterance doesn't change though.
So for example, when I first read "grice" at the start of your comment I thought you were making some sort of pun about rice, so checked the previous comments in case there was any context I was missing. In this case the interpreted meaning was clearly different from the intended meaning.
If in the future you use "grice" to make some sort of pun about rice, the fact that this current instance of grice use was intended to refer to a british philosopher does not change.
I seem to think that there are two meanings to a given expression, but you seem to think there are two different uses of a given expression. Apparently the utterance is being used at two different places, for two different things, just two different uses, except that the listener is not using any utterance. He is not doing anything with words. Hes listening to articulated guttural sounds, and no matter their use or context, he is supplying this activity with his own meaning, derived from his own understanding of the language and how it is used.
You give us an example. I have never said there are two different meanings to a given expression, and in fact said meaning is generated every time it is expressed or understood, which implies two separate acts. Two separate acts generates two separate accounts of what the meaning is, by virtue of there being two people involved. So its no surprise that, despite the lack of usage on the one hand and the contradictory use on the other, you came to believe I thought along the same lines as your bad faith usage of my utterances permitted. You devised your meaning first, then twisted the usage to fit itthe usage is in the meaning.
Second-order skepticism about the existence of static meaning is antithetical to first-order skepticism about the truth of our theories. The way I look at it, not only do we have Gettier problems, we cannot even be certain that we really have Gettier problems!
:rofl:
:up:
Everything in time is created and destroyed in due time. If meaning was at any point created in time then in time it should be destroyed or in other words forgotten. The potential for meaning on the other hand always persists with time, which means it can rise again in due time.
As long as humans exist then human meaning will also persist although it may not persist in pristine form. The original meaning may be lost, mangled, or dead, but memes reproduce and adapt to new minds where the pressure of evolution holds as well as in any other place or time.
Some or perhaps most of the meaning held by prehistoric people about things in their world is completely and probably irretrievably lost today. The meanings or words from dead languages we've never even heard about, extinct religious and cultural systems of meaning are no more. Meaning will come and go, but it always keeps on coming and going.
If, in the OP, you used the word "mean" to mean what I think you mean by it, and if its meaning has not changed in the meantime, then this means that its meaning can persist over time.
Since everything occurs in time, asking whether something occurs in time is superfluous. The question "does meaning persist over time" is the same question as "does meaning exist." Exist being to persist in the now.
That is, if meaning doesn't persist over time without identifying how long must transpire, there'd be a loss of meaning in the milliseconds after the words left your mouth. We don't need to go all the way back to Plato just to impose the element of time into the equation.
Or does it? How could one have ascertained that which encompasses all being without theoretically placing oneself outside of it... is this not how "time" was discovered and differentiate from the falsehood or "current understanding" that must have existed prior to its discovery? People fail to ask themself these questions.
No, you're taking the time element too literally. What I meant was that if meaning can be lost or altered (think reification of terms of words), then is it possible that meaning can alter over time. I mean, norms do change, and with that meaning too, yes?
Can you say exactly what constitutes a "static" meaning for you here? How long must it remain static? And how static must it remain- completely static? Mostly static? At least a little bit static?
I believe that's true, or how you interpreted the OP. But, I'm still apprehensive to claim that meaning consists of use, what do you think?
I'm not sure I am. If the argument is that time corrupts meaning due to whatever social, personal, or whatever changes occur, it's correct to assume some degree of change during any expanse of time, which is to invoke an ineffabilty to some degree between what is said and what is meant.
Time, (i.e. intervening events), is just one corrupting influence, as if think limited communicative skills in first place would be the primary one.
But, take Banno and busycuttingcrap argument for example, who inspired me to make this thread. That meaning is use...
If meaning is indeed use, then would it be possible that things once said, now could mean different things?
At some level I think there is. As a second job I have worked as a journalist. I tired hard to write pellucid prose. My meaning seemed clear. But no... that is naive. People interpret 'the meaning' in different ways. What might be intended as a progressive idea might be interpreted as a conservative one depending on how the reader relates to or understands your concepts. I hold a view that people have visceral, emotional reactions to words and concepts that transcend the usage of a word.
So, there is something mysterious about meaning after all?
It'll be because you are in Australia. We live ten or more hours in the future. Most of the folk here haven't yet even gotten to Christmas eve, and by the time they do Santa will have already visited us.
What @Tom Storm seems to be alluding to is that we have beetles in boxes, pace Wittgenstein...
What I'm alluding to is that there's something about intension that hides behind the words that are then interpreted. But, I already know your answer in that there's nothing more than what is said when someone says it.
I don't think I'm making a private language argument. Some people will comprehend the nuances, especially if those people inhabit the same time and culture. Or have a historical understanding of it. But the chances of them understanding references, conventions, values and even some meanings are diminished by time and cultural differences. I think this process is built into all human communication. There's a reason for the expression, 'Some jokes don't travel.'
Quoting Banno
I think it's clear that Santa is the guarantor of all human meaning and morality.
I only mentioned the beetle in a box because of the mention of what you alluded to as some aspect of meaning that isn't expressed, the intensionality that is.
What the speaker intension and the receivers interpretation. But, things like this happen every day, so it's not a surprise to me.
Anyway, carry on. :smile:
Quoting Shawn
Every product of culture, without exception, must be continually reinterpreted for each era. This goes for music, art, literature, history, science and philosophy. There is no getting back to some veridical original meaning. History is repurposed from the perspective of current thinking and concerns.
Sure, meaning can be altered by time. But, more often than not the original meaning holds true over time also.
No. Meaning doesn't persist over time.
The world around us evolves over time. The language we use to describe it also evolves over time. And the culture in which language is contextualised too evolves over time.
Take the word "Dog" for example. Now it means something concrete.
But consider 10, 000 years in the future when languages exchange sounds, written text and usage. Assuming humans still exist, English likely won't - At least not in any form familiar to us at present. Dogs too will have evolved. And our culture will likely be very different - perhaps dogs will have been replaced with something that is more "man's best friend" than the humble canine.
The alphabet may change. And if it doesnt, the words we use most definitely will. As they have done so in the past steadily with time.
Information has an attrition rate. It is lost with time. Because memory is lost with time as well as the means to decipher it (language and context). If I write a book describing life in 2022/23 and store it somewhere safe for thousands of years, the linguistic experts of the future will at most establish an interpretative rough guide - a vague meaning, for what I said.
If we could decode the first writings of the earliest humans as they meant it then we could reasonably assume the same of future generations. But we cannot with 100% confidence. So we cannot assume the future will be the same.
The only things that may stand the test if time is mathematics and physics formulae. They are reasonably consistent with the observable universe and its innate mechanism. The words we use to describe that may be the only access future civilisations have to our language and its application in a broader sense.
In that way poetry and metaphorical language will likely be the first meaning to be lost. Mathematics and formal language the last, assuming there isn't a Copernican revolution in our understanding of the the universe in the meantime that alienates former Thought.