Ye Olde Meaning
Quoting BC
Do I dare ask if meaning is objective or subjective?
No.
I also am tempted to ask what @BC meant, but I don't want to focus on him -- I think he's done an admirable job of highlighting a difference in thinking.
"meaning" has been in the background of my previous thread on identity and masculinity, so I wanted to make another thread to focus on that more and less on identity.
Is the right question "why do we say the same things?" or "why do we say new things?" ?
What's up with this question of meaning, linguistically?
Moliere and Judaka seem to belong to the same Free Church when it comes to word meaning:
Every use of the word is itself a new meaning which isn't fixed by a Public Shelf of Meaning
Moliere
Judaka I generally have the same issue with those who view word meanings as having stringent, objective definitions
Bullshit!
Do I dare ask if meaning is objective or subjective?
No.
I also am tempted to ask what @BC meant, but I don't want to focus on him -- I think he's done an admirable job of highlighting a difference in thinking.
"meaning" has been in the background of my previous thread on identity and masculinity, so I wanted to make another thread to focus on that more and less on identity.
Is the right question "why do we say the same things?" or "why do we say new things?" ?
What's up with this question of meaning, linguistically?
Comments (112)
There's a spectrum between creativity and orthodoxy. Go too far in either direction and you have bullshit.
Is there a Public Shelf Meaning to:
"I walked home"?
I suspect that's not an identification statement in the sense of identifying-with, except for how we might interpret "I"
"Richard Nixon was a good Democrat"
doesn't sound like an identification statement to me. It sounds like a statement written to make people angry.
But it is of the form of an identification statement, complete with the "way" modifier "good".
Oh, go ahead and focus on me. I'm 76 and haven't had my 15 minutes of fame yet -- just -7 minutes and 23 seconds worth.
Quoting Moliere
Yes; "home" has numerous Public Shelf meanings and usages.
a) baseball (home base)
b) the 'home' keys on the QWERTY keyboard--'f' and 'j'
c) magic (rub your ruby crocs together 3 times and say "get me the hell out of here and back home."
d) a place to die ("Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in." The Death of the Hired Man by Robert Frost
e) retail (Home Depot; the Home Store; HOM;
f) medical (a facility you may be sent to possibly against your will) old folks home; nursing home; a home for the very bewildered
g) a trait of animals -- homing instinct
Words have recognized usage. Where can you find a record of current and past word usage? In the 20 fat volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Words have denotations (their plain most direct meaning) and connotations (their nuanced, shaded meaning). "The armored car weighs a ton" is denotative. "She weighs a ton" is connotative.
Take away: The Public Shelf meaning of words has plenty of room to maneuver. It isn't necessary or desirable for each individual to supply his or her own meaning nor for each use of a word to have a unique meaning.
You could be like Humpty Dumpty: 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.'
Fine for the cracked egg.
Bullshit:(Creative---Orthodoxy):Bullshit
Is Bullshit on the left-hand side the same as Bullshit on the right hand side?
And do you mean Bullshit like Harry Frankfurt?
:D I'll only take a minute of your remaining fame.
Quoting BC
We both agree that words have a recognized usage. Meaning is public. I think the part of the metaphor I dislike is the "shelf" part, as if it's in a garage somewhere or containable in a Museum: language-as-bicycle. I certainly don't subscribe to the Humpty Dumpty theory of meaning, though.
But let's take a gander to a time before the Oxford English Dictionary was invented. The "shelf" part of the metaphor looses potency, though we might have to gander further back before the printing press to take the wind out of its sails. And before ships how were journeys and transitions talked of? What of the record of the metaphors before the script, when all writing was phonic?
My uncertainty is more to do with how meaning becomes public than whether it is. Or, since private meaning is a nonsense a how question for publicity is likewise nonsense, how is meaning shared?
Your opening sentence is a bit cryptic. Is it the meaning which accrues new experience, or is it the speaker?
Yes, that was the idea. We are the avenues by which meaning accrues, but, in some real sense, it must also be external to us since it is objectively encapsulated and shared. It is a bit of an enigma. Possibly the notion of a collective entity solves this?
So meaning is emergent in language rather than resident in word atoms. To take the exemplary example, the meaning of the word 'meaning' was analysed and emerged, or as I would maintain, actually drowned forever, in the seminal book The Meaning of Meaning, by Ogden & Richards. (I hereby condemn @Moliere to skim reading the entire wretched book as punishment for starting the topic. The word should no longer be spoken in polite society.)
Meaning,n. That which is consumed as fuel by philosophy, and produced by poetry.
:up:
Why wretched? I thought it a good read.
One of my pet peeves is the way the Private Language Argument is misinterpreted on this site. Some people do it over and over and that misinterpretation spreads. The argument only suggests that you can't have a language that is untranslatable even in principle. This has no bearing whatsoever on whether you can make up your own words for things, or have your own private thoughts which you never share with others.
So yes, you can make up words that you never tell others about. The reason you have no trouble keeping your private language straight is that it's resting on a shared language, which has rules that you learn from others.
Language use can be broken down into these parts:
Utterances: these are the actual sounds you make, or the marks you create when you write.
Sentences: these are formal entities, like The cat is on the mat. Imagine you have a group of friends who have decided to use "The cat is on the mat" as a code for You have spinach in your teeth.
You can see that the meaning of the sentence depends on the context of utterance. This is always true.
Propositions: In the case of your group of friends who have used a sentence as a code, the proposition expressed by "The cat is on the mat" is that you have spinach in your teeth. So propositions are the meanings of uttered sentences. If you take the sentence out of context and just focus on it as a formal entity, though it may have a logical meaning, it doesn't have any specific meaning.
This is the importance of saying that meaning is use. Look to use to discern meaning. Look at the setting of the utterance of "It's a small number" to discern what proposition is being expressed. Meaning is use does not mean that meaning is the actual utterances. That's absurd, but there are people on this forum who will blow through that absurdity and assert it anyway.
Quoting Pantagruel
I haven't read the book; perhaps the authors share valuable ideas. The authors practice a wretched style of composition I associate with 19th century academic writing: complex sentences containing way too many clauses and phrases.
Ogden was the creator of "basic English", a means of communication requiring less than 1,000 unique words. Basic English has some merits, but it would definitely rule out the kind of snarled sentence quoted above.
The sentence "The cat is on the mat" takes me back to 1968 and a very basic literacy workbook the Job Corps was using. There was a line drawing depicting "the cat is on the mat". Very basic literacy instruction.
I have never worried about spinach in my teeth, but I have come across several literary uses of worrisome spinach lodged in the narrator's teeth. Who eats so much spinach, I'd like to know.
Quoting Moliere
But you are not "taking a minute of fame" you are contributing a minute (or seconds, really) of fame. For which I am grateful. Every second counts.
It's a lovely sentence.
I like the relationship between poet and philosopher -- subversive to put the poet as the maker of what the philosopher needs to do his craft!
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "collective entity", I think that's the idea behind Propositions. But I thought your original proposal more interesting because it makes meaning dependent on even more than context, but also one's knowledge of a particular language. So this multiplies meanings even more while sensibly saying how it is they are multiplied -- since meanings are changed by what they are couched in, not just the meanings that are around the sentence but even the knowledge of a speaker is relevant.
Which would really put a number on determining identity-statements -- the very same phrase in the same context spoken by two different speakers, even in the third person, can mean different things. "He is a cautious man" so rest assured vs "He is a cautious man" so don't expect him to do much.
I thought that at one point, though sometimes I flirt with the notion too. But it is absurd, I understand. (though the world is too by my reckoning, so there are worse conclusions)
Quoting frank
I think I'm tracking. This is why I thought going down the PLA was different from understanding Identity -- but I do think the PLA has a bearing on some common thoughts about the meaning of identity-statements. Of course we have private thoughts we can keep to ourselves, but this doesn't speak against the argument basically. In defense of this interpretation it's common for people to go the other way with it, too, and claim that Wittgenstein is wrong because we obviously have a private life, or some such.
When the truth is that Wittgenstein was such a philosopher's philosopher that it's best to reserve judgments from thinking he supports this or that thing we care about. (early on cutting my teeth on W. I did the same thing -- seeing connections to leftist politics and all that. Eventually I figured out that that part was all me just trying to grasp the thoughts of a genius mind. It's an easy mistake to make with the greats)
Yes, there really are no "generic usages," (unless perhaps media is contributing to the creation of a "generic mind"). But maybe not all nuance is important.
:grin:
Quoting Moliere
Some commentary I read said that a high percentage of interpretations are based on reading in ideas not expressed by W. Maybe that stuff ends up being more interesting than W. himself.
Quoting Moliere
Like "Jack is a dog"? That kind of statement?
I will try to answer that first, uninfluenced by other responses, then read the rest of the thread.
The purpose of language is communication. In the early development of human language, this communication was minimal as to vocabulary and grammatical structure, but vital, as to its function. "Run" may have been the first word ever spoken. The listener who not understand its meaning was eaten by a saber-toothed tiger and left fewer progeny than the ones who did understand it. In order to optimize clan survival, language was standardized within the group, so that all members would respond appropriately to warnings, reprimands, hunting deployment instructions and food allocation.
Thereafter, language grew, expanded to functions beyond the immediate and pragmatic survival communications: to express feelings, tell stories, deliver messages between separated individuals, conduct transactions, convey more complex information regarding weather, geography, etc. Eventually, it branched out in specialized sophisticated human endeavours, such as commerce, warfare, science, religion, social interactions and art.
Only in the last two applications is there leeway for imprecision and creative usage. Those two applications adapt over time through innovative uses of language which become popular, and also through influence from other cultures. The scientific, military and economic applications expand and change as new knowledge is gained, as technology is invented, as transactions multiply: new things, processes and relations must be named.
All of these evolutionary changes are possible without disrupting communication, only as long as they take place logically (there is a need for a new word, a comprehensible reason for an adjustment, and consensus among the primary users of the jargon) and gradually (so that the users of the language have time to learn the new application.) Otherwise, Babel ensues.
Yup, that fits the form. The original question was with respect to gender-identity, but the form is there.
The one thing about the form that might elude the original disagreement is that "Jack is a dog" can be read not just as an identity-statement, but also as a description. It'd depend upon the context -- if the question is "Did you buy a cat or a dog?" then that's a description, but if Jack is running around the yard barking like dogs do, and so you express "Jack is a dog" then that's an identity-statement.
Excellent summary there.
Quoting Pantagruel
I'm not entirely serious, but having read it more than once, I don't feel much further forward. It tells how the word is used, but that's like telling me that a frying pan is used by heating it from below. Good useful stuff no doubt, but what's for dinner?
I'm sorry, I'm out of the loop on what the original disagreement was. If the question is asked: "Is that a dog?", the meaning of the uttered sentence is partly a matter of context and partly about what we pick out as dogs by convention.
Thanks!
Probably best to leave the context behind. That was the idea behind starting a new thread -- I didn't want the conversation on identity in the masculinity thread to become a conversation on the meaning of statements of identity. But the creation of this thread was a bit extemporaneous from my usual approach: trying to spin off into another discussion that is more suitable to the question of meaning.
"By convention" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, with that in mind. Isn't that like pointing to the public shelf of meaning?
Yes. It is. Is that bad?
:cool:
Its only a simplified summary of Wittgenstein.
Meaning is use. Philosophy is 'engine idling' - Philosophers are not saying anything, as the engine is not doing any work, going anywhere, producing new knowledge. They are tuning the language to make it run more smoothly. Thus philosophers do nothing useful with the language in the sense of saying anything meaningful. They disentangle the threads so that poets can weave new meanings and identities for us to wear and use.
In favor of this picture of linguistic change I'd say that languages do, in fact, take a long time to change. There's a stability there which is the reason we are tempted by the metaphor of the Public Shelf of Meaning, or in more sophisticated prose, metaphysical Propositions.
What I'd substitute for Propositions is repetition. By repeatedly using a locution in a similar fashion it comes to seem that the days resemble one another, or even that there are days at all rather than intermittent light-space dark-space. Then by finding ways to preserve our writing over time that allowed us the metaphor of nature as book that we can read. The fundamentals of writing are the same between speech and the script, the only difference is rate at which the sign fades, which in turn allows us to start interpreting the sign in the same way that we were interpreting the world, which gives rise to the picture of Propositions.
Given that meaning is public -- for what reasons do we disagree over meaning?
In truth, I have never heard 'the public shelf' reference before, and I have no idea what the 'metaphysical proposition' is. So, here we have a failure to communicate. For me, language use is not a philosophical issue; it's as simple and pragmatic as the several uses of a hammer.
Quoting Moliere
Meaning may be public - that is, a language used by many people consists of a vocabulary. But its distribution is not egalitarian. Different classes have access to more or less education, more or less sophisticated concepts and therefore different ways of using language, different applications for the same word. Specialized occupations also have specialized words and applications even for common words, while the general public has little access to those specialized forms of communication. Language is distorted by financial and covert interest groups who deliberately exclude members of the public from their communications. Some economic and political groups also deform the common language in order to manipulate and mislead the public. And some slight innovations, such as a play on words or metaphor, are introduced in popular entertainment and art.
In an era of fast-evolving technologies and mass communication, these intentional distortions, as well as unintended misunderstandings, from several sources at once, can spread far more rapidly than they could have even a century ago - over a far larger population that incorrectly believes it owns and speaks a single language.
Now that's intriguing, and I think forms the most radical interpretation of @frank's "creative" side of the gradient of meaning.
At a certain point we don't speak the same language. It becomes Middle English or German or some such.
But are you and I speaking the same language in this series of posts?
One of the things I like about the Oxford English Dictionary is that it is empirical in its research -- it looks for actual uses to support the record of meaning. It is an empirical historical method of inquiry.
And with that comes new uses. The dictionary is never finished since, from our present record, we clearly see that meaning shifts over time.
Maybe the better question is -- how is it, given that meaning is public, that we understand novel uses?
I agree with the spirit of this (I think), but I also think it's analytically useful to keep the meaning of the utterance and the meaning of the sentence separate. In your example, I'd then say:
The utterance "The cat is on the mat," means "There's spinache between your teeth," but the sentence still retains the meaning "the cat is on the mat", too. That is, given that code divides audience between in-group and out-group, the in-group would still know what the sentence means to the out-group, and if a member of the out-group would use the sentence, that's what the utterance would mean.
I'd say any theory based on "meaning is use," would have to incoroporate that difference. More later. Maybe. I'm not at my best lately.
Well, sometimes we don't understand.
"Dope", for instance. The word was derived from Dutch "doopen" meaning 'to dip" or 'sauce' and was imported into English about 200 years ago. It has been used to mean a) a drug b) inside information c) a stupid person d) a thick varnish or a lubricant. It also has a meaning in semiconductor manufacture, It is both a noun and verb.
Those uses were familiar to me. "Dope" meaning 'cool' or 'high quality' -- dope shoes -- was meaningless to me the first few times I encountered this usage.
Things used to be "hot"; then they became "cool".
I read pretty widely, and I thought I had a large vocabulary. However, I keep coming across English words that are as unfamiliar as Sanskrit. I've been collecting them, along with their meaning. The words are not common at all -- I check them out on Google Ngram, which is a measure of the frequency that words have appeared in print during the last several hundred years.
Who the hell uses these weird words?
A medievalist would be familiar with destrier, a medieval knight's warhorse. But who uses instauration[/I], the action of restoring or renewing something? Here's one with very narrow usage: [i]floccinaucinihilipilification The Latin elements were listed in a well-known rule of the Latin Grammar used at Eton College, an English public school. Right. Not my neighborhood. But here is a rare word that one could use at TPF fairly often:
Paywall is a new word we all know the meaning of.
So: we encounter new words that are familiar to other speakers; we can guess at the meaning from context, ask what it means, or look it up. If we hear the word several times, we might add it to our own lexicon. Or not: I read somewhere that after middle age, people tend not to learn new words. My guess is that this is not a brain phenomenon, but a cultural one. Life no longer brings older people into contact with people regularly using new and different vocabularies. Plus, other middle aged or older people find somebody using too many new words very annoying.
I have added this new word to my vocabulary: deliquesce. It means to melt, or fade away, It's what happens to a snowman on a warm winter day. There are times when I wished I could just deliquesce -- quickly melt and fade away from the unpleasant situation I was in. 'Deliquesce' also labels the unpleasant experience of becoming obsolete and irrelevant--another experience I've had (sob, snivel).
Checked your 'sell by' date?
I'm about half a century old, but this is mostly about... environmental hazard? I do start feeling the wear and tear.
No, it doesn't: neither of those peoples would understand a word of it. It becomes jargon, code, doubletalk, jingo, financial hocus-pocus, hieratic, moneyspeak, propaganda, newscaster parrot, hype, slang, dialect and nonsense.
Quoting Moliere
There is a large enough overlap to call it the same language, yes. It's not usual for all speakers of a language to be familiar with its entire vocabulary, and it is quite common for each party in a conversation to apply a word as it is used in a different discipline.
Quoting Moliere
The agility of the human mind. We apply associations and imagination to accommodate variation. We can usually correct quite accurately for errors on spelling and regional difference in pronunciation, as well as discern the merits of creative linguistic construction - hence the appreciation of poetry and humour.
On the other end of the spectrum is the Hittite language. When they were first trying to translate it, they thought maybe it was Semitic, because there was a lot of that in the region They kept coming across a word that looked like it would be pronounced "wassah", and it was frequently near a word that was probably "bread." Then somebody had the crazy idea that "wassah" may have been the same as the English word "water." Turns out that was true. Hittite is an Indo-european language from a 3500 year old extinct culture, but they pronounced "water" pretty much the same way we do. That's an old shelf to take meanings down from.
I agree.
Tell me about it! I'm 76 and limping around (bad knees and hips).
Good point.
And maybe that's the better question too: why don't we understand, sometimes? Or maybe I'm just barking up the wrong tree.
Quoting BC
A handy list of techniques for determining meaning.
Really, I think that's basically exhaustive. At least these are the usual ways of determining meaning.
So, as @unenlightened hinted at, there was no question here at all, and all the theories of meaning are just so many words missing the point because you can't determine meaning ahead of time, you have to learn it.
Is it because of this experience that we believe others are wrong when they use a word in some way we perceive as novel? "Look, the locution has been this way for a long time, and I don't understand why you'd change it..."
Or is it always a matter of some other disagreement -- that the meaning is well understood, but the claim that one or the other person does not understand the meaning is usually an exaggeration, and is more like shorthand for "I wouldn't say it like that"?
Heh, then I'd say we're in a conundrum: at what point is there not enough overlap? Is it just more like a feeling of frustration which we give into, and so the beginnings of a social divide starts, and eventually -- over time and practice -- the groups evolve differently?
Surely there is more than one language. And surely there is miscommunication. What enables us to learn another language, or to understand a miscommunication?
Quoting Vera Mont
I find that unsatisfying because it comes back to the idea that meaning is mental. While I'm happy to say we need a mind to speak, or at least a brain, I don't think meaning is mental. Or at least, if meaning is public, you get into some weird thoughts about the mental then -- like that the mental is also public, when we usually think of our individual minds as being not-quite-so-public.
Not entirely false, but definitely counter-intuitive.
Part of my background thoughts is that meaning is a part of the world, and overflows our attempt to grasp it -- and language is that very attempt to solidify, in thought, what can't be solidified in thought.
The American Republican and Democratic core have already arrived there.
Quoting Moliere
They diverge, yes. Whether they evolve, I don't know. The Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Britons did meld to become British; the Normans overcame the communication gap and went on to become English. The Welsh learned English, but remained a separate identity. It all depends on how history devolves from the point of contact, or the point of divergence.
Quoting Moliere
The capacity and willingness to learn. An interest in the other group and its culture... or a benefit in interactions with that other group.
Quoting Moliere
Well, it's not physical or spiritual... Language is one of the processes the brain carries out, because the kidneys and thyroid can't think.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, we're capable of weird thoughts, even bizarre ones. Why would you need to share a brain, or compromise your individual identity, in order to partake in a common pool of words and their conventional usage? What part of your identity do you sacrifice by drawing water from a communal well?
Quoting Moliere
That's way-out metaphysical for a pedestrian mind like mine.
And we understood this bit, in the translation, but did we get the whole meaning? I don't think so.
Puns and jokes are a good example here -- the meaning of a pun is so contextual that it's pretty hard to understand without context. And surely they had jokes about so common a word? We say "it's water under the bridge" to mean that the past no longer matters. Surely we didn't recover all the meaning of the language in understanding one of its uses that we still use?
In this case, yes. Our own usage was like the Rosetta stone for Egyptian, or Babylonian texts were for Sumerian. The latter two cases show that translation doesn't rely on a continuum of usage. We're able to engage with abstract patterns that people thousands of years ago used. We're outside those ancient communities, though, so it's possible that translation is lossy. Since our worldview is profoundly different from theirs in some ways, I would say that's likely, though there are those who would disagree.
Quoting Moliere
There are probably nuances that we don't know about.
Quoting unenlightened
Quoting Vera Mont
So this is a nice demarcation of scope, to me. Rather than reaching for Big L Language, as I was, this focuses the meaning of meaning, in our case, to meaning in terms of mutual understanding, or meaning in terms of two opposing sides who just seem to refuse to communicate, and asking the far more relevant question: why does disagreement seem to distort meaning to a point that we no longer mean the same things, and are talking past one another?
Some ideas provided here -- no interest in the other group or culture, or no benefit from interaction with the other group or culture, or good old fashioned fun (cooperation is boring! I want to win!)
There is an element of that when disagreement is over some fundamental concept, like the equality of citizens or what the cardinal sins and virtues are. In that kind of situation, words like "right" and "justice" and "value" have the same linguistic root yet represent different ideas.
In most cases, though, I don't think it's the disagreement itself that alters the meaning of language, but rather the leaders and would-be leaders of a faction, who deliberately distort and misrepresent ideas in order to manipulate their followers. So the two factions still agree on what a "table" is, they have very different motives for pounding on it.
In order to understand others you have to put yourself in their shoes. See what they see out of their skull holes. Then you hook into their frame of reference and the meaning of their utterances will be obvious.
If a person has a very rigid sense of identity, they can't take up residence in other people's positions. Or maybe they've judged the other to be evil or what not. Then they don't want to be tainted.
This doesn't undermine the idea that meaning is first shared and after that potentially private. It just means sometimes we aren't communicating. We're just talking at each other.
-- the wisdom of Asperger's.
I think the "language as use," insight is simultaneously genius and a negative influence on the philosophy of language. While Wittgenstein is more equivocal in the Investigations over whether language is always use, his work has been used to build an all encompassing theory, one of the very sort he argues against in the Investigations. Language may sometimes be a game, but it isn't always a game, unless we stretch the definition of "game" to become so broad as to lose all explanatory power.
It is prima facie unreasonable to say that we don't [I]mean[/I] things by our words outside of the structure of language. Language is, after all, a method of communication. Sometimes we very obviously are referring to objects with speech, e.g., "my car needs a new timing belt."
Now, animals also communicate, monkeys make different calls for different predators, different dances by honey bees refer to the location of food in relation to the hive, etc. When a dog shows anger, aggression, it is communicating it mental states. And, all sorts of animals communicate aggression in very similar ways, making themselves look larger, bearing their fangs and claws, making displays of strength by jumping or beating things around them, etc.
To be sure, we could perhaps describe this in terms of evolutionary game theory, but we don't think evolution is games all the way down. Also, to totally define language in terms of use seems to demand that we lapse into a hard behavioralism that denies that language sometimes is communicating our internal, subjective experiences. But even non-social animals raised in isolation communicate their internal states through body posture, facial expressions, etc. So it seems that the "use" isn't necessarily based on learned rules. IMO, language is not suis generis, but rather a type of communication, and much confusion comes from us focusing on the most complex form of communication in isolation from simpler forms.
I'll allow Umberto Eco to make the case for a broader view:
[Quote]
To realize that /stop/ and the red light convey the same order is as intuitive as to decide that, to convince people to refrain from drinking a certain liquid , one can either write /poison/ or draw a skull on the bottle .
Now, the basic problem of a semiotic inquiry on different kinds of signs is exactly this one: why does one understand something intuitively?
...To say that some truth is intuitive usually means that one does not want to challenge it for the sake of economy - that is, because its explanation belongs to some other science.
Now, the basic problem of a semiotic inquiry on different kinds of signs is exactly this one: why does one understand something intuitively?
[Consider charming/seducing someone versus threatening them into an action. The resulting behavior one gets, the use, is the same. Why do both work the same way? And why is one more likely to work than the others in some cases]
Perhaps it is by virtue of a 'shallow' similarity in their effect that one intuitively understands that both behaviors produce ideas and emotions in the mind of the potential victim . But, in order to explain how both behaviors produce the same effect, one should look for something 'deeper' .To look for such a deeper common structure, for the cognitive and cultural laws that rule both phenomena such is the endeavor of a general semiotics .
[Semiotics does not need one answer for the question above] it can also decide, for instance (as many semioticians did ) , that the way in which a cloud signifies rain is different from the way in which a French sentence signifies - or is equivalent to - an allegedly corresponding English sentence ...
[B]
[The principles of a more general semiotics can allow] allow one to look at the whole of human activity from a coherent point of view. To see human beings as signifying animals - even outside the practice of verbal language - and to see that their ability to produce and to interpret signs, as well as their ability to draw inferences , is rooted in the same cognitive structures , represent a way to give form to our experience.[/B]
[/Quote]
I agree 100% with the last paragraph. Cognitive science tells us we use the same hardware for understanding language as for perceiving. When we visualize words we use the visual cortex in ways similar to processing sight, etc. This system is modular. Disorders like aphasia show that meaning can be completely separated from language production based on rules; we can lose the rules but retain our sense of meaning, or lose our ability to imbue speech with meaning but keep the ability to follow the rules. The attempt to draw general rules in philosophy of language is simultaneously to focused on just human language and too broad, attempting to reduce an emergent property used for many purposes to one sort of thing.
Me too. And we use the word in that way "Footprints mean feet have passed by'; 'clouds sometimes mean rain'; 'Rainbows mean god promises to spare us from flood'; 'Umberto means... when he says...' This is why it becomes confusing when one asks what 'mean' means. And even more confusing when one writes a whole book about it but does not deign to stray outside the writings of academic philosophers, as if there is no meaning outside the ivory tower. (I'm looking at you, Ogden and Richards.)
You are correct here, however I will add a caveat.
When people use these words in the context you describe, they are often being taciturn. When person A says "I want justice," they really mean "I want justice in line with my values and my worldview." When person B says "I want justice" they also mean the same. Of course, if persons A and B have different values or worldviews, then what "justice" looks to them is different. However I would put forward that the problem is not a misunderstanding of the word, rather that the word is being used as a short form for more than just itself. Simple elaboration clarifies the misunderstanding.
I am interested in figuring out a framework for people with different politics, values, etc to communicate effectively with each other, and I see this as one of the biggest stumbling blocks.
Another example in politics that I see all sides throw at one another - divisive. People will say "X is being divisive." However the way this is often used actually means "X is being divisive and I want them to come in line with my values and worldview, and I refuse to move towards them or meet halfway even if that will solve the divisiveness because I find their values and worldview deplorable."
A lot of misunderstanding can simply be solved by elaboration. One thing I like about this forum is the elaboration, it certainly helps healthy discussions.
The desire to believe their faction's version of reality. The minions are less interested in accurate information than in reassurance and the promise of being made great again - whether they ever had been anything but puny or not.
Quoting Moliere
On the contrary! Jingo gives them a much louder, more persuasive collective voice than their individual intellect ever could have. Yelling slogans makes people feel strong.
Quoting PhilosophyRunner
Try peace and prosperity. The easiest way to keep the polity at one another's throats, so they don't notice you're picking their pockets, is to keep shouting "Boo!" The terrists are coming! The migrants want you wimmin and your jabs! The commies will take all your stuff! Bad weather is a Chinese plot! Vaccines will make you sterile! Democrats want to sell your kiddies! Anxious people lash out in whatever direction somebody points to a cause of all their troubles. (Especially in countries where education and news media are controlled by the same interest group as the economy and law enforcement.)
When people feel secure and have the leisure to inform themselves, they tend to become far more tolerant, more interested in maintaining equilibrium.
Is this assuming nominalism? That there is no "justice," or "good," that people can point to that extends outside the frame of "my desires and preferences?"
That everyone might understand justice in a different way doesn't preclude that "justice" exists. People understand what is meant by "species," "economic recession," "computation," or "fundemental particle" in different ways, but that doesn't mean the words lack a referent, right?
Values are perhaps different in that it is less possible to describe them truthfully while also describing them objectively. But objectivity ? truth. In some ways, moving to more objective descriptions of a phenomenon appear to lead to less accurate depictions of those phenomena.
Anyhow, values being somehow more subjective doesn't seem to preclude their having some sort of referent outside of personal experience. When we refer to "a lack of justice," in the world, it seems like we are referring not simply to our own mental states or to a collective set of mental states, but states of affairs in the world in a way not of a different kind form claims like "there is no hydrogen gas in the cannister." That is, there is a set of empirically discoverable conditions we think a certain state of affairs lacks.
Consider that many animals and young children appear to have a sense of fairness.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230302114205.htm#:~:text=FULL%20STORY-,A%20sense%20of%20fairness%20has%20long%20been%20considered%20purely%20human,reward%20for%20the%20same%20task.
We live in a world of cause and effect. We are highly attuned to recognize these patterns, and their nuances. We become frustrated when events do not correspond to our predictions. There is a desire for regularity and this transfers over to social conditions as well, although social conditions can shift greatly over time, for humans and animals.
A desire for fairness has a certain sort of logic, even from an evolutionary standpoint. To my mind, this recalls the idea Hegel develops in the Philosophy of Right and which Honneth picks up in Freedom's Right. We can objectify values to the degree that we can understand their underlying logic in nature. And they do seem to have an underlying logic, to be something necessary rather than contingent a solution to the game of survival. The human mind comes from nature and it would be suprising if broad similarities across species and cultured did not stem from something necessary in our development as opposed to contingent. Hence, I think a form of justice, etc. can be found implicit in the development of species and further in the development of cultures and history. But this doesn't mean that an objective Platonic form of justice exists as such, but rather that the concept is developing, unfolding, itself a complex and dynamical process.
Which is all to say, I think we have good grounds for thinking justice can refer to both our individual sense of justice, social norms, OR a higher form of justice that lies implicit within the logic of being.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't think that's what he meant. I think @PhilosophyRunner meant that often when people talk they assume that their words will be interpreted as they interpret them, from their point of view, with all of their assumptions. Sometimes people recognize the need to spell out those assumptions, but often they don't. Philosophy is obsessive about spelling out assumptions -- witness you here bringing up nominalism -- but ordinarily people aren't, hence @PhilosophyRunner's suggestion that understanding can be improved by what he calls "elaboration," which I take to mean people spelling out their assumptions, their point-of-view. That's all.
Of course, your examples suggest, @PhilosophyRunner, that people agree less than they appear to, that for instance people who all say they want "justice" might have in mind very different things, but there may be examples that go the other way, where people don't realize they want the same thing because they use different words for it.
If figured that might be the sense of it. But it seemed like a convenient on ramp for what I hope could be an answer for:
If there is, at least in principle, a way to tie values back to something outside the individual, then that provides a framework for understanding how value claims gets communicated without an infinite loop of translating mental state to mental state. Our sense of values did have to emerge out of something after all.
I don't think social norms work for this because they are too malleable, we need a more general principle that stands behind social norms, hence looking to how animals view fairness. But this might be overly speculative.
lol. I picked up the Routledge Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Language recently because my knowledge of the field has a lot of gaps and it amazed me to see not one mention of C.S. Peirce, Saussure, or Eco, and almost none of Augustine. These four seem like maybe the top four places to go to look for a theory of meaning, but the silo walls are apparently quite strong. I was less surprised, but still saddened to see very little mention from the Continental tradition either.
I see nothing wrong with engaging in a specific type of inquiry or tradition, but you need to look outside the silo for ideas too, especially if you've been stuck in place for half a century.
Today Peter and Mary will shout at each other "Your views are disgusting, I want justice" while tomorrow maybe they will have a debate about Peter's nominalism and Mary's moral realism which is their actual divide. A better world would be one where people disagree with scalpels and not with sledgehammers.
I also think you monkey example is an interesting one:
All those monkeys share a sense of fairness, but disagreements may ensure.
Should the monkeys get equal food for equal tasks? Should they get their preferred food for equal tasks (even if that is different). Should the monkeys that are hungrier and/or malnourished get more food for the same task? Should weaker monkeys get the same food even if they do not complete the same task? Should older monkeys get the same food even if they are unable to complete the same task? etc.
Those may be discussion points that would ensure in a discussion around monkey politics. What are the worldviews underpinning different stances for those questions? What common ground can be found, and what specific disagreements are there? What assumptions underline those different stances?
However what we are more likely to see in political discussion today is a slogan by one side about fairness, and a counter slogan form the other side about fairness. And that is lamentable.
Yes that's exactly what I mean (in a thread about meaning).
Absolutely, that would be great.
But which comes first? Peace and prosperity or better communication? I don't see peace and prosperity if people struggle to communicate with each other.
That might be reinventing the wheel, if language is outside the individual in some sense, even if it's not outside all individuals in the aggregate, outside at least in the sense of being explicitly a technology of cooperation. And then there's @Isaac's narratives, which serve multiple purposes as language does.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This might be a mistake, looking for a framework. It could be we have many sorts of conversations and they have different sources and structures. I care about my kids and I care about democracy -- is that the same thing just because "care" is in both descriptions? Do we talk about these the same way?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Same problem we have everywhere, and I don't know how to solve it. is a persuasive statement of the view, and much as I'd like to, I don't know how to get around it, and I'm not willing just to reject it by fiat.
When I come up with a solution, the forum will be the first to know.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, and I don't see a better candidate for rock bottom than biology. I think everything goes back to being a living organism, first of all, and being whatever sorts of living organisms we are, which is to start with whatever we were crafted to be by evolution.
I've had some sympathy for the sort of emotive account you can get from Hume and Smith. (The moral sentiments.) I see all sorts of material to work with in the theory of cooperation, from Axelrod to Grice, which I think we can also assume has a biological basis.
My gut instinct (heh) is that we are not that different from the first Homo sapiens, and that our biology is much closer to the surface than we realize.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Obviously I think this is exactly the right approach.
That's kind of what I did say. They define the word according to their values. In most people's minds, justice has roughly the same meaning in the abstract, but the value systems or world-views interpret the purpose and administration of justice differently. To a liberal progressive, it means judging an act in its social, economic and psychological context and allowing for mitigating circumstances. A religious conservative believes in punishment equal to or greater than the crime, regardless of other conditions; for a Native American, it means restoring harmony to the community; to some Christians, it means healing the rift an act has created and leaving judgment to God.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Of course that's true. But nature and logic are not central to most human belief-systems; some belief-systems are, in fact, hostile to nature and all that is natural to a human animal. In fact, some go so far as to deny evolution and many ignore all the obvious similarities between humans and other animals.
Up to that point, that's a sense of grievance. It only becomes a sense of justice when it's reciprocal. Did the unfairly rewarded monkeys throw the grapes at the trainer because the other group got cucumber? In my world-view, "fair" means equitable and "justice" means a fair judgment of persons and acts, according to all available evidence. In some world-views, it would be unfair to give to a servant what is due to a master, or accord to a lesser ethnicity or gender the rights and freedoms of the dominant ethnicity or gender.
But back to language:
Logic and nature need not be explicitly central to systems of belief for them to [I]underlie[/I] such systems. People might reject that they are a type of animal, or the products of natural selection, but that doesn't stop them from being so anymore than some ancient emperors' belief in their own godhood saved them from death. That is, if cause and effect are understandable in terms of logic, and the mind is the product of nature, the the development of "irrational," beliefs is, in its own way, rational.
Indeed, it makes perfect sense for living beings to have irrational beliefs because following through all the implications of the information we are exposed to is impossible with scarce computational resources. Computation is, in its own way, communication. To be fully aware of how one is thinking requires that you subject the initial computations to another round of analysis, and so on. Perfect self knowledge then requires infinite recursion. We do have some ability to analyze our own thinking, but it is necessarily finite.
What we care about is the "difference that makes a difference." Likewise, the amount of information we can take in from our enviornment is always limited because too much entropy destroys an organism. Imagine if we tried to encode all the entropy in the microstates of the air around us? We'd have to somehow [I]embody [/I] the chaos therein. Extremely lossy compression, and a sensory systems that mines incoming data for relevance while discarding most of what comes in, both seem essential for our perceptual system. I imagine that the same logic is part of what causes so many headaches for us re communication, we have to use heuristics to glean meaning in a time effective way.
E.g., I can read Rumi, Chaucer, Aeschylus, or Paul's letters again and again and come away with new levels of meaning, great depths lie there, but this takes time and resources.
But, just as true is the fact that knowledge is power. Genomes work by correctly encoding information about the enviornment. Technology wins wars and technology requires knowing how the world works. So being has this strange property where it has spawned life forms who can understand it very poorly but who also seem inexorably drawn on to plumb its depths in a sort of recursive, fractally recurring process of being coming to know itself. Downright trippy if you ask me. And a big role of communication is simply to further this ability to explore and encode information about the enviornment.
The ones who benefit from injustice don't always speak out against it. From antiquity through the American Civil War, how many slave owners spoke out against the unfairness of slavery and yet owned slaves?
Okay, then. How does that rational irrationality relate to the meaning of words?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
A few - just the ones with a stronger affinity to justice than to self-interest - i.e. the ones who both recognized and admitted an injustice. Of course, the next logical step would be to free their own slaves and campaign against the institution, but even fewer people have that much resolve.
At the most basic level, if computational theory of mind is correct, then the logic of information dictates how language can convey meaning. That doesn't mean language is reducible to quantitative theories of information, but it means that they can give us a very basic starting point for understanding communications. When dealing with emergent phenomena, it helps to know what they emerge from.
In any event, I was thinking about value statements in particular with my original post. These seem particularly tricky because of the is-ought gap. That's why the logic behind seemingly inherently subjective concepts is important, it allows us to ground them in facts. Of course "x feels y," can be an objective fact IMO, but it's a fairly inaccessible one in many ways, the sort of fact it is hard to verify or quantify the way we would like.
Good point. I was getting a little far afield. I think such a grounding is also important for resolving the is-ought gap in the manner of Honneth, etc. but that isn't necessarily key in understanding language in general. Although, it seem helpful for understanding value claims, it might be more helpful for making them, which I have prehaps conflated a bit.
I agree. See:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/826773
IMO, the challenge is too find more general principles underscoring processes without trying to reduce different processes into one thing just to get a theory that is comprehensive. It's the difference between trying to squeeze things into a box and trying to find a box that easily holds everything you need. It's easier said than done, because finding a new box and squeezing things that don't fit into an old one are easy to mistake for one another when it comes to theorizing.
As for the referenced post:
This is fine as a definition. But the "external world," as an external world still shows up in such a description. The external world is posited as part of agent's observational history, and posited as something which the agent believes to be [I]distinct from[/I] the observational history that contains said description an external referent. That is, we can say "there is nothing outside the text," but the text might very well say otherwise.
This assumes the agent is self conscious of course, i.e., that they are aware, through recursive self analysis, that their observational history is different from the world. But obviously agents can have the belief that the world of appearances, their observational history, is not the "real world" (Plato), and they can even believe that such a real world exists but that they can never access it (some interpretations of Kant).
An agent that differentiates between "the tree is in front of me," and "this is my view of the tree; others to my left and right have different views, and none is privilege vis-á-vis the "truth" of the tree," has moved past this description even if:
is still the case. However, I would reject the above statement unless we are talking purely abstract models. Understanding how a phenomena occurs, in this case belief formation, requires understanding what causes it. If we only understand the observational history, we can't understand how the beliefs are actually formed for the same reason that an eye can't see itself and we can't do psychology and neuroscience just by reviewing our thoughts. E.g., neuroscientists don't just scan brains, they expose people to controlled stimuli as they scan the brain; you'd get nowhere with just one half of the equation. Plus, if we accept extended minds, etc. it's unclear where to draw the line for locating an agents' beliefs in the real world.
No finite agent can perfectly encode how it comes to all its beliefs; the observational history must have gaps. If I have a meta eye that captures every detail of how my eye works then I need a meta meta eye to capture all the details of how the meta eye works, and so on. If an external observer has perfect information about an agent's observations, they still won't know everything they could know about how the agent's beliefs have developed without reference to the external world.
Pinkhard - Hegel's Naturalism
Language has already emerged. We have a pretty good idea where it came from and how it developed over time. We have a pretty good reconstruction of the growth and mutation of religious beliefs. We can observe how the latter distorts the former. We are already where we are, not at the dawn of time, or the differentiation of hominids or the introduction of supernatural ideation and heiratic usage.
Why go back to the making of the first wheel to figure out why your car malfunctions?
I don't think that analogy fits. We're talking about how to understand how language works philosophically, something like: "how does language convey meaning." The car analogy would be apt if the problem was something like: "why can't x understand me when I say y and how do I make them understand?"
The philosophical view is more like the question: "how does my car work?" And yes, for that question, chemistry, the history of automobile development, mechanics, thermodynamics, etc. are all relevant parts of a complete explanation.
Humans have sex, eat, breathe, blind, drink, etc. Presumably we learn something about how and why we do these things from animal studies, else I don't know why scientists spend so much time getting animals high on drugs, neuroscientists work so much with mice, etc.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm not. I'm talking about how language is altered, adapted, specialized and perverted over time.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That was certainly one of the questions.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
When I take my car to a garage, I never ask the mechanic any questions about chemistry or history. At $60/hour, I couldn't afford to, even I were confident that he knows those things. All i need him to know is how this particular engine operates, why it doesn't, and how to rectify the issue.
Something that is very often described in information theoretic terms using a theory that was started by an electrical engineer and furthered mostly by computer scientists and mathematicians. Or it is often explained in terms of natural selection, a theory created by a biologist, but now widely applied across a host of subjects, including language evolution, both on the grand scale and in terms of changes in slang.
I'm not saying you need to unpack all the details of friction to be able to fix brakes, but having a rough idea of it helps. I wouldn't trust a mechanic who can't tell me why bald tires are no good.
Likewise, to understand language getting a PhD in biology is probably not your best bet, but reading some biology? Yeah, that might help. This is why linguists work with cognitive scientists, biologists, doctors, neuroscientists and why all scientists work with pure mathematicians, philosophers, and logicians from time to time (more often during paradigm shifts).
Another way to think of this via the distinction between proximate and ultimate questions in the philosophy of biology.
Proximate questions ask "how?"How do words convey meaning? How do children learn language so intuitively? How do salmon find their way home to spawn each year?
Ultimate questions ask "why?" Why do we use language? Why did we develop the capacity for language? Why do salmon bother expending so much energy to return to their original homes to mate?
Biologists focus on both because the answer for one often helps unpack the answers for others.
Well, that's fine for PhD work; it seems a little over the top for a simple conversation.
Quoting Vera Mont
Quoting Vera Mont
So in this picture we have a common sense of meaning which is distorted by desire, of a kind -- but the desire is stoked by leaders who know how to speak to people and people who like to be spoken to in a symbiotic relationship of belief-maintenance which in turn has a positive feedback loop from it being an empowering experience -- a place in the world, a social network, power, and a righteous cause all wrapped into one (though with enough moral vagaries that many are dis-affected and simply don't participate).
And we have two camps with that set of motivations disagreeing with one another on the correct way to proceed on... well, lots of things. At base, though, it seems your picture says that it's a conflict of desires to believe such and such means such and such because believing that the words mean this or that is what reassures people of their particular faction's version of reality.
That's the picture in many countries today. But sometimes, it has been monolithic - like the suasion of the RCC in medieval Europe. Other times and places, there may be multiple parties representing interest groups or opinions, and there still be civil discourse in a single language. I see anxiety-level as the main determinant of extreme divergence and distortion. ("Fear is the mind-killer.")
Quoting PhilosophyRunner
Quoting frank
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm adding you at the end @Srap Tasmaner because it seems like you're part of this thread of thought in mentioning limitations to some of the suggestions above while gesturing towards the biological as a kind of rock bottom for understanding meaning which is where you and I probably diverge the most, so maybe we'll find something here to connect on.
So the problem of meaning, in scope, is the problem of misunderstanding. We frequently understand one another, and frequently don't, and the latter has become more apparent over time -- or perhaps we have actually lost some ability to understand one another too.
I'd call your solution @PhilosophyRunner the philosopher's solution par excellence -- if the people are ignorant of what some other person means then clearly they'll misunderstand, and elaboration is a way of filling in the gaps of that ignorance. And frequently this will actually be the case, that someone has an actively false notion about some other person's belief or expression that needs only be addressed and corrected, and the misunderstanding disappears.
But @frank points out that sometimes it's not a matter of simple ignorance and elaboration. Sometimes we misunderstand because we're simply not able to see what someone else sees, to hook into their frame of reference, for instance if someone has a rigid sense of identity (to imagine that I might be elsewise is to not be me, so I won't imagine it). Basically the meaning is public, in the PLA sense, but there's more to the problem of misunderstanding than what elaboration will address.
Which is where I thought @Count Timothy von Icarus's conclusion shored up some difficulties -- in the appeal to values outside of ourselves, or a notion of justice, or social norms. Something aside from the basic meaning of the words, and something aside from the identities which are in conflict.
In addition it's worthwhile to point out that the final step in evolution is extinction. From the descriptive angle "survival" isn't even enough, because eventually all species will die. It's not survival as much as species-wide fecundity that's important. What's important about this is that insofar that we're able to take care of our children such that they are able to reproduce we've officially cleared the evolutionary hurdle.
And we've done that not just with different languages, but if we go far back enough then we did it without any language whatsoever -- or, at least, that's how the story goes.
In this way of looking language is just kind of an accident that happened along the way, that came along "for free" but had no purpose at the level of a general description of species-being or speciation.
It would probably help if you gave a worked example. Show us an exchange that you would characterize as people misunderstanding each other, and why you would call it misunderstanding rather than something else.
In passing, I'll note that people often feel the impulse to reduce misunderstanding to (unrecognized or unacknowledged) disagreement, and disagreement to (unrecognized or unacknowledged) misunderstanding. There might be a problem with that.
That story is inaccurate. "We" did nothing. A very long line of mammals before us, birds and reptiles before them, elaborated systems of communication that we, in our superstitious arrogance, didn't take into consideration when contemplating the origins of our language. Much older species have used vocal cues as warnings, threats, alarms, greetings, indications of mood, expressions of satisfaction, pleasure, anger, sorrow, pain, identification or solidarity. The more socially integrated a group of animals is, the better each individual's, especially those of the vulnerable young, chances of survival. The more precise and comprehensive its means of communication, the better that group's social integration and the more efficiently it can coordinate individual efforts.
Quoting Moliere
Neither. Language evolved along with the brain capacity of hominids, for the purpose of uniting and organizing social units and coordinating their individual efforts in defense, food-acquisition, evading predators and rearing the young.
Let's take "socialism" -- I'm not sure I could write a dialogue demonstrating, but maybe our experiences with this word could suffice?
What does "socialism" mean?
There's more than one definition that people would offer, even among those who'd say they are socialists.
And there's a strange mixture of misunderstanding and half-understanding and pop-understanding along with more precise understandings of the meaning of socialism.
My thought on the mechanisms of misunderstanding: in a conversation where languages are shared I think it's possible to shore up misunderstanding insofar as there's sufficient trust or charity among the participants. So anything that decreases our desire to offer either would explain misunderstandings of the sort where we both share a language but have that strange feeling that we're not speaking the same language.
Or do you want something more concrete? I started flipping through the news, and then starting thinking back through labor history but then had this thought here. Good call on asking for something concrete, though.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
One thing I've noticed is something like what you say here: there's an important step in a discussion where you have to realize that you understand one another just fine. What you can't do is agree.
But then there's another misunderstanding from that. Just because we don't agree that doesn't mean that's the end of a discussion. There's something fruitful in disagreement. And usually there's more to be said or thought about.
Well, I did nothing, that's for sure. And there is no "we" in the sense of a species-across-time, so I'd go that far. If the biological story is accurate then there's not really a hard distinction to be made between species, so it will be a Sorites Paradox if we try to draw a hard distinction.
Even though we share meaning with creatures and are interconnected to the life around us it seems like, say, our ability to compute sums with language is different. And humans can speak like other animals do -- like the mating lures we've created for birds to watch them. Language, in this symbolic sense that allows us to speak as other animals and compute sums, doesn't really seem to take hold with other species very well. To some varying degrees, yes, but it's not the same as what's accomplished by even children.
Which isn't to say we're over and above or somehow separate from nature or other animals. It's just that this is one way in which it seems there's difference that isn't accounted for by animal communication alone. At least, not to me. Rather I'd say the reason we're able to communicate is because we're able to construct meaningful utterances.
Quoting Vera Mont
How do you know?
In the daytime, I watch bluejays, crows, chipmunks, cats, dogs, human children and raccoons - they do come out sometimes in the middle of the afternoon, but are communicative only after sunset. At night, I watch documentaries and read books.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1992-98032-001
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-02624-9_2
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0963721420979580
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2018.0405
I'm interested in anthropology, cognition and language.
Have you come across anything in your reading to suggest that other animals sometimes misunderstand each other?
This is a characteristic and chronic problem with communication: how to transfer one kind of understanding to a different form of expression and retain credibility.
Could you give an example?
I'll try. Like I said, it's hard to explain.
The feral cats on back porch (a colony of 7-11 at any given time) have complicated relationships. The two indoor cats have a fairly simple relationship: the small neutered female is a bit tom-cat phobic, because of harassment in her pre-domestic adolescence. The big neutered male is mostly placid, but can be a bit of a bully when he's in a bad mood; she knows to stay clear of him then. The third domestic cat, another neutered male, spends more time outside with his native people than in here with us. So his manners are kind of rustic.
The outside cats get fed in bowls scattered all along the porch and they go back and forth, displacing one another, sharing, switching bowls: mealtimes are constant motion. D2 (aka Brown Cat) is often part of that food-shuffle. Inside, each cat has a separate feeding place: Scruffy's bowl is next to the kibble; D2's is next to the water; Sammy's is up on the counter.
But they don't necessarily eat on schedule.
D2 may come in and be the only one in the laundry room. He starts eating the first food he comes to, like they do outside. But that's Scruffy's dish. If Scruffy happens by just then, he takes this as an affront to his status; it could be a challenge. He doesn't just shove his larger head into the bowl, forcing the other one aside, as the outside cats assert seniority; he makes an issue of it. He huffs, flattens his ears and utters that low throaty mwaaa sound.
D2 turns to face him but doesn't raise his hackles or hiss; he's just like "What??" But he backs off to a safe distance; there is no confrontation. After a cautious pause, Scruffy approaches his bowl, sniffs at it and walks away on stiff legs. Property secured; status confirmed. D2 sits, licks his paws, cleans the backs of his ears ("wonder what his problem is...") and resumes eating.
This is I think a good example of what I suggested as elaboration. The multiple people who say "socialism" misunderstand what it is the others are saying. If instead they each communicated a couple of paragraphs explaining exactly what their view of socialism is, will this not reduce the misunderstanding?
Those people may still disagree on which detailed view is the one we should strive for, but that is then not a misunderstanding of meaning, but a disagreement (in the vein you talked about).
Yup, I think so. People have to want to understand at some level -- so I've been insisting upon trust and charity as interpretive virtues within a conversation, or what is missing if we're mis-understanding one another -- but I think that's a good place to start.
Right.
Maybe the question is -- is there a time when a definition is true? Can we insist that a particular meaning is true of an utterance? Then the disagreement is about the meaning itself rather than, or perhaps also in addition to, disagreeing upon what we should strive for (or whatever it is the dispute is over).
Right, so this is tricky for the thread. It's Scruffy who makes a communicative display and vocalization, which is correctly understood by D2, who backs off. D2 was not attempting to communicate anything to Scruffy by his behavior, he was just eating. But Scruffy seems to have taken this behavior as potentially a challenge, so he responded accordingly, and we want to say here that Scruffy has made an incorrect inference about D2's intentions, or at least had has taken action to determine whether it was a challenge. (And it makes sense that Scruffy's repertoire would include a range of behaviors that starts at maybe-a-threat.)
Back to the topic: this might or might not be what @Moliere is interested in. D2 did not engage in a misunderstood communicative behavior, but may nevertheless have been misinterpreted. (That's word's a little tendentious, but who cares.) Now if we say that the reason we (a big enough "we" to include cats) interpret each other's utterances is to divine each other's intentions, same as with other behaviors, since utterance is verbal behavior, then what Scruffy did is what we're interested in, since it's where verbal interpretation ends up.*
But there may still be a problem, because D2's behavior, unlike speech, and unlike Scruffy's display and vocalization, was not intended to be communicative. That would seem to put this event outside @Moliere's theme. Unless we want to say something deflationary about communicative intentions, which we certainly could.
* There are alternatives: we can insist that there's a difference between understanding what you mean and understanding what you intend, which is fine. But we could also say that even if the whole point of verbal interpretation is divining your intentions (aka "mind-reading") -- "point" being shorthand for why we have such a skill -- it is still an ability I now have and can apply for other purposes, like just trying to understand you even if I don't care about predicting your actions, or placing your verbal behavior in some wider context. All arguable in different ways.
That's useful.
Now if only I was clear enough in my own thinking to say what I'm interested in. :D
Also for @Vera Mont
For one thing I'll be clear that I'm not pursuing a deflationary account of meaning, at least. I'm open to a reductive account, but a deflationary account would be like solving the riddle by saying there's no riddle. Which very well may be the case, but I'd rather not start with that explanation given how it kind of terminates the thought.
But your interpretation of Scruffy works for my purposes of misunderstanding one another: D2 was not challenging Scruffy, Scruffy interpreted it as a challenge and issued their own challenge, D2 shuffled off.
I'm not sure this is exactly right, though -- but I'd say that because my thought has more to do with symbolic meaning than communication: the meaning which signs have. So if someone says "Red means go" that's obviously wrong, because red means stop (in the proper context, etc.).
My thought is that some signs, like democracy or socialism, don't have such a straightforward symbolic meaning, that they have a multitude of associations that make it difficult to pin down something straigtforward.
Cats participate in animal communication -- status within a tribe, territory, or even just grumpiness. My thought is that symbolic meaning can be used for animal communication, but it can be used for more than that. We communicate intentions, animal communication is shared (hell, organismic communication occurs across more than animals, in the sense of a sender, a sign, and a receiver). I'm not interested in putting human beings "above" animal communication.
But even the great apes don't seem to understand that 7+5/12=1, for instance. Or other feats of the human language. It's not a surprise, either, because it's kind of the only thing we have going for us in the big natural world -- our trans-genomic-adaptability is our main advantage, I think. We don't have to have as many of us die in order for the species to "learn" -- which pairs well with our reproductive rates being extremely slow in comparison to other species.
My stance is that within social conventions, yes a definition can be wrong as defined within those social conventions. Different social groups may define the word differently (different dialects, slang, technical jargon, etc).
Outside a social convention, no.
I didn't say this before, but you could reasonably restrict the word "misunderstanding" to misinterpretation of intentional communicative behavior. If I didn't say a word to you, how could you have misunderstood me? But you can always interpret my behavior, whether I intend you to interpret it or not.
What I was asking @Vera Mont about was really this restricted sense. Conventional (what Grice calls "non-natural") meaning leaves an opening to attach the wrong meaning to an utterance; it's just not clear to me how this works with other animals, whether a vervet monkey might think you meant "snake" when you meant "leopard" or whatever. We know for a fact with humans that the particular sign is arbitrary because there are multiple human languages. Not clear to me whether there's anything conventional about signaling systems among other animals or not. I just don't know. It would be interesting if there were cases of a non-human misinterpreting a signal, or if there were never such cases.
I agree. That's a good question!
I suspect it does not happen. And I suspect vervet monkeys never mistakenly make the wrong warning call, i.e. misspeak. (On a related note, I believe they only call out "snake" is they believe there are other monkeys nearby to warn; it would also be nice to know if they ever mistakenly call or keep silent, but that's a side issue.) But there's no point in guessing and the world is a surprising place.
His response was. He's easily Scruffy's physical superior: younger, leaner, tougher. He made not even a token gesture; no hackle-raising, side-walking or flat ears, just took three or four polite steps back and sat down. (Hey, dude, chill. I did'n mean nuthin.) It worked, this time. But they have had a few scuffles which they're invited, in no uncertain terms, to take outside - even in January.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, that's humans for you! Overcomplicate everything.
Quoting Moliere
Neither would any human who has not been specifically instructed in arithmetic. But that's not part a natural language. That's a specialized artificial language invented by adults to keep track of their possessions and punish their children. Apes in laboratories can learn a great many human-invented symbols that have no function or meaning in the ape's world, just as dogs and horses learn unnatural behaviours under human tutelage. I don't see many humans learning to read urine tags or the wind. Different forms of communication can be acquired with study and practrice, but they don't come equally easily to all species or individuals.
Quoting Moliere
Plus a big, super-convoluted and oxygenated brain. Of course, that can sometimes be a handicap, as well: difficult birth, long maturation period, a ridiculous number of possible ways to malfunction, both individually and societally.
It's easier for other animals to get the terminology right every time, since they're naming real things with known characteristics: I very much doubt any humans would mistake a snake for a hawk, either, and monkeys don't have garden hoses lying around to confuse the issue.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I don't know. The young of the more sophisticated species are taught by their mother the rudiments of expected behaviour, and the social ones have their education enhanced by other members of the pack, flock or troop. I would imagine that vocal communication would be included in that education (crows are certainly vocal enough, especially when instructing the fledglings - everybody participates.) Maybe Jane Goodall has been privy to these communications, but I don't suppose many humans are. Konrad Lorenz had some interesting observations about geese and jackdaws, wolves and dogs in King Solomon's Ring.
I wonder if small isolated societies misunderstand each other as much as we do. For example the isolated Amazon tribes. I would guess (and it is a guess or intuition) that they rarely misunderstand what it is they are saying, for the simple reason that they are likely to all share common definitions, values, world-views, etc.
I see. So the idea is that D2 reacted in this way to tell Scruffy that he was getting worked up over nothing. Interesting. (And his nonchalance might have been a deliberate reminder that he's no pushover.)
Quoting PhilosophyRunner
This is an interesting point.
I want to just agree, because I think it's clear that there are things that change once society reaches a scale where you interact everyday with strangers, rather than kin and nearly kin you've known your entire life. We probably need to talk about that, the institutions we rely on to guarantee trustworthiness and so on.
There's something else I wanted to say, but I think it might rely on what amounts to a myth that traditional societies as not only homogeneous but static. My thought was that homogeneity could also cut the other way because members of such a society would have so little experience of divergent views -- disagreeing with how something is done might be unimaginable or if broached then something like a sign of madness. On the other hand, we're used to it. People in modern societies can all name a dozen religions -- bedrock stuff for a great many people, and we're casually aware that there's variation. We know about different political views, differing tastes in food and fashion and art and sport, in lifestyle, in everything. We're in some ways old hands at something small homogeneous communities would find at least puzzling if not shocking.
---- But that just might not be true. It sounds plausible, but I don't really know anything about how traditional communities deal with relatively serious divergence. (Only thing that comes to mind is a story from some French ethnographer of a small tribe in which sometimes there might be a man who did not find the hunting lifestyle of the men suited him, and the other men agreed so he would be left with the women, who didn't particularly want his help with their tasks, so he would make pots and baskets as they did, but his work being unnecessary, could spend time creating new designs and patterns for them. So there you go, gay men invented art here by being 'extra'.)
Quoting Vera Mont
Right, there's certainly training of some kind in something, but it's hard to pin down the details. There may be some convention in there. Maybe it doesn't matter, but convention looked like an easy point of attack for misunderstanding, in theory anyway: if other animals communicate without conventions and never misunderstand each other, that might suggest that reliance on convention is necessary to misunderstanding, and that would give us a way in. Since it's so hard to tell, we'll just have to do without.
For 'static', substitute 'stable'. Ructions and upheavals generally had an external cause, rather than dissent within the group. When a serious difference of opinion arose, a group might split and go separate ways, rather than start a civil war the way more complex, heterogeneous societies might: almost nobody wants to kill his uncle or cousin.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Why should that be? Have you never seen brothers and sisters fight? Anyway, tribal societies were not so isolated as all that. They generally had trade relations with several other communities, and big social gatherings a couple of times a year, with dancing and feasting - particularly so that young people could meet potential mates from other groups.
I think the cause of misunderstanding among humans is not in the conventions, so much as in the versatility of human language. So much of our theoretical, conceptual, intellectual communication correspond to nothing concrete in the real world that we couch our less pragmatic ideas in metaphor and borrow words that mean something ordinary to use for something entirely different.
To run, in the real world means to move one's legs very fast to achieve rapid forward motions. So how is a great big cumbersome building caused to perform that action? And yet, this skinny guy in a suit 'runs the factory'. How the hell does a 2 ton contrivance of metal parts propel itself over a pool of liquid fossil fuel - and yet all kinds of cars 'run on gasoline'. And those are examples of pragmatic usages. Wait till we get into moral precepts, which have no real-world components at all!
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Not really. People have been studying avian behaviour for a long time, making videos and recordings. Might be worth your while to seek out some nature shows on You Tube.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You keep mentioning Grice which makes me want to read him more. Once upon a time I came across his maxims but that's about all I know of him.
This, at least, is a start though: under the condition of social convention a definition can be wrong. Definitions are often a feature of quizzes to see if students bothered reading or understanding the material, and that seems to be the most obvious case of being wrong. Misinterpreting the signs on the literal signs of the road seems an obvious case as well. What girds both is some sort of social project that predates our birth or even decisions -- school for children to develop into adults (and allow the adults to work), and streets to transport. To demonstrate a knowledge of these definitions is to be right about the definitions.
But then when it comes to "democracy" that just is a project that already assumes ends. Even in agreeing we like democracy we can misunderstand one another because we have different conventions in mind (maybe your teacher preferred Rawls, and mine preferred Nozick).
To disagree, after coming to understand one another, on definitions is to disagree upon social convention.
I say "trans-genomic-adaptability" because I'm not one to emphasize the brain in the question of mind. That's one likely part in our species' adaptability, but the social aspect is very important too. As you note:
Quoting Vera Mont
Of course the instruction needs to be there.
But would you deny the difference? Or would you say:
Quoting Vera Mont
As if to say "Abandon All Hope All Ye Who Enter Here"?
I didn't equate those two sentiments. But, of course there is no getting out of one's species - except by a long hard slog evolutionary slog. And of course brain configuration is a major factor in the range and complexity of thought of which a species is potentially capable. That doesn't mean every individual of the species approaches anywhere near the potential. And of course socialization also plays an important part - as it does in other intelligent species (and some not quite so clever ones); even the notable exception
I believe humans tend toward overcomplication because they combine reasoning capacity with imagination. That imagination has been most useful in many ways, but when it uses reason as a vehicle, rather than other way around, it drives us into quagmires of weird and twisted thinking.
Weird, twisted -- and fun ;)
Well, yes. If you're looking for a way in which humans are unique, I guess it's that we make things up. Some of that fantasy leads on to great inventions and discoveries; a lot of it is fun, but it also digs some deep dark tunnels covered in phosphorescent toxic slime. And, as a bonus, conspiracy theories, cults and political fragmentation.
There's no becoming-animal, if I'm correct about language at least. Once you know how to Write there's no unlearning it while at the same time retaining its lessons (thinking here of lobotomy).
We just have to live with the fact that when we make things up it can lead us to inventions, discovery, fun, darkness, fragmentation -- etc. But we'll keep making things up all the same. It's what we do!
Yes, I agree with this.
Well, that wasn't as hard as I thought then. Unless there are lingering doubts out there.
But how do you make that move, maybe? If I were to tell someone in a conversation about democracy "look we understand one another, we're just disagreeing on conventions" -- how do you make that disagreement into a productive disagreement rather than the termination?
By making the next sentence: "How do you interpret democracy?" ...and paying attention to the answer.
Just to clarify my thoughts - if we understood what it is each other is saying, but disagreed on the word to use to represent the other's views, that is a disagreement on social conventions. Here we can continue the conversation once we understand in detail what each other means behind the word.
If we disagreed on the underlying concept itself, then that is a disagreement that might be about social convention or not, depending on the specifics. The continuation here would be specific to the underlying issue - a moral philosophy discussion, or a scientific discussion, etc.
An example of the second type above - If you think our political system should be such that everyone votes directly on each policy, while I think we should elect officials who then vote on policies.
An example of the first type above - Whether we should call your system, my system or both "democracy"