The meaning of meaning?
What is meant by "mean"?
Road signs have meanings, very rigid and objective ones.
Words (like "meaning") have meanings, slightly mushier than road signs.
Stories and histories have meanings, though they vary between readers. Yet, any old meaning won't do.
We say lives are meaningful and meaningless, our life, and others'. And even of life itself, we ask: "what
does it all mean?"
What is the meaning of the usages of "meaning" that unites them? Is there a unitary concept they share?
Road signs have meanings, very rigid and objective ones.
Words (like "meaning") have meanings, slightly mushier than road signs.
Stories and histories have meanings, though they vary between readers. Yet, any old meaning won't do.
We say lives are meaningful and meaningless, our life, and others'. And even of life itself, we ask: "what
does it all mean?"
What is the meaning of the usages of "meaning" that unites them? Is there a unitary concept they share?
Comments (81)
Like the notion of truth, meaning is an abstract with a range of usages. The 'meaning' of a road sign is not the same usage as the 'meaning' of life. Meaning is not a property that operates identically wherever it is found. Although some might take the view that every variation of meaning is merely the interplay of signs and signifiers.
What unites them? When anyone asks; what does X mean/what does life mean/what does Hamlet mean? we are essentially asking what sense did you make out of this artifact, behavior or phenomena, which is an open question. Even identifying an object as a particular thing, a screwdriver, say, is a form of sense making. This is a cardinal activity of humans as meaning making creatures.
I asked myself the same question a while ago. I did a brief search on Google or Friesian, but it was difficult to find answers because I was wondering if these questions were part of metaphysics or epistemology. Well, it turns out that it is a matter of metaphysics, and specifically speaking, "A Kant-Friesian" approach. I fully recommend you to read this. I guess you will find some answers: Meaning
Basically, the problem of the nature of meaning has been one of the main debates in philosophy. This is why I was wondering how to understand it, because it has both epistemological and metaphysical theories. My only contribution might be the above link, but I will be reading the replies in your thread because there are users who have more knowledge on this matter, and they would dive in (maybe).
I think it is something like this. Not signs and signifiers themselves, but the relationship between signs and signifiers:
X points to Y, but Y does not point to X. X is subordinate to Y, Y is essential, X is contingent.
Where this relationship obtains, you have meaning. And you can ask of anything, what is a/the Y to this X?
Signs convey meaning, but not all meaning is conveyed by signs. We can say that a sign is meaningful insofar as it signifies some reality, but at a deeper level some signs are more meaningful than other signs, because the realities they signify are more meaningful. Meaning is more than being signified.
Quoting hypericin
Perhaps something like significance, resolution, comprehension, making-sense-of? "Meaning" seems to be a rather root or simple concept, not easily explicable in terms of other concepts.
I have some sympathy for post-structuralist notions of meaning in as much as this approach seems to contend that signs and signifiers are arbitrary, and meaning is not fixed but constructed within specific cultural and historical contexts.
I am not a Platonist, or a believer in any grand narratives which transcend contingent human meaning.
I agree, a look, and action, a poem, a life may contain meaning, not just signs. I am arguing that meaning is to that which conveys it as the signified is to signs. Sign-signified is one form of the meaning relationship.
Quoting Leontiskos
Then how did we learn it?
Quoting javi2541997
Thanks! looks interesting.
Quoting Tom Storm
I think it is complicated. A word can be thought of as arbitrary, yet "uzuzzxu" cannot be an English word, while "hamlick" could have been; there are rules. There is no essential connection between word and meaning. Yet once established a word is fairly fixed, though drift happens. Words are not chosen at random, they meet the needs of the physical and cultural environments they find themselves in; "arbitrary" is too strong.
Quoting Tom Storm
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes. I think that sensemaking is key.
'Making-sense-of ' or 'sense-making' is a concept and a process. There will be disagreements as to its 'meaning' depending on context. Physical, mental or social. As in making sense of this discussion.
7 properties described in wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking
Quoting hypericin
The How is related to the Why. Does it start with confusion? About What. We seek direction and connection.To place, people and time. Questioning self and others. Past, present and future action.
Quoting hypericin
Yes. It can be. Like any other concept to be unravelled.
Quoting hypericin
Yes. It's about interpreting events and uncertainties, ambiguities.
It helps in making decisions; taking action. We need to look, listen and learn.
The importance lies in not being fooled by others' use of words. Like politicians and their speeches.
To call it out when someone deliberately misinterprets your words and meaning.
We need to be clear. Knowing what we mean and how best to convey it.
I like the related concepts, below:
Quoting Sensemaking - wiki
Read the book O ye lovers of definition, and despair.
I think the beauty of discussion lies not in how experts know things that others don't, rather the interaction between all lovers of meaning. What it is and how it is expressed.
Clearly, you have delved into this topic before and have come to this conclusion:
Quoting javi2541997
I'm confused. Perhaps you can explain what you mean?
Why would lovers of definition despair if they read the book?
Come on. Spit it out. Why did you mention this particular book? Does it hold a special meaning for you?
Quoting Amity
A sign of wisdom! A book defining a word uses several thousand other words, each requiring a similar book length analysis to establish the meaning of. For the wise, a peek is enough, the very foolish like me have to read the whole book, and complete idiots have to start all over again on the exact same damn word.
Or laziness or full to the brim.
Quoting unenlightened
Kinda sounds about right, when it comes to philosophical definitions of concepts.
Quoting unenlightened
At the time, it was something you felt compelled to do. You learned something from it.
But sometimes we never learn and keep on looking for the one meaning that makes sense.
When there are multitudes...and deep down we know what it means, don't we?
Then, perhaps, we give a sigh when it all starts over...
But with a different slant, and others' views and experiences - it's interesting.
Before trying to understand a concept in philosophy, I think about which category the concept should be. Using this 'logic', it helps me to make the 'correct' premises. Something like meaning and concepts can be seen in two different views: epistemology (if it is a form of knowledge) or metaphysics (if it depends on the truth/reality of our knowledge) and more precisely, I would include this exchange in a subcategory: Philosophy of Language or "metalinguistics".
Steven Pinker, in his book 'Words and Rules, The Ingredients of Language', states that grammar - thus, if we can include meaning inside this linguistic category - has two key components: rote learning ("words") and innate rules ("rules"). The fact that I enjoyed reading his book the most is the debate amongst experts on which category the meaning should be: Is it a word or a rule? I agree with him that there must be "rules" behind all the way down. And 'meaning' is included in this category because it helps us to analyse language and vocabulary.
But aren't looks, actions, poems, and lives all signs? I think they are all signs conveying meaning. I think meaning is conveyed by signs, and the "meaning relationship" is the triadic relationship between sign, signified, and interpreter.
The point I was making is that conveyance or "meaning relationships" does not exhaust the meaning of meaning, and we know this because some signs convey more meaningful things than other signs. For example, a wedding ring is much more meaningful than a crumb on the floor, even though they are both signs which signify a reality.
We could simplify by thinking about meaning in a univocal way, and say that each meaning-transaction utilizes signs, just as each bank-transaction utilizes cash or a check. But this fact does not tell us about the level (or quality) of meaning present, just as the fact about banks does not tell us about the quantity of money being transferred. Then going further, money is meant for more than bank transactions, just as meaning is meant for more than signification.
Quoting hypericin
The same way we learn most things: through experience.
Quoting hypericin
It is well-accepted in the field of semiotics that some signs have no inherent connection to their object, while others do. An acorn signifies an oak tree, and this is not arbitrary or human-imposed.
---
Quoting Amity
:up:
How do you account for something like a stop sign? If a foreigner asks you what it means, and you say, it is a spiritual recommendation to stop, meditate, and appreciate the immediate surroundings, you are quite objectively wrong.
But how do words and signs take on their meaning and how do we learn them? That meaning is "constructed," is an important part of the story, but it can only be half of the story unless we suppose that the mind is somehow causally separated from nature.
If the mind emerges from, and is caused by, nature, then will be reasons that words, signs, etc. gain the meaning that they do that are posterior to the existence of any individual human being.
I think meaning has been tied down better than "truth," in key ways. Information theory, the study of communications systems, and semiotics offer, IMO, fairly rigorous and well grounded ways of conceptualizing the origin points of meaning in terms of very basic physical phenomena and rigorously definable metrics.
"Meaning," of course has many meanings and is used in all sorts of contexts. Thus, there cannot be any comprehensive answer to . However, I do think there is a general principle that unites them.
Essential to meaning is the concept of correlation. Some input covaries with some state of affairs or description to some degree, reducing uncertainty about the thing being described. (Truth could even be defined in terms of this sort of correlation/information, but I will save that for later)
For example, dark clouds being a sign for rain or smoke being a sign for fire. The correlations aren't absolute, but they are strong.
Language isn't sui generis in this sense because the sounds we use for words aren't arbitrary. Language evolves over time and this evolution has a causal history, one linguists can map decently enough. What makes language different from signs like smoke or fire is that they can be entirely arbitrary provided people have means to communicate the correlations they intend by words. But just because we can arbitrarily map phenomena or abstractions from phenomena to a language system does not somehow entail that arbitrary language systems somehow exist in a sort of "extra causal space," cut off from the world. This position seems simple enough, but gets missed a lot.
Information theory is neat in that it's been used to successfully describe information transfer in this way across a wide array of fields, in some ways unifying the social sciences, physical sciences, and everything in between. For example, we can see why gold became a currency virtually everywhere. It is hard to fake, giving it cryptological value, while being common enough to serve as a medium of exchange (without being too common). A currency must by cryptologically secure to act as a meaningful sign of people's obligations to one another. You see these methods being used in economics, textual analysis, physics, neuroscience, etc., which demonstrates broad isomorphisms between many different types of communications as different scales, from the quantum to the society spanning.
Of course, the correlative aspects of communications leave out an important element of meaning: subjective first person experience. I am not aware of any good, rigorous theories that explain how correlation gives rise to mental life, and so here we miss something deep. (No doubt, plenty try to point to information in a hand waving fashion to explain mental life.)
But that doesn't negate the fact that there is a strong correlative element underpinning human communications, how genes encode instructions for assembling proteins, how computers can store text files, etc. And while there is no one perfect definition for information that covers all contexts, there are many that work very well in many key contexts. If you Google "logical information," you can see how these can also be built up from very basic first principles.
All that convinces me that the correlative element of meaning is essential. You can see the same general principles at work in analyzing human language mathematically that you see at work in cellular biology.
A big question is whether "information," only exists in the context of life or whether it is a useful concept in other contexts. IMO, proponents of the "information starts at life view," simply tend to talk past the other camp. The point is that the same basic set of relations apply to all physical systems. Life then introduces another layer to these contexts, and mental life another. But the correlative element you'll find in all of them, which makes it the most general principle, although by no means the only important one.
I should like to say life introduces "goal directedness," to information contexts while mental life introduces "experiential elements," but those are obviously hazily defined terms. These seem to build on top of the initial correlative aspects.
Exactly. "Meaning" like "beauty" only makes sense in the context of an observer to grant an entity that quality. Thus there is no inherent meaning (nor beauty) in the absence of an audience.
I dont know why I just saw this but I said on the Witt thread:
Quoting schopenhauer1
We know what a stop sign means because over our lifetime we have come to learn what a stop sign means. We know the word stop, use it often, understand the colors associated with stopping, see others stopping when pulling up to it, and so on.
If a foreigner grew up learning that it was a go sign, that the sign meant go and the people around him treated it as such, he would see it as a go sign. I suspect we continually generate and supply the meaning to the signs rather than the other way about.
This isnt to say that the signs are arbitrary. Far from it.
Im told this is a good site to start on this topic.
I have a much bigger problem with "meaninglessness" than with meaning. "Meaningless" is a major put-down, insult, dismissal. "His book is meaningless." "Her life is meaningless." "It was meaningless sex." No! There's no such thing as meaningless sex, meaningless lives, or meaningless creations. I hesitate to say there is no such thing as meaningless work, because it seems like I have done "meaningless work" on several occasions, but I suppose it meant something to somebody somewhere.
A "hash number" may seam to be meaningless -- just a string of digits and letters -- but it might represent or be connected to something very concrete and meaningful, like a railroad car loaded with organic whole wheat flour, or maybe just the railroad car itself.
Quoting GRWelsh
If human life has value because we value it, why wouldn't human life have meaning because we give it meaning?
Your life has 'you' as a referent, doesn't it? When you say, "I am" you are referencing yourself. You are not a zero, null, nothing.
Words can also be used to instruct or command such as go or stop, the meaning of these can be conveyed without the use of words and non-linguistically such as in the form of traffic lights so meaning is always context driven in these types of scenarios but what does this mean in terms of language use? Well it in order for instructive or descriptor words to be understood one must be acquainted with their usage by understanding those signs or that language. It could well be that the colour red in another country means go rather than stop so meaning is also culturally relevant.
What does the sentence S mean? Well, as a first approximation, we want some other sentence p such that we can write:
So we write
What we are lookign for, in asking about meaning, is what the bit in the middle is; the
Now Davidson points out that we can replace this structure, without loss, with
There's a bit more to his argument than I give here... But the upshot is that we might produce a theory of meaning in which for every sentence S we produce some sentence P such that
Notice that the "S" is in quotes, the P is being used.
We have here a theory of meaning in which each sentence is replaced by one for which we know the circumstances in which it is true. And if we know the conditions under which a given sentence is true, then what more is there to it's meaning?
Anyway, that's an overly brief rendering of Davidsonian semantics: the meaning of a sentence is it's truth conditions.
Are you saying that truth and meaning are the same thing ? Maybe Ive misunderstood your post.
What more is there to it's meaning?
If someone who is not well acquainted with the English language was to ask what does cat mean you would have an easier time explaining it to them then if they were to ask what does mean mean? First of all you would be perplexed by the nature of the question as theyve correctly used the word mean in this enquiry so they must know what mean means.
Just going of on a slight tangent there
At some point, probably during the Cultural Revolution, somebody in the People's Republic (Mao? Foo Yung?) decided that RED = STOP was contrary to socialism, so ordered the change to GREEN = STOP, RED = GO. It didn't go well. NOT because "red" inherently means stop, or "green" go, but because the meaning of red and green (for purposes of traffic) were too deeply integrated into behavior.
There would be no need for traffic signals then as the comrades would share the road in the good ol spirit of communism!!
We can not claim that the universe is meaningless for the reason that we, meaning mongers that we are, are in the universe. Even whining teen-age nihilists can not escape meaning by claiming that life is pointless and the universe is meaningless. In one narrow way, meaninglessness, vacuums, emptiness, absences, vacancies, etc. are loaded with meaning--maybe gray, dry, dusty, stuffy meaning, but meaning none the less.
I agree with that and if nihilists ever lacked meaning then they should create one but thats asking too much of them.
But if we take meaning to be the same as purpose then even a nihilist cant complain unless theyre the suicidal type.
The purpose of man is to exist simple as that and try to make that existence a happy one not just for oneself but for others to.
If our purpose here is to simply be is that not meaning enough ? Why do we try to look for some sort of extravagant meaning ?
The problem is that people use the word otherwise. Quite a lot of incompetent language users, if you are right. So for instance, is Victor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning" just incompetent?
Why indeed?
Quoting simplyG
Apparently that isn't a sufficient reason. Were existence more difficult for us all (not just one), and survival less certain then perhaps "existence for its own sake" would be enough. For quite some time life has been relatively easy to maintain, which gives us time to think about many more meanings,
A look and poem, I suppose so, yes.
An action? Unless it is an act of communication, it wouldn't seem so. The same for a life, I don't see how a human life can be treated as a sign.
Quoting Leontiskos
This is a good point. Now I wonder if in fact there are two distinct meanings of meaning: sense, and significance. Or, is significance conveyed with "meaningful", a distinct word from "meaning"?
Quoting BC
Meaning would then be a subjective enterprise for each individual whether that is to make ones life comfortable or to remove barriers that make it uncomfortable. Some are more positive such as seeing more of the world, exploring, doing philosophy, meditating, reflecting or conquering oneself. Life sometimes is just there to be appreciated and be glad that you are here on this journey.
Good. I agree. We can live life this way to the extent that we can obtain innocence. I imagine this is the way life is experienced by animals for brief moments of time when they are not hungry, are not being actively preyed upon, the weather is nice, no threats are in view. We can, perhaps, experience life in innocence for much longer periods of time than a squirrel or goose.
Unlike 'the lilies of the fields, we have to strive to regain innocence. Our normal social selves are, biblically and secularly speaking, as innocent as the driven entrepreneur. We are busy getting and spending, laying waste our powers, and all the time hashing over the meaning of it all.
So is the above an explanation of a Kant-Friesian approach? :
Quoting javi2541997
Again, I confess to being confused.
I clicked on the link you provided and found myself lost.
I extracted a quote:
The links led to both metaphysics and epistemology. A fascinating 'Deuteronomy'.
So, I'm still not clear how you arrived at your conclusion.
Your approach is to decide which category a philosophical concept should be boxed.
You seem to suggest that this discussion (see underlined) should rest in a subcategory:
Philosophy of Language.
However, this is a main category distinct from 'Metaphysics and Epistemology', according to TPF.
Either way, @hypericin placed it in 'General Discussion' for a reason, reflected in the OP.
The exploration of 'meaning' involves more than philosophical definitions. It is interdisciplinary:
Quoting unenlightened
I could go on about TPF Categories but this is not the time or place.
Exactly, Amity. But boxing this OP in the 'Philosophy of Language' category is just a personal opinion, which helps me to understand it. I do not pretend to say if the OP is in the right or wrong direction of debating. I don't even have enough knowledge on the matter! :smile:
The fact that we are thinking and feeling beings means that everything has some sort of meaning, because we associate physical stimuli with our memories and ideas. That gives all objects some importance beyond their physical stimuli. As for ideas, they must have meaning, because they are not physical by nature. When we ask what life means, we are seeking any answer beyond the surface, beyond what actually exists, that explains or develops the concept of existence.
If an arbitrary phoneme can be a sign, then why can't an action or a life? Photographers capture actions and use them as signs or even symbols. Biographers capture lives and help people see these lives as signs of one thing or another. But people always do this same thing even without photographs or biographies. For example, the life of Martin Luther King Jr. is a sign of hope and progress in the realm of racial discrimination, and it had already taken on this signification long before a biography was written.
Quoting hypericin
I think they shade into one another. For example, a distinction that is not meaningful for Sue will, at least at some point, not have sense for Sue. For most people the arcane distinctions that analytic philosophers make are not perceptible precisely because they are not meaningful, and it is only by helping the person understand the significance of the distinction that one can get them to see what the distinction even means. Usually this is done by illustrating the historical disputes that gave rise to the distinction.
There surely is a distinction to be had, but the word "meaning" is clearly used for both of them.
I feel correlation is close, but it is missing something.
Clearly correlation itself is not enough. The word "peanut" correlates with the word "butter", and smoking correlates with heart disease, but these are not their meanings.
On the other hand, "correlation" seems to understate what is going on with meaning. For instance, does "3 + 3" correlate with 6, in the same way that smoke correlates with a fire? It doesn't seem so. Rather, the expression is axiomatically endowed with the meaning, "the sum of 3 and 3", because "3" is endowed with the meaning "three units", and "+" with "the sum of what is to the left and right". Just as a computer opcode ADD more than correlates with an addition, in some sense it *is* addition.
Outside the contexts which endow these meanings, the symbols are nothing. "3 + 3" is just a scribble in a culture where it is not recognized, ADD is just a number outside the computer. Inside them, the meaning seems absolute.
Although you made this caveat, in the context, "my life has no meaning", the complaint not that one's life doesn't correlate with anything.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What about this? Meaning is just the counterpart to representation. "+" is the representation of an addition operation, which is +'s meaning.
Representation has meaning according to a context, which can be physical (smoke/fire), social (money/value, "carrot"/edible orange root), or personal (orange/nostalgia, life/purpose). But the core concept of meaning is agnostic to these possibilities, it applies to all of them.
For any X, one can X, "what does X mean". This means, "treat this X as a representation. What is X's corresponding meaning?". This may or may not have an unambiguous answer, or it may have no answer at all: X is just meaningless.
One thing I think is crucial is that the meaning must in some way surpass the representation. The paradigmatic case of this is signs: signs themselves are nothing. "+" is just two marks intersecting, all the juice is in the meaning, the addition. But all meaning, I think, surpasses its representation.
Is meaning just representation?
[Quote]Clearly correlation itself is not enough. The word "peanut" correlates with the word "butter", and smoking correlates with heart disease, but these are not their meanings.
[/quote]
This is thinking much too high level. "Meaning" for us is the result of a massive amount of communications at lower levels. It's better to think of the correlation that occurs at the level of Hebbian "fire together wire together," selection-like neuronal development. Or think about how children learn words. Looking for correlations between compound words is sort of looking in the wrong place.
I think this is prehaps confusing things. "Three" is a sound that is associated with the quantity three in a fairly arbitrarily manner. Based on the fact that some animals can do basic arithmetic, I think it's fair to say that the quantity three was probably recognized before a word was ever created for the quantity.
It's important to remember that our communication, which seems so natural and effortless to us, and so simplistic, emerges from an absolutely mind boggling amount of communication at lower levels, e.g. the complex interactions between neurons, glial cells, sensory systems, etc.
What you seem to be getting at is something similar to the Scandal of Deduction. Certain types of messages don't seem to transmit any information because the inputs to the process fully determine their outputs. But IMO, this is more of a cognitive trick than anything else. Sure, 3+3 seems eternally equivalent with six, it's cognitively automatic to see that relation, but what about ?512 × 19 ÷ 3? The same determinism is there, and yet the answer will surprise us, it will give us more information. This suggests that we can't conflate the "determinism" of how inputs into a formal system work with the causal determinism at work underlying our conciousness.
Formal systems and mathematics, as practiced by humans, are abstractions that exist within conciousness. IMHO, one of the big wrong turns in philosophy is to conflate the seeming eternal nature of such "closed" systems with their existence outside of the substrate in which they exist, i.e., thought. But even if mathematics "in some way" exists as a closed system outside of our experience, the fact is still that we only seem to access said systems in experience, an experience that is underpinned by nature, not by some special Platonic element of the soul, etc.
IMO, the best example of this comes from the Stroop Test. What could be more surface level in terms of cognitive information then that a blue object looks blue? But put a bunch of names of colors up and mismatch the color of the font from the color of the text and people read off the colors they see much slower and often inaccurately. This is often explained as a sort of crosstalk between regions of the brain. Computation itself involves communication, which occurs over time. That's why "eternal relations," are, IMO, simply abstractions. We can abstract mathematics away from its context in the world, tweak rules, etc. but that never makes our thoughts not causally grounded in the correlation based communications studied by neuroscientists.
Representation is much less basic. It assumes a lot. Does anything except for complex living organism do representation?
But a dry wadi holds information about where water has been, foot prints in sand hold information about which animal has walked there. But in what way does sand do representation?
I agree it does seem sort of backwards. Representation is something we do as toddlers, drawing in crayon, whereas we often only learn about correlation in college. But the basics of information theory can't have representation first since things like logic gates and pulses of light only "represent" anything in virtue of a complex entity that can actually "represent things to itself," interacting with them. Correlation is something rocks can achieve though.
Notably, you can formulate Wittgenstein's insights about how language correlates with behavior in terms of information theory pretty well too, and this has the benefit of grounding the insights in a theory that bears fruit from quantum physics to economics, about as wide of a paradigm shifter as you can get.
Because we can. Why do we walk when we could crawl all our lives? Why do we go to the moon? Why do we write string quartets, novels, and poetry? Because we can. We dont not do the things we can do. Why would we not?
No, because meaning has an experiential element. Like I said, I am not convinced by any of the explanations of how first person experience might emerge from information (or anything else for that matter). This means we're missing [I]something [/I]essential. However, I don't think that entails we don't have a grip on at least one essential element, the correlative element.
Meaning isn't just information, but it seems closely related to it. But this relationship does not seem straightforward and I don't think it will be easy to formalize. So, defining semantic information in terms of excluded possible worlds ala Carnap-Bar Hillel Information seems like a false start at best. That more complex internal life seems to track with more complex organisms seems to suggest that discovering what undergirds the experiential side of meaning will require understanding organisms at a very fine grained level.
Rather, I just meant that information is obviously part of meaning. And information is extremely general. So, it's a good place to start looking for the most general principles that result in meaning. Information is important for "tying meaning to the world," and to the sciences, even if it obviously misses part of the story (the experiential elements).
It seems that it is more than 'just a personal opinion'. You have used your knowledge about Philosophy and its Concepts logically to make 'correct' premises. Do the scare quotes around 'correct' mean they are 'provisional' assumptions? Are there only 2 views/theories of 'meaning'? Perhaps, yes, if the spotlight zooms in on:
1. Semantic and 2. Foundational - as always there are lists of competing sub-theories and views.
Quoting Theories of Meaning - SEP
Quoting javi2541997
Why would the OP be considered a right or wrong direction? What would be 'enough knowledge'?
It's an exploration.
I like the way it flows with diverse perspectives, knowledge and experience. Zooming in and out.
Perhaps, it's time to ask what prompted @hypericin to ask the questions in the OP?
There are more users who would have better and more precise answers than me, because they have a background in Linguistics and Philosophy, something that I don't.
Quoting Amity
I think more than premises, they are 'tools' for me. I personally believe that this OP is understood using Philosophy of Language and some authors, as Steven Pinker explains this very well, or at least, I liked it a lot. Nonetheless, I am aware that some members would disagree about the way I see and understand 'meaning', because it is something that maybe goes beyond than just boxing in categories.
OK. I understand what you mean. But would that still be 'enough' for you? Or just different and leading to even more theoretical questions. As if there aren't enough theories going the rounds.
What do we learn from them all circling and competing with each other in almost a spiral of confusion?
What is the key importance - implications and benefit - to humans and their communication.
How does a mess of philosophical theories help? When there are other more practical disciplines?
Quoting javi2541997
Of course! It would be surprising and boring if there were only one main understanding of 'meaning'.
My problem, I suppose, lies in the fixation of where the discussion should be placed.
It's fine if that is where the OP's main interest lies. But I think it narrows the exploration and would not necessarily have attracted those from other perspectives. We would have lost something...
Well, this is a good question, because there is not always enough for the seek for knowledge. I think I was referring to a technical context/idea. Trying to answer this interesting topic, but not having 'enough' background to explore its nature. I must assume that I need to read more books related to philosophy, because most of the time I only read Japanese literature. This is not something I regret, but it is obvious that I have lost some information on other topics. Maybe I should be more paradigmatic.
Quoting Amity
You are right!
Well, literature is arguably just as, if not more important than philosophy when it comes to 'meaning'. The combination of the two, well...that kind of narrative impresses me much.
I think you are well-placed to answer at least one of the questions in the OP:
Quoting hypericin
This acknowledges different interpretations (even translations) of text.
But why would 'any old meaning' not do?
It was prompted by another thread: there is no meaning of life
There are a few common and contradictory kinds of responses to this sort of question.
Meaning is a property of things which must be properly apprehended; meaning is fluid and abundant, an exuberant exudation of human life; meaning is elusive, and more often than not, illusory. So, which is it? What does meaning... mean?
Meaning seems to be of great import to philosophers; the whole enterprise can be thought of as a search for meaning. Conversely, it always seems to threaten to collapse into meaninglessness, mere assemblages of words. We've all encountered this, here, and from "real" philosophers. As I attempt to write philosophically, I'm always haunted by the doubt, what does all this even mean?
There is a philosophical tradition (which I am not totally unsympathetic to) which "answers" questions by consigning them to meaninglessness. It's convenient enough, for all these seeming imponderable questions to be mere misuse of language. We can move on with our life. But what does it mean for these questions, seemingly so full of meaning, to be in fact meaningless? Can this even be, if meaning is in my head?
What gets to have meaning, and what doesn't? What are the rules? What is this "meaning" we are so worked up about?
Quoting Amity
I was trying to show that meaning is more or less fluid or rigid, depending on where it is found. Stories are an intermediate case. Clearly they admit to multiple interpretations. But not any interpretation. Little Red Riding Hood is not a parable about the dangerous and deceptive nature of the over-hirsute; to most, this is a misreading.
I think not. I am not capable to do so and @hypericin just answered you. I alude to what he states.
On the other hand, I wonder what you refer to as 'old meaning'. I am lost here. I do not understand what you mean by such a concept or idea.
I really don't understand why you think you are not capable of responding to questions asked. Do you think there has to be a 'perfect' or 'correct' answer?
Related to the 'intermediate case' of stories, you have not only read but have written meaningful content with meaning.
During the Literature Event, we talked about haiku and other types of Japanese poetry.
They can be simple or ambiguous. An understanding at the level of immediate perception or those with a deeper meaning. All kinds have a 'meaning'.
I wonder what you think of this article about Japanese Literature, in particular, this quote:
Quoting Japanese Literature - Britannica
Quoting javi2541997
The phrase is 'any old' - it's an idiom.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/any%20old
Hope this helps!
Perhaps it means that your brain is intuitively projecting meaning onto the question, despite where your more consciously reasoned thinking points?
Quoting hypericin
To me it seems to me like a good example, of meaning being in our heads.
On the other hand, regarding your quote from Japanese literature, Yes, I feel more comfortable with this topic and I can provide answers with knowledge.
Japanese literature is well known for being ambiguous, and I fully agree with the author of the paper in Britannica. There was a big debate amongst modern Japanese authors whether they should be writing in this technique because they were receiving a lot of influence from Western authors, who are very different from them, obviously. To be honest, if a haiku is not ambiguous, you kill the haiku. The ambiguity is the main essence of these poems, and fortunately modern Japanese haijin have not given up on this. Yet, I understand that it is a big and complex task for translators, because how do you translate this ambiguity into Western languages? It reminds me of Sofia Coppola's film: Lost in translation.
When you use the word 'pretend' do you mean 'attempt'?
I thought it might be a 'false friend', so checked it out:
Quoting False friends - Spanish course
Knowledge of 'false friends' in any language is most important to communicate the exact meaning of a word.
Quoting Beware false friends - britishey
And there are many more examples. I bet you've met a few!
I still maintain that you are more than able to respond to questions of meaning. But I'll leave it there and respect your self-assessment.
Just as I do your language ability and fascination with cultures other than your own.
Yes. Some meaning gets lost in translation. Loved that film. Haven't seen it in ages!
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Interesting that you talk of "levels" here. It seems there is a vast difference between the communication between neurones and that between people. So while I'd like to avoid the ghost in the machine, my inclination is to reject the reduction of meaning to mere communication. Isn't there a difference of kind here?
MLK's life had meaning to people. But to call a life a "sign" takes too much license with the word. From Merriam-Webster:
Signs are just one thing that can have meaning.
Quoting Leontiskos
Now that I think about it, the distinction is clear. "Meaningful/Meaningless" is a word about the sign/representation. It designates whether and how much corresponding meaning the sign/representation has. Whereas "Meaning" is about the other side of the equation, what the sign/representation points to, the meaning.
I didn't know it was a false friend! Wow, this is so interesting to me. I am learning a lot ,thanks to this thread and interacting with you, Amity. Yes, I was referring to "attempt" not "pretend", which are two different concepts.
Pretend: 'to behave in a particular way, in order to make other people believe something that is not true'
Attempt: an act of trying to do something, especially something difficult, often with no success.
I was referring to the latter, but I used the wrong word. I beg your pardon. I feel ashamed of myself when I don't use grammar properly.
Quoting Amity
Yes, I know one that is a classic: Anuncio/publicidad means 'advertisement', and not 'announcement' (anunciar), to announce. :smile:
Por favor, no debe estar embarazada - or even embarazado?! :wink:
Quoting javi2541997
Yo también :smile:
Quoting Banno
This meaning is truth logical but meaning goes beyond that. False statements have meaning.
Thanks for reminding me of Davidson and a broader theory of meaning and interpretation:
Quoting Donald Davidson - 4.1 - SEP
There is certainly a difference in kind. The subjective element appears to be totally missing from some types of communications.
But the new kind seems to be "emergent from," the more basic. In support of this idea, I'd offer as evidence all the ways in which particular types of brain damage or disruption impede the ability of human beings to form understandable language or understand language (and often only one type of language, written versus spoken, gets disrupted). Think Wernicke's aphasia, damage to Broca's area, various disorders that allow people to draw objects accurately but not to name or describe them, etc.
So the new kind seems dependent on the correlative element.
It also seems to involve it though. There is a ton of information theoretic work on human languages themselves, the types of grammars we see versus possible types, bit flow across all human languages, etc.
So the new kind also seems to have some of the "work" it does explained in terms of correlation. And indeed, that languages must be learned also suggests that symbols need to be coordinated with past experiences or other learned concepts.
Moreover, not every statement is true or false. Commands are the obvious example. Opinions, "coffee tastes good", another. But I think statements of perspective, which is a lot of what we do here, are not binary true/false either. Can you actually assign T or F to every sentence, paragraph, and post here? I don't think so. Our little contributions are more or less consonant with what is discussed, fit well or poorly with the thread of discussion, and are likely true in some senses, false in others. This kind of ambiguity is typical of actual communication, rather than toy sentences such as "the sky is blue"; it is those that are the exception.
And then, of course, it is not merely sentences that have meaning.
I would be the last person to doubt that, or to speak about "eternal relations" when discussing a language. The signs and rules of a language are utterly contingent, and in fact transform drastically over historical time.
Language, like all social realities, are grounded in thought. But this doesn't mean that language, or any social reality, is not a reality, and is not properly discussed on its own terms.
An easy case is games. Games are obviously human, contingent things, No one would confuse them for platonic, eternal forms. Yet still, in chess, in the game's own terms, bishops move on diagonals axiomatically, not a mere matter of correlation. While, you might aptly describe the mental operation associating bishop and diagonal movement as correlation.
In my op, what I was looking for was the conceptual basis of the word "meaning", in terms of the language. Even neurally, correlation seems to fit best with the meaning of words. The comprehension of sentences seems like a more complex operation. But in language's own terms, its neural instantiation doesn't seem totally relevant.
Consider the Slab game in PI. The builder calls "Slab", the assistant brings a slab. The Builder calls "Block", the assistant brings a block, and so it goes. It is difficult to see how this behaviour is "emergent".
There is much more here than the transfer of information between builder and assistant.
And that without consideration of anything "subjective"
Hence, I suppose, 's call to holism.
To be sure, the suggestion is that if you have the truth conditions of a sentence, you have it's meaning. This is so whether the sentence is true of false.
"Der Hahn legt ein Ei" is true if and only if the rooster laid an egg.
You understand this, even though the rooster did not lay an egg.
Yes. Thank you for the clarification. I understand but have never been completely at ease with truth conditional semantics.
Quoting Banno
[Appreciate the clever and funny example, given earlier 'false friend' exchange with @javi2541997]
For me, this is circular and goes nowhere. So what? Davidson's more holistic view is an improvement.
Including context and interaction.
Quoting Donald Davidson - 4.1 - SEP
But then again. Why the need for a triangle? Can't an individual be said to have an internal meaningful conversation?
Quoting hypericin
Yes. This makes sense. Our interaction is both subjective and objective with varying degrees of expertise and quality. Attitudes, views and arguments, judged and responded to, if we want to appreciate all kinds of meaning and understanding.
Quoting hypericin
Indeed.
You can give any value, any weighting, any nuance of meaning, to anything at all, be it a scientific one, philosophical one, artistic one, spiritual one. These are just categorical restraints (or lack-thereof) to applying meaning.
Meaning is created by a "meaning applier" - a conscious subject, an interpreter of things.
Meaning and how it is attributed to reality is fundamentally what separates us, what gives the "individual", as all individuals have an individual sense of the world and how it works, their own unique set of meanings, relationships, associations.
Meaning is a moving target. Even in Science where the meaning and significance of things is always shifting with the latest evidence and general consensus.
Meaning is fluid, flexible, like the language that carries it. The meaning of an "apple" can be metaphorical/figurative, poetic, spiritual, anatomical (Adams apple), scientific: physical, biological, chemical, or It could be literal, functional, mathematical, it could have meaning in a strictly cuisine/gastronomical sense or in a personal sense - for Steve jobs, for newton. It has meaning from the point of view of a cider maker, a botanist, gardener, a painter, a chef, a perfumer, a preacher, a geneticist.
One thing can have innumerable/infinite meanings, depending on how it's applied. And that of course changes over time.
There are 8 billion versions of the exacting and total meaning for each thing that exists based on the current human population. There are individual differences, and then there is the useful communal concept - the generic simple, approximate version we use to communicate and refer to it.
It's perfect correlation such that knowing "bishop" entails "moves diagonal." But this doesn't make games some sort of sui generis phenomena that cannot be analyzed in terms of other communications. The rules of chess evolved over time, pieces changed, the rules still change around the margins such that international bodies have just given up on codifying a "one true rules of chess." More importantly, no one learns chess unless they interact with it "out in the world."
Trying to look for the meaning of chess, the meaning of games, or the "meaning of language games," "in their own terms," is a mistake if it means studying them without reference to anything else in the world. It's like trying to study life while refusing to admit a role for chemistry. Chess is not the type of thing one learns about except through experience, and so how is the way the sensory system works not relevant to understanding how we understand things like chess?
Right, I would just consider if this is the correct question to ask for a holistic understanding. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations makes a good argument we cannot get an understanding of language of the sort we might like from starting with language. Philosophy of language has gone around and around for a century proposing various mutually exclusive "all encompassing" theories of how meaning works, and none looks like a particularly good candidate. I'd argue that the fundamental mistake is to think of language as somehow special, not something that might be explained, to some degree, by semiotics, communications theory, biology, etc. The result is something like trying to explain biology without any reference to chemistry, astronomy with no reference to physics, economics without psychology, etc. This doesn't entail that the one is reducible to the other, it just means that understanding the higher-level phenomena requires understanding how it interacts with the lower.
Not sure what you mean here, but evidence suggest that language isn't understood on a word-by-word basis. You can mess around with phonemes or letter ordering quite a bit and people still understand the meaning of the sentence, and they rely on body language and tone quite a bit as well.
Philosophy of language has all sorts of problems with puns, double entendres and Spoonerisms precisely because it tends to insist that the meaning must be "in" the sounds and symbols, or, if meaning is constructed, that there must be neat relations between words or sentences and "brain states," (supervenience thinking lurking in the background there), or that meaning must come down to sentences relations to timeless eternal propositions. It seems to me like you need an analysis in terms of all three. The sounds and symbols matter, the "construction" matters, and the ability to abstract meaning into propositions matters, regardless of the ontological status of propositions.
And yet a small stroke will leave a person babbling incoherently and not realizing that they are doing so, or unable to understand spoken language, or unable to name or understand the function of the objects they see. If meaning in "languages own terms," ignores the fact that understanding and communicating meaning are profoundly shaped by relatively small brain areas then it seems to be missing something quite essential.
Sorry for the late reply. If you are still interested:
I don't want to deny that the kind of holistic analysis you suggest is wrong, or can't be done, or isn't valuable. But it is also possible, and valuable, to exclude this sort of discussion. It really depends on context, on what you are trying to achieve. When we play the role of philosopher, we are biased towards attempting grand, holistic perspectives. But you won't often find people doing actual work, as opposed to philosophizing, taking this tack. This is not because they are philosophically naive, though they may indeed be. But more importantly, it is useful to exclude as much as possible from a discussion, to focus on what is relevant to the topic. Books on chess playing might include some background tidbits on the history of the game, and even maybe how we process the game neurally. But the bulk of the book will be about strategy, tactics, and analyzing past games: that is, on the consequences of the rules, on their own terms, independent of their history or instantiation in brains.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Is this true? I thought the rules of chess were well established. I think the last major rules change was the introduction of en passant, and this was centuries ago. But regardless, games are axiomatic things, whether or not the rules are universal. Even if you are playing by "made up" rules, i.e. let queens also move like knights, these rules are axiomatic as far as the game we are now playing is concerned.
To say games are axiomatic is to say their rules are arbitrary, having no relationship with anything physical, which is to say that they are informational. This does *not* say that they are sui generis, incapable of being analyzed in terms of other things: they have histories, and like all informational systems, they must be instantiated physically, in order not to be abstractions. But their histories are histories of axiomatic systems.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Just as a friend circuit might leave an AI language model unable to speak intelligibly. It is characteristic of information that it is dependent on physical instantiation, and yet independent on it, in that the instantiation can take any number of incommensurate forms. This dependence/independence suggests that it is intelligible to speak of informational systems both in terms of its instantiation, and independently of them.
Another point: when you are asking what a word means (as opposed to asking "what language means", whatever that means), this precludes grander, holistic explanations. 7 year-olds happily use the word "meaning", knowing nothing of neurology, information theory, and so on, not even implicitly. If you ask a 7 year old what "meaning" means, they might say, "what something means!". Yet they, like we, must have implicit knowledge of this meaning, in order to use the word properly. The puzzle here is rooting that out.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What I mean is, from a neurological perspective correlation seems apt only when considering the meaning of symbols, such as words. As you say, meaning becomes a more complex operation with sentences, where a number of inputs, words, tone, gestures, context, are synthesized. Moving up the complexity ladder, the meaning of say, a story, the construction of meaning becomes a complex, creative synthesis, far from merely correlative.
Congrats! You got yourself a perfect circularity! :smile:
Or isn't it perfect? Because the question can also go ad infinitum: "What do you mean by "What is meant by mean?" :smile:
Quoting Alkis Piskas
This is easily dismissed. The question is no different than any other. What is meant by
"poodle"? What do you mean by "what is meant by poodle"? Each iteration means something different, and each is more... meaningless.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
This might seem to be a problem. After all, to even formulate the question, you apparently already have to know the answer. Yet, we all know what meaning means... implicitly. If we didn't, we wouldn't be able to use the word correctly. The task here is to make this implicit understanding explicit. To do this, we must make use of this implicit understanding to guide us.
This is not quite the same. The question "What is meant by 'poodle'?" applies, as you say, to any case. Your original question though, "What is meant by 'mean'?" is a unique case. It already initiates a chain based on the verb and concept of "mean". There's a clear difference.
Anyway, the whole subject is taken a little too seriously ... :smile:
They are part of the symbol system we have created for communication - abstraction.