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What is Meaning?

Clinton took a lot of well-deserved abuse for his "meaning of 'is'" evasion, but the whole question of the nature of existence and being is certainly worth discussing.

For instance, you have two verbs in Spanish - SER and ESTAR, both meaning BE. You have Heidegger's question "How does it stand with being" that sort of ties those together (STAND from some Indo-European root that also gives us exiSTENce, BE from something like dwell, abide)

All that aside, we are meaning-creating animals, and that leads directly to signs and words. I take those to be a form of tools, myself, meaning being an attribute of things we create, physically.

So, while meaning may not exist independently of us, the objects we use to convey meaning certainly do.

What makes something a sign or symbol for something else?
 
hammegk said:
Linguistics gets complicated to start with.

How can a word -- say tobacco -- acquire the same meaning for color, smell, taste, etc. as well as for now & for all past and future, events real, hypothetical, imaginary,etc etc.

And even worse, every language has a designated word for tobacco that exactly corresponds across all languages.

Evolution sure pulled off a wonderous (random) trick in this regard! Materialists have no trouble believing anything.
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Yeah, I thought Bill, Victor, or maybe Stimpy, would explain this for us, logically, scientifically, from a materialist=puppet perspective. Too busy reading their latest prayer tract in some peer-reviewed journal perhaps?
 
hammegk said:


Yeah, I thought Bill, Victor, or maybe Stimpy, would explain this for us, logically, scientifically, from a materialist=puppet perspective. Too busy reading their latest prayer tract in some peer-reviewed journal perhaps?
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jump.gif
 
hammegk

Yeah, I thought Bill, Victor, or maybe Stimpy, would explain this for us, logically, scientifically,
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What's there to explain, dude? The words for "tobacco" across various languages mean the same thing because they have the same ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ correspondent -- actual tobacco, the plant and the leaves and somesuch! Mystery solved. It amazes me that you even thought there was amystery here. Of course you are an idealist, so such performance is only yo have been expected...
 
Language is a fun thing to study.

Do you know that almost every culture on earth has a similar sounding word for "mom?"

Want to know why?

It's one of the first meaningful (not googling or crying) that humans ever produce. So, it was adopted to mean "the woman who gave birth to me, or cares for me" by most cultures.
 
But the MEANING of tobacco does, in fact CHANGE across cultures.

Go outside of California and it's not a DIRTY WORD. People smoke in restaraunts and bars regardless of the *nasty* health effects.

Go outside of the U.S., like to the UK, and you'd think they are given beer and smokes at birth. They chain-smoke and drink like it's a serious business to them. Take thursday night to go out drinking with the office buddies so they can spend friday night drinking with their real friends. All in choking-thick tobacco smoke in a pub that reeks of cigarettes. Naturally, from a non-smoking POV it's pretty foul. It must be nice having nationalised health care to pay for all the treatment they'll need before they die anyway.

As victor points out, if we have a concrete model, like TOBACCO, or perhaps even ROCK, the conceptual thing is very consistent because we can all simply show them one, point at it and point and say "ROCK". We can even get an ape to sign rock when shown one. Parrots are also capable of this neat trick (with long, patient training), but they'll SAY it.

Take a term like 'phenomenology', and it's a whole other animal. It is an abstract concept which suffers from being built on MANY abstract models. And like tobacco, it *means* different things to different people.
 
evildave said:

Take a term like 'phenomenology', and it's a whole other animal. It is an abstract concept which suffers from being built on MANY abstract models. And like tobacco, it *means* different things to different people.
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It don't mean nothin' to a simpleton like me.

AS
 
Well, that's just the thing, isn't it?

An abstract model is going to be built on the preconceptions and experiecne of the person who is learning it.

Someone who is well educated and has robust and fairly standardised abstract models for various intellectual concepts will be "formatted" to model certain new abstract concepts, yet even here various educated people will disagree on many points of definition.

It's nothing like walking outside, picking up and handing someone some sand and saying "SAND", then picking up some dirt and saying "DIRT", then picking up some gravel and saying "GRAVEL". There are "grey areas" even here, but most people seem to muddle through it.

I personally use desks and tables interchangeably. Take any desk without drawers and cabinets built into it and explain why it's a desk and not a table. Or take any table and explain why it isn't a desk. Your explanation will tend to be subject to your upbringing. And even if you explain it as well as you can, you probably won't convey what the difference between them really is TO YOU. In thinking about it, you might even change your mind about your definitions, mid-stream. More things which were "tables" will become desks, and more things that were desks could be considered tables. I used my own dining room table for a computer desk for about a year. It was fine for it, but eventually I picked up a "real" computer desk. Form and function, and accessibility to cables and ports.

Abstract models are even worse, because there's never a real, physical model you can simply refer to. You can't stand around an abstract model and point at it, like a desk. You can describe it and diagram it, but in the end it isn't "real" unless you can build it. Computers can make certain classes of abstract models "real", but they certainly can't give them "meaning". At least, not yet.
 
AmateurScientist said:


It don't mean nothin' to a simpleton like me.

AS
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Not a real common term, but most of us know how to start:
phe·nom·e·nol·o·gy

A philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness.

A movement based on this, originated about 1905 by Edmund Husserl.
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courtesy of dictionary.com

Subtleties & shading can be examined as one wishes using other sources, and thought.

evildave
For "tobacco" beginning to carry added significance over the past few decades, in a few decades more this newest meaning will attach itself in every language I'd say. Also interesting.

Just my 2cts....
 
hammegk said:


Not a real common term, but most of us know how to start:
courtesy of dictionary.com

Subtleties & shading can be examined as one wishes using other sources, and thought.

[
Just my 2cts....
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Gee thanks for the lesson. I was being facetious.

I try not to trifle with phenomenolist tedium. To me it exemplifies how some philosophers can get so wrapped up in terminology and definitions as to ultimately say very little of substance.

I'm interested in the world around me, but I don't want to spend 375 pages defining what "being" means. Just get on with it, don't blather.

Oh, and I'm a materialist. I'm not so self-centered as to believe that when I close my eyes the world around me disappears.

AS
 
Regardless, to many people tobacco will still mean "gotta go get some", no matter what stigma is attached.

And in some cultures there's little or no push to get rid of it. So that stigma will not really make many inroads into it.
 
I think the question "What is the meaning of meaning" goes way beyond linguistics or semantics.

The aspect of this that I find most interesting is the extent to which the meaningfulness (is that a word?) of a body of information (in whatever form) can exist independent of any mechanism for decoding it; in other words, to what extent does meaning reside with the information, and to what extent does it reside with the decoding mechanism?

I forget whether the following gem is from Pinker, or Dennett, or who, but consider this (short) conversation between a man and a woman:

Woman: "I'm leaving you."
Man: "Who is he?"

It takes only a moment to grasp the meaning of this brief exchange, but where does the meaning reside? Not in the words themselves, certainly; nor strictly speaking in the decoding mechanism either--neither of these two sentences poses a particularly difficult parsing challenge. The most important information actually resides in an enormous database of facts about the world. Accessing the pertinent data within a time frame that can make it useful in real time requires some very good guesswork.

Looking at Arabic (or Sanscrit) text is interesting for me in a different way than looking at some twigs scattered about on the beach; even though I cannot extract any more meaning from the former than from the latter, just knowing that it does contain meaning changes my perception of it. (It is usually safe to assume that twigs on a beach were not arranged by someone fluent in Arabic). Of course, it's possible that I might not find a particular passage in Arabic to be meaningful even if I were able to read Arabic; it might simply be some nonsense written in Arabic, or it might use terms or concepts specific to a subject I am not familiar with.

In other words, there are at least two levels at which it might (or might not) be meaningful: the level of syntax and the level of content; and at either level, my abilitiy to understand can also fail--even in the face of well-formed, meaningful content.
 
Cool. Consider the difference between the decipherment of the Egyptian and Mayan Heiroglyphics (or Linear B) - in one case you have the Rosetta stone as a guidepost, and in the other, only internal evidence. Although Michael Ventris did as I recall identify structures that appeared to correspond to "Conoso" and so forth.

We somehow recognize that there's meaning present in such texts without having any idea what the meaning might be.

....context....

You start running into all sorts of methodological problems when you posit meaning where none exists - the pattern of the constellations, the spots on a leopards fur (I forget the name of the story in Borges' Labyrinths where a prisoner discovers the secret word of power encoded that way - great collection of stories), twigs on a beach...

I've often contemplated sending suspicious looking emails containing nothing but pseudo-random junk, to see if they'd catch the attention of the NSA, and let those folks spin their Crays trying to decode them. Of course, there's a risk in that - you never know what might be hidden in the junk.

I forget the how Stephenson's Cryptonomicon goes, but there's a cryptogram that turns out to be some complex mathematical function where the encryption key implicates somebody but the text is just a sequence of digits - I'm babbling now.

Where do you want to go with this?
 
- I'm babbling now.
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This subject will do that to you. You ain't seen nothin, watch me:

You asked: "How do signs signify?" a couple of times, but I didn't see much of anything in the way of an attempt at an answer.

I heard that Pablo Picasso was once asked about the meaning of one of his paintings, and responded by asking, "What is the meaning of a flower?".

A flower is a structure which has evolved to serve a purpose, a term so closely associated with meaning that you often see them used almost as if they were one word: meaningandpurpose.

Within the frame of that purpose, a flower might be seen as a message that says, "Free nectar here". But I wonder if the effect that has on a bee is really a correlate to the effect that a sign such as, "Free beer" has on a [stereotype] human[/stereotype]. In the latter case, the message must be decoded before the response, "mmmmm....beeer" is triggered, whereas in the former case, the wavelengths of light coming off the flower trigger the response, "mmmmm...nectar" directly (or so I imagine--I'm working with a concept that is new for me, and for biology as well--the concept introduced by Richard Dawkins in The Extended Phenotype, that since substances produced by one organism may be designed to produce an effect in another organism--altering that organism's behavior, and possibly even its physical structure--it is reasonable to consider the acting organism to carry part of the acted-upon organism's genetic information in its own genotype).

So what I'm proposing is that, to a bee, a flower is not a symbol, but a direct trigger, and that that is something different than the indirect signal carried by a message that is encoded in some way. What is less clear is what happens to this idea when applied to the "I found nectar" dance that bees do upon returning to the hive. (Shoots it down, maybe.)

To a human, of course, a flower may indeed be used as a symbol, and your local florist can guide you in the use of this system of symbols to send a variety of messages. Once properly decoded by the recipient, a neurological response may then be triggered, but this is starting to sound more deterministic than I think I'd be willing to support--maybe here, the symbol acts as a pointer to a location in memory where processing can begin, but with no certain outcome.
 
And Derrida goes on to argue that this "meaning" is different for different individuals, and also changes over time.

I think Derrida does argue this, but he takes it much further. Meaning exists outside the individual and is embedded in language. "Dissemenation," or the shaking loose of meaning occurs in the interplay of language, particularly in the union of opposites, or what the greeks called Zeugma (sp.?). Meaning is more than a state of an individual's conclusion to the matter, but somewhat of a living dynamic entity that always comes down to the notion of presence verses absence. Meaning exists outside of us and is arrived at through a variety of means. This is subtly and profoundly different than a modernist view, which says meaning exists outside of us and therefore dictates our lingusitic combinations, or existentialism, which states that meaning exists within us and dictates the truth outside of us.

Flick
 
Elsewhere I've argued that meaning, symbollism and intelligence, are not unique to human beings but are found in various degrees in other species, your cats and dogs, for example. Now it may be that they only appear to possess these skills by analogy, or because we've trained them, but it seems really unlikely that there's a clear line that separates human behavior from that of animals.

Animals other than humans do appear to use signs and teach one another skills. The question is perhaps whether they're capable of creating signs and meanings ex nihilo (or indeed, whether WE are capable of doing that). Animals appear to be able to understand language even if they cannot create it. I suspect that one language has arisen in some form (however primitive) it spreads like a virus. Its use may even modify the structure of the brain that uses it. (There's your "consciousness creates matter" in a highly attenuated form).
 
First there arises an interesting conundrum in English since meaning has two meanings (lame pun intended): definition or purpose. I'm going to focus on the first one, so if anyone asks me about the meaning of life, I'm going to give biological type answers.

As I see it language is the use of abstract "symbols" (I put symbols in quotes because I am including things like sounds and motions) to signify objects or concepts. The meaning of a symbol is the object or concept which corresponds to this symbol. While ultimately meaning is personal, there often exists a "universal" meaning, i.e. when multiple people use a particular word, they are all referring to the same object.

The interesting parts occur because meaning is ultimately personal and meanings can also be kinda fuzzy.

If you hand a person a cigarette and say the stuff inside is tobacco, they are not going to immediately make the connection that tobacco also refers to the plant that the material is made of. The picture of a Dr Pepper can beneath my name is my avatar. I'm quite certain that there are millions of people who know what a message board avatar is and are totally unaware of the connection to Hindu mythology, and vice-versa.

When I say "species" everyone knows what the heck I'm talking about, but what is the definition of a species? Not even biologists are certain. Red refers to light with a wavelength between 770 and 620 nm while orange is between 620 nm and 590 nm. If you showed 10 different people light with a wavelength between 625 and 615 nm, you'd probably get 12 different answers as to the color. Most of us know that H2O is the formula for water, but when you fill a glass with water, there's a whole lot of stuff in there that isn't H2O, yet we still call it water since H2O is by far the primary ingredient. But it's also the main substance in things like soda or vodka. Why don't we call those things water? Exactly how much flavor syrup do you have to add to the water before it becomes soda?

So, who determines meaning? Usually it's the individual, and this is good enough for most communication. In some situations, however, it is useful to make sure everyone is on the same page, so to speak, and define as precisely as necessary the terms which are to be used.
 
As an experiment, CWL, Hans, and Bjornart are assisting me with my first tentative steps in Swedish. A practical demonstration of the conveyance and negotiation of meaning through communication. It's not perfect because they speak English, but the various missteps on my part appear to support my claim that linguistic meaning is in part a dynamic process of construction.

Meaning as ostention (pointing to an object and saying "this is x") and meaning as stipulation ("a circle is a geometric figure with these properties....") is more cut-and-dried, but also far more limited - but for that reason, more powerful. Such meanings tend not to evolve.

There's also the question of the meaning of artifacts where the creators the the artifact have disappeared. Linear B, the heiroglyphics, the Phaistos Disk. http://www.cix.co.uk/~hansel/phaistos/phaistos-intro.html

Or the transmission in Contact or Lem's His Master's Voice for instance.
 
whitefork said:
I posed the question "who determines the meaning of anything?" in one of the religion threads, and thought it might be worth opening a separate discussion on the topic. I haven't been keeping up with the latest trends in semantics and semiotics - all that Post-post-modern, Derrida and Foucault type material gives me a headache. But I think there's something to be gained by talking about words, signs, significance, and meaning. Such concepts cut to the root of language and discourse.

So, what is Meaning? How do signs signify? Is there actually anything to discuss, or is it crystal-clear to everyone?
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Derrida and Fourcault are pretty high level stuff semiotics-wise, what with their big things being the relationship between language and power.

A more accessible entry point would be a guy called Charles Sanders Peirce who came up with a handy typology to understand the relationship between signifier and signified: icon (where there's a resemblance between signifier and signified); index (where there's a direct connection between signifier and signified) and symbol (where the relationship between signifier and signified is a matter of usage).

Verbal language is symbolic, in that there is no relationship between the signifier and the signified other than through usage. So for instance, when I say "flower", this might elicit slightly different representations of flower--I might think of a Himalayan poppy; someone else might think of a dandelion--but we'd all be in agreement on what the basic qualities of that flower are. But there's nothing intrinsic in the word flower that indicates the thing it represents.

Operating around the same time was a Swiss linguits called Saussure who came up with a number of ideas that were highly influential in European semiology, particularly that language could be studied as a discreet system (or structure--hence structuralists and post-structuralists), and that language could be separated into two parts; langue (the content , or signs, of any language at any point in time) and parole (structures, or the mechanism by which content can be manipulated).

Saussure had a huge influence on a French psychoanalyst called Lacan. Lacan was a Freudian, but substituted society for the father-figure in Freudian analysis to suggest that our unconsciousness is structured like language; hence, his famous claim that "language speaks us"; language precedes the individual and it is only through language that we can understand ourselves, each other and the world.
 
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