Did thinkers discover meaningfulness as a concept immanent to an individual’s existence at a certain stage of civilizational development so that before this explicit discovery human interactions were, though tacitly, still based on an (even if vague) intuition of meaning? What do you think of this way of viewing the origin of meaning? To be clear the aforementioned „meaning” is used in the broadest sense and signifies both the meaning we find in an interlocutor’s words, observe in pieces of art, ascribe to life or deduce from a text.

The reason I’m curious about the question is that a positive response to it might have extensive consequences for a conscious perception of reality. Instead of having two rather popular oculars for seeing the world from either a nihilistic-relativism point or a mechano-scientism perspective both of which pose their own threats to the subsistence of meaning, we may miss a third enriching option which avoids self-annulment.

In the philosophy of language exists an entire field of inquiry called “foundational theories of meaning”, where different approaches strive for investigating the very core of any discourse (at least I suppose it to be such)- the nature of meaning and what it means to understand meaning. Is it controversial to state, that in the very heart of any philosophical discussion lies the silent belief (in case the content has already passed the person’s selection of attention-worthy and understandable matter), that the ideas conveyed have meaning even if wrong in a logical or objective sense? I suppose it’s not, however insights for the contrary would be extremely interesting and useful.

Moving on: the mere fact that foundational theories treat meaning as a given phenomenon(correct me if I’m wrong) is fascinating, because then meaning(in a narrower sense, but still) could be regarded as an inherent part of the world(=absolutely everything), since humans are its particle already. The nature of necessity and universal continuity additionally to the discovered/invented(=approximated to the actual state of affairs) naturalistic laws then also finds its expression in the very semantic experiences sentient beings have.