What is the meaning of the usages of "meaning" that unites them? Is there a unitary concept they share? — hypericin

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.

What is the meaning of the usages of "meaning" that unites them? Is there a unitary concept they share? — hypericin

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).

Although some might take the view that every variation of meaning is merely the interplay of signs and signifiers. — Tom Storm

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.

What is the meaning of the usages of "meaning" that unites them? Is there a unitary concept they share? — 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.

Where this relationship obtains, you have meaning. And you can ask of anything, what is a/the Y to this X? — hypericin

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.

Signs convey meaning, but not all meaning is conveyed by signs... Meaning is more than being signified — Leontiskos

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.

"Meaning" seems to be a rather root or simple concept, not easily explicable in terms of other concepts. — Leontiskos

Then how did we learn it?

I guess you will find some answers: Meaning — javi2541997

Thanks! looks interesting.

signs and signifiers are arbitrary, and meaning is not fixed but constructed within specific cultural and historical contexts. — 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.

Is there a unitary concept they share? — hypericin

we are essentially asking what sense did you make out of this artifact, behavior or phenomena, which is an open question — Tom Storm

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. — 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

Then how did we learn it? — 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.

I think it is complicated — hypericin

Yes. It can be. Like any other concept to be unravelled.

Words are not chosen at random, they meet the needs of the physical and cultural environments they find themselves in — 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:

A 2014 review of the literature on sensemaking in organizations identified a dozen different categories of sensemaking and a half-dozen sensemaking related concepts (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014).

The categories of sensemaking included: constituent-minded, cultural, ecological, environmental, future-oriented, intercultural, interpersonal, market, political, prosocial, prospective, and resourceful. The sensemaking-related concepts included: sensebreaking, sensedemanding, sense-exchanging, sensegiving, sensehiding, and sense specification. — Sensemaking - wiki

the Meaning of Meaning.

Read the book O ye lovers of definition, and despair.

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). — javi2541997

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:

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. — javi2541997

I'm confused. Perhaps you can explain what you mean?

Read the book O ye lovers of definition, and despair. — unenlightened

Why would lovers of definition despair if they read the book?

You'll have to read the book to find out.

No way, I had a peek and that was enough, thank you.
Come on. Spit it out. Why did you mention this particular book? Does it hold a special meaning for you?

Its a big long book about one word. The authors arrive at a list of about 16 different definitions in use by "reputable philosophers" not counting its use in phrases like "the meaning of life", mentioned in the op, which they dismiss as meaningless.

I had a peek and that was enough, thank you. — 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.

A sign of wisdom! — unenlightened

Or laziness or full to the brim.

A book defining a word uses several thousand other words, each requiring a similar book length analysis to establish the meaning of. — unenlightened

Kinda sounds about right, when it comes to philosophical definitions of concepts.

...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. — 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.

I'm confused. Perhaps you can explain what you mean? — Amity

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.

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. — hypericin

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.

Then how did we learn it? — hypericin

The same way we learn most things: through experience.

I think it is complicated. — 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.

---

Yes. I think that sensemaking is key. — Amity

:up:

The meaning is invariably in the human being. The meaning of a word, for example, is only constant at the point of a speaker or listener, her body, and never in the signs and mediums. This is why we cannot understand the meaning of a sign by looking at it. Nothing called “meaning” is in the sign. Nothing called meaning is conveyed from one point to another by way of linguistic vehicles. There is no meaning in guttural soundwaves and scratches on paper. Philosophy ought to steer clear of this magical thinking and approach a biological or individual account of meaning, leaving the word-chopping to the linguists.

The meaning is invariably in the human being. The meaning of a word, for example, is only constant at the point of a speaker or listener, her body, and never in the signs and mediums. — NOS4A2

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 don’t know why I just saw this but I said on the Witt thread:

1) There needs to be an internal aspect for meaning to obtain. If there is no mental aspect, meaning is not meaning. Meaning is something else (a function perhaps, like a program running). Meaning has to somehow have a point of view. Even knee-jerk commands and actions from those commands are had from a point of view.. a "feels like". If it doesn't "feel like" something, then it is not meaning-ful. Even if at some point there was an complete lack of mental-state during some speech-act, as long as later on, someone can look back at it, it has become meaning-ful. If that person lacked a mental state in perpetuity, then meaning was not had for that person. He basically behaved like a computer, he performed a function, he did not garner any "meaning". Actually, I am not even going to let myself get away with "function", because function mplies someone with ability for meaning, has programmed it. I am just going to say, "a state of affairs happened in the universe". I'll give myself enough charity there, but even then... — schopenhauer1

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.

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 isn’t to say that the signs are arbitrary. Far from it.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/
I’m told this is a good site to start on this topic.

I think things only have meaning when they are signs, symbols, or referents for something else. So, the word 'tree' has meaning because it points to the concept of a tree. But a tree itself just is what it is, and isn't a referent for anything, so it doesn't have meaning. And that's why I say human life doesn't have meaning. It isn't a referent for something else. I don't mean that in a depressing way, it's simply a philosophical distinction between things that have meaning and things that don't. Another way to use the term meaning would be in regards to value. In that sense, I think human life has value, but only because we value it. Things only have value because they are valued by subjects capable of doing that. Gold has value because we think it is pretty, and because it's rare, and because we find some of its properties to be useful -- but without our valuing it, it's just one element among many in the universe. I don't think things have intrinsic value because I don't think that concept is a coherent one.

We generate / shed / excrete / ooze / produce... meaning. Meaning is not some sort of irreducible 'element'. Meaning is always debatable. Even road signs are debatable. Just what does "YIELD" supposed to mean at this weird junction? Who goes first when it says "4 WAY STOP". "STOP" on the other hand, leaves little room for debate. There are various ways of disobeying a STOP sign, but the meaning is extremely narrow and specific--as long as STOP isn't modified: "We will stop soon"; "stop before you get to the end".

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.

human life doesn't have meaning. It isn't a referent for something else — GRWelsh

human life has value, but only because we value it. — 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.

Meaning signifies word usage in context but it’s also a referent or descriptor of abstract objects/ideas or real things.

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.

It might be helpful to visit Davidson here.

What does the sentence S mean? Well, as a first approximation, we want some other sentence p such that we can write:

"S" means that p

So we write

"il pleut" means that it is raining.

What we are lookign for, in asking about meaning, is what the bit in the middle is; the

.....means that.....

Now Davidson points out that we can replace this structure, without loss, with

....is true if and only if...

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

"S" is true if and only if P

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.

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 its meaning? — Banno

Are you saying that truth and meaning are the same thing ? Maybe I’ve misunderstood your post.

Well, if you know what needs to be so for a sentence to be true, what more do you need?

What more is there to it's meaning?