I didn't pretend to find the 'perfect' answer — javi2541997

When you use the word 'pretend' do you mean 'attempt'?
I thought it might be a 'false friend', so checked it out:

Spanish false friends: PRETENDER

In a similar conundrum to intentar, the verb pretender often gets used by English students when they want to translate the English verb ´to pretend´. However, like intentar, the actual translation of this verb is ´to attempt´. When you want to express the verb ´to pretend´ in Spanish, the appropriate translation would be fingir — False friends - Spanish course

Knowledge of 'false friends' in any language is most important to communicate the exact meaning of a word.

The potential for embarrassing situations arises when speakers assume that they understand the meaning of a word in another language simply because it resembles a word in their native tongue. This can lead to unintentional humour, offence, or other types of misunderstandings.

Examples of False Friends in Various Languages

1. English-Spanish False Friends

– “Embarazada” in Spanish and “embarrassed” in English sound like they might be related, but they have very different meanings. While “embarrassed” refers to feeling ashamed, “embarazada” actually means “pregnant” in Spanish. This can lead to embarrassing situations if you’re trying to describe feeling ashamed and instead announce that you’re pregnant. — 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!

Good to see something a bit more sophisticated going on here.

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 neurones, glial cells, sensory systems, etc. — 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?

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. — Leontiskos

MLK's life had meaning to people. But to call a life a "sign" takes too much license with the word. From Merriam-Webster:

a fundamental linguistic unit that designates an object or relation or has a purely syntactic function

Signs are just one thing that can have meaning.

There surely is a distinction to be had, but the word "meaning" is clearly used for both of them. — 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.

When you use the word 'pretend' do you mean 'attempt'?
I thought it might be a 'false friend', so checked it out: — Amity

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.

And there are many more examples. I bet you've met a few! — Amity

Yes, I know one that is a classic: Anuncio/publicidad means 'advertisement', and not 'announcement' (anunciar), to announce. :smile:

I beg your pardon. I feel ashamed of myself when I don't use grammar properly. — javi2541997

Por favor, no debe estar embarazada - or even embarazado?! :wink:

I am learning a lot ,thanks to this thread and interacting with you, — javi2541997

Yo también :smile:

@hypericin It might be helpful to visit Davidson here.
[...]
Anyway, that's an overly brief rendering of Davidsonian semantics: the meaning of a sentence is it's truth conditions. — Banno

@simplyG...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? — 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:

In Davidson’s work the question ‘what is meaning?’ is replaced by the question ‘What would a speaker need to know to understand the utterances of another?’

The result is an account that treats the theory of meaning as necessarily part of a much broader theory of interpretation and, indeed, of a much broader approach to the mental as such.

This account is holistic inasmuch as it requires that any adequate theory must address linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour in its entirety. As we have already seen, this means that a theory of interpretation must adopt a compositional approach to the analysis of meaning; it must recognise the interconnected character of attitudes and of attitudes and behaviour; and it must also attribute attitudes and interpret behaviour in a way constrained by normative principles of rationality.

Rationality is not, however, the only principle on which Davidson’s account of radical interpretation depends. It involves, in fact, a marriage of both holistic and ‘externalist’ considerations: considerations concerning the dependence of attitudinal content on the rational connections between attitudes (‘holism’) and concerning the dependence of such content on the causal connections between attitudes and objects in the world (‘externalism’).

Indeed, this marriage is evident, as we saw earlier, in the principle of charity itself and its combination of considerations of both ‘coherence’ and ‘correspondence’. Davidson holds, in fact, that attitudes can be attributed, and so attitudinal content determined, only on the basis of a triangular structure that requires interaction between at least two creatures as well as interaction between each creature and a set of common objects in the world. — 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.

False statements have meaning. — Amity

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.

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. — Count Timothy von Icarus

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.

Sure, all good pints.

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.

False statements have meaning. — Amity

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.

It's interesting to speculate what effects that mind-reading technology could have on our linguistic conventions. It is conceivable that the use of white-box methods for directly probing correlations between speakers mental states and their use of linguistic expressions could lead to an enriching of ordinary communication, e.g The English language might introduce a public name for the mysterious sensation correlated to rising blood-pressure that everyone had hitherto ignored, apart from the private linguist who scribbled "S" in his diary.

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. — Banno

Yes. Thank you for the clarification. I understand but have never been completely at ease with truth conditional semantics.

"Der Hahn legt ein Ei" is true if and only if the rooster laid an egg. — 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.

Davidson holds, in fact, that attitudes can be attributed, and so attitudinal content determined, only on the basis of a triangular structure that requires interaction between at least two creatures as well as interaction between each creature and a set of common objects in the world. — 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?

[...] 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. — 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.

And then, of course, it is not merely sentences that have meaning. — hypericin

Indeed.

"meaning" is applied, not inherent.

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.

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.

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?

In my op, what I was looking for was the conceptual basis of the word "meaning", in terms of the language.

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.

Even neurally, correlation seems to fit best with the meaning of words. The comprehension of sentences seems like a more complex operation.

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.

But in language's own terms, its neural instantiation doesn't seem totally relevant.

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.

Meaning is the desire for things to be other than they are and it comes in two flavours, avoid and approach.

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.

the rules still change around the margins such that international bodies have just given up on codifying a "one true rules of chess." — 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.

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. — 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.

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. — 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.

What is meant by "mean"? — hypericin

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:

Or isn't it perfect? Because the question can also go ad infinitum: "What do you mean by "What is meant by mean?" :smile: — 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.

You got yourself a perfect circularity! :smile: — 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 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"? — hypericin

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:

Is there a unitary concept they share? — hypericin

They are part of the symbol system we have created for communication - abstraction.