The meaning in all art is naturally a reflected meaning.
Seems to me that all designs in any work of art, be it
music /sculpture/painting/ poetry/etc. have a variety
of relationships of forms within it's total work. What the
mind's feels depends where it is centered, hence ,the work
reflects different things to differently experienced minds.
mando
On Mar 20, 2008, at 9:07 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Peirce can be mind-enthralling. I remember when I was a freshman in
college,
it was Peirce who provided me with my first new philosophical
insight, and it
bowled me over. (The insight was this: A belief is anticipation of
future
experience. I'd simply never thought of belief that way, and it
seemed to fit
wonderfully.)
But exposure to a great deal of Peircean theory early on has a peril,
something like the one of being deeply immersed in a religion
during childhood and
youth. Many young people drilled in notions of God, sin, the after-
life,
heaven, hell, the soul etc can never thereafter quite free
themselves from their
convictions enough to question those fundamental elements of their
"faith".
Among the fundamental elements in Peircean theory are the
assumption, for
example, that "signs" "have meanings". As an undergraduate I never
questioned
that, say, words "have meanings". Today, it nearly astonishes me
when I see
textbooks on philosophy of language begin with the statement, "The
central feature
of bits of language -- what makes them language -- is that they
have meanings;
so linguistic meaning is something you encounter more often and are
more
familiar with than just about anything else. It is remarkable,
then, that it is so
difficult to explain exactly what linguistic meaning is." ("The
Meaning of
Language", Robert M. Martin)
Martin doesn't question that words "have meanings". He simply
accepts that
they "have" them, and he takes his job to be to discover what these
"meanings"
-- that in some sense each word "possesses" -- "ARE". But
why doesn't he ask just why he has come to believe this? My
position is that
indeed words DON'T "have meanings", that it is the repeated
association of the
utterance of word -- "milk", "hot", "doggy" -- with a given word
that causes
the notion of milk, hot, or dog to arise thereafter in our minds
when we hear
those words. If I utter "doggy" to a shepherd in the remote Andes,
no picture
of a dog will arise in his mind. But if 'doggy' "has a meaning",
why doesn't
that happen? Because he hasn't been exposed to repeated association
of the
sound, "doggy", with real dogs that his parents pointed at when
they said the
word.
The rise of electronics has resulted in numerous neologisms being
created --
'input', 'internet', 'blog', 'email'. It's only because of their
repeated
association with certain notions -- an associating that is common
to almost all of
us here in the U.S. -- that a somewhat common notion arises in the
minds of
all of us when exposed to the word. To me, it's almost dizzying to
see that
people believe that when these neologism were created they somehow
came with a
mind-independent "the meaning of" the word. No, someone may say,
they
"acquired" the meaning. When? At the moment some lexicographer
decided to put it in
his dictionary? How can one tell if a certain utterance/scription like
'foopgoom' "has" a meaning, "is" a word/sign? Answer: you can't
discover it, because
that "having", and the mind-independent "meaning", are chimerical.
Similarly, I shake my head at the seemingly unquestioned assumption
by some
Peirceans that "signs" DO things, call it "signify", and they
signify specific
mind-independent "significations", what others might call the
various "THE
meanings of" the signs. This error is all but identical with the
error of
believing "words have meanings".
Okay -- don't agree with my conclusions, but at least question the
belief.
But, as I say, like the belief in God, sin, damnation and
salvation, once
inculcated early on, these beliefs in "meanings" and "signs" and
"symbols" and
"icons" etc as words that label mind-independent entities --
objects and related
actions -- seem exempt from doubt, from asking, "Why do I believe it?"
**************
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