>From Cheerskep's Bible sermon: . The word 'carrots' was > constantly associated with an > experience of that vegetable, so when someone hears > 'carrot' the image etc of > the vegetable comes to mind. Alright, now tell us about that "image". What IS in fact an image? And what about that "etc" following "image"? Is that a (metaphorical) net to capture something relevant beyond the image? And what's in that net? More images? Or more words? Words that are triggers for meaning? And how can meanings be separate from images or words unless they are already shaped (as words or image/words)?
When Cheerskep reminds us that the obvious shortcuts we use when we say words have meanings are not to be taked literally, he reiterates how easily we slip from subjectivity to false objectivity. Fine. But he only pushes the problem back further, to the previous steps, as it were. I use the word carrot to convey my associative memory/feelings of a particular vegetable. Cheerskep calls that an "Image, etc" That's where we get stuck again. We don 't know what an image IS since we may be imagining a picture of a carrot but nowhere in the brain is there a space for such an image if it's like a picture/word of a carrot. So what's an image? Is it a recollection of a word? Oh-oh, there's that bugaboo again, a word AS meaning. Now what? Reduced to something truly fundamental, words are simply noisy utterances that convey some vague mental state. My cat does that. My cat makes quite a few differing utterances, differing "meows" that must be intentional and therefore meant to convey some meanings. But I don't speak meow language and so I have difficulty in shaping mental "images" evoked by "meeee-owww, or me-ooooow. But if mee-oww is heard everytime there's a piece of tuna at hand I suppose I could begin to learn basic cat talk. Unfortunately my cat does not have the physical apparatus to make thousands of separate meow utterances -- at least not that I can recognize. The same cat utterance may serve for hundreds of differing cat desires. The same may be true with humans. No matter how many images or words we pretend to have stuffed into our brains, no matter how many billions of neual "associations" we conjure, there will always be an excess of stimuli, emotions, desires, urges, what have you, that lack sufficient utterances. So we can say that meanings (and we don't know what they are if they are not images and other words) are either non-existent without images or words or are in excess of any capacity to convey them. That would suggest that any utterance fails to convey full meaning -- or to create it. In this respect all language is messy and ambiguous. You use a word, even "carrot" and that little rowboat is suddenly filled to flooded by a host of unruly immigrant meanings hoping to escape from the boiling sea of unformed whatever. The little orange vegetable/image (ghostly neurons) for whom the rowboat is supposedly serviceable is possibly crushed or tossed overboard. Ditto with images. Ah, such is the delight of poets and all artists who thrive on ambiguity -- vorticism. We always end up with a linguistic musical chairs, where the chairs, as images and words, are too few for the ghostly meanings scrambling to fill them. This is such a mess. Happily, humans decided long ago to work with the most practical notion, realizing it was inadequate. They said "let words create meanings" and so civilization was born. What Cheerskep insists on is truth, the truth of the impossibility of adequately using utterances or words to transport meanings (that invisible primordial stuff we can't use without balling it up into the clay of images or image/text). If humans had agreed (and how could they) to stick to the truth instead of what works, we'd have a perpetual Babal, and be ranked somewhere below cats. Meow. WC
