I always felt that meaning was the relationship between the object
and the
total experiences in each individual mind, unless the mind can create
objects
not related to one's experience.
mando
On Aug 24, 2008, at 1:25 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
"Meaning" is always in a mind, never in an object.
Whenever we look upon (or hear, or taste, or smell, or even palp)
an object,
the sense data each mind receives is more or less different from
the next
mind's receipt, and each mind then "processes" it differently.
The processing is largely a matter of associating the immediate
sensations
with other notion already stored in memory. That inventory of
memories, plus the
intricacies of our associating apparatus, result in new notion that
can be of
wide variation from mind to mind -- variation and degree of
"recognition".
If confronted by an elaborate mathematical formula, many of us can
go no
further than perhaps "recognizing" it as a mathematical formula,
while a
mathematician's mind goes bounding on to all sorts of new notion.
When confronted with
a scription in a foreign alphabet, many of us may think, "Well,
it's eastern
Asian," -- and be wrong because it turns out to be ancient African or
something.
What most of us have in mind when we talk of an object's "meaning"
is solely
in our heads, a somewhat "recognizable" notion. Thus when
confronted with a
scription we are told is Attic Greek, we may say with a chortle,
"It's all Greek
to me!" Or, more seriously, "Well it's meaningless to me." When we
say that,
what we have in mind is the fact that our associating mind has not
come up
with notion that we can "get a grip on", grasp, recognize to some
degree.
And that's where our lingo begins to mislead us. We commence saying
it's the
scription -- or poem, or painting, or strange sound -- that is with
or without
meaning.
If a scholarly woodsman sees elaborate markings on a tree, he may
wonder what
"their meaning" is. If the markings turn out to be the clawings of
a bear, he
may say, "Ah! So they're meaningless." But a second woodsman may
demur: "Oh,
no. The markings mean a lot. The only a bear does that is when..."
And their
young companion from the city may say, "I'll tell you what they
mean. They mean
there are bears around here. Let's go home."
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