I wrote:
"What the creator had in mind is one thing (a notional thing), but it's folly
to figure his intention becomes a property somehow inhering in the object --
ITS "meaning"."
Michael Brady replied:
"Well, then, how does one get to whatever was in the creator's mind, he or
she not standing next to you, coaching you? There must be a structure that
does
inhere in the medium, those old words, that conveys some approximation of the
author's "meaning" to the person who reads it and recreates some approximation
of it internally. Or it's all a crap shoot."
First off, I'd dispute the idea that the "author's meaning" is anything like
the explicit, unitary, stable notion Michael suggests here. I've already
claimed it's a mistake to think of a given paining, poem, play etc as a single
work
of art. Certainly anything I write is multiplex, a compound of countless
considerations and decisions. Moreover, I revise a great deal, and the
motivation
behind the new phrasings is to achieve something, but also to avoid an
unwanted effect of the old phrasing. In sum, what was in my mind when I wrote
a
playscript is so multiplicitous even I, the creator, can't recall all the
considerations.
Remember, my core point here has concerned the deluded belief that something
called "meaning" in some way inheres in an object, that the object "has" that
entity. When Michael asks in that context, "Well, then how does one get to
whatever was in the creator's mind?" it conveys to me two things. He's right,
I
think, to believe that we can garner something -- though not all by a long
shot
-- of what was on the creator's mind as he worked. ("I know why the author
makes a passing reference to the tool shed early on; it's because he wants to
set up that later scene whereb&") I'll even go along with accepting "words"
as
"structure", something we can observe in the object.
But notice his saying these words "convey" "some approximation of the
author's "meaning". I agree with Michael's basic point here -- when we read
the
words, there arises in our minds notion somewhat like what the author had in
mind.
In my finicky way, however, I'd insist the words themselves do nothing. If the
word is 'pitchfork', and we've had many earlier encounters with the word and
the generic object it is regularly juxtaposed with, our associating mind
summons up notion no doubt quite close to the author's notion -- even if he's
using
it metaphorically. But what Michael thinks of -- quite understandably -- as
the word's action -- he says the word "conveys" -- is actually an action of
the
observing mind. The word itself is inert.
When we contemplate an object, we never see a "meaning"; we see solely its
observable surface, and this sight arrives in our head in the form of sense
data
that the mind quickly associates with familiar notion. What I'm pointing at
is that "meaning" is not "in" the word. When we hear a voice, or sometimes a
mere cough, we may correctly cry, "That's Dad!" But it's not because the cough
"means" Dad. It has a surface sound we "recognize" -- i.e. its familiarity
immediately induces the associating mind to summon up the notion of Dad.
Michael goes on to say:
"You missed my point. You regularly claim that the "meaning" is re-
created or evoked in the listener's mind. IF that is so, does not the
presence of different translations of the same work imply that the act
of recreating or evoking the author's "meaning" in the mind of the
other person is imperfect (and hence, there cannot be "the" meaning of
anything)?"
Crikey. William regularly growls about my repeating stuff. I do it because
listers so often seem not to have heard it first time, or second time, orb&
Michael, I have many, many times insisted that communication is NEVER
"perfect", in
the sense that we can never convey to another mind every exact notional
detail in our mind as we speak/write. For example, even as I am typing a
sentence I
may be turning over thoughts about how it can fail to make my point, or how
I've told the other guy this same thing just yesterday, or how I know
so-and-so
won't get this, or let's hope he'll learn something from my correct spelling
of 'accommodation' -- or even, when will my daughter call, or Ooh! The smell
of bacon!
I hope other listers will not -- as many seem wont to do -- read my "we can
never convey to another mind every exact notional detail in our mind as we
speak/write" as saying we can never convey any notion whatever. Yet again: our
communication, though never perfect, is often serviceable.
Regarding various translations of the same work, Michael says;
"Whatever was
embodied in the non-English book was conveyed more or less intact in a
translation, but some translations capture or embody more of the
original, or all of the original in more salient ways, than others."
One of the things that can make philosophy tedious to read is that careful
philosophers are wary about using numerous different words to convey what they
want to think of as the same notion. So they keep using the same term in
un-euphonious repetition. Michael now slips in the words 'embody' and
'capture'. I
wonder what he means by those. WHAT is captured, embodied? "Meaning", perhaps?
This inclines me to suspect Michael may indeed believe an object can "have a
meaning" -- but I concede I could be wrong, and his position is effectively
identical with mine: The elements that make up the observable surface of an
object -- like the inky marks we call words -- are simply occasions for the
associating mind to conjure notion. And all those from the same community who
have
been exposed to the same regular juxtapositions of words and objects are
likely
to find their associating apparatus summoning roughly similar notion. When
we as writers serve up words that, when contemplated by others, occasion
associating activity in those others that results in their conjuring notion
serviceably similar to ours, we are justified in claiming we have
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