On Aug 28, 2008, at 6:29 PM, William Conger wrote:
Meaning is always in a mind.
This reminds me of the plaques that were put aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft that were sent out of the Solar System in 1972 and 1973. They showed a drawing of a man and woman, a diagram of the orbit of the Earth, a representation of hydrogen, and a the Sun and pulsars. [Picture at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque ] And Voyager in 1977 carried a sound recording accompanied by visual representation of how to activate the recording.
Now, do these artifacts contain "meaning" or anything "meaningful"? They were included on the spacecraft so that if they were acquired by other intelligent beings, the plaques and recording could tell the others something about where the spacecraft came from.
All of the natural world is ordered in such a way that humans have been able to infer its order and, by experimentation and other scientific methods, reveal or clarify that order. In that circumstance, I don't believe that Nature has any 'meaning' as such, more than exhibiting its own order.
But I believe that there is such a thing as an intentionally meaningful artifact, that is, things made by humans with the purpose of conveying meaning. And further, such artifacts contain a meaning in their structure, such as the markings on the plaques. I cannot see how they don't. But as I said in an earlier post, the artifact is a channel with a signal, and the signal (the diagrams) contain meaning in a way that is separate from the receiver (decoder).
I believe it is correct to say that Linear A, a prehistoric script from Crete, is meaningful, is full of meaning, because it exhibits all the evidence of an intentionally produced form of written communications. We just don't know how to read it. When we do, we will be able to know what it means.
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