From: joseph berg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: "Meaning" is always in a mind, never in an object.
To: [email protected]
Date: Saturday, August 30, 2008, 5:01 PM
- My photographs are not planned or composed in advance, and
I do not
anticipate that the onlooker will share my viewpoint.
However, I feel that
if my photograph leaves an image on his mind, something has
been
accomplished.
Robert Frank
On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 10:25 AM, <[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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