Michael writes: "Through these many messages and discussions, it seems that you hold a firm position that the receiver's mind forms all the meaning from whatever is taken in."
(I'll take "the meaning" here as the notion in the mind of the receiver. (I use 'notion' for everything in "consciousness". So pain is notion, and so is the awareness of the color red. I want to make a soft distinction between two kinds of notion: sense data, and the product of post-data processing. (I'll use 'sense data' for the conscious images, sounds, smells etc that come into our consciousness, and not for the nerve impulses on their way to the brain prior to any conscious event.) Granted, both the data and the post-data notion are affected by the brain's processing. But the "formation" of sense data is more constrained because it depends on, among other things, the kind of stimulation at the nerve-endings of the sensors, and the competence of the sensors. Further granted: the post-data is also limited by those constraints, but it can be supplemented by, combined with, and otherwise manipulated by post-data processing. If I imagine a story, it certainly depends on remembered sense data, but it is not restricted to solely the rigid initial data. My post-data imagining can create notional little green men, though my sense data never included images of such creatures. "And you seem to acknowledge that nothing inheres in the things that pass between sender and receiver." "Inheres in" is ambiguous to me, and so is "pass between". If someone writes a word, and I read the word (i.e. I contemplate the ink on paper), the sense data I take in may "resemble" data from the past -- i.e. it's "a word I've seen before". This resemblance stirs associations with memories of notions that were effectively concurrent with previous experiences of that now-familiar datum -- and an increasingly complex notion forms (and morphs) in the mind. Similarly, we may get a back pain that we'd say we've "had before", because of its resemblance with a previous sensation. I myself wouldn't say such sense data "inhere in" the object I sense -- e.g. the ink on paper, lor a stone in Central Park. But certainly some physical features of the object -- the ink that affects the reflected light rays, the roughness of the stone where I touch it -- are features "of" the object, and if you want to say they "inhere in" in the object at that time, I'll go along with you. Do you want to say that the light rays "pass between" the ink and me? Okay. What "passes between" the rock and me when I palp it and get a tactile sense of roughness? "In fact, in a previous message, you rejected the notion that words were "coded" and "decoded" in the process of verbal communications." What I wanted to convey is that when we contemplate a "familiar" arrangement of ink on paper, the associating mind summons up lots of "connected" memories. If I repeatedly hold up an apple before the students, and then point at the scription 'apple' on the board, they will soon make a straight-forward association. I see no usefulness in saying that "encoding" is involved. I haven't taught the kids a "code". So, like Ockham with his razor, I cut the useless notion of "coding" from my "theorizing" on this matter. "I claim that some human artifacts--words, pictures, sculptures, etc.--are so formed that they convey to the receiver [the means by which the receiver reconstructs] a notion of what the sender put into formal arrangements." "I am not sure why you resist the idea that the words contain the means to bring this about." The handy dictionary behind me defines the plural noun "means" as "a method, course of action, instrument by which an action may be carried out or an end achieved." I have no problem in saying the writer uses words as one of his means of his carrying out an act of "communicating". And I'd agree that the receiver uses those words as one means of discerning what notion the writer wanted to convey. But I can't agree that the words do the conveying or anything else. I certainly understand how our long exposure to word usage would move you to say the inky letters on paper "convey". The writer puts a familiar arrangement of ink on paper. He does it with a notion in mind. He chose the word -- say, 'bird' --because that's the sound/scription that had been associated with images of birds since his childhood. He assumes I've been subjected to similar juxtapositions of word and image. I contemplate the inky arrangement. Many associated images similar to the writer's come to my mind because my parents had indeed also associated the word and the bird-image for me. It feels natural to say, "See? The word conveyed the image!" But no -- the word is not like a ship's signal lamp, blinking its message to us. Suppose I say to my Andes shepherd, "myrmecoid". No "message" rises in his mind. Nor, perhaps in yours. Because the word isn't sending one. It is inert. Suppose I then say, "'Myrmecoid' a fancy word for 'ant-like'. I once used it metaphorically to convey 'constantly busy at small tasks'." You're likely to respond, "Then why didn't you just say 'ant-like', you bungling pedant! Most minds have never heard/read 'myrmecoid' juxtaposed to anything, never mind the notion of 'ant-like'." We talk of words "conveying", but, strictly, they do nothing. They are simply the occasion for the associating mind to go hunting for an associated notion. Would you accept this as a fair statement of the gist of your argument (from a certain angle)? "When a writer has a notion and summons up a word that he -- and, he believes, others -- associates with that notion, and he puts the inky scription of that word on paper, he is creating a physical object that will affect any light rays reflected off it. He is confident those light rays, if observed by another human eye, will result in a familiar image arising in the human's mind. He is further confident that that image -- the "picture" of the word -- will ultimately be associated by the mind with notion, and the notion is likely to be serviceably like the one that prompted him, the writer, to choose that word in the first place. The word is the writer's means of conveying his original notion." I'd go along with that. "Why do you say that words don't "provoke" a thought, but a pin prick can "occasion" a cry of "Ouch!" Does the verb "occasion" change the activity that happens?" If I bang my foot against a rock and break a toe, I'm wrong to say the rock broke my toe. When I say the rock occasioned the break, I mean it was something in the circumstance AND if it weren't there I wouldn't have broken the toe -- but the rock did nothing; it did not "cause", or "provoke", or do anything else. Neither do words. All the action is by the mind. 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