Cheerskep > Michael writes: > > "Your Andean shepherd is "deficient" in English, so the inherently > meaningful configurations of English "have no meaning" to him only to the extent > that they are inaccessible to him because he doesn't speak English. If > he did speak English, he could access them, and even if they referred to, > say, "bangers," the Andean could be shown how to access whatever that word's > configuration conveyed." > > The only thing "conveyed" to the Andean's receiving apparatus is sound > waves. An English-speaker receives exactly the same sound waves - nothing more. > Michael implies that if the sound waves are "English", they have "inherently > meaningful configurations". I grant that the patterns and tones of > English are different from those of other languages, but I don't grant Michael's > unsupported assertion that they are "inherently meaningful".
I can see that I was unclear and a tad imprecise and my electronic signals led you astray. When I said that the Andean shepherd could not "access" the meaning of the English words, I meant that the Andean did not have previous experience with English words so that he could correlated the sounds with the speaker's thought or notion associated with that sound. There is a town in Austria named Fucking. To the inhabitants, it's nothing of any consequence, but to English-speaking tourists it's the source of entertainment, picture-taking, and even sign-taking. Different notions are being accessed by the same scription (the pronunciation in German is different than in English). But nonetheless, we can recognize language when we hear it and we can recognize whether we know what the words "are saying." That is, when we hear speech in English, we readily hear "the meaning," i.e., we form those thoughts in our heads. When we hear, say, Dutch or Farsi, we can still recognize it as human speech but cannot produce any coherent thoughts that "are the meaning" of the words. For me to hear spoken English and *not* understand what is being said (not have ideas present themselves to me mentally) requires one of three conditions: I'm not awake or alert, the pronunciation or intonation of the words is greatly distorted (by accent, by the melody of a song, by some defect in the recording device), or they are words I have never heard and thus do not have a way of "understanding." The last, by the way, is a foopgoom moment in which an unusual word occurs in the the otherwise completely recognizable structural words of English. > I assume Michael is in part prompted to call them "meaningful" because some > auditors - those who "speak English" -- upon hearing the sounds, will find > rising in their minds certain notions. The notions are familiar and they > regularly occur in correlation with specific sounds. Michael's position > apparently is that this occurs because something he calls "meaningfulness" is > inherent in the sound-patterns. I deny this. I claim that when we hear an > utterance that we "understand", it is not because a "meaning" is inherent in the > sound configuration. It is because certain sound configurations have, in our > past experience, been associated with certain notion. This is where we do part company. The words and artifacts that exist out there between us preserve the mechanisms that can elicit the meanings in your head. Communications is not a million monkeys with a million typewriters. It's a systematic, ordered, cohesive, and coherent set of practices that produce these physical things that instigate an idea in your head that I believe is pretty close to what I had when I wrote those words. And communication relies on the artifacts preserving the means of making meanings in your head. > ... > > What do you have in mind with your notion of "accessing" such an entity? > For me, the accessing is merely the retrieval from memory of an associated > notion. When people do what you would call "come up with the wrong meaning", > I'd "explain" it by saying either their memory fails them or they were taught > the wrong association to begin with. "Your Dad was wrong to say that's a > dog. That's a coyote." How would you explain it with your "accessing the > meaning" theory? > > Consider my specimen utterance "foopgoom". What would you accept as > evidence proving it does - or does not - "have" a "meaning"? Oh, it does have a meaning, and I know what that meaning is: "foopgoom" is Cheerskep's nonce word, like bryllig and those slithy toves, which he uses in discussions on "meaning." > ... > > There's every chance I've entirely missed what's on your mind, Michael, in > which case say so. And tell me if in your judgment my position leaves > "unaccounted for" anything that your notion of "meanings" takes care of. I'm > betting that Ockham is on my side. >From what I read here and previous posts, you do not acknowledge or agree that artifacts have formal characteristics (sounds, lines on paper, etc.) that preserve and then convey "meaning" from one person to another. I once called that encoding and decoding, which you rejected, so I took to calling them "formal configurations" that "convey meaning." I am confident that mature users of artifacts do so with the knowledge that the words or images they pass back and forth are open to misinterpretation, to misperception, or to being misconstrued by the other person because the words or images connote something else or "mean something different" to the other person. Words do "pre-limit" the communication, because, first, they reduce the multiplicity of what I am thinking at any instant to what I can form into a word or sentence. Representations, as I said on another thread, are always less than their referent. And when you read or hear my words, your initial reaction is "pre-limited" to a core array of "meanings" until your own thought processes produce wider and more elaborate "meanings." But in any event, the thing that exists there between us, the words or pictures or sculpture, has within it the means to pass the meanings from me on to you or to someone two centuries later and half the globe away from here. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
