Imago writes: > Your response relies upon the 'meanings' of words (whatever that may be), > > and the material implications they make possible.B You are presupposing > > what > > you deny. > My whole position will/would take pages, so these short responses are inended only to suggest, not demonstrate irresistibly.
No, my response does not depend on words "having meanings". It depends on your reading my scriptions and retrieving the associations in your mind. We have both long been conditioned by similar juxtapositions of words with images, feelings, ideas, so when I say 'Eiffel Tower' or 'hungry' or 'milk', I feel confident you have long associated each word with images/notions roughly like those I have also piled up in my memory. If a shepherd in the Andes saw my words on paper, he'd have no gush of retrieved memories in his mind. If I utter 'apelsin' to him, the only thing arising in his consciousness will be the sound of the word (and perhaps some dire thoughts about why I'm bothering him with gibberish). But if I say 'apelsin' to a Swede, it will occasion memories of oranges because all his life that word has been juxtaposed with the images, tastes, etc of the fruit. It is not the case that the Swede somehow has access to the "external realm" of abstract entities -- "meanings" -- that the shepherd does not. If you feel that no one really believes this way, that I am parodying a non-existent position, that no one believes in a "third substance" (after materiality and consciousness) I refer you to the (very poor) Wikipedia entry for 'pragmatics', where you will find phrases like these: "As defined in linguistics, a sentence is an abstract entity b a string of words divorced from non-linguistic context b as opposed to an utterance, which is a concrete example of a speech act in a specific context." "it rejected [Saussure's] notion that all meaning comes from signs existing purely in the abstract space of langue." I do recommend you try the reductio ad absurdum of imagining just how a given utterance acquires the mind-independent abstract entity you'd call its "meaning". Association accounts for whatever "communication" takes place; assuming the existence of a mind-independent realm of quasi-Platonic abstract entities does not.
