Boris quotes me. . .: "My lengthy earlier posting tried to convey the dangers of suggesting that tools -- whether they be words or wrenches -- have goals, intentions, "meanings"."
. . .and then he writes: "Is there any purpose in having words ? To say no is absurd, but to say yes is to admit of the words purpose for speech communication, as meaningful information carrier. Two of the ancestral words from which 'slur' is derived meant 'a thin mud' and 'to slide over'. I've cited what might be called a "slurring muddle". It's when a human "purpose", goal, aim or intent is imputed to the tool used to achieve that purpose. "The purpose of that tiny screwdriver is to tighten my eyeglasses." "The purpose of that peculiar-looking wrench is to tighten nuts in hard-to-reach places." There is very little confusion when the tools are material objects like that. Most reasonable people would concede at once that the screwdriver does not "have a purpose" in the sense of aims, desires, goals, intentions. They may say, "When I say 'the purpose' of the tool I mean that's its utility, its intended function, what it was invented for." But we have to see that, even though we use the same word for both, our notion of a human's "purpose" is different from our notion of a tool's "purpose". The philosophically harmful muddle comes when the "tool" is a WORD. One of the tools we regularly use to accomplish our intended end, our purpose, is "language". Our purpose in using words is to convey "what we have in mind" -- our idea, our notion. A bit more precisely: We want to cause to arise in another person's mind a notion that serviceably replicates the notion WE have in mind (assuming that are not intending to deceive). We often speak of that notion as "our meaning": "No - you didn't get my meaning!" This sense of "meaning" is different from what we have in mind when we speak of "THE meaning of" something. "No, no - you don't get the meaning of that poem." "What's the meaning of 'apelsin' in Swedish?" (Philosophically, there is ALWAYS a certain amount of confusion when we speak of 'THE meaning of' something.) For example, down the street from my childhood home there is still the stump of a large oak tree. When I was six, there was a hurricane, and, to the horror of my mother, I managed to slip out of the house in the middle of gale. I passed by that oak tree twice that day - as I walked away from my house, and as I returned home. The next day I heard the tree had blown over and it had struck and killed another child about my age (whom I did not know). I went to look at the scene. The fallen tree was already cleared away, but there was still an enormous blood stain on the sidewalk. It did not escape me that that blood could have been mine. To this day, I might say, "That oak stump has a special meaning for me." But I know that my feelings are not "THE meaning of" the stump. (I have no illusions that there exists a "THE meaning" of that stump. I believe there exist no such abstract entities as non-notional "meanings".) To grasp the scope of the slurring muddle with words, consider this. We say, "I mean", and we say, "The word means." We talk of "my meaning", and we talk of "the meaning of the word". We discuss "our purpose," and we discuss "the word's purpose" When we say, "I mean. . .", our audience usually understands that we are trying to describe our "idea" or feeling, the notion, the mental entity in our mind at that moment. (Don't let the definite article 'the' there lull you into believing your notion is discrete and stable. It never is - but it's often serviceable enough "for all intents and purposes".) And we often use both 'meaning' and 'purpose' in the sense of "intention": "I meant to tighten that screw." And, as with 'fight' or 'link', we use the same word - 'meaning' - whether we have in mind the action of "meaning" something, or the notion "meant". These and other deluding characteristics of language can lead to heaps of confusion - more so as the objects being considered are less concrete; the word 'hammer' will not mislead as much as words like 'meaning', 'purpose', 'category' et al. Which entails that the language of philosophy is a land of notional quicksand. In the end, these characteristics abet us to ascribe, in typical slurring fashion, OUR purpose to the word, OUR "meaning", to the word. But WE are the ones doing the "meaning", WE are the ones who have in mind the notion that is "meant", We are the ones who have the intention, the purpose. And yet, because it is the tool we're using, we soon find ourselves saying the WORD does all those things. Consider again Boris's riposte: "Is there any purpose in having words?" There's an ambiguity to the phrase, and, though I can't know what ran through Boris's mind, I think he might agree to this rephrasing: "Did the early humans develop language because they had goals, desires, in mind that they perceived words could help them to achieve?" But someone of Boris's persuasion might object to my eliminating the word 'purpose'; he might reject my attempt to replace it with 'the goals, the desires', because he senses such things belong to humans, and not to the words, and it seems silly to talk about the "desires" that words have. He clings to the idea that words "have" a "purpose", without noticing that his notion behind 'purpose' has slurringly moved from goal, intent, to mere "utility". I agree that words have a utility, a usefulness, but the words themselves have no goals, no desires, any more than a wrench does. Where this slurring becomes pernicious is when "meaning" enters the discussion. We say the speaker has a purpose (goals, intents), and the slurring mind soon erroneously ascribes such "purpose" to the words. Similarly, we may acceptably say the speaker "means" something in the sense that he has a notion in mind that he wants to convey to others. The great error is when we come to ascribe the "meaning" to the words. (Pause. The second most misleading word in our language is the verb 'to have'. I'm quite aware of how loony this sounds at first hearing, but I need to say it: "Having" never happens. We say John "has" money in the bank, this apartment "has" a nice view, people "have" names, words "have" meanings. But the alleged act of "having" isn't just an invisible event, it's imaginary, a verbal dodge -- "having" never happens. In particular, words don't "have" meanings. Reading or hearing them can occasion notion in a reader's mind, but it's not because the words "have" "meanings". I inject this pause here, because I know I have myself used in this posting the word 'have' -- and related terms such as 'belong to'. But the confusion caused by my using them here is not as harmful as would be the elaborate explanatory circumlocutions I'd have to devise to get around 'have'. Philosophy is hard; sure, the "concepts" it entertains are challenging, but the renegade recalcitrance of language is, I think, the higher hurdle.) (To be continued.)
