I think I agree with Cheerskep here. Can I ever be sure that I can fully agree with anything another says or am I agreeing to my inner creation of what another says? I Communication must be a sort of negotiation over time in which meanings are created in the context of that time and bandied back and forth as it were not only between the communicants but between their self-conversations that accompany the actual conversations. Context embraces both the actual time and the inner time and they can be different. There are at least four participants in any communication.
wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, October 10, 2010 1:16:34 PM Subject: Re: challenge When Jeremy Seabrook wrote: "If it had been the purpose of human activity to bring the planet to the edge of ruin, no more efficient mechanism could have been invented than the market economy," and Boris replied: "There is no progress without competition. The problem is in the excesses," -- there was a good deal of merit in Boris's reponse. But when William wrote: "In communicating we create a context by means of signs but the signs themselves are "meaningless", -- and Boris responded: "If signs play any role in the creation of a context, they have some meaning just by existing," -- I think Boris goes badly wrong. Of course, I can't be sure, because I can't be sure what either man has in mind with 'context', or -- even more to the point -- what Boris has in mind with 'meaning'. But Boris's usage appears to me to beg the point in the sense that it seems to assume a "meaning" is an external-to-the-mind entity that the "sign" in some way "has". We can escape being too balled up if we use the word 'meaning' to in some way indicate the notion that arises in our mind when we hear a sound (e.g. of a "word") or see an object (e.g. a gun, an apple, a scription of a "word"). "That's the meaning for me." Similarly, when we have a notion and try to "put it into words", we are trying to "express" the "meaning for me" -- i.e. we are trying to stir in the other guy's mind a notion similar to ours. The error lies in the conviction that our utterance, our would-be "expression", is an attempt to make our auditor "see", comprehend, a mind-independent entity, a "meaning" that somehow "exists" in the world of non-mental entities. Rephrased: All we are hoping for is to occasion in our auditor's mind a notion roughly similar to the notion in our mind. We are not hoping that our auditor will grasp "THE mind independent meaning" of our words. Granted, we all resort to the (mistaken) correction, "That's not the meaning of the word!" when the other guy, upon hearing us say "militate", conjures an eccentric notion -- e.g. the notion we would have in mind if we used the word 'mitigate'. "No, no -- 'militate' doesn't mean to alleviate or moderate. That's the meaning of 'mitigate'!" With those two sentences we are obviously thinking that there is a fact-of-the-matter, mind-independent meaning to 'militate'. But there isn't. We are simply counting on the other guy's mind, upon hearing "militate", to associate that sound with roughly the notion that generally, commonly, arises in the mind when we read the dictionary entry, the "definition", of 'militate' e.g., "to wield an influence on bringing about or preventing an effect", e.g., 'excessive harshness in a parent militates against openness in the parent's child'." The reader of that definition is not discovering the in-some-way-absolute meaning of 'militate'. The reading of the definition is occasioning a cluster of earlier associated notions, a cluster very similar to what's entertained by people familiar with the word 'militate'. Similarly, there is no absolute meaning of 'context', which is why it's important for a speaker to describe what he has in mind when he is using the word.
