In a message dated 3/14/12 5:29:06 PM, [email protected] writes:
> Ah, wasn't what you say below precisely what I said in one sentence, > quoted > below? > William, dammit, you left out the quote of your sentence! Since I believe you've posted some nifty things lately, I'd be very happy to see which sentence you have in mind. Post it again? Underlying your query above is, for me, a very interesting subject. In trying to convey my point, I need to avoid writing "What does a sentence say?" because I want to question the idea that a sentence "says" any one particular thing. In informal kitchen-English, I'll accept that if a sentence repeats an earlier sentence verbatim, we can agree that the second sentence "says" what the first one "says". But that's only a remark citing an identity of sound. Usually, what we have in mind is something like this: "Your sentence repeats the MEANING of my sentence." Your point, William, is that in one sentence you conveyed notion(s) that I took rambling paragraphs to convey. I suspect there's basic merit in your assertion; I'm by nature garrulous, and I often use this forum to fumble my way through various try-out lines in a search for the "best wording". But the notion I want to convey here will strike many listers as bizarre: Except for the verbatim words, we should not argue that a sentence "says" any specific thing. This is because it's an error to think our words -- spoken or written -- in some way "have" intrinsic "meanings". The same utterances will occasion different notions in the minds of various listeners. If I write (or utter) 'justice', 'beauty', 'art', 'unfair', 'belong', 'understand', 'genius', the variety in the notions arising in the minds of my readers will be enormous. Why? Because the ideas, feelings, images that those words will occasion in readers are not a function of mythical "meanings" the words have. They are a function of the various receiving and processing apparatuses -- the brains -- of the varying readers, plus their hugely different inventory of memories connected with the words (where by 'words' I have in mind solely sounds and inky scriptions). Consider: Say "Milk!" to a girl every time you give her a glass of the white stuff, and she'll link that sound to her memory of the white stuff, and retrieve that memory whenever she hears "Milk". We'd agree she has "learned a word". But notice: we've explained the "learning of a word" entirely in terms of a sound and an associated memory. No alleged mind-independent "real meanings" are required -- to account for what's gone on in the girl's mind. Ockham, with his razor, would cut off "meaning", and other appendages, at the first syllable. All those abstraction words I cited above -- 'justice', 'belong', etc -- are "learned" in the same way. When we occasionally "stipulate" a "meaning" for a phrase we're about to use, all we're doing is trying to describe the notion we have in mind, and instruct our audience, "When I use the term XXXX, the notion I want you to have in mind is YYYY." The stipulation did not create a "meaning". In sum, when you, William, assert you have used many fewer words to occasion in our readers' minds roughly the same notion I've used a bargeful of words to convey, I suspect that for many of our readers you're right.
