Please delete the posting that came from me a minute ago. My wandering thumb accidentally hit 'enter'.
Kate writes: "I think I need you to explain clearly why it is that if the only way you can see a painting is because it has a physical existence the physical existence has nothing to do with the meaning. How do you propose to establish the meaning if you don't look at the painting? It is clear that the physical existence of a book is not the same as its meaning, but the physical existence of a lot of paint on canvas would seem a little different." I'm woefully aware that the hardest thing about my position to explain is that it's an error to assume that a painting, poem, play, dance or ANYTHING "has a meaning". I don't question that, when we contemplate such things, notions arise in our minds. And I realize how often we are all inclined to call those notions "the meaning for me". And we then tend to feel it's obvious we "got the meaning" from the object. "Where else could it have come from?" From which it follows the object "must have that meaning", otherwise it couldn't give us that meaning. But I claim that what comes into our mind is solely bits of memory we've associated with the object during past experience (the object could be something we're seeing, it could be a word-sound, etc). Consider: If I say Lincoln to you where else except your memory could the various flooding notions come from? Granted, we tend to say the likes of, "The word 'milk' means this white stuff." But if I say "milk" to you, why does what comes to your mind differ from the meager flickers that would come to a shepherd in the Andes? Don't say, "It's because the shepherd hasn't learned the meaning of the word." If you think about it, that's simply saying the shepherd has no associated memories with the sound "milk". If someone says, "The word Taliban has come to mean" he is, in philosophical terms, overreaching. What the speaker has in mind is that many people in the West like him will retrieve similar dire memories associated with that word. Those "thoughts" will be quite different from the ones that come to locals in the north of Afghanistan. Picasso may have had fierce thoughts when he was painting "Guernica", but what thoughts the painting occasions in millions of other contemplators will depend on their own receiving apparatuses (some may be color blind) and experience-memories. When you say, " How do you propose to establish THE MEANING if you don't look at the painting? It is clear that the physical existence of a book is not the same as ITS MEANING" it is glumly clear to me that you think an object "has a meaning", that you think there are two distinct entities out there the object and "its meaning". No. All of what you call "meanings" are (varying) mental entities inside heads. Paintings do not have mental entities inside their frames.
