OK, nailed to my desk wall! wc
________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2013 1:48 PM Subject: Re: rule one William writes: "When Cheerskep wants to chide one or two of us for neglecting to insert the qualifier that things and words do not convey meaning, even though everyone here is fully aware of that fact but habitually falling into vernacular language usages too easily, I suggest that he simply assert "Rule 1" instead of subjecting us to overly lengthy explications of his linguistic outlook on meanings. We all agree with him but being creatures of culturally flawed habit we fail to use the pedantically correct form now and then. All he needs to do is say "Rule 1!" sort of like an imitation of a football referee, and we will nod guiltily and suffer the reprimand with some strained dignity. WC" I'm sorry you take it as "chiding", William. I don't do it with a chiding intention. I do it with a reminding intention. I think you err in your apparent conviction that everyone else on this forum agrees with you and me that word-sounds, scribbles, and gestures don't "have meanings". My guess is the majority would scoff at me if I said, ""Death', 'pain', 'hunger', 'knife', 'fork', 'spoon' don't "have meanings"." And they would subtly distort my notion by saying, "You're saying death and pain and hunger are meaningless?!" I'd also claim you sell me a bit short by characterizing my effort as merely a dedication to "pedantically correct form". Believe it: The reifying that accompanies the use of 'art', 'life', 'sin', 'marriage', 'miracle', 'luck', 'obscene' leads to delusions that have been very harmful through the ages. Moreover, I'd claim that in my recent exchanges here I've tried to make a point that distinctly different from solely saying word-sounds, scribbles, gestures don't "have meanings". I'm asserting they don't CAUSE anything. They are the OCCASION for the receiving brain's action. "Words", I claim, don't DO anything. It's the receiving mind that's doing things. Look at the writings of all the leonine philosophers of language. What they've had to account for is this deluding observation: When a speaker has an idea or image in his head, if he speaks and phrases things aptly, a similar notion -- never identical but roughly similar -- will arise in the listener's head across the room. "Please pass the salt" works! How? An outside-the-skull transmission of a notion from inside his skull to inside the listener's skull! The "transmission" part is easy: When he speaks there's a noise, and that goes across the room. The listener processes the noise into a sound. But here's the heart of it: You can send a noise, but not a notion. Heard sounds are not notions. No man, noise or scribble can ever assuredly "deliver a message". The speaker usually thinks the salt gets passed to him because he has landed what he calls "words" in a listener's brain, and "words" intrinsically "have meanings" that release into the hearer's mind. But all any speaker can ever hope to land is sounds. What follows the sound in any hearing mind depends not on a mythical "meaning" the sound "has", but on that mind's memory inventory, its retrieval apparatus, and its reconfiguring brain. Try asking for "salt" in Tibet. A noise, a scribble, a printed word-sound, is as inert, as passive, as a rock. It's the hearer's mind that's at work -- inferring. If the speaker is lucky, the notions his sounds OCCASION will be roughly like his own notions. As usually happens with "salt". In America. But far less often with abstractions. Anywhere. Imagine a hundred-person audience made up of fifty people who speak only English, and fifty who speak only Swedish. When the speaker speaks, he will send the same noise to all hundred. All hundred will process it into the same sound. But there the sameness in what happens in their heads ends. If the speaker is speaking Swedish, his noises will occasion in half his audience roughly similar notions. But in the other half? Maybe this will help convey my point: If a Klansman and Martin Luther King have the same audience, they don't have the same audience.
