Let's Talk About Meaning
What sorts of things are meaningful? How do these things become meaningful? To whom are these things meaningful? These are all reasonable important questions to ask. We can look towards actual everyday events and find plenty of good answers.
We can offer an accurate account of some specific language use and in our doing so provide a prima facie example of shared meaning by virtue of our doing so. Each and every time someone offers an accurate account of Kant's Categories, the meaning that was first attributed by Kant is attributed once again by someone else. That meaning transcends Kant in the exact same way that the meaning of "hula hoop" transcends it's original usage by being the name of a referent(the thing called such). As long as same correlations are being drawn between the language use and other things, the meaning continues.
We can watch a user die and witness his/her meaningful creation remain. Historical accounts are more than adequate proof of this. We can know a user is dead and suspect that their creation has died alongside. It's very difficult sometimes to know if the original meaning of certain language use no longer exists. Such knowledge requires drawing the same correlations between the language use and other things as the speaker. It requires knowing what the speaker was talking about. In these cases, the speaker is dead.
We name something for the first time. By naming something we make both the names and their referents(something other than the name) meaningful. Naming practices are one way we attribute meaning. An original naming event happens when a capable creature draws a correlation between the name and it's referent. All subsequent and consistent/coherent use of that name maintains that meaningful correlation. We all learn to point at the tree when uttering "tree". This is rudimentary shared meaning:A plurality of creatures drawing correlations between the same things. In this case, it's a plurality of creatures drawing correlations between the name and it's referent(between "trees" and trees).
We all 'agree' that those things are trees and these things are not... by virtue calling those things "trees" but not these things. This agreement is necessary for language to proceed in it's evolutionary process. The 'agreement' need not be an intentional act. To quite the contrary, prior to the ability to voluntarily enter into an agreement about the referent of a name, one must already be deeply embedded in language use.
One must first learn how to pick stuff out to the exclusion of all other things prior to being able to take account of how we pick stuff out. We name and we describe. All of this is to create, further perpetuate, and/or build upon meaningful things.
Why does it seem so difficult to do this when talking about conceptions/uses/senses/etc, of the same term "meaning"? Is it not a reasonable question to ask someone when they're using the term "meaning" what they are referring to? Ought not the speaker know what they're referring to, when using the term as a noun? I mean, when we begin using pronouns like "it" as a means for referencing, if all we're are pointing to is the term "meaning", then we've got some serious explaining to do.
So, the persistence and/or continued existence of meaning is clearly not existentially dependent upon any individual user, but rather it is existentially dependent upon language being used in a consistent way. That consistent usage is satisfied - it happens - when a plurality of capable creatures draw correlations between the specific language use and other things.
This holds good for all uses of the term "meaning" as well.
We can offer an accurate account of some specific language use and in our doing so provide a prima facie example of shared meaning by virtue of our doing so. Each and every time someone offers an accurate account of Kant's Categories, the meaning that was first attributed by Kant is attributed once again by someone else. That meaning transcends Kant in the exact same way that the meaning of "hula hoop" transcends it's original usage by being the name of a referent(the thing called such). As long as same correlations are being drawn between the language use and other things, the meaning continues.
We can watch a user die and witness his/her meaningful creation remain. Historical accounts are more than adequate proof of this. We can know a user is dead and suspect that their creation has died alongside. It's very difficult sometimes to know if the original meaning of certain language use no longer exists. Such knowledge requires drawing the same correlations between the language use and other things as the speaker. It requires knowing what the speaker was talking about. In these cases, the speaker is dead.
We name something for the first time. By naming something we make both the names and their referents(something other than the name) meaningful. Naming practices are one way we attribute meaning. An original naming event happens when a capable creature draws a correlation between the name and it's referent. All subsequent and consistent/coherent use of that name maintains that meaningful correlation. We all learn to point at the tree when uttering "tree". This is rudimentary shared meaning:A plurality of creatures drawing correlations between the same things. In this case, it's a plurality of creatures drawing correlations between the name and it's referent(between "trees" and trees).
We all 'agree' that those things are trees and these things are not... by virtue calling those things "trees" but not these things. This agreement is necessary for language to proceed in it's evolutionary process. The 'agreement' need not be an intentional act. To quite the contrary, prior to the ability to voluntarily enter into an agreement about the referent of a name, one must already be deeply embedded in language use.
One must first learn how to pick stuff out to the exclusion of all other things prior to being able to take account of how we pick stuff out. We name and we describe. All of this is to create, further perpetuate, and/or build upon meaningful things.
Why does it seem so difficult to do this when talking about conceptions/uses/senses/etc, of the same term "meaning"? Is it not a reasonable question to ask someone when they're using the term "meaning" what they are referring to? Ought not the speaker know what they're referring to, when using the term as a noun? I mean, when we begin using pronouns like "it" as a means for referencing, if all we're are pointing to is the term "meaning", then we've got some serious explaining to do.
So, the persistence and/or continued existence of meaning is clearly not existentially dependent upon any individual user, but rather it is existentially dependent upon language being used in a consistent way. That consistent usage is satisfied - it happens - when a plurality of capable creatures draw correlations between the specific language use and other things.
This holds good for all uses of the term "meaning" as well.
Comments (290)
BTW, an attempt to divert 'meaning' onto a property of 'things' seems equally mentally incestuous to me since 'thinghood' already presupposes that aspect of language behavior we call 'naming' (the first or nominal level of measurement)', which is used to denote significant focus of human attention.
In short, 'meaning' is about 'what matters' both individually and socially and we attempt to organise that shifting state of affairs via a socially acquired combination of gestures we call 'language'.
The term "meaning" is existentially dependent upon speech acts. So is the term "Mt. Everest". Neither of those things(the referents themselves) are also existentially dependent upon speech acts. Although, obviously linguistic meaning is, it's not the only 'kind', it's not the only way to attribute meaning, and it's certainly not the first way one does.
So...
I'm failing to get your point.
Quoting fresco
The term "meaning" is not about the terms "what matters".
So, again...
I'm failing to get your point.
Meaning, i.e. semantics, are not always a useful goal.
The best part of advanced mathematics and metamathematics is about removing all possible meaning from an abstraction while only leaving structure, i.e. a bureaucracy of formalisms to apply to a preferably meaningless symbol stream.
The flagship of mathematics is general abstract nonsense.
In mathematics, abstract nonsense, general abstract nonsense, generalized abstract nonsense, and general nonsense are terms used by mathematicians to describe abstract methods related to category theory and homological algebra. More generally, “abstract nonsense” may refer to a proof that relies on category-theoretic methods, or even to the study of category theory itself.
In other words, the presence of meaning, i.e. any possible reference to real-world semantics, is considered to be a bug, an error, and a serious defect in higher mathematics. It needs to be corrected by applying additional operations of further abstraction:
Abstraction in mathematics is the process of extracting the underlying essence of a mathematical concept, removing any dependence on real world objects with which it might originally have been connected, and generalizing it so that it has wider applications or matching among other abstract descriptions of equivalent phenomena. Two of the most highly abstract areas of modern mathematics are category theory and model theory.
Every time I see an attempt to attach meaning, i.e. semantics, I shiver, because we should be doing exactly the opposite of that. Full abstraction can only be reached when the expressions in language have become completely meaningless. If they still mean something, then there is something wrong, which then needs to be corrected.
That's an awful lot of differentiated terminology for a practice without meaning. It's true that mathematics abstracts away meaningful content but it does does so in order to arrive at meaningfully useful tools. One chooses to make use of a particular calculative method becasue of its pragmatic usefulness in relation to one's purposes. For instance, number abstracts away all particularies of the set of objects it counts, but it does so in order to allow us to form the notion of the act of counting itself, which is anything but meaningless in its origin or purpose.
The application of math in the real world is itself not math but always something else, such as physics, engineering, and so on.
Math supplies a bureaucracy of formalisms that will help maintaining consistency in these other fields. It is these other fields that are (possibly) real-world meaningful and useful.
For math, being meaningful, i.e. semantically rich, would only detract from that goal. Being directly useful would also detract from that goal.
In other words, the applicability of math would be badly impaired if it sought to be directly meaningful or useful. Math is necessarily, in and of itself, meaningless and useless, in order to maximally relegate these characteristics to its real-world application.
You seem to be using the word "meaning" in at least three different senses:
They all seem to get mashed up together. I think things would have been clearer if you had defined your term better at the beginning.
Yes, in order to make use of meaning in the universe we value, we must eventually position it in relation to value - but it doesn’t follow that there is no meaning outside of value. Neither does it follow that we cannot make use of that meaning.
Or one sense that covers/exhausts them all...
:wink:
No doubt that all the aspects of "meaning" I mentioned have something in common. It's not as if all the meanings of "meaning" are unrelated. But still, I think getting our words right at the beginning is important.
...and you think/believe that I've not?
I don't think you were clear enough laying out what you were trying to say. I was confused. The discussion was muddled.
That's no surprise to me. Don't take that the wrong way. It wasn't about you, so much as it was about me.
What's muddled or confusing for you?
Math is not about quantities, or numbers, and in that sense, not about values. Only number theory is.
Furthermore, number theory is, in and of itself, a relatively weak axiomatization which is certainly not Turing complete. Numbers do naturally reappear inside any axiomatization that actually is effectively Turing complete, such as set theory (zfc), lambda calculus, combinator calculus, and so on.
So, if "value" means "quantity" or "number", then no, because it is not an essential building brick in math.
Quoting Possibility
Math is "meaningless", i.e. devoid of semantics, because it only seeks to deal with syntax, i.e. the bureaucracy of formalisms that govern the abstract, Platonic world of mathematics.
Furthermore, math only supports knowledge, i.e. justified beliefs, while knowledge is just one limited mental tool. Knowledge cannot possible be an essential or the primary ingredient in the discovery of new knowledge, because otherwise humanity would either have no knowledge at all, or else, have discovered all possible knowledge already.
What's more, not all knowledge can be expressed in language and objectively shared. Michael Polanyi already pointed out the existence of tacit knowledge.
Furthermore, we have no guarantee that our existing list of standard academic knowledge-justification methods is complete: axiomatic, scientific, historical, and epistemic. There could be other epistemic domains generated by their own associated method. Who says that we are successfully operating in all possible epistemic domains?
What's more, not all epistemic domains apply mathematics as a tool. For example, the historical method does not rest on numbers. In fact, it does not seem to involve any mathematics at all.
Quoting Possibility
In fact, mathematics does not tell any of the applied, real-world disciplines that happen to use it, how exactly they should define semantics. To that effect, math would actually have to deal with semantics, i.e. meaning, which it obviously doesn't. These applied disciplines can only use mathematics to maintain consistency in their own semantics-heavy statements. They cannot use mathematics as a source of semantics/meaning, because mathematics refuses to supply that ingredient.
Quoting Possibility
You can use real-world oriented disciplines for the purpose of dealing with meaning, but even these disciplines are not the exclusive source of meaning.
I was just pointing out that not all knowledge is meant to provide meaning. In Immanuel Kant's lingo, synthetic statements a priori, such as mathematics, are not providers of meaning, and even actively avoid providing meaning.
That's just not true...
Math is clearly meaningful. Arriving at a conclusion that says otherwise just shows how far off the rails one's thought/belief can go if they begin with a gross misunderstanding. Math is not only meaningful, it is rigidly so. Numbers name quantities. Symbols are meaningful.
Some things exist prior to language. Math isn't one. It is a language.
What is math about then, if not quantities?
To give you a little background, I adhere to radical pragmatism (Rorty) and Husserlian phenomenology(starting with his Origin of Arithmetic). From the perspective of these approaches, any experienced reality is inherently meaningful in that it has significance for, matters to us.
Math does not become meaningful only when it is applied to real world phenomena. The origin of number and calculation is a series of synthetic intentional acts of understanding that emerged at various points in human history. If one goes back far enough, one can find cultures with no notion of object permanence, formal counting or number. These were conceptual inventions motivated by practical concerns, much like concepts such as left-right, high-low, fast-slow. In order for number and calculation to have any coherence, one must first construct the idea of a world of discrete objects out of the flux around us. Further ,we must develop the notion of empty plurality, etc. These are semantic notions in themselves, prior to their application to phenomena we wish to perform calculations on. We wouldn't know what a calculation is in the first place unless we retained the semantic meaning that led to its creation by our forebears. It is not that math is useless in and of itself, It is that that there is no such thing as math in and of itself.To think of calculation is to automatically imply a substrate. That is what counting means. To count is always a counting OF something. If the semantic emptiness, that is, the absolute abstractive generality of the something, is one component of what calculation means, equally implied is how a mathematical operator acts on, transforms its object. Multiplication, addition ,subtraction, simple counting, these are all specific procedures ,and as such they represent specific semantic meanings, developed through pragmatic interaction with the world at some point in human history.
In sum, for radical pragmatism and phenomenology, any empirical fact has a formal, normative component. By the same token, formal mathematical concepts, originating in the most basic notions of number and counting, have a empirical component that defines their meaningful sense, and renders them at the same time a discovery and an invention.
A definition of "meaning" is - I suppose - what you're seeking from me. Fair request.
The best I can offer is what all attribution of meaning consists of and/or requires. According to current convention, all theories of meaning presuppose symbolism.
So...
At a bare minimum, all attribution of meaning(all meaning) requires something to become symbol/sign, something to become symbolized/significant and a creature capable of drawing a mental correlation, association, and/or connection between the two.
There are no examples to the contrary.
You fail to get my point because you fail to understand that talking about language is in essence an infinite regress equivalent to pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.
The only 'given' we can start from is that we are clever primates with a complex set of socially acquired behavioral gestures ,we call 'human language' which segments what we call 'the world'. The abstract persistence of 'words' (internalised gestures) act as place markers for focal aspects of that shifting flux we call 'things' allowing us to attempt to predict and control aspects of our world relative to our lifespans and our pattern seeking. Place markers are not 'representational' of 'things in themselves', they are contextual memory aids within potential action plans.
'Meaning' is about the internal visualization of a 'potential to act'.
The meaning of 'chair' is (usually) 'potential to sit upon'. The meaning lf 'unicorn' is 'potential to observe a picture of, but never enounter, a type of animal'.
(References: Heidegger ...'caring'. Merleau-Ponty...'affordances'. Maturana...'languaging' is a behavior which coordinates behavior'.)
NB. All the above will remain 'meaningless' to you unless it triggers 'an intention to act' in you, e.g. to follow up the references. If you stick to the futile quest of 'defining meaning', it means we have mererly engaged in a bit of social dancing which seems to be the principal activity of 'philosophers'.
Onward to the next course...
What's a tasty ad hom without the healthy effects/affects of non-fat non sequitur yogurt?
Oh, let me tell you, the two make an unmistakeable well good for poisoning. Don't drink from that well.
Got one?
To whom was the ad hom suggestion addressed ?
...dance on by all means....!
If knowledge was equivalent to 'degree of confidence in the results of potential action', all knowledge would require thinking in terms of potential and/or logical possibility. Not all knowledge does. Some(to put it lightly) knowledge is about what's already happened, and/or is currently happening and not about what may.
Thus, knowledge is not equivalent to 'degree of confidence in the results of potential action'.
Some belief rides alongside...
I doubt whether it would be worth going into 'time as a psychological construct' (Einstein) or 'things are just repepetitive events' or 'past and future are parochially ordered like up and down'(Rovelli), whilst you are wearing your comfortable philosophers dancing shoes.
On the one side, I do subscribe to formalism:
Formalism holds that mathematical statements may be thought of as statements about the consequences of certain string manipulation rules. For example, in the "game" of Euclidean geometry (which is seen as consisting of some strings called "axioms", and some "rules of inference" to generate new strings from given ones), one can prove that the Pythagorean theorem holds (that is, one can generate the string corresponding to the Pythagorean theorem). According to formalism, mathematical truths are not about numbers and sets and triangles and the like—in fact, they are not "about" anything at all.
but I am intuitively also attracted to Platonism:
A major question considered in mathematical Platonism is: Precisely where and how do the mathematical entities exist, and how do we know about them? Is there a world, completely separate from our physical one, that is occupied by the mathematical entities? How can we gain access to this separate world and discover truths about the entities? One proposed answer is the Ultimate Ensemble, a theory that postulates that all structures that exist mathematically also exist physically in their own universe.
The true nature of mathematics is still up in the air:
[i]It is a profound puzzle that on the one hand mathematical truths seem to have a compelling inevitability, but on the other hand the source of their "truthfulness" remains elusive. Investigations into this issue are known as the foundations of mathematics program.
Philosophy of mathematics today proceeds along several different lines of inquiry, by philosophers of mathematics, logicians, and mathematicians, and there are many schools of thought on the subject.[/i]
I tend to view mathematics with a mix of both formalism and Platonism.
That is quite an anti-Platonist view. Mathematics deals with counting of not anything in particular. In the abstract, Platonic world of number theory, which is obviously not the real, physical world, there is no need for something to count. Mathematics explores that non-real world.
The "OF something" is simply abstracted away:
Abstraction in mathematics is the process of extracting the underlying essence of a mathematical concept, removing any dependence on real world objects with which it might originally have been connected.
If the "OF something" is still present, then the statement is not part of mathematics but of something else (physics, engineering, and so on ...).
Quoting Joshs
These specific procedures obviously originate from pragmatic interaction with the world. However, the goal of mathematics is to abstract away the real world. Otherwise, without abstracting the real world away, it is not mathematics, but something else. Mathematics adopted its current nature in the first half of the 20th century. Mathematics prior to that, was not exclusively abstract, axiomatic, and algebraic.
The turning point is generally considered to be the year 1905, with the publication of ZFC set theory:
In set theory, Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, named after mathematicians Ernst Zermelo and Abraham Fraenkel, is an axiomatic system that was proposed in the early twentieth century in order to formulate a theory of sets free of paradoxes such as Russell's paradox. Today, Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, with the historically controversial axiom of choice (AC) included, is the standard form of axiomatic set theory and as such is the most common foundation of mathematics.
Still, attempts to move to pure abstraction already began earlier, e.g. with Cantor's work on the various infinities. It triggered quite a bit of resistance:
Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers was originally regarded as so counter-intuitive – even shocking – that it encountered resistance from mathematical contemporaries such as Leopold Kronecker and Henri Poincaré and later from Hermann Weyl and L. E. J. Brouwer, while Ludwig Wittgenstein raised philosophical objections.
Nowadays, Cantor's work is considered uncontroversial. Mathematics is pure abstraction anyway. Mathematics has nothing to do with the real, physical world anyway. Therefore, extensive symbol manipulation (algebra) of infinities, with associated rules, has become a non-issue.
Last week a friend and I visited the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. We got in an interesting discussion with one of the guides there. I said, although I'm not certain it's true, that paintings and other visual arts don't mean anything because only words have meaning. She and my friend disagreed.
Do you agree?
Sure, I guess, maybe. Maybe not entirely. I don't believe that the universe is, somehow, mathematics as some do, but ever since I started learning how to express ideas mathematically in high school, my understanding of reality has had a strong mathematical flavor. Change is calculus. Physics is statistics. Math is not all form and no content.
Well, your explication triggered an intention to act on my part. Maybe I'll come back to ask questions after I've checked your references.
It's always struck me that there is only one place for those mathematical entities to exist - the mind of God. A belief in Platonic ideals and a belief in God are equivalent.
Other disciplines, unrelated to physics, also successfully use statistics. Hence, physics uses statistics.
I would disagree with the claim that only words have meaning.
Would you argue that any form of representation has meaning (including art, photographs, etc.)? What about a door? When I see a door, I know I can potentially open it and walk through it. Does a door have meaning? Or, what about my Grandfather’s burial flag? It might have meaning to me that it doesn’t for others. What about that?
Delusions of persecution? Sorry, couldn’t resist.
I'd be pleased to discuss references, some of which (Maturana) are difficult to commune with because they are non-anthropocentrically deflationist with respect to 'thinking' and 'cognition'.
Yes, of course. I overstated my point for emphasis. What I was trying to get across is that my understanding of how the physical universe works is closely related to my understanding of how statistics works. As I said, statistics is not just an empty structure we fill in, it has it's own meanings.
That was the point I was trying to make at the museum. As I indicated, I'm not sure it's true. This is one of the questions that is hard to get a handle on because the terms of the discussion - the meaning of the word "meaning" - are not well defined.
Yes, that's what I was trying to say, although I was also whining in frustration that poor definition of terms has made this discussion less productive than it could have been.
Agreed.
An interesting discussion. The way I see it, it’s not that paintings and other visual arts don’t mean anything - it’s that any meaning attributed to them is relative to the observer’s limited position within the various structures of the universe in which we interact.
We have made use of meaning in the world by containing it within certain value structures: in discourse, logic, numbers, language, etc. This is how we understand what meaning is. In the same way, we have made practical use of subjective, value-laden experiences by understanding them as contained within certain 4D event structures such as evolution, life, and of 4D events such as a person by containing it within a 3D object. This is how we try to make sense of and interact with the universe.
So a straight-forward photograph is a 2D container for 3D objects that refer to 4D events with 5D experiences, and we can follow the logic of containment and relate to the structure of meaning in it.
But most artworks these days don’t follow this: they can invite us to find meaning in objects or events without referring to a particular experience, or even in shapes or colours that don’t refer to specific objects. They challenge us to recognise meaning outside of these standard structures: to realise that our understanding of the universe that is confined within these structures is only a very limited aspect of how we are capable of interacting with the universe.
So when you say that ‘paintings and visual arts don’t mean anything because only words have meaning’, in my opinion you are trying to contain the meaning of all your experiences to a particular value structure that you believe to be universal (ie. words) - and so anything that cannot be contained within words is declared ‘meaningless’.
Insightful.
You can get into whatever you like as long as it's relevance to meaning is clearly stated. On an aside, I deny knowledge of future events altogether. That is a consequence of knowing what sorts of things can be true(correspond to what's happened and/or is happening) and what makes them so.
An odd agreement given that I've offered an adequate criterion(definition if you like) for all meaning.
There are two claims here about which I am dubious. Firstly, there is the claim that for meaning to be there must be symbolism. Perhaps by "symbolism" is meant signing in general; and if so, then no problem.
Peirce draws very useful distinctions between signs, ikons and symbols, if my memory serves. So, some examples of signs could be: some clouds are a sign of rain, some bird calls or animal sounds are signs of the presence of predators, smoke is a sign of fire and so on. Ikons are visual representations of things; representations in the sense that the ikon resembles what it represents. Symbols are arbitrary marks or sounds that "stand for" things. The last is restricted to linguistic phenomena.
Secondly, is the claim that all meaning consists in "attribution of meaning". This is one sense of meaning, but there is another common usage where to say that something has meaning is just to say that meaning may be rightly attributed to it, and that if we deciphered it correctly then what we took it to mean would be ( more or less) in accordance with what it was intended to mean.
So, for example, say you discover what appears to be an ancient tablet with hieroglyphics inscribed on it. There are two possibilities; either those marks have meaning or they don't. If they don't have meaning they might just be random marks inscribed for no purpose, with no intention to convey anything. If they have meaning, then they would have had a culturally agreed (or even in extremis, merely an individually intended) meaning at the time they were inscribed; which means that they could, potentially or in principle at least, be deciphered correctly or incorrectly.
So, it would be in keeping with common usage to say in the latter case that the tablet has meaning, even though it may presently have no determinate meaning for us, because we have not deciphered it.
Well played. I realized that that ad hom charge may not have stuck after I posted.
Well, my own staunch resistance against incorporating any premature semantics into mathematics, especially en provenance from physics -- which is undoubtedly the greatest culprit in that respect -- is because it could easily make mathematics unusable for application in other disciplines.
Take, for example, a look at Kleene's closure:
In mathematical logic and computer science, the Kleene star (or Kleene operator or Kleene closure) is a unary operation, either on sets of strings or on sets of symbols or characters. In mathematics it is more commonly known as the free monoid construction.
Kleene's star is the basis of Kleene algebra:
In mathematics, a Kleene algebra (/?kle?ni/ KLAY-nee; named after Stephen Cole Kleene) is an idempotent (and thus partially ordered) semiring endowed with a closure operator. It generalizes the operations known from regular expressions.
Like every abstraction in mathematics which is either without value, or else with very high value, this construct is meaningless/nonsensical (=no real-world semantics), useless (=no direct use), lazy (doesn't do much; even as little as possible), and therefore, ultimately ridiculous.
Of course, most such abstractions will turn out to be worthless, but most high-value abstractions are also like that. The formalist philosophy in mathematics warns for that:
According to formalism, mathematical truths are not about numbers and sets and triangles and the like—in fact, they are not "about" anything at all.
The governing rules in mathematics demand that the domain for each variable is properly declared. For example:
?x?A={x|x ?N?x<10}
When introducing x, you must declare what domain it belongs to. This domain is never the real, physical world. The following is forbidden:
? x ? real_world
So, if the variable does not belong to the real, physical world, where does it exist? Well, in an abstract, Platonic world that is not the real, physical world.
In other words, the metarules in mathematics staunchly enforce Platonism, even though mathematics is in essence a bureaucracy of formalisms that are not "about" anything at all.
Stephen Kleene originally started writing about his algebra in 1951, in his technical report for the US Airforce, "Representation of Events in Nerve Nets and Finite Automata". It took decades for his work to snowball into the incredible hype that it is today:
[i][b]Welcome to Regular-Expressions.info.
The Premier website about Regular Expressions.[/b]
If you just want to get your feet wet with regular expressions, take a look at the one-page regular expressions quick start.
Do not worry if the above example or the quick start make little sense to you. Any non-trivial regex looks daunting to anybody not familiar with them. But with just a bit of experience, you will soon be able to craft your own regular expressions like you have never done anything else. The free Regular-Expressions.info Tutorial explains everything bit by bit.
If you're hungry for more information on regular expressions after reading this website, there are a variety of books on the subject.[/i]
His work has become bigger than life now. There are an incredible number of addicted afficionados who are gurus in the field that Stephen Kleene created. Kleene is truly a grandee.
Note that after practical implementation of Kleene algebra inside a regex engine, it is still not "about" anything at all. Kleene's work would not have taken off, if its purity had been badly tainted from the get-go with real-world semantics en provenance from physics.
I would argue that all representation is meaningful. How it becomes and continues to be meaningful is set out in the OP. We could get into that farther in you like.
The language use matters here.
Is a door meaningful? That all depends. If it's the only door at the end of the universe and there are no creatures alive that draw correlations between that door and something else... then no, it's not, because it does not have what it takes to be.
Your grandfather's burial flag is *precisely* as meaningful(to you) as each and every correlation between it and something else that you've drawn.
Yes, exactly! And No, completely!!! I'm saying, again, I'm not sure, that "meaning" means words. Paintings are not insignificant, or unimportant, they just don't mean anything. And that's the frustration of not having defined "meaning" back at the beginning.
So let's do it now:
Some phrases:
None of this seems particularly satisfying to me.
It's been adequately defined since. Does that not matter here? Does that change not alter the degree of frustration you had prior to it?
Hegel or Heiddy? Dasein or desein? What do you mean here?
:wink:
There may be a danger in thinking like that. The core claim in religion, the belief in God, is about the origin of the real, physical world. Religion is not about the origin of the abstract, Platonic world of mathematics. It is about the origin of our true reality.
In my opinion, natural predisposition is the reason why the belief in God, as the creator of the real, physical world, is so prevalent.
A first reason is that we instinctively sense that the universe cannot have existed forever. The mathematical intuition for this is that, since time progresses, it cannot be infinite, because infinite plus a finite amount, is still infinite. Hence, if time were infinite, it would stand still, which it doesn't. Therefore, instinct says that there must be a beginning of times. Furthermore, since everything that exists has a lifecycle, i.e. a beginning and an end, the universe will also come to an end. Hence, our intuition about a Last Day, i.e. the Day of Last Judgement.
You will also find this theory of instinctive acceptance of a Beginning and an End, Alpha and Omega in the religious scriptures, i.e. the Bible and the Quran:
[i]"Fitra" or "fitrah" (Arabic: ?????; ALA-LC: fi?rah), is the state of purity and innocence Muslims believe all humans to be born with. Fitra is an Arabic word that is usually translated as “original disposition,” “natural constitution,” or “innate nature.”
It has also been suggested that the religious meaning can be translated into the logical equivalence in philosophy, as Kant's concept of 'ought'. In a mystical context, it can connote intuition or insight and is similar to the Calvinist term "Sensus divinitatis".[/i]
The danger in excess Platonicity inside the core of religion, is that we would be repeating views from the notorious Mutazila heresy ( 8th to the 10th centuries).
Excessive rationalization of "fitrah" can lead to far-reaching trouble:
This paradigm is known in Islamic theology as wujub al-nazar, i.e., the obligation to use one's speculative reasoning to attain ontological truths.
A purely Platonic view on God was widespread and known as the "Greek heresy" in the Golden age of Islam:
Harun Nasution in the Mu?tazila and Rational Philosophy, translated in Martin (1997), commented on Mu?tazili extensive use of rationality in the development of their religious views saying: "It is not surprising that opponents of the Mu?tazila often charge the Mu?tazila with the view that humanity does not need revelation, that everything can be known through reason, that there is a conflict between reason and revelation, that they cling to reason and put revelation aside, and even that the Mu?tazila do not believe in revelation. But is it true that the Mu?tazila are of the opinion that everything can be known through reason and therefore that revelation is unnecessary? The writings of the Mu?tazila give exactly the opposite portrait. In their opinion, human reason is not sufficiently powerful to know everything and for this reason humans need revelation in order to reach conclusions concerning what is good and what is bad for them."
The Greek heresy will always end up denying the axiomatic base for religion, i.e. in Kant's lingo, the unexplained (="revealed") categorical imperatives that serve as a starting point for religious law, i.e. morality. As Aristotle nicely said (probably in Metaphysics, Book Gamma), "If nothing is assumed, then nothing can be concluded". Without axiomatic starting point, reason alone becomes an exercise in infinite regress.
Hence, I am against the excessive Platonic rationalization of "fithrah" ("Sensus divinitatis"), i.e. the natural predisposition ("instinct") to believe in God and the Last Day. Rationality is merely a tool and does not encompass every possible mental faculty.
"Meaning" is just a loosey-goosey word for I don't really know the fuck what. And no, it hasn't been defined in any way that allows a clear understanding. This whole thread is constructed on a foundation of loose sand.
I have no idea what either "dasein" or "desein" mean. I don't think Hegel or you do either. I don't think either of you know what "means" means.
We can’t satisfactorily define ‘time’, for instance, unless we examine it from a theoretical position in which time is irrelevant. Any attempt to define time in relation to a universe of objects, to position time within a time-dependent discourse, is fractured at best - like your definitions for ‘meaning’ listed above. Time is relative to the living, and meaning is relative to the observer. It points to the difficulty of clearly positioning meaning within meaning. Like trying to locate a photon without measuring it.
This is why @creativesoul’s definition of meaning is an expression of the relationship of the observer to a value structure.
They do mean something, but the ‘something’ isn’t fixed. That something is always going to be different for a different observer, and will also change in relation to the value structure they employ in interacting with the painting.
I like the way you write and your thoughtfulness. Your depth of knowledge is impressive, but I can't help think your way of seeing things makes something which is very simple much more complicated than it needs to be. That is my primary complaint about philosophy, especially western philosophy. I do recognize that I have a lazy man's tendency to want things to be as simple as possible. I always come back to on of my favorite quote from Kafka:
It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.
We're just back to what does "mean" mean.
I left this out of my last response. It's getting late. Natural predisposition? Maybe. I'm not a believer in any specific God, but it seems to me that a belief in God is recognition that our world, universe, reality is fundamentally human. We are mixed up with the physical manifestations of reality in a way that is not separable. The universe did not exist before we, or someone like us, recognized it. I don't mean that in any kind of mystical or magical way. I come from materialism, although I left it behind a long time ago.
Quoting T Clark
In my view, we can talk about meaning in the same way that we can talk about algebra: as variables in relation to each other. But these variables are themselves algebraic equations, with their own variables that are algebraic equations. That’s enough to do anyone’s head in, and it’s probably why alcontali’s writing is so complicated.
Meaning is about as complicated as it gets for us, and any attempt to simplify it ends up having the same capacity of a photograph in portraying a full concert experience. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t show the photographs anyway, with a ‘you had to be there’ disclaimer.
As a self-identified lazy person, I can't help thinking that the complications are in the way we ask our questions, not in the underlying nature of meaning. I'm not even sure what that means.
In the case of 'talking about meaning' I remain bemused that you can't see that your exhortation for 'things to be clearly stated' is equivalent to the apocryphal 'turtles all the way down' assertion !
To All
There are one or two respondents here who are observing 'the dancing' for what it is. I refer to those to whom it is obvious that 'meaning' is inextricably enmeshed in the praxis of living. I suggest that it may be only by communing with the neologisms used, or the analysis of living in references like those I cited, that they might avoid being drawn back onto the dance floor.
There is a sense in which that statement is true, but that's the point; it all depends on what you mean by it. And when people argue over materialism vs idealism, for example, it often comes down to each party insisting on a sense of the terms being used which the other does not agree with or at least is not employing.
You're leading that dance.
We can.
Of course you can, but you will have limited your understanding of the term in the process, and you cannot then ‘talk about meaning’ objectively, (in relation to the praxis of living, for instance) from this position.
Quoting Janus
I agree with you here only in some respects. I think that meaning is an aspect of the universe that potentially exists as a relationship between everything, regardless of whether or not anything is aware, connects or integrates that information.
But the tablet in question (or any inscribed mark) does not have a specific inherent meaning as separate from its relationship to both the observer and what is significant to that observer. In ‘deciphering’ the tablet as a text, an observer must attempt to form a relationship with both the signs/symbols and what is significant that most closely resembles that of the original cultural agreement. They then attempt to reflect that relationship in their translation/meaning by referring to a different relationship with different signs/symbols and what is significant to the observer. It is an inexact process that at best reflects meaning, but does not find it in the tablet as such.
The tablet, undecipherable, still has a relationship with the observer, albeit in relation to a slightly different significance: the awareness of a cultural experience that exists in our collective past. And as such, regardless of whether the marks were random or inscribed to convey anything, it is meaningful.
You qoted T Clark's statement about what we call the universe being observer-dependent. For me, his point is self evident without the need for an appeal to contextual 'truth' which impacts on 'agreement about terms'. In short, it is for me the recognition of a quest for a vantage point transcendent of the synthetic dichotomy 'observer-observed' which is only philosophical action worth taking,
(That action has been variously attempted and shows some promise in investigating, for example, Wittgenstein's approach to meaning.: Ref [Rosch "Prototype Theory".)
I agree with that. I look at the world as being replete with meaning, not as lacking it. I still maintain a distinction between a tablet that is inscribed with hieroglyphics that had ikonic or symbolic meaning to whoever inscribed it, and one which has been inscribed with marks which had no ikonic or symbolic meaning. I don't think it matters even if we cannot know.
The fact is that if there is meaning there then it is, in principle at least, decipherable.Of course it could be deciphered more or less correctly or incorrectly, but that possibility does not exist in the case of the meaningless marks; we would simply be making a mistake if we tried to decipher it.
The thing about your perception of ‘deciphering’, though, is that it implies one ‘correct’ meaning, which is unlikely to be the case. If it were about cracking a code, then there would only be one ‘correct’ translation of any biblical text, for instance.
In the case of ‘meaningless’ marks, it would indeed be a mistake to assume they correspond to a written language, but I don’t think any marks are meaningless. They could be patterns that mark the tablet for a particular use, as belonging to a certain family, tribe or social strata, or they could be the random, idle patterns of a skilled artisan’s blade on a bench. They are still meaningful. Forming a relationship with both the sign/symbol and what is significant that most closely resembles that of the original interaction is still what is required in this case, so the process of ‘deciphering’, as you put it, is still important.
Having recently joined this forum seeking a more contemporary approach to 'philosophy', I am somewhat disappointed in what I find.
On the specific issue of 'meaning', where, I ask, (following die Kehre ), is the discussion of Wittgenstein's adage 'meaning is use' ? Where I ask is discussion of the major shift to nonrepresentationalism in language ?...or where is Derrida's point that 'meaning' even for the author of text, dynamically shifts ? (merely dismissing that 'Derrida' on this won't do !).
Hence my accusation of 'dancing' (or as Wittgenstein might have called it, Geschwätz)
I think we all know what it means. ... But describing and defining it in words, with any sort of precision? Not so easy. And yet it remains the case that we all know what "mean" means. You see? :wink:
Things aren't literally meaningful. Rather, people think about them in a meaningful way. A person can think about anything in a meaningful way. And they can also refrain from thinking about anything in a meaningful way. It depends on the person and the situation.
As I posted in another recent thread:
Meaning is something mental that we do. Namely, it's the mental process of associative thinking, of thinking about something so that it implies, refers to, connotes, denotes, suggests or "pushes" or "leans towards", etc. other things. It's not possible to perceive this. Even when you observe things like others literally pointing at something, or you read dictionary definitions, you need to think about those things in those associative ways. This is why the paper that a definition is written on, for example, can't do meaning. You can't perceive thinking about something in those associative ways. In fact, you can't literally perceive others thinking period. We rather abductively conclude that others are thinking.
I see, but I don't think I agree, at least not in the context of this forum. I want to try this again. What does "meaning" mean?
As Charles Montgomery Burns once said - I don't know [s]art[/s] philosophy, but I know what I hate. And I don't hate that.
I've been thinking about this. I really like your formulation, but I think you've broadened the discussion to a point where it isn't reality about meaning anymore. It's about the nature of reality and truth. I think that's why I like it. It struck me a while ago that the primary question of philosophy is not "what is truth" but rather "what do I do now."
Yes..'meaning' is a side issue which might arise in the case of problematic action decisions. Further social transactions (extending the action context) tend to resolve potential ambiguities
Translation problems between languages yield some interesting examples of 'action dilemas', a pertinent example being the word 'representation' itself which can be translated as either Vorstellung or Darstellung in German which have differential connotations within both Kantian and Heideggerian philosophy.
(indeed, i believe one German philosopher, possibly Hegel, even said 'you can't do philosophy without German !)
And 'truth' is surely a word which potentially triggers what happens next...as in a courtroom verdict...or whether to heed a weather forecast....or whether to embrace religious observance.
Are you a platonist? Are you comfortable with Kant's notion of math as originating from the a priori categorical formal attributes of a transcendental subject? If so, then quantity may seem to you as something we could think apart from meaningful semantic quality, as arising from a different world, that of the a priori purely empty subjective formalism. For phenomenology, on the other hand, quantity is itself a peculiar species of the meaningfully semantic qualitative. It abstracts away all other properties of objects in order to lay bare its own meaningful organizational properties inherent in what calculation is trying to do, what it aims at in itself, apart from what it is applying itself to.
Quoting alcontali
Mathematics would be unthinkable without the notion of the object, which originated with the Greeks and by the time of Galileo became the basis of science with the complete transforming of the phenomenally experienced world into an abstracted realm of 'real' objective bodies, what you call the "real physical world". For Husserl, fundamental experienced reality contains no objects. these are idealizations, formal devices of thinking to organize our world. For him , the entirety of 'real physical reality' is a second order abstraction based on a formal condition of possibility, a thinking which, in the hands of Kantian and platonically oriented philosophers and logicians, is not able to make explicit its presuppositions in order to ground them in a more primordial origin of mathematics. Objectivity presupposes the notion of identity. The idea of an object is that of self-persistence. An objective thing is only an object in that it is considered as identical to itself. Thus, the origin of the 'real physical world' rests on a set of formal presuppositions that include self-identity, which is not a property of the world independent of our theorizing activities. (Even as theorized, pure self-identity masks subtle , continual changes in the sense of what we try to hold as self-identical). Calculation and number would be impossible without this idealization. The thinking of number, as 'same thing, different time' is already implicit in the formal basis of objectivity as identity. In this way, modern empiricism and mathematics presuppose each other and arose together as forms of understanding.
To begin from the 'real physical world' as irreducible leaves us with a schism between quantity and quality, between empirically contingent causal 'objects' and the subjectively and universally formal meaninglessness of math(as well as with subject-object dualism and the hard problem of consciousness). This leads to the view that one can devise out of ones imagination any formal mathematical idea at will without it having to have the slightest practical connection to, or influence from, the 'real' world. After generating such pure ideas out of thin air, we then go on to see if and where such meaningless, purely abstract formalisms apply to this real world, and then shout with astonishment when they miraculously describe aspects of this world. That's platonism in a nutshell.
What I suggest is instead the case is that, a at all periods in human history, the development of mathematics, in its pre-formal as well as recent purely formal incarnations, is as utterly dependent on the intersubjective cultural environment as any science . It is for this reason that each historical innovation in mathematics (Greek geometry, classical logic, analytic geometry and calculus, etc. arise out of the intellectual milieu of their time n the same fashion as does every scientific theory. Classical, medieval, Renaissance, enlightenment and modernist chapter of of the development of mathematical concepts parallel developments in the sciences as well as the arts and all other arenas of culture because all of these interpenetrate and influence each other. It is not the case that the history of mathematics is merely a cumulative enterprise, with new developments merely adding to and building onto previous ones, which would be the case if mat were purely, platonically formal.. There is a continual, subtle reinterpretation of the meaning of all aspects of mathematics just as happens in physics or any other science . But because it is in the nature of the language of mathematics that its formalisms are very general, it is assumed that our practical understanding of them never changes, that their sense stands outside of time, that they in fact have no sense because , of course, calculation is supposed to be empty of all sense. but this is mistaking generality of sense with absence of meaning.
Formalisms , whether of a mathematical or any other nature, stand for a semantic content. They mean something in order to to do something. Self-identiy is not an irreducible basis of the world, it is a semantic gimic. 'Same thing- different time' is a pragamtically meaningful notion. If it is the case that one can ignore every feature of the world that one is applying a mathematical formalism to, then it is equally true of other sorts of categorical generalities. We can think color in general abstracted from all other aspects of the world. All that is necessary is to have the neurological capacity to imagine color. In same fashion, we can think counting part from any features of an object that is to be counted, as long as we have the neural capacity to do this(there are some neural pathologies that prevent the ability to think calcualtively).
But the fact that we can separate our formalisms from specific objects that we want to apply them to does not mean that these forms are not in themselves meaningful, or that they are not always motivated by some purpose which belongs to their meaning in a subtle way. For instance, normally, it only occurs to us to calculate when a need arises for some practical aim. That need does not only motivate the onset of the counting as a background drive that then vanishes the minute we begin to count, it continues to frame the counting. It is a subtle part of what it means, right now, in the midst of the performance of calculating, to continue the activity . If I am interpreted , what brings the task back to mind is the recollection of why I wanted to count in the first place.
Are you familiar with 'Where Mathematics Comes From' (Lakoff and Nunez) ?
Your exposition above may have some points in common.
LATER EDIT
I note your impressive website which imo goes exactly in the 'required' direction to counter the Geschwätz. !
Quoting Terrapin Station
When we have a dream – does it satisfy your definition of meaningful mental activity? Is it a process of associative thinking? And what about fits of delirium? Also, it is not clear if your understanding of “the mental process of associative thinking” includes just verbal thinking.
Think about a 'stop' sign. If someone found one in the future, after the apocalypse, they might be induced to think it was a human artifact with a meaning, but if English was no longer spoken, they could not translate it. But of course there is one and one only correct translation. Obviously with texts it is not so straightforward, but translations cannot vary that much; if they were too divergent they would lose the meaning of the original text.
Quoting Possibility
Say someone was bored and they were just playing around, inscribing marks that looked somewhat like heiroglyphics into a stone; there is no intended meaning there, that's how the artifact differs from a stone tablet that originally had a meaning. The first is not decipherable, whereas the latter is, at least in priniciple.
In another sense, beyond mere semantic meaning, I agree that there are no meaningless marks; they are all signs of something; could be lightning, bushfire, erosion, whatever.
Interesting that you find what I've put forth as incompatible with those views. By my lights it exhausts them and the older notions alike.
You know where I stand on ancient texts.
Yes, but not necessarily outside the realm of mathematics. I believe that mathematics more or less enforces Platonism by its metarules on the declaration of variables. In the following example:
? m ? A: m² ? m
The expression declares a variable m from a domain A. Mathematical notation is strongly typed, and the metarule does not allow the use of m without such prior declaration. Furthermore, the domain A is never the real world, because it is not possible to traverse the real world for all occurrences of a domain. That would cost too much energy. Therefore, the metarule insists on the use of objects from an abstract, Platonic world.
In other words, it is not even possible to write anything about the real, physical world. That impossibility is strictly enforced in mathematics.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, that even follows from the metarules.
Quoting Joshs
The publication of Algorithmi's work, "The Art of Hindu Reckoning", originally published in Arabic, later on translated into Latin in the 12th century, suggests that mathematics trivially traverses cultural and linguistic barriers. Two mathematicians have much more in common with each other, regardless of nationality, than say, two Americans.
Mathematics did not make any significant progress in Europe, beyond what the Greek had developed, until the decimal positional notation ("Hindu Reckoning") and the treatise on algebra ("Liber algebrae") came in from external origin in the 12th century. That was a standstill spanning around a millennium. It was clearly Algoritmi's publications (Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi) that kicked off new activity in mathematics.
Quoting Joshs
A good example of a popular formalism are regular expressions, i.e. Kleene's closure. In term of real-world semantics they do not mean anything, because they were not even abstracted away from anything that exists in the real, physical world.
Kleene algebra is an abstraction that came out of the blue when Stephen Kleene, acting as a consultant for the Rand Corporation, wrote his report on finite automata for the U.S. Air Force in 1951.
Finite automata are again, an abstraction that was never abstracted away from the real, physical world. Automata do not occur in nature. You need to painstakingly build them. They are always artificial.
It was not even clear how to build them -- there were several competing theoretical models -- until in 1945, John Von Neumann wrote his winning proposal, "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" for the United States Army Ordnance Department.
Finite automata do not mean anything, really. They are just an abstraction, meaningless (=divorced from the real world) and even useless (=no direct use).
Quoting Joshs
Mathematics does not even need to abstract away from the real world, which used to be the primary source for abstraction, but that is no longer the case any more. Many, if not most, 20th century publications in mathematics were not abstracted away from the real, physical world.
For example, I do not believe that anything in Alan Turing's work was ever abstracted away from the real, physical world.
Without connection, no matter how flimsy, to the real, physical world, an abstraction has no meaning, i.e. semantics.
Quoting Joshs
When an abstraction was originally abstracted away from the real, physical world, it is its origin that may still suggest meaning/semantics. If it was never abstracted away from anything real or physical, however, what could possibly be its meaning?
Pre-20th century mathematical theories still had some kind of connection to the real, physical world, if only, their origin. It was not "real mathematics", in Hardy's terminology:
We have concluded that the trivial mathematics is, on the whole, useful, and that the real mathematics, on the whole, is not.
Meaning and usefulness are treated as grave defects in pure mathematics. Seriously, "real mathematics" is necessarily meaningless and useless.
Are symbols meaningless?
I still find that impossible to reconcile with engineering which relies heavily on the application of mathematics to the physical world. What am I not understanding?
Okay. Point out to me where you have discussed any impact of die Kehre on analysis of 'meaning'.
Engineering is a semantical and even a very intentional thing.
For example, you want to build a boat. It must be 55 meters long.
By dragging "55" into the fray, which are symbols that have inherently absolutely nothing to do with boats, you have subjected yourself to number theory. You cannot do whatever you want with "55", if you want to do it consistently.
You are now bound by a bureaucracy of formalisms, i.e. rules and regulations that govern the abstract, Platonic world of numbers. It constrains you and reins you in. With every mathematical object that you drag into the fray, you will become increasingly beholden to the formalisms that govern them.
Before you know, you are the prisoner of a web of constraining formalisms that will tightly wrap up your boat project.
It is not that you wanted to do mathematics. No, you just wanted to build a boat.
But so much of what we use every day - every minute! - depends on maths, and without maths it wouldn’t exist. Take the device you’re reading and replying on; computer science and cybernetics is intensely dependent on maths. Without some maths, you couldn’t be a computer scientist.
One point about Platonism is, in my opinion, that it’s an essential ingredient of the scientific revolution, and one of the principle reasons that the West (as distinct from India or China) devised modern science. So declaring that maths exists in some ethereal platonic domain doesn’t do justice to the facts of history.
I myself am intrigued by Platonic realism, but my interpretation of its significance is rather different to your own. To me, it means that mathematical reasoning is an indispensable ingredient of scientific thinking, although I also don’t believe that there is a scientific explanation for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. But I agree with mathematical Platonists who believe that maths comprises insight into a real, albeit wholly intelligible domain.
If a symbol is a nonterminal, then it can be explained in terms of other nonterminals and terminals, using a production rule, which gives it its definition. Terminals are axiomatic starting points. They are not further explained.
That is how it more or less works for formal languages that abide by a context-free grammar.
In natural language, these terminals are the defining vocabulary. If judiciously chosen, the defining vocabulary can be associated with just images.
For example, you do not need words to explain what an apple is. Just show one or more images, and that will do too.
Apparently, the smallest defining vocabulary is 360 words that gets expanded through a layered system to approx. 3000 words. The origins of this hierarchical system are attributed to Samuel Johnson, who argued that:
Words should be defined using terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained.
Yes, daily life pretty much unavoidably gets trapped into the web of mathematics, simply, by inadvertently using an abstract, Platonic object of mathematical nature. That's indeed it. The enslavement process will unstoppably start, because the formalisms will kick in, if you want to do it consistently.
Quoting Wayfarer
Mathematics has interface points everywhere. It is almost impossible to speak for longer than a minute or so, before the speaker has dragged into the fray a regulated language expression, causing him to become subject to an entire regulatory framework that governs the use of these regulated language expressions.
Still, that does not mean that these regulated language expression are real. They are not. Language expressions do not appear as real, physical objects with physical characteristics. They have no size, weight, temperature, or any other physical characteristic. They are mere abstractions.
It is not just mathematics that exists in some ethereal platonic domain. All language does.
It all depends on what you mean by ‘real’.
[quote=SEP]Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects which aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences. Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate.[/quote]
Note the implicit presumption in declaring it ‘would be’ an important discovery. :smile:
No ! All languages, including the metalanguage of mathematics exist ie. are useful concepts in the only 'domain' that matters to humanity i.e actions and interactions connected with prediction (including pattern seeking) and control. That sentence of mine can be behaviorally construed as an attempt to control/elicit future interactions with me.
That still does not mean that language would be a physical phenomenon with size, weight, temperature, electromagnetic radiation. Does language have any particular color or smell?
Seriously, language is an abstraction that lives in its own Platonic world. We cannot avoid using such abstractions, simply, because we communicate.
Still, we should not confuse these abstractions with the real, physical world.
The word "cat" is not a cat. It is a word. It is a language expression. It is not the real, physical thing at all.
Agreed.
In Kant's lingo, mathematics truly is synthetic, i.e. knowledge.
It is, however, "a priori", i.e. divorced from the real, physical world; unlike science, which is a "posteriori".
Kant insists on the existence of synthetic knowledge a priori (purely abstract), "pure reason", which is separate from synthetic knowledge a posteriori (i.e. real-world).
Unfortunately, Kant did not insist on the fact that pure reason, divorced as it is from the real, physical world, is in and of itself, necessarily meaningless, i.e. free of any possible (real-world) semantics. It is its extreme purity that makes this type of knowledge meaningless and also useless, to be understood as: having no real-world semantics and no direct use or direct application.
What you have ultimately done here is talk about language - about what language is. So where is your infinite regress?
You provide an "only 'given'" yet provide more than just one 'given', and you used language to represent that 'given' for communicating to others that 'given'.
Are we really clever primates, or is that just a use of scribbles on a screen? Does "clever primates" refer to some state-of-affairs, or is it just scribbles on a screen? Is it a fact that these "clever primates" possess "a complex set of socially acquired behavioral gestures that they call "human language" which segments what they call the world?", or are those just scribbles that don't refer to, or represent, or mean anything?
In using language, what are actually doing? Are you doing something different with language when you listen as opposed to speaking? If we are doing different things with language, then how do we communicate? What is the glue that binds the listener and speaker together? Isn't it meaning?
Quoting T Clark
It's really simple. Meaning is the relationship between some cause(s) and some effect(s).
What some word means is the idea in some speaker or writer's head and their intent to communicate that idea(the cause of the words appearing on the screen). When reading other's words, you are trying to get at their meaning, not yours. If you only try to get at your meaning of the words, then how do you expect to understand what the writer intended? You are trying to get at the cause of the words on the screen and part of that is knowing that scribbles on a screen (the effect) is caused by humans submitting their ideas via language (the cause).
Seeing scribbles on a screen means that some human submitted their ideas via a post on an internet forum. What do the scribbles mean? They mean the ideas (that are not just other words BTW) in some human's head. Which causal relationship do you want to talk about - the one between you and the screen with scribbles, or the one between the scribbles and the author of those scribbles? The fact that we can talk about both and still be talking about language use shows that there are multiple causes that precede you reading scribbles on screen (using language).
When you don't understand what someone wrote - is it that there is no meaning to the words, or is it that there is meaning but you haven't been able to discover it yet (the causal relationship between the scribbles and someone's ideas)?
When we ask what something means we are asking about causal relationships - about some cause or purpose.
There are many words that carry multiple meanings. Many of these carry meanings that can be distinguished easily from the context in which they are used. And some don't; these are the difficult ones. As a designer, I was always a little bit annoyed by the word "design", and how it meant quite a few different things ... but those things were closer in meaning to each other than the easy ones we just mentioned. So they cannot always be distinguished from context.
I think quality (cf. Pirsig's Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance), and good, are (examples of) such words. The multiple meanings they carry are too close together to separate easily. Maybe this is what gives rise to confusion? These words carry all of the meanings they carry, often simultaneously (or so it seems). So when it comes to defining these terms precisely, we encounter problems.
Thoughts? :chin:
No, what I have 'done here' is to use 'languing' behavior to elicit languaging behavior from you ! There is no 'ultimate', but It would have been more gratifying if I had also elicited 'research behavior' as well !
http://www.enolagaia.com/M78BoL.html
'Thoughts'..?
I suggest you think about the 'meaning' of that one key word ...'context'.
You might find that discussion of 'meaning' without that is as vacuous as trying to play tennis with no tennis court and no other player.
Yes, of course, but this is a more or less universal truism; it's not confined to this discussion of "meaning". I said as much, and more.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
My point is that there are some words whose meanings are closer together than the easier examples, and that, for this reason, it is much more difficult to distinguish them purely from context. Words like "mean", "good" and "quality", to offer but three good examples.
Thoughts? :chin:
But you havn't analysed 'context' which I suggest always consists of 'an action decision scenario'.
Your examples:
Take the word 'good' for example...look at the action it might promote like 'continue to work like that (teaching scenario)....'to enjoy eating something good' ...to enjoy reading a good book...etclook at verbs !
Take the word 'design'...already a verb implying activity fulfilling overt or covert criteria some of which may not be explicit.
Take the word 'quality' ...implying the mental action of deciding between desireable alternatives.
Without action, or potential action as to 'what happens next', there is no meaning !
Weird context...suppose a stranger puts his head round the door and says 'shark'....what action would you take?...does the word 'shark' mean anything other than to act as though 'this guy is a lunatic' !
Sure. The ambiguity is part of the fun and the power of language. In the context of this discussion, what's important is that the posters make sure we are all talking about the same meaning of "meaning." Otherwise, we get a muddled mixture of comments that don't seem responsive. When I am king of the forum, I'll make everyone define terms in the first paragraph of the OP. Also, I'll ban anyone with a cute username. Don't worry, "Pattern-chaser" is ok.
I don't understand the argument you are making. Your definition doesn't match my understanding of what "meaning" means.
Are you familiar with the work that Fresco mentioned above? In case you are not, let me quote a few passages summarizing 'Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being'. Lakoff is a psycholinguist who has developed a cognitive-psychology based explanation of the origin of mathematics that in many respects in comparable to the position I have been arguing.
"In the course of our research, we ran up against a mythology that stood in the way of developing an adequate cognitive science of mathematics. It is a kind of “romance” of mathematics, a mythology that goes something like this:
.•Mathematics is abstract and disembodied—yet it is real.
•Mathematics has an objective existence, providing structure to this universe and any possible universe, independent of and transcending the existence of human beings or any beings at all.
•Human mathematics is just a part of abstract, transcendent mathematics.•Hence, mathematical proof allows us to discover transcendent truths of the universe
.•Mathematics is part of the physical universe and provides rational structure to it. There are Fibonacci series in flowers, logarithmic spirals in snails, fractals in mountain ranges, parabolas in home runs, and pin the spherical shape of stars and planets and bubbles.
•Mathematics even characterizes logic, and hence structures reason it-self—any form of reason by any possible being.
•To learn mathematics is therefore to learn the language of nature, a mode of thought that would have to be shared by any highly intelligent beings anywhere in the universe.
•Because mathematics is disembodied and reason is a form of mathematical logic, reason itself is disembodied. Hence, machines can, in principle, think.It is a beautiful romance—the stuff of movies like 2001, Contact, and Sphere.It initially attracted us to mathematics.
But the more we have applied what we know about cognitive science to understand the cognitive structure of mathematics, the more it has become clear that this romance cannot be true. Human mathematics, the only kind of mathematics that human beings know, cannot be a subspecies of an abstract, transcendent mathematics. Instead, it appears that mathematics as we know it arises from the nature of our brains and our embodied experience. As a consequence, every part of the romance appears to be false, for reasons that we will be discussing. Perhaps most surprising of all, we have discovered that a great many of the most fundamental mathematical ideas are inherently metaphorical in nature:
•The number line, where numbers are conceptualized metaphorically as points on a line.
•Boole’s algebra of classes, where the formation of classes of objects is conceptualized metaphorically in terms of algebraic operations and elements: plus, times, zero, one, and so on
.•Symbolic logic, where reasoning is conceptualized metaphorically as mathematical calculation using symbols.
•Trigonometric functions, where angles are conceptualized metaphorically as numbers.
•The complex plane, where multiplication is conceptualized metaphorically in terms of rotation."
"Metaphor is not a mere embellishment; it is the basic means by which abstract thought is made possible. One of the principal results in cognitive science is that abstract concepts are typically understood, via metaphor, in terms of more concrete concepts."
Do you agree with any of this?
What is "languaging" behavior? Just making scribbles appear on screen because you put scribbles on a screen? or representing some ideas that are not of some "languaging" behavior with "languaging" behavior?
Is the State of Affairs you are languaging about the scribbles on the screen or something else?
It might do you some good to read the rest of the post. The definition I used is how everyone uses the word "meaning" - to refer to some cause or purpose.
When someone asks, "what do you mean?", they are asking what ideas you intended to convey with your use of words. They are trying to get past the scribbles and the words to the idea in your head which is the cause of the scribbles or a words.
When someone uses words and we don't understand their use, we don't ask "what do the words mean", we ask "what do you mean" which is talking about your idea in your head and your intent to communicate it.
We understand that people may use words differently than the dictionary definition but that isn't to say that they don't mean something when using the words that way.
When someone asks, "what is the meaning of life?", they are asking about the cause or the purpose of life.
'Languaging' is a form of behavior which co-ordinates behavior. Your languaging sample about 'just squiggles on a screen' is your attempt to to elicit a response from me involving the word/concept 'ideas'. But from Maturana's 'languaging' point of view, 'ideas' are merely sequences of 'internal actions/conversations which we call 'thinking'. It is this ability to 'act off line' which gives humanity an evolutionary advantage over most other species. In fact, one definition psychologists use for 'intelligence' is 'the capacity to delay a physical response'.
Well, what a total shock. Who would have thought.
Quoting alcontali
Perhaps Kant saw things differently. He was after all a polymath, someone who lectured in science and geography as well as philosophy. He well understood the fact that mathematics relates to what you describe as 'the real world'.
Are not "the nature of our brains" and the "nature of our embodied experience" part of nature? We experience nature as difference and sameness or similarity; because we can differentiate we can count, and counting is the basis of mathematics. It is not our brains alone which originate difference and sameness.
I think @alcontali is talking about meta-mathematics. I could be mistaken.
Cool
So how can scribbles be about themselves? What does it mean for something to be about something or itself?
Quoting fresco
Or to filter our instinctive behaviors. But this is all scribbles about things that arent scribbles. I'm not writing to get you to write back, or to hear you talk. My intent is simply to convey ideas, and ideas can be non-verbal. The scribbles on the screen are about my ideas, and ideas are about the world.
I do too.
Quoting Janus
Your meaning is clear, however the case of an ancient inscriber deliberately making random marks that appear to be hieroglyphics is curious. I imagine it takes quite a bit of effort to inscribe marks on a stone tablet. Also, that the marks appear to be hieroglyphs implies a significant degree of order. The amount of effort and the designed order both suggest intention or purpose. Even if the intention was to make a faux tablet, for decoration or a prop, or perhaps to fool people, the object served a purpose and was meaningful in that regard.
Quoting Janus
As I suggested, maybe the purpose is to try making others attempt to decipher it.
To further demonstrate my point, I defy you, or anyone, to reply to this post with a meaningless response.
Yes, I do agree with you that the tablet would have meaning in those senses, just as natural marks have meanings. And the tablet in question would also embody human intentional meaning. I was just attempting to draw a coherent distinction between those more or less arbitrary or extemporaneous intentional and unintentional kinds of meanings and conventionalized semantic meanings.
Unlike metaphysics, which is epistemically not a legitimate subdiscipline of physics -- as it cannot experimentally test its propositions -- metamathematics does derive its propositions axiomatically -- i.e. is subject to provability -- and is therefore epistemically a legitimate subdiscipline of mathematics.
Seriously, metamathematics is NOT to mathematics what metaphysics is to physics.
So, no, I do not particularly distinguish between metamathematics and mathematics, because there is simply no need for that. For example, Hilbert calculi may be metamathematical but that is a non-issue in their discussion. They have absolutely no fundamentally different nature.
Mathematics has absolutely no problem talking about itself. So, yes, mathematics is vain. It definitely has narcissistic qualities.
As a side remark, I always thought that science cannot legitimately talk about itself -- it generally cannot -- but I think that there may be a twist to that.
Falsificationism is in my impression subject to falsification, because Pavlov's dog is a falsificationist animal. You can repeatedly carry out Pavlov's experiments to look for a black swan in that context, i.e. to find a dog or another animal assumed to subscribe to falsificationism, but that refuses to learn to salivate when repeatedly served with a bell ring. Therefore, falsificationism seems to "eat its own dog food".
Furthermore, when Hardy quipped that real mathematics is useless, he was referring to his own experience in exploring number theory; which is not part of metamathematics at all.
Real number theory is obviously as useless and meaningless -- no direct use or application possible and utterly devoid of meaning/semantics -- as every other axiomatic theory in mathematics.
The good stuff is also quite lazy, as it minimizes what it actually wants to talk about, besides, of course, being purposely useless and meaningless. Therefore the good stuff, i.e. in Hardy's terms, the "real mathematics", tends to be fairly ridiculous. If it does not make you laugh, the stuff is probably just too serious.
So metamathematics is provable, metaphysics is not. So, is counting apples meaningless? Or is that not mathematics?
Never mind. I think this answered my question, and I think I agree with you.
No, it is the apples that provide the semantics/meaning. So, it is not meaningless.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
It is application of mathematics and not mathematics proper. So, you are possibly doing inventory control, or so? Is it about accounting and financial reporting?
Ha ha! I would go bananas if I had to do those jobs.
Well, when people become semantical, they are often intentionally motivated. It is a real-world job to help other people discover and/or achieve their goal. Still, for various reasons, the job of "consultant" actually has a bad reputation.
Ultimately, the reason why there are accountants is the same as why there are trash collectors, sewer divers, or any other real-life jobs, really. The work just needs to be done. So, someone will end up getting dragged into it, kicking and screaming, and then also getting paid to do it. There will also always be some kind of manager equipped with a whip, keeping an eye on the situation. Slavery is freedom.
I can’t tell if you’re being admonishing, analytical, or comical. I suspect it’s all of the above.
Art. 71b. Arbeit macht frei !
Das bundesfederationlich Zusammenarbeitsgesamtsamt
I was just making fun of these long German words by inventing a mostly meaningless one.
Apparently, I am not the only one doing that! ;-)
This used to be the longest one, until they deprecated and archived it:
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
It is the name of an abandoned regulatory arrangement for beef labelling.
Selbstverständlich!
Ever since the publication of "The Kingdom of Auschwitz", by Otto Friedrich, it seems to be ok to mock the literal German version too. In fact, Orwell had already spectacularly pulled that off in "1984" in English, published belatedly in 1949 (it is obvious that Orwell had wanted to publish it in 1948).
Thinking of it, the slogan is indeed something sinister and truly Orwellian.
I agree. “Work” as in work you don’t enjoy or work that you mind is a dirty word.
Is being nonterminal equivalent to being meaningless?
Evidently we've two different ideas regarding what it takes for one position to effectively exhaust another... It's a matter of explanatory power.
Offer an example, any example, of meaning that does not consist of what I've already set out. Heiddy invented all these new language games as a result of not understanding how all thought/belief works. He did not clearly delineate between thought/belief that is prior to language, pre-reflective thought/belief in linguistic form, and reflective thought/belief in linguistic form.
Simply put, he did not draw and maintain the actual distinction between thought/belief and thinking about thought/belief. Being, Dasein, Being in the world, ready at hand, etc, all of those notions are the result of not getting thought/belief right to start with.
He was not alone.
Get that wrong, and you'll certainly get meaning wrong as well.
Revisit the ancient texts thread.
Only if the terminals in that system are meaningless. Otherwise, no.
For example, the terminals in natural language ("the defining vocabulary") are explicitly meaningful. You can explain each of them by showing one or more real-world images. No need for words. Just show one or more images of a "man" and a "woman", and it should be roughly clear what these terminals mean.
In my impression, meaning/semantics somehow requires real-world terminals. I am not sure, though, because semiotics is obviously an endless rant.
According to formalist philosophy, to which I subscribe (without denying Platonism), mathematics is syntax-only:
Syntactics is the Morris'ean branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and symbols; the interrelation of the signs, without regard to meaning.
Natural language wants to convey meaning while formal language wants to structure it.
I think that you're mistaken on several levels here.
There are many meaningful terms within the defining vocabulary of natural languages that do not have a real world physical referent.
Natural language does much more than convey meaning. I may even argue against that on it's face.
Structuring meaning is not equivalent to being meaningless.
Terminals are language constructs. Symbols are meaningful in exactly the way I've set out here. That's the difference between accidental marks and symbols.
I would not doubt if current convention agrees wholeheartedly with everything you've written, although some of it seems dubitable. I'm not an expert in maths. Hell, I'm not even at a novice level. That said, to say that mathematics is meaningless given it's historical evolution through time through people, is suspect to say the least.
Given that mathematical symbols are meaningful to those who know how to use the language, I find the claim that math is meaningless to be entirely untenable, unexplainable, and contrary to known facts.
You could be right. I am not familiar with the semiotics thing.
Quoting creativesoul
Well, if all the meaning is necessarily elsewhere ... I think that the problem is rather the negative connotation of the term "meaningless".
Quoting creativesoul
With "meaningless" considered to be "bad", and "meaningful" considered to be "good", in common parlance, I certainly understand your objection. The problem is that this view can easily lead astray.
Therefore, the problem is rather to overcome the resistance to considering "meaningless" and "useless" as neutral terms. In a technical context, these terms should probably not be used to make value judgements.
It is a connotational issue.
For example, in common parlance, "laziness" is bad; even very bad. In a technical context, laziness, as in "lazy evaluation", is a lofty ideal to aspire to. The lazier, the better, because less is more.
In a technical context, "Your approach is lazy", is a compliment. It means that you are an expert at avoiding work, and therefore, an example to be emulated.
But your lay term 'aboutness' is vacuous, because unless you are a naive realist you have no 'bedrock'. My 'cordination of coordination' rests on the bedrock of 'action decisions' involved in physical, psychological and social 'prediction and control'. Now part of that coordination certainly uses the abstract persistence of 'words' to mentally paint shifting snapshots of 'an external world', but my contextual 'snapshot' can never be guaranteed to be synonymous with yours. All that matters is a degree of mutual coordination as to what might happen next (which Maturana calls 'structural coupling').
I suggest you need to consider some of the empirical studies of language pathology to understand my position. For example, it is well known that the development of twins can be hampered by an ideosyncratic private language. And studies by Merleau-Ponty of brain damaged war veterans showed for example that the command word 'salute' produced no understanding but social situation of an officer entering the room produced immediate saluting action.
i see, so your answer is 'Heidegger got it wrong' ! You dismiss his admirable attempt to use neologisms to transcend the infinite regress as futile ? .....
And die Kehre in philosophy has been equally applied to Wittgenstein's dismissal of his earlier Tractatus which involved a 'picture theory of language' . Also..to non representationalist views of language developed by Quine et al conducive to neo-pragmatism (Rorty), and post modernism (Derrida) all of which were iconoclastic with respect to traditional analytic philososophy (which concerned itself with 'pseudo-problems' like discriminating between 'thought' and 'belief' !).
No doubt, they all 'got it wrong' !
...which in my terms translates as 'if you want to structurally couple, with me you need to commune with my psychological need to reinforce my understanding of philosophy'.
I can only give an 'Irish' response to that, which is
...'If you want to get to Dublin, I wouldn't start from here' !
a footnote - the root of the word 'idiot' is someone who speaks in a way that nobody else can understand - from latin'idios', own or private; (c.f. 'idiom' to make one's own; so 'idiomatic'); also idiosyncrasy c. 1600, from French idiosyncrasie, from Latinized form of Greek idiosynkrasia "a peculiar temperament," from idios "one's own" ; so in this context, use of the word 'private' is actually redundant!
Good point except that two 'idiots' speaking their own mutually understood language are involved.
Looks like 'idiosyncratic' is redundant. !
How can a term be vacuous when words are only used for coordination? And the reason you gave that it was vacuous isn't that it doesn't coordinate (because you replied back with more scribbles), but because there is no 'bedrock' - whatever that means. What would it mean for a term to be vacuous, or to have no bedrock, if terms are only used for coordinating actions between individuals?
And why would I be asking what your word use means if we are merely coordinating actions? Where is the coordination when I ask, "what do you mean", or say "I don't understand what you mean." It seems to me that coordination comes about only when we agree. But then what would be be agreeing on, or about? What does it mean to agree or disagree?
Quoting fresco
I don't use words to paint shifting snapshots of an external world. I have shifting snapshots of a world in relation to me and I use words to categorize different sensory impressions under one sensory impression - a word - which is a visual scribble or sound. Words are not abstract. They exist out in the world as ink on paper, light on a computer screen, or as vibrations in the air. The abstraction lies in our mental representation for the cause of hearing sounds or seeing scribbles. The abstraction lies in our attempt to simulate the meaning, or the causal relationship between hearing or seeing sounds or scribbles and what caused them. What do the sounds or scribbles mean? How is it that I am having a visual experience of scribbles on a computer screen right now when looking at your post? What are those scribbles about? What are you trying to convey?
Quoting fresco
So now you are pointing to states-of-affairs with words - like studies and the development of twins, brain damaged vets, etc. Your words are about things - these states-of-affairs. If not, then I don't know what your are talking about. If you aren't talking about these things that are not words themselves, then you are just making scribbles on a screen that have no meaning other than the fact that you, fresco, put scribbles on a computer screen.
What is the difference between scribbles and words?
I agree. A lot of scientists and mathematicians believe that the universe is mathematical, and not in a metaphorical way. Mistaking the map for the territory is a common human failing. Some people also think the universe really, literally consists of information, or is a computer, or a living creature, or consciousness.
Silly, ha, ha, ha, ha. Think that's funny, some even think the universe consists of a four dimensional space formed and distorted by matter and energy.
The idea of falsification is not science, it's metaphysics. The scientific method is metaphysics. Induction is metaphysics. If math has no content, none of these things do either.
I have always thought of these things as subjects of epistemology, i.e. theory of knowledge.
Metaphysics study is conducted using deduction from that which is known a priori. Like foundational mathematics (which is sometimes considered a special case of metaphysics applied to the existence of number), it tries to give a coherent account of the structure of the world, capable of explaining our everyday and scientific perception of the world, and being free from contradictions.
I don't think that this is possible.
The strong, classical view assumes that the objects studied by metaphysics exist independently of any observer, so that the subject is the most fundamental of all sciences. Some philosophers, such as the logical positivists, and many scientists, reject the strong view of metaphysics as meaningless and unverifiable.
I am afraid that I have to agree with the logical positivist view on the matter. As far as I am concerned, epistemology is the flagship of philosophy, while at the same time it is not clear whether metaphysics even makes sense.
I've spent some time thinking about this. To me, epistemology is part of metaphysics. If you look up definitions, it's about 50/50 whether others agree with me. I have always thought of metaphysics as the set of rules we agree on that gives us a common framework for looking at the world. Again, some agree, some disagree.
A paper that I have found very helpful is "An Essay on Metaphysics" by R.G. Collingwood. And by helpful, I mean he and I agree.
And I do agree that epistemology is the key to everything. The heart of the matter. But I think metaphysics is really the only thing that lets us agree on what makes sense and what doesn't.
To me, this is completely wrong. Backwards. Metaphysics provides the rules for the application of human conventions of knowledge to the world. It makes the universe a human place. As Lao Tzu might say, it brings the universe into existence.
But something does exist. Descartes told me so. At least, I think he did.
Something exists, not because he thinks, but because he perceives he thinks. His perception of existence (and also ours) may not be real. And I could go on ;)
Anyhow, this is pointless, right?
Pointless? I don't know about that, but you're opening up a discussion that's much broader than this one. When push comes to shove, Descartes was right, or at least close. I experience something, therefore something is.
Some chose the GOD explanation (it is simple and it works, the guy up there pulling the strings), others go with nothing, others go with the pursuit of it, even knowing if it is out reach.
So, Descartes was Descartes, Nietzsche and Heidegger didn't agreed and Sartre was in loved with the fact that he did not knew. If any of them where right? Can´t tell you. Not yet ;)
It seems the ad hom charge does stick...
:wink:
It is actually hard, convoluted, and rather pricey to get hold of the publication:
https://www.bookdepository.com/Essay-on-Metaphysics-Collingwood/9780199241415
I do not store paper copies. Someone would have to put in the effort to scan it back first. It would use up space already assigned for other purposes. I would rather store live trees than dead ones in my living room.
Ideally, I use a text file that I can read on my phone while I am at the swimming pool, or so. I usually also simplify pdf files (duh) with the pdftotext utility.
So, I am incompatible with the practices of Oxford University Press. Furthermore, there is no doubt that I am more stubborn than them. There is simply no hope for them that they would defeat me in nay saying. That kind of people cannot make me adjust to them, because I have a long history of doing exactly the opposite, and always winning at that. As Nassim Taleb so beautifully wrote: The most intolerant wins.
The most intelligent are often the most humorous, and at the same time, inaccessible to the masses.
It's not about good/bad. It's about what all attribution of meaning takes. It's about what being meaningful takes.
It's about how math emerged onto the world stage solely by virtue of our attribution of specific non-negotiable meaning to certain marks and quantities and how that evolved into also talking about non physical things with meaningful marks...
The similarities between math and natural languages are many, but it seems you've neglected to take those into account.
I found it free for download at archive. org. Just type in "Essay on Metaphysics PDF." It's also available at Amazon - $4.61 kindle. $15 paperback.
Meaning includes values, of course, but it also includes narrative, and perhaps purpose. Self-identity also seems to be integral.
Value is simply the worth of something, or the amount of attraction or repulsion a being may have for something. It could be said, for example, that a plant values sunlight, and this is expressed in its bending towards it.
Quantities, i.e. numbers, are not even needed for inadvertently dragging in an entire bureaucracy of verifiable formalisms, rules and regulations:
These expression in algebra may have an overly modern look, but they are as much part of mathematics as number theory.
Therefore, just saying "Every man is mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal." already triggers an entire regulatory framework in mathematics.
Quoting creativesoul
In my impression, natural language expressions and mathematical language expressions are very compatible Platonic abstractions. I am actually convinced that it is natural language that provides the interface points for mathematics. It is by mixing both types of expressions, even inadvertently, that mathematics kicks in.
I don't have a clue where you get this 'ad hom' nonsense from...
..on the other hand...
...maybe the 'clue' might be that you have invested so much in this 'meaning fixation' of yours (considering your similar thread of 2 years ago) that like a religious believer, your self integrity is dependent on it ? For a believer, an attack on his belief system is taken personally.
The Princess Bride always makes our points better.
So wise and true.
So to think 'meaning' is about independently existing 'things' is to assume a 'bedrock' which is in essence 'quicksand', because it fails to take into account the subtle dynamics of linguistic interactions which constantly shift or negotiate the focal boundaries of 'thinghood'.
So the 'direct answer' to your question has been given. 'Words' are behavioral markers in the process of organising actions to fulfil human needs. They could be considered to be 'the currency of thought', and like monetary currency their 'value' can change according to context.
So, from that pov, which is supported by my references, any failure to take this on board constitues an incestuous 'language game' involving futile demands for words to define words...futile because its like asking 'how many dollars is a dollar worth' ?
Q: What does a dollar/word mean ? A: What action you can perform with it.
BTW Your 'scribbles' are equivalent to banknotes/coins/poker chips, etc.
Collingwood writes:
The word ‘science’, in its original sense, which is still its proper sense not in the English language alone but in the international language of European civilization, means a body of systematic or orderly thinking about a determinate subject-matter.
That view is epistemically unsustainable.
Dianetics is not science. There is no way to determine that, using his definition. The collected lyrics by Paul McCartney is not science. How can you derive this conclusion from his definition? Hence, I do not even agree on the definition of the term "definition" with Collingwood.
It is of no importance what the original definition of 'science' may have been. It was wrong and we fixed it, but he apparently didn't.
Science is the collection of propositions that can be tested experimentally.
The sentence "Water boils at 100 degrees Celcius" is part of science if you write that in a test report in which you clarify that you tried it 11 times and you did not manage to black-swan it, i.e. produce a counterexample. Then, someone else can comment that all you need to do, is to reduce or increase the atmospheric pressure and see what happens.
Science is the epistemic domain generated by its distinct epistemic method. So is mathematics. So is history. So is epistemology itself.
While mathematics is indeed all about presuppositionism, since its epistemic method is staunchly axiomatic, science is absolutely not. Everything is science is falsificationist. There are no presuppositions in falsificationism. If you cannot write something as a conclusion in a test report, then it is not science.
Sometimes Collingwood writes things that we would consider utmost strange nowadays: Newtonian, Kantian, Einsteinian physics. Beg your pardon, Kantian physics? That has never been a thing.
Then, he writes: "The business of a metaphysician is to find out that Newtonian scientists presuppose that some events have causes." There is no presuppositionism in Newtonian mechanics. Just go to a laboratory, test something, and report back. If it does not observably emerge out of your experimental test, then you should not write about it in your test report.
Then, he writes: "He can study the presuppositions of Arabic science, of Indian science, of
Chinese science."
I must utterly reject this view.
Science is justified by experimental testing. It does not matter if it is an Arab, an Indian, or a Chinese who repeats the experimental test, writes a test report, and notifies us that he has been able to black-swan some theory.
Mathematics is justified by axiomatic derivation, i.e. proof. Who even cares that a theorem was provably derived by a person of whatever nationality? We just want the theorem and its proof. Hand over, please.
Collingwood utterly confuses nationality with religion. Of course, there are the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist theologies, which are axiomatically brought back to four different defining scriptures -- but note that the Papacy rejects axiomatic theology. So, this is not really or only partially the case for Christianity. There are Christian Arabs, Muslim Indians, and Rabbinically-orthodox Jewish Chinese. Nationality is one thing and religion is another.
Of the various epistemic domains, only the axiomatic one is presuppositional.
Subject matter is a rather arbitrary concept. Unlike Collingwood writes, it is rarely "determined". For example, when is a proposition part of economics, sociology, or psychology? The explanation will invariably revolve around random nonsense.
Furthermore, in my opinion, a subject that does not specify a standard epistemic knowledge-justification method, is not a legitimate academic endeavour.
Universities may teach "marketing", "international relations and dating", "cotton plantation management", "gender and confusion studies", and so on, but as far as I am concerned, they are merely selling snake oil with a view on cashing in on the juicy student loans.
A fool and his money are easily parted. If you don't strip him clean, then someone else will. So, you could as well do it by yourself. Furthermore, if you hesitate too long, the money will be gone already. So, hurry up.
That is why for me the snake-oil industry is not a major issue at all.
Still, I would appreciate it if the university cash-generation machine reined in their sanctimonious, virtue-signalling, pseudo-morality a bit, especially, of how they are going to do good for the world, which they are undoubtedly also going to save.
:lol: Is everything going okay? Your dog didn’t die, I hope.
Here's what I said in my previous post:
Quoting T Clark
That's all I said. You seem to have taken great offense at Collingwood's essay. Is was not my intent to start a new discussion about it here.
I do not "take offence", of course.
There is obviously quite a bit of presuppositionism going on in the field of knowledge, but not where Collingwood says it does. Still, yes, I do not particularly like the term "subject matter", because it is fundamentally arbitrary. I personally believe in the term "epistemic method", i.e. knowledge-justification method. So, I am beholden to epistemism.
Arbitrary stuff invariably allows for lots of mischief; which, again, I am not necessarily up in arms against, because from my lazy chair, I enjoy letting the laws of nature run their course.
Only complete maniacs such as myself or 5 sigma geniuses such as yourself have the luxury of letting the laws of nature run their course. :wink:
The topic is meaning. The contention is whether or not math is meaningful. You've argued in the negative. I'm arguing in the affirmative.
Numbers reference quantities. Numbers name specific amounts. Numbers are the meaningful marks that we use to count things. Math and all of it's rules are existentially dependent upon language. Talking about language happens in the following three ways.
We are talking about a.)that which is already meaningful prior to our talking(all who are learning the rules of math/language), b.)that which is as a result thereof(as in the case of talking about that the rules that we stipulate), and c.)that which exists prior to our language itself.
All meaning is existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things. There are no exceptions.
Numbers are meaningful because they are mathematical symbols and all symbols become meaningful by virtue of being part of a mental correlation drawn by a creature capable of basic thought/belief formation. Without numbers and quantities, there could be no counting. All math is existentially dependent upon arithmetic.
To further make my own case, mathematics emerged onto the world stage via human thought/belief. Math is language. Language is meaningful. Math is symbol. Symbol is meaninfull. Math is measuring. Measuring is meaningful.
Math is meaningful.
So, let me just ask you this (as I am having trouble with it): does a game with rules, such as basketball, have meaning outside of its meaningful value in personal taste/judgment to so many people? Because I think @alcontali might say that pure mathematics is a lot like basketball in that it is something like a game with rules.
I guess that you say that because you attach a value judgement to the terms "meaningful" ("good") and "meaningless" ("bad").
I don't.
Furthermore, fake morality often throws a spanner in the works. If you cannot view the technical term "meaningless" as morally neutral, then you will invariably look for meaning/semantics, where there isn't any, especially by design.
In semiotics, the meaning of a sign is its place in a sign relation, in other words, the set of roles that it occupies within a given sign relation. A symbol, which is the most abstract, does not resemble or bear any physical relation to the thing that it represents in any way. Peirce's model assumes that in order for a sign to be meaningful, it must refer to something external and cannot be self-contained, as it is for Saussure.
Mathematics is symbol manipulation only, of symbols of which the meaning has been completely stripped away:
According to formalism, the truths expressed in logic and mathematics are not about numbers, sets, or triangles or any other contensive subject matter — in fact, they aren't "about" anything at all.
Furthermore, these "truths" are not correspondence-theory "true", because they do not correspond to anything in the real, physical world. So, I disagree with the use of the term "truth". It should be:
The theorems expressed in logic and mathematics are not about numbers, sets, or triangles ... they aren't "about" anything at all.
You guess wrong.
It's not about good/bad. It's not about morality. Red herrings aren't acceptable.
Meaningless means lacking meaning. Meaningless things lack meaning. They do not have what it takes. It has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with what all meaning is existentially dependent upon as well as what math is.
Poisoning the well is not acceptable either.
I can make my own case.
I suggest your concept of 'the real world' is just as nebulous, as say, 'the imaginary component of a complex number'. Both are concepts which stand or fall on their contextual utility with respect to human affairs. Both involve a grammar of usage which structures their relationship with other concepts.
Suppose I said 'football is not about anything'....or 'doing philosophy is not about anything'...
Neither statement is generally open to a truth value, but such values are assigned contextually in specific social transactions in which a consensual domain is being sought.
IMO It is the glossing over of such social contexts which generates much of the 'word salad' on threads like this, but of course even that activity no doubt has its social recreational function.
Personal taste/preference aren't that relevant here. They are one result of things becoming meaningful.
Basketball is meaningful because it is existentially dependent upon certain language use, and that language remains in use. The same holds good with math.
Well aside from all the love and affection being bestowed upon me, the bulk of the conversation is about something that they claim is not meaningful. What's the topic about again?
Not 'odd' at all according to Derrida. Aporia is inevitable. Every assertion involves its negation as a backcloth to establish its ephemeral semantic import..
When I read the literal words of David Hilbert (formalist) I seem to pretty much always agree, because apparently, I experience things in the same way as he does. Sometimes I can explain why I agree with David Hilbert, but sometimes I cannot. Sometimes it is mere intuition.
When I read what Brouwer (constructivist) says, I usually cringe, because his views sound utmost heretical to me. As far as I am concerned, he is an accomplice of Satan.
Now, the strange thing is that I do not have this problem with Stephen Kleene, even though he is also a constructivist. I just happen to like his work really much. That is probably why I just ignore it when he writes something that I disagree with.
I subscribe to formalism but also to Platonism in mathematics. That choice is just an opinion.
But you have not processed my suggestion to examine what you mean by 'the real world'. For example, there is the pov that 'reality is a social construction', but I have no knowledge of whether Brouwer's constructivism is related to that.
No, I asked what human-caused scribbles and sounds mean, among many other questions. You aren't answering the questions.
Quoting fresco
:brow: Huh-wha? They are about agreements about action decisions?
Earlier, you said:
Quoting fresco
If 'aboutness' is vacuous, how is it that you've used it twice in one sentence to describe what words are about? I asked you how 'aboutness' could be vacuous, but you again ignored the question and then contradict your own statement by using the word. :confused:
Quoting fresco
I never said 'meaning' is about independently existing 'things'. I said 'meaning' is the relationship between causes and their effects. You aren't paying attention.
Quoting fresco
What are humans if not things? Another contradiction
Quoting fresco
Another misinterpretation of my statements. I have never said that words ultimately define words. Words are just types of visual and auditory cues. We try to get at the cause of the experiences we have, whether it be a car horn, a knock at the door, words being spoken, the sting of an ant, a hand waving, scribbles on paper, steam rising from water, smell of smoke, upset stomach, etc. By getting at the cause, we get at the meaning of the sensory impression.
Words (spoken/auditory or written/visual) are just a type of sensory impression that we understand through experience over time to mean some idea some person wanted to convey. The idea isn't just other words. It is other types of visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, olfactory sensory impressions, which are themselves about the world.
When someone says, "I don't feel so good." What are those sounds about? What do they mean? It means that the person has a pain somewhere in their body. Pain isn't just another word. It is a feeling. If you ask them, "what do you mean?", they may be more specific and define the pain as throbbing in their head and dizziness. [u]The fact that they used other words to define their pain does not mean that words define words. It means that words are the only means we have to communicate to others things in our experience that aren't words.
What we do with words is communicate, or invoke, our other types of sensory impressions in other's minds.[/u]
Some philosophers hold words, or language use itself as the foundation of all of our thinking. That we can't think without words, or language. That simply isn't the case. Animals and infant humans are thinkers without any understanding of language. How can you even learn a language without being able to think prior to learning it? How can you learn anything at all without thinking?
I have referenced Ildefonso's story numerous times on this forum. If his story doesn't put to rest the claim that we can't think without words, then I don't know what would. The only reason people could think that we can't think without words is because they are unaware of Ildefonso's story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words
Ildefonso is a deaf man that didn't learn what language was until he was an adult. He didn't understand why people moved their mouths at each other. Once Susan Schaller took the time to teach him what language was about (which wasn't easy), Ildefonso wasn't surprised that he could think, he was surprised to learn that we had a shared symbol for all the states-of-affairs in the world, including his own ideas, which allowed him to communicate them to others.
I see ! So 'cause' = 'meaning'...good luck with that one!
Let me know if you follow up my references.
Thankyou for the conversation so far.
NB. In terms of your flair for combative philosophy you might appreciate this critique of the Schaller study.
I did.
It seems that other prominent philosophers don't even think that Derrida's Deconstruction theory is legitimate philosophy.
How is it that you can criticize something that you say doesn't exist? What are you criticizing? "Language" is a string of scribbles, not the actual act using signs to refer to other signs. So, scribbles can be about something else that isn't scribbles. Your end up contradicting yourself and defeating your own argument by criticizing something that isn't a word with words.
What you and Derrida seem to be saying is that it is signs all the way down. Good luck with that one.
Like I said, how can we learn language (how to map a new set of symbols) if we don't already think, or know how symbolism works - if there isn't already an aboutness to our experiences? Sure, Idelfonso could already understand symbolism in that some feeling is an indicator of some state of his body, or some state of the world. How do you expect some person to learn language if they don't already represent things in their mind?
I understand (I think) what each of you thinks meaning is. What I don’t understand is how you both can’t be right at the same time. I am dumb. We all can agree on that!
Have a go with Maturana. He doesn't do 'mind' or 'thinking'...only behavior.
'
To whom is this a reply?
I'm pleased you say you undedstand what each of us is talking about. I doubt whether each of us understands the other !
Bingo.
As far as I am concerned, the "quantum physics license" applies when investigating particles to which the size of a photon is noticeable, given the fact that light is so important to the process of visual observation; and electrical current and electromagnetic radiation for the purpose of measurement. That is probably the same as saying that the wave length and the distance measured are too close in each other's range. In those circumstances, we can reasonably expect disturbances to practices that are normal at larger scale, and therefore things to become fishy.
It's not even that the law of the excluded middle no longer applies. We may just no longer be able to observe it. For all practical purposes, we can probably treat them as the same situation: "cannot possibly be observed" versus "not there at all".
When things get too big or too small, normal expectations will not be met. The example that is the most interesting to me in that respect, is the Eddington limit. I personally suspect that there is also a corresponding lower limit (minimum size of a celestial body), and that it is in fact a range. However, in the standard model where "matter causes gravity" it will not be analysed as such. Why would you look for something that your standard model predicts not possibly to be there?
Still, I do not really like physics, because you cannot do it with just pen and paper. Real-world disciplines do not suit my lifestyle of limiting the tools to just a (virtual) pen and paper, i.e. a linux laptop.
In some sense, we could even say that the law of the excluded middle, and probably a lot of other laws, only apply in our typical scale range, i.e. when it is about things that are not too big and not too small.
Complementarity is not a 'size' issue. It's in part a 'set membership' issue...particle versus wave.. which were thought to be mutually exclusive.
I have no problem in accepting pure mathematics as an intellectual exercise, often with later surprising applicability. (I believe, for example, that the equations applicable to electric power transmission lines were formulated in the 17th. century).
And yet a criterion for all meaning has been offered since, shortly afterward. There are no examples to the contrary. It's what all meaning has in common that makes it what it is.
When one attempts to take account of meaning by definition s/he will inevitably find themselves stuck talking about the meaning of "meaning".
All terminological definitions are meaningful as a result of the criterion I've put forth, including all senses of the term "meaning".
What's not to love?
And there [I]are[/I] counterexamples to this, but of course you won't acknowledge them whilst you cling to your position. And you cling to your position like Tara Reid clings to alcohol and fame.
Fresco/Derrida claims meaning doesn't exist. I say it does. How can we both be right?
Maturana is a p-zombie?
See my 'existence' thread !
Sigh...
No. He's a behaviourist. The problem here, of course, is that behaviour is but one part of meaning, when it is, and not all behaviour is meaningful.
Not sure about Derrida. However, @fresco described how meaning could work. How he described its function is not inconsistent with other definitions of meaning. It’s just another mode of understanding meaning. If Derrida deconstructed meaning into nothingness (I’m just speculating as I’m not familiar with his philosophy) that is another manner, and it shouldn’t be analyzed through the Anglo-American analytic tradition as then his meaning would be missed.
My reading of Derrida suggests that 'meaning' is a transient directive aspect of our interactions. Contexts are dynamically shifting so that a word like 'car', say, means (has import) at one time 'a convenience', at another 'an expense', etc, whithout those usages being functionally synonymous with respect to subsequent action or thought (aka 'neural activity'). Obviously dictionary definitions attempt to give relationships to other words, or suggest potential usage contexts but that statistical aspect of 'meaning' is also transient over a greater time period. (Consider the word 'nice' for example which was originally related to the word 'knife').
For Derrida 'frame' (usage context) is as important as the focal 'word'....even in text, which in turn is framed by previous texts and 'reading attitude'. This is why he denies that the 'meaning' of text is any more permanent than speech, even though 'the squiggles' are ! And this point is valid even for the authors of the text themselves. Thus so-called 'inconsistencies' are to be likely to occur.
No wonder traditional philosophers don't like him !
Whatever it is, it isn't metaphysics!
Some thoughts:
Perhaps if we differentiate understanding and meaning, we can clarify our conceptualization and use of the word ‘meaning.’
Understanding is a mental process, an embodied experience. When we are able to construct understanding from a given sample of language, we ascribe the attribute of “meaning” to that sample. We commonly say the sample “has meaning”—as though meaning somehow exists in the language itself. And if we are unable to construct understanding, we say the sample has no meaning, as though the sample just doesn’t contain meaning. But meaning or lack of it depends on whether or not we can construct understanding.
Dispute about the meaning of language arises when people construct different understandings of the language. Whole hermeneutics arise to guide such interpretations, and sometimes evidence can be presented about the author’s intent—that is, their understanding expressed in the language they generated—but this does not negate the fact that different interpretations can be constructed from that language. An interpretation’s legitimacy or illegitimacy is up for grabs, established only by subscription to one hermeneutics or another, including by generally prevailing use in the language community at a given time.
Understanding is a mental process. We can construct shared understandings and meanings because in a given language community we share mutual associations of words and expressions with experiences. We have learned which words and expressions “go with” which experiences, and our syntax tells us how to construct understanding from how the words are strung together. Note that when we are unable to construct understanding from a language sample, we say we are unable to “make sense” of it. “Make sense” is a very telling expression, revealing an embodied experience. ”Make” emphasises our active construction of our experience of understanding, and the “sense” or lack of it ultimately rests on sensory experiences we’ve learned to associate with the words and expressions.
What has no meaning cannot be spoken of.
Any attempt to counter this with an example will only do so by presenting ‘meaning’ - albeit nonsensical or otherwise.
Of course some could argue that something with no discernible pattern has no meaning, yet I would counter that knowing this makes the point ‘meaningful’ rather than absent of meaning (whatever that could mean?).
I guess the general problem is in the application of language and highly abstract terms like ‘absolute’ and ‘total’.
meaning=purpose, but since things do not have purposes but are given purposes by the individual, purpose=use. So, what sorts of things are useful? Everything you know and perceive and do is useful in the game of the will to power, which is why Nietzsche's amor fati is indispensable from the conception.
Every other conception of meaning is reactive.
I agree. Meaning is independent of any particular vessel. This reminds me of one of my favorite themes in Derrida.
[quote=link]
Derrida (1930-2004) famously argued that writing preceded speech. By this I believe he meant that the “iterability” of language logically preceded its spontaneous performance...that is, repeatable in any context whatsoever, just as this very introduction to Derrida I’m writing now must be able to signify as an introduction to Derrida after this semester is over [hey! like now!], after I’m dead, after you cease to read it, after the expiration of every element of the context in which I am composing it now. That, writes Derrida, is the very condition of writing itself, without which we simply do not recognize writing as such: if the writing is not “iterable,” it is not writing.
[/quote]
Quoting creativesoul
I very much agree, with only a slight suspicion about 'correlation,' and I associate this with Wittgenstein. One of my favorite philosophical themes is how radically embedded we are in language use. I don't think it can be over-stated. Even this 'I' that doesn't think it can be overstated is, as a sign, embedded in the way we learn to use 'I.'
To be a human is perhaps most essentially to be co-embedded in a language. The 'we' is utterly prior to the 'I' in the sense that the 'I' is only constructed within the 'tribe' and understands itself in relation to other selves. Far from being controversial, I think such things are obvious to those who are willing to make their tacit knowledge explicit against the resistance of theories that tell us otherwise (and often flatter us.)
I like 'embodied.' I'd also add embedded, embedded in a society,embedded in what is expected and prohibited. Embedded in what something that looks like a chair or a knife or a tire is used for. I don't have to remind myself to walk on the sidewalk and not in the middle of the road. This is automatic, along with so many other things, like how close to stand to strangers at a bus stop, how loud to talk.
I'd also add (basically agreeing) that the sense we make doesn't have to focus on sensory experiences. When someone talks to us and we don't understand, we might experience this in terms of not knowing what they want from us. We don't know where they're coming from. It's as if we try to put ourselves in their position as charitable listeners. For better or worse, as online philosophers we are tempted to emphasize differences. Maybe it's easier to see what a theory gets wrong, at least when a theory is the other person's.
If you ask them what they mean by 'meaning,' won't they be forced to add more links to the chain of signs? What do we refer to by 'I' ? Or 'you'? Is there a finite chain of signs that can get this exactly right? If the signs are intelligible at all, they can be quoted or repeated in other contexts, among other signs, and be understood differently.
It's us philosophers who find it difficult to determine the meaning of meaning, mostly because we want to do a good job, and perhaps because we're questionably attached to a project of juicing words for their maximally context-independent meanings. I like the game, but I also see it as an infinite game. The interpretation of any text is one more text that's open to interpretation. This is not at all to say that all interpretations are equal. It's just that to live is to be still determining and interpreting. I think even a dogmatic philosopher is always still figuring out what exactly he means by his dogma. We can repeat the words in our mind, but is this really a repetition of something like exact meaning? Perfect, exact meaning is like God or pure spirit.
I've no issue with this at face value. I agree. What I take issue with is the idea that that somehow applies to thought and belief that does not involve understanding a text. We're talking about all thought and belief and what they have in common at a basic level such that that content is capable of evolutionary progression...
Correlations.
[/quote]
I think Derrida makes a strong case that speech is 'writing.' (He uses writing as a metaphor for a new concept.) He challenges the notion of meaning being simply and directly present to a subject. The pure subject and the pure meaning present to it are related concepts.
There is no denying the affect/effects that common language use has upon human thought and belief. However, there's no good reason to believe that we cannot acquire knowledge of that which exists in it's entirety prior to language. We do it all the time. There's also nothing stopping us from taking proper account of our linguistically mediated thought and belief.
You mentioned suspicion about 'correlation' - which is my notion of thought and belief. All thought and belief consists of correlations drawn between different things.
Quoting Harry Hindu
That doesn't follow. Rather it fails to draw the distinction between causality and meaning. "Neglects" may be a better word choice here. "Conflates" works as well.
Undoubtedly, but that's true of asking anyone what they mean by any other term as well...
Quoting Eee
If one does not know the difference between you and I, well, there can be no distinction between who says what.
Quoting Eee
Is there a finite amount of signs that can get this right? What on earth is this? Is there a finite chain of signs that can be used to comprehend how we use the terms "I" and "you"???
Is that what you're asking me here?
Quoting Eee
Perhaps is right.
Quoting Eee
Nothing likable about that game from this vantage point.
[quote=cs]
Bein' reasonable is thinking about our own thought and belief, including but not limited to statements thereof. That's the best place to start looking. After-all, if our notion of belief is not amenable to evolutionary progression it can - and ought - be dismissed out of hand as soon as we realize that it's not.
[/quote]
I agree, but I think we need to add something. I'm not reasonable merely by thinking about my thinking. I have to meet some implicit standard. To put it dramatically, I am only reasonable when 'we' are thinking 'through' me. Earnest philosophy tries to avoid the distortion of its petty individual 'host.'
[quote=Hegel]
If the history of Philosophy merely represented various opinions in array, whether they be of God or of natural and spiritual things existent, it would be a most superfluous and tiresome science, no matter what advantage might be brought forward as derived from such thought-activity and learning. What can be more useless than to learn a string of bald opinions, and what more unimportant?
[/quote]
I agree, and I think that's significant. Is it really the case that a 'full' meaning is present that we are merely finding more words for? Or something else?
"Full" meaning is present?
I don't talk like that. Something else.
All answers to the question of what one means by some word or other requires increasing signage... Some explanation increases signage. We agree here, I think.
Correlation is fine, but I guess I want more info. If we stretch correlation enough, maybe it'll work.
Quoting creativesoul
Of course. And of course I know how to use the signs 'I' and 'you.'
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, that and the meaning of meaning. I think to know a language is like knowing how to ride a bike, primarily non-theoretical. The words just pour out of us most of the time. And we can read and understand as a fish moves through water.
[quote=link]
Heidegger constantly reminds us throughout Being and Time, the account of 'inauthentic' life of everyday anyone is not to be interpreted evaluatively or morally but rather ontologically. It is an a priori Existential of being human: "the anyone is the condition of possibility of all human action" (p. 2). Thonhauser writes: "To be socialized in the framework of established modes of intelligibility and regulated modes of comportment is the prerequisite for becoming an agent in one's own right" (ibid.).
[/quote]
This 'framework' is like W's 'form of life.' So in some sense I'd argue that the 'I' and the 'you' depends on a 'we' that is prior. Or to put it another way, Kant had to know German in order to write the CPR. But knowing German or English, however mundane, is also a symbol for being human.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/from-conventionalism-to-social-authenticity-heideggers-anyone-and-contemporary-social-theory/
In other words, do we know exactly what we mean? Are we ever done knowing what we mean? We have words that feel right enough, but when asked what we mean...are we not also being creative and still figuring out what we 'originally' meant?
Derrida (1930-2004) famously argued that writing preceded speech. By this I believe he meant that the “iterability” of language logically preceded its spontaneous performance...that is, repeatable in any context whatsoever, just as this very introduction to Derrida I’m writing now must be able to signify as an introduction to Derrida after this semester is over [hey! like now!], after I’m dead, after you cease to read it, after the expiration of every element of the context in which I am composing it now. That, writes Derrida, is the very condition of writing itself, without which we simply do not recognize writing as such: if the writing is not “iterable,” it is not writing.
[/quote]
Basically the mortality of the subject is tied up with the iterability of the sign. This is a dramatic way to express it, but the point is that language is 'exterior' in some sense. We know that something like 'pure meaning' is translatable. So I can read quasi-Derrida in English. I hope you see why I bring this up. A fundamental idea in philosophy is that it is translatable. Any knowledge that is universally rational shouldn't be caught in a particular language. So philosophy understands itself as a kind of anti-poetry, and therefore would like to exclude metaphor as vague and misleading. But if literal terms are dead metaphors..., and if the idea of the literal is itself a dead metaphor...
Excellent. And I think we agree that language is a social phenomenon, only possible for a community in a shared world. It makes no sense without bodies and objects 'outside' of the 'mental.' I put these in quotes only because language has to be in place for us to think in terms of bodies and objects. Language is an invention and yet 'prior' to us being able to say so.
It probably evolves from talking about and orchestrating the handling of objects. At the same time, myth/religion seems so human that from the very beginning we were also trying to talk about important internal experiences, create solidarity, etc.
Agreed.
The meaning of "meaning" consists of the correlations drawn between it's use and other things.
Correlations being drawn between different things does not require language use to be one of those things. The meaning of "meaning" is existentially dependent upon language use. Correlations are not.
By correlations you mean 'a mutual relationship or connection between two or more things'? It does seem clear that language largely deals with relationships. But surely there is more to say, even if that's a start. And maybe there can be no end to the talk about talk. Perhaps what we mean by meaning is largely dark for us, because what we can make explicit is just the tip of the iceberg. That doesn't mean I'm against trying to clarify. I just speculate that the nature of meaning might prevent an exhaustive definition of meaning.
Right, but that's very hard in philosophy. We humans are good at teaming up to deal with objects. But when we talk about talking things get wild. Meanings evolve historically. To understand what thinker X means by word Y requires backtracking and reading one's self into a long conversation. For instance, Derrida uses 'writing' in a special way, for a reason that only makes sense slowly. At the same time I'll never be done understanding Derrida. Furthermore I re-read older writers having read Derrida and find new meanings, new connections. So in that sense that future determines the past as much as the past determines the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutic_circle
I agree. So that's why I like to call philosophy 'taking the impersonal personally.' It's difficult. Most people don't care about clarifying the talk about talk. So the philosopher as such finds a 'higher value' is carefully articulating what he and the world are.
All meaningful use of the term "meaning" consists of the correlations, associations, and/or 'connections' drawn between it's use and other things. It's mutual(shared) when a plurality of individuals draw the same correlations between the use and other things.
Quoting Eee
I disagree here.
All attribution of symbolic/linguistic meaning requires something to become sign/symbol, something to become significant/symbolized and a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things. All attribution of meaning by language less creatures requires only the creature capable of drawing correlations between different things... none of which are linguistic devices and/or marks(signs/symbols), and all of which are directly perceptible things. That situates the kinds of correlations that are drawn at a level some call 'beneath' common language.
I agree that we have an intuition of sharing meaning. I trust (irrationality?) that you understand these words roughly as I intended them. That, by the way, is the 'anyone' or 'shared subject' I'm talking about, or part of it. Nothing mystical, just our basic sense of being mutually intelligble and understanding chairs as chairs and not random shapes with no obvious purpose. Co-enworlded with language.
Leaving intution out of it, there's also this beetle in the box video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x86hLtOkou8
Which you've probably seen/read. But it's well done if you haven't, and short.
Quoting creativesoul
I agree that what you say corresponds with the typical use of 'meaning.'
Quoting creativesoul
This seems reasonable. Cats and dogs understand the world in some way. Maybe they have their own kind of a childlike thinking. I haven't studied it closely.
So let's grant a pre-linguistic kind of meaning.
But I'm still most interested in the highest levels of human thinking, which, it seems to me, requires words. 'Life is the dream of a monster.' This is one of those suggestive phrases that has no clear meaning. It asks us to (creatively) interpret it. We meet it with our entire pasts.
As I said above: For instance, Derrida uses 'writing' in a special way, for a reason that only makes sense slowly. At the same time I'll never be done understanding Derrida. Furthermore I re-read older writers having read Derrida and find new meanings, new connections. So in that sense that future determines the past as much as the past determines the future.
That element of the future determining the past seems important to me. As you read this sentence you'll find its beginning organized by its end. The 'time of reading' is strange. As humans, we find new meaning in things we read long ago.
These notions of exact meaning and pure meaning are foreign to me. The "pure" qualification makes no sense to me given that all meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things. If "pure" is meant to denote something in it's most unadulterated uncorrupted and/or basic state, then it doesn't get any purer that what I've set out here.
How much more precise can a universal criterion be? There are no exceptions to the contrary. There is no stronger justificatory ground. There are no simpler means of negation. All it takes is one example of the attribution of meaning that does not include a creature drawing correlations between different things.
What's not to love?
Naming and descriptive practices.
Derrida was quite a prolific writer.
By pure meaning I just mean the imagined context that can be moved from French to English. That somehow an English translation is the 'same' book suggest the notion of a language-independent meaning, though many translators will stress that they have only done their best and actually created a new, only similar work.
What do you make of this?
[quote=SEP]
Language, Saussure insists, has an oral tradition that is independent of writing, and it is this independence that makes a pure science of speech possible. Derrida vehemently disagrees with this hierarchy and instead argues that all that can be claimed of writing - eg. that it is derivative and merely refers to other signs - is equally true of speech. But as well as criticising such a position for certain unjustifiable presuppositions, including the idea that we are self-identical with ourselves in 'hearing' ourselves think, Derrida also makes explicit the manner in which such a hierarchy is rendered untenable from within Saussure's own text. Most famously, Saussure is the proponent of the thesis that is commonly referred to as "the arbitrariness of the sign", and this asserts, to simplify matters considerably, that the signifier bears no necessary relationship to that which is signified. Saussure derives numerous consequences from this position, but as Derrida points out, this notion of arbitrariness and of "unmotivated institutions" of signs, would seem to deny the possibility of any natural attachment (OG 44). After all, if the sign is arbitrary and eschews any foundational reference to reality, it would seem that a certain type of sign (ie. the spoken) could not be more natural than another (ie. the written). However, it is precisely this idea of a natural attachment that Saussure relies upon to argue for our "natural bond" with sound (25), and his suggestion that sounds are more intimately related to our thoughts than the written word hence runs counter to his fundamental principle regarding the arbitrariness of the sign.
[/quote]
To me one of the interesting themes is a destabilizing of the so-called mental realm, the idea of which is tied up with pure meaning. Of course we have intuitions of being minds, and we take this granted, the talk of minds filled with thoughts. But there's no private language, and we use 'I' fairly automatically.
To put Derrida in context, there's Braver's A Thing of This World.
https://www.unm.edu/~pmliving/Braver%20review.pdf
Braver talks about 'impersonal conceptual schemes,' which is basically what I mean by being 'in' a language community and / or form of life.
Perhaps you can see how this connects to the idea of being reasonable and ultimately with the very identify and self-consciousness of philosophy.
If causality and meaning aren't the same, then what is the distinction?
When you ask me what I mean when I use words, what are you asking?
I'm asking you what you mean.
The distinction between meaning and causality is one of elemental constituency. They are existentially dependent upon very different things.
What are you speaking of then?
When we realize what meaning is, we know what it takes, we know what it is itself existentially dependent upon, what the necessary preconditions are. Hence, we can know that when those conditions have not been met, there is no meaning.
Your answer lacks substance. Care to elaborate?
Quoting creativesoul
How so?
I would have expected something to chew on rather than these empty claims and answers you've provided. Be more specific.
I would not say that translation suggests the notion of a language independent meaning. It does suggest that some meaning is neither bound nor completely determined by any particular language.
Look at what you wrote my friend. Your answer lies in your question.
Do you know what elemental constituency is?
Quoting creativesoul
Nope. If I did I wouldnt be asking for you to clarify. I don't understand why you are finding it difficult to flesh out your argument because I have no idea what you're arguing for or against.
"Natural bond" might be better rendered as one that is not existentially dependent upon the written word.
"The destabilizing of the so-called mental realm..." is an interesting notion. I take it to be referring to the conventional notion of the mental realm at that time. It was wrong. So, if deconstructing it destabilizes it, then such an endeavor was needed as a means for acquiring greater understanding of meaning and/or our own thought and belief.
The 'problem', of course, is that what counts as "mental realm" and "arbitrariness" is relative to language use. One of these notions can be said to pick out something that exists in it's entirety prior to language use, but the other not so much.
Some signs are arbitrary. Some are not.
Meaning is most certainly not properly accounted for solely in terms of "mental realm".
It’s basically a trick of language. Everything is necessarily ‘meaningful’ to us if it is within our scope of attention. That is to say anything outside our scope of attention is ‘not meaningful’ in one particular way - potential. What can never have meaning to us is not something we can ‘attend to’.
As a further example just try and bring up a topic that has no meaning. Even something nonsensical or gibberish has ‘meaning’ surrounding it.
Note: I understand you probably meant ‘meaning’ in a more confined way. I’m not encouraging rhetoric here just presenting the limitation of worded thought in terms of what is ‘real’ or ‘existent’. We must necessarily limit our thought and scope to possessing ‘meaning’ - no talk is ‘free floating’, but we can still offer up analogies and metaphors like ‘free floating’ to explore ‘gist’ ideas.
That's better. It seems that you're looking into(talking about) what all meaning takes and/or has in common. That's precisely the aim!
I did. From the first page of this thread...
Quoting creativesoul
Does the correlation between symbol and what is symbolized exist only mentally, or is there an external, physical, causal relationship between the two that exists independent of any mind drawing the correlation?
Are those the only choices?
What if correlations consist of both?
can you clarify what you mean here? I my mind, math support all faculties of the human mind, esp. since the operate under known physics and signaling types.
Quoting alcontali
can you clarify in other terms what you mean here? I don't understand the logic/argument supporting "humanity would either have no knowledge at all, or else, have discovered all possible knowledge already"
Quoting creativesoul
how are you so sure about that? For example, one type of meaning in something is if it, in-and-of-itself, contributes to an explanatory principle of something else; e.g., a causal reason for a process being triggered is not a symbol or sign.
Quoting fresco
knowledge is not confidence . do you maybe mean the know-how to actions needed to achieve a certain result, with some degree of confidence in the causal connection between acting on the knowledge achieving the result?
If you need formal knowledge in order to discover new formal knowledge, how do you get hold of the very first formal knowledge? How do you get the process even started? Conversely, all that is required to discover formal knowledge is formal knowledge, then it would all have unravelled already.
why are you limiting the definition or process of knowledge building to formal knowledge? Very little of our initial, formative knowledge is formal. And what do you mean exactly by 'formal'?
This is incoherent.
Beauty.
If you want to live, or avoid pain, food and drink have meaning.
If you don't, you can regard it as meaningless.
So what is meaning?
Examine the fact you take pain if you don't eat and drink, there is already a meaning bias.
Meaning is a consciousness phenomenon, but in this universe we are forced to find specific things meaningful. Our consciousness is bound.
In essence, meaning is subjective, but we have objective meaning included in our experience.
Being in the universe is not like being held down agile by universal weight. We have enough liberty to disobey, but this liberty is gained along an objective path.
The world's were created for animals theory where the worlds are just objectives for a pre-conscious mind.
Formal knowledge are sentences for which "the paperwork" containing their justification can (conceivably) be verified mechanically.
Quoting Statement of the Church-Turing thesis
Paperwork concerning reasoning from first principles (=mathematics) can be verified mechanically. Paperwork related to experimental testing (=science) can (conceivably) be verified mechanically.
Quoting Sir Philo Sophia
I limit it to formal knowledge because formal knowledge is by definition understood objectively, since its main requirement is that a machine must be able to perform the verification of its justifying paperwork.
In Computational Knowledge and the Future of Pure Mathematics, Stephen Wolfram writes that he believes that formal knowledge can also be discovered mechanically (and not just verified):
Quoting Stephen Wolfram on 'Math by enumeration'
On the other hand, Stephen Wolfram also admits that there are fundamental problems in mechanically searching for knowledge:
Quoting Stephen Wolfram on the limitations of 'math by enumeration'
By the way, I do not completely understand what Wolfram means by "we can never nail down that the thing we denote by '+' is ... [what we think it is]." He seems to say that the existence of nonstandard models of arithmetic effectively renders the semantics of field arithmetic ambiguous. Of course, this could be the case, but I have never run into anybody else describing the problem in this way.
I personally do not believe that knowledge can successfully be discovered by mechanical enumeration. But then again, I am not against Wolfram trying. ;-)
sorry, let me rephrase more clearly:
For example, one type of meaning regarding something physical is if one observed a physical process that in-and-of-itself, w/o any need of signs or symbols, contributes to or completes, an explanatory principle of something else; i.e., a structural or causal reason or explanation for a process being triggered or explained is not a symbol or sign. e.g., think of observing a missing piece of a puzzle that exactly structural fits and contributes information that completes the empty part of the puzzle whereby you thereafter can understand what the whole puzzle means and how to use it. That (last) piece of the puzzle is not an objectified symbol/sign of anything, it is an analog of the source object.
is this clear enough now?
Quoting creativesoul
What correlation, association, and/or connection would you ascribe to the meaning of a term that is at the tip of one’s tongue? To be clear: to the known meaning of a word which is momentarily not known to oneself as sign/symbol … but, again, whose meaning one is nevertheless aware of.
At the very juncture of this experience, the meaning cannot be deemed to be due to a correlation involving its sign, for the sign is absent from one’s awareness while the meaning is not.
This makes no sense on my view. Meaning consists of correlations. Your asking me what meaning I would ascribe to the meaning of a term that is at the tip of one's tongue.
Hopefully the correct one.
"At the tip of one's tongue"
Temporarily forgotten... in part at least. The forgotten term's resting place. Times when one knows that one has previously been able to say something appropriate. Times when one knows that there is an acceptable description, but cannot remember it.
Quoting javra
Forgotten.
Quoting javra
The meaning of a term is lost when a word is on the tip of one's tongue; when a term is forgotten; when one cannot remember which term applies. Akin to apples and apple pies. Apples are part of apple pies. Terms are part of the meaning of the term. In order for a term to be on the tip of one's tongue, one must have already long since used it or been around it's use.
One cannot forget which word to say unless previous use has paved the way.
So... this poses no problem for my position.
Joking, I presume.
Quoting creativesoul
I'll offer that only the term's perceptual properties (both visual and auditory) are forgotten, and that terms are always percepts - but that the concept that the term would be used to adequately reference is itself present to the awareness of the person and, hence, is not forgotten. A simple argument for this: Were the concept that the term is used to denote to be forgotten, one would hold no means of recalling what the proper term is. There would be no reason to search for a term, for there would then only be a meaninglessness background to ongoing cognition - rather than a meaning one intends to adequately convey but is momentarily unable to. To make this explicit, a concept which a person contemplates will be in some way meaningful to the bearer - even if inexpressible.
Again, at such instances of experience, there is awareness of meaning (here, of concepts) devoid of an awareness of what its proper, representational sign or symbol is (the latter always being perceptual - which concepts of themselves are not ... likely a different argument).
Quoting creativesoul
No doubt. But how a person comes to hold awareness of a particular concept and, hence, of a conceptual meaning holds no bearing on what is here at issue: the reality of being aware of meaning when the given meaning is, granted momentarily, devoid of a known sign or symbol.
Causality is not existentially dependent upon meaning. Some of the most rudimentary level thought and belief recognize/attribute causality. Causality and meaning are distinct. It seems to me that you're conflating the two.
You're increasing the complexity of your argument without considering what I've just said with regard to what the meaning of a term consists of.
The term is one elemental constituent. That fact refutes your initial objection. No kidding.
If the meaning of a term consists of the term, then when one cannot remember the term, one cannot remember the meaning...
Pretty simple and always true.
not true. Datamining algorithms discover tremendous meaning out of otherwise meaningless data-sets/bases.
logically that does not prove, or even evidence, that they are part of the same thing/process (e.g., forming knowledge). There can be multiple very paths/ways to the same result (e.g., knowledge). So, if 'causality' is one type of 'meaning' then they are not distinguished by elemental constituency differences but by hierarchy in a path for transforming information to knowledge.
Causality is not a type of meaning.
then you have to indicate which part of my clarification is not clear enough to you. I'm not going to play a guessing game on that after trying once.
why not? give me a concrete, detailed example, not abstract, circular, statements.
None of it is clear. Not the first, not the last. Makes no sense to me.
Define the terms. Substitute the definitions for the terms. See what it looks like. I quickly performed this test and arrived at incoherence/self contradiction.
Causality needs no creature capable of drawing correlations between different things. All meaning does.
now I see why you think all I said was incoherent, b/c you are off topic and missing the point of the thread. The thread is concerning only 'meaning' to (human) creatures, not some abstract inherent meaning in the universe of things. In that light, your statement is nonsense. To further a meaningful discussion on this top, please restate your position on the relation of 'meaning' and 'causality' to each other in the context of its import to (human) creatures who use observations of causal relationships to infer meaning between the causally linked entities. Anything else is off topic.
:brow:
That's all it takes to refute the position I've been advocating here. You've yet to have done so.
There's a simple actual distinction. Causality and meaning are not equivalent.
not true. attention is paid in hopes of finding something meaningful worthy of the attention, often we pay and expand the scope of our attention try figure out the meaning of something we initially had to little scope of attention to make any sense of. The quest for allusive meaning almost always expands the scope of our attention.
you are confounding so many things there it is incoherent. Introducing qualia adds needless further complexity and confounding. Pain alone, of course, is programmed to have meaning to the sentient agent. So, that is a non-statement. When it comes to the agent wanting to gain knowledge of how to best avoid experiencing that pain (or worse) again, it has to figure out that cause of it, so it has to seek out meaningful predictors of causing that event, and when it associates its touching the fire it creates meaning in the fire object as a meaningful source, touching as the meaningful process creating the causal nexus resulting in the qualia pain, thus the causal meaning created knowledge of how to avoid that pain/harm problem. In this way, you still have not provided us a concrete example which does not relegate causal relationships as one (of many) mode of creating meaning for use in building knowledge.
I used your own example to make my point. If you cannot focus on point out and correcting where you think my logic is wrong then, I'm afraid, we will not converge to anywhere productive.
So long...
An assertion of fact based on what evidence?
In all honesty, my experience contradicts it. Given that the experience which “tip of the tongue” specifies is universal enough to be termed in multiple cultures and languages, including sign language (here, “tip of the finger”), I’m quite confident I’m not alone in experiences where I know what I want to say but can’t find the term for it. The meaning is there; the term is not.
Again, if a term at the tip of one’s tongue is meaningless (because its meaning is forgotten along with the term, this since they're both are one and the same "elemental constituent"), than how would one be aware of there being such a thing?
Addressing this would be an argument. Again implying that it doesn’t fit your offered definition of meaning and thereby is erroneous would not be.
Every example thereof.
The meaning of a term always includes the term.
That is not a rendition of my argument.