Where is the meaning in Language?
It seems to me that sounds and symbols (like letters) have no inherent meaning.
For example you could use the words "Cow" or "Vaca" to mean cow.In which sense this is just an arbitrary array of symbols/letters pronounced or signed with arbitrary sounds or signs.
You could refer to a cow anyway you feel like making up your own word like "Goytsz"
So this suggests that meaning is in the head or mind. But what does that mean?
I am someone who thinks in words which leads to the paradox of how you can have thoughts without language. Language seems to rely on thoughts and vice versa.
The only thing I can think of to ground language is experience via the senses creating ideas. But once you have a language it can contain thousands of words which by that stage are somewhat divorced from experience.
For example you could use the words "Cow" or "Vaca" to mean cow.In which sense this is just an arbitrary array of symbols/letters pronounced or signed with arbitrary sounds or signs.
You could refer to a cow anyway you feel like making up your own word like "Goytsz"
So this suggests that meaning is in the head or mind. But what does that mean?
I am someone who thinks in words which leads to the paradox of how you can have thoughts without language. Language seems to rely on thoughts and vice versa.
The only thing I can think of to ground language is experience via the senses creating ideas. But once you have a language it can contain thousands of words which by that stage are somewhat divorced from experience.
Comments (21)
There is a type of word that has "inherent" meaning, onomatopoeia. Similarly, hieroglyphic writing has "inherent" meaning because you understand it using your basic pattern matching ability, not anything specific to language.
So it seems plausible that thinking starts with pictures and sounds, which become more abstract and eventually form language.
I think that the letters M O O that make a word like moo are not identical with the sound but fit the conventional pronunciation assigned to those letters.
In the case of pictures they are similar to what the writer wants someone to understand. However I don't know how hieroglyphics create sentences or information.
This seems to be basic strategy in philosophy of language to make meaning start with something simple like basic colours, sounds or pictures or pointing and build out from there. But I think this strategy is limited to a small segment of language.
For example how would you represent "Yesterday" in a picture or "The Unconscious".
I am not opposed to this strategy but what puzzles me is how meaning does not seem to reside in letters, words and sounds. I was thinking about this in relation to trying to learn a new language and the words seem completely arbitrary unless they are historically related to your own language.
But who would understand you?
A simple, obvious fact about language that folk often forget is that it is shared. "Goytsz" does nothing unless someone else uses it, too.
One does not learn a language simply by looking around.
One learns a language by interacting with other people.
Again, language is shared.
This is the feature and not the bug. It is the arbitrariness of a symbol that allows it to be the signifier of any state of interpretance. It is how thought and speech start off with a detachment from the world, and so become capable to referring freely to any possible world, any possible variety or division of experience.
If I wave a knife under your nose, you have to take its meaning rather concretely and literally. There is little else that such an act could signify.
But if I utter some string of noises - say, “? ????????? ???????? ????, ????” - you really have to learn what I could have in mind as the meaning.
I could mean anything. The noises are maximally arbitrary in respect to any thought, intent or action they might encode. And now your ability to understand what I mean becomes a demonstration of just how completely you can rely on a shared mental habit of symbol interpretation. There can only be a mutual engagement through this new realm abstracted from the physical world we also happen to share.
You would understand yourself. That seems to be to a large extent reality. We communicate with ourselves constantly before communicating with others.
How do you know this?
Babies look around a lot before speaking. They also touch things and suck them etc. They are extremely curious. It seems like they are processing a lot of information prior to language.
Congenitally Blind children can become completely fluent in a language but they tend to learn later than other children. However touch (The haptic sense) is very influential. I think we all use all of our senses like this. For example people who have a congenital pain defect have to be taught to understand the implications of pain sensations. So the word pain gains meaning from experience here.
The problem imo is how experience attaches itself to an arbitrary symbol.
It seems to me that experience comes before symbols. But then with language it has thousands of words and numerous contested meanings.
Noam Chomsky proposed an innate mental/brain module to to grasp language (universal grammar). He seems to think this is required prior to understanding any language.
But critics of Chomsky have pointed out the lack of similarity between languages and their grammar. It would be great of you could easily pick up a language due to some consistent rules.
In Chomsky's defence it seems that there must be innate cognitive modules to explain things like children's swift ability to learn any languages.
The reason why kids can pick things up easier than adults is that their brains have more plasticity.
This plasticity stops when we reach about 25 years of age.
Letters are a much later step. Language developed as spoken language first, and that's what you're thinking in.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
First of all pictures are abstractions of experience. A picture of a cow doesn't look like a cow to you because it's creator imbued it with cow-ness. It's your own pattern recognition that matches the picture to the animal.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I don't think they create information. They're an arrangement of information you can pick up if you have the corresponding experience, i.e. you recognise the animals / actions etc. The real amazing part about language is that it is ever so slightly different for everyone.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
There are millions of years of improvement between a modern, alphabetical language and a basic system of language as it may have been around with our hominid ancestors. So it's not surprising that it'd be hard to imagine simple pictures and sounds turning into language, just like it's difficult to imagine a dog-like critter turning into a whale.
I think our ability to use abstract words must be understood in conjunction with our mental ability to abstract in general. We can form categories, and because we can do that, we can also read categories into sounds we hear or symbols we see. So we can group different cries of birds into the sound of "a bird". And because we can do that, we can also understand when other people do it, and hence start the process of abstraction.
Yes a person will use language to communicate with oneself. This is especially true of written language, we communicate with ourselves at a later time, so that the language acts as a memory aid. We write things down to serve as reminders at a later time. Consider taking notes in a lecture. Banno is swayed by the so-called private language argument, refusing to accept the fact that this is an argument by equivocation.
What Wittgenstein demonstrates with the so-called private language argument is that words do not refer to internal objects. Though this is an important refutation of Platonic realism, which shows us something important about meaning, it does not demonstrate that a private language is impossible, as some conclude. That conclusion requires equivocation.
If meanings were in the words we’d understand a foreign language as soon as we heard it. Meaning is generated within.
This is why I believe that any platitude about the “power of words” is magical thinking and censorship a fool’s errand, because words have as much power as any other guttural sound or mark on paper. Meaning, and any feelings derived from this process (arousal, stress, fear, laughter), is entirely self-generated. In theory, one could learn to control this process and realize his power over language.
I beg of you in the bowels of Christ to consider that a ridiculous and meaningless question such that any attempt to answer would result in confusion and misunderstanding. Meaning is also a a relationship.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Suspiciously Russian sounding words... :chin:
That misses the point that words have the power to lift thought beyond such embodied reactions and into what we call a rational level of semiosis or signification.
Vaca, Spanish cow
Goytsz, BS
If meaning is something which needs to be interpreted, then this is not necessarily true.
I think that words seem to refer to things and in this sense hearing a word or sentence etc will take us from the mere words to a dynamic in the external world or the internal emotional world.
You could say words internalize the external. They have a strange "power" because we use words and other symbols to create technology, art and do science.
But it seems like it must our brain/mind that is creating and manipulating meanings in reverse of what I said first words could also be said to externalize the internal.
It is just a strange dynamic. In some religions if not most God was the entity that gave us language and imbued it with meaning. In this sense it is like meaning requires an authority. Hilary Putnam argued against internalism by using the idea that we need experts to resolve the meaning of words.
I just find the topic elusive.
What if there is an alphabet by the laws of Nature so that for each human vowel or consonant there is only one symbol required?