Language and Meaning

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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It seems to me that language, and especially the relation between words and meaning, is poorly understood. I think we should address this deficiency here. I think Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics is a good introduction to this subject, at least as far as understanding his basic model of the “linguistic sign,” the signifier-signified relationship. Despite its shortcomings, I offer structural linguistics as a starting point because learning about it briefly in a lit. theory course helped me tremendously in orienting my thinking about what words are in the first place and how meaning emerges form the interplay of sounds/images and concepts. If anyone knows something about the theories that have since superseded structural linguistics, I welcome your input. This thread is for learning together.

I’ll start with this, a brief idea and my general understanding.

Words are used to forge meaning, but do not carry meaning on their own. We glean a sense of a word after we find it used repeatedly; but our sense of any word is only a semi-cohesive synthesis of inferred meanings and implications. Language is a game of catching on. In this game,it is important that boundaries are variously pushed and maintained, but at heart, and what the entire affair turns on, is relational difference. I’m beginning to fall in love with the idea of difference, that generator of shape, where presence and absence meet and form ‘this’, ‘that’, and ‘the other’, in this case meanings. It is but matter of perception, and perception is everything.

So then does anyone want to try to explain the relationship between word definitions and meaning? Other comments are great, too.

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Have you read Derrida? He’s absurdly dense, but his concept of “differance” is massively productive for any kind of understanding of structural linguistics. I, too, love the idea of difference being primary in producing meaning. Words have no identity to themselves, but rather work off a constant, open-ended differentiation from other words in the system. Saussure related this difference back to the system itself, which he thought to be closed, and called it la langue. So, for Saussure, words derive their meaning from their difference from other words, as well as their relation back to the system as a complete whole. Difference, then, is not endless, not ceaselessly changing. Derrida, however, opens up a rather fertile ground for the post-structuralists in un-closing Saussure’s linguistic system, rendering difference endless and meaning constantly changing. When I define ‘house’, I get one meaning to the word. When I define those words I used in the definition, I get a different meaning, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

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I have to come here more often, or I have to start coming here. This is right up my alley.

About the relationship between meanings and their words [sic], this is Heideggers take before his famous Kehre: “[M]eanings grow to their words. Words are not arbitrarily given their meanings.”(Sein und Zeit (or Being and Time), p. 161. The original pagination is maintained in all translations.) As language develops, words grow to their meanings too (Derrida in a nutshell), but that presupposes the coinage of a given word. I recall reading some interesting things about the relationship between (the later) Heidegger’s and Saussure’s views on language on a website a few years back … I’ll try finding it again sometime soon.

EDIT: Ah, here it is: http://www.egwald.ca/ubcstudent/theory/heidegger.php (Unfortunately, the webmaster’s poor choice of background colour makes it rather hard on the eyes, but aside from that it is a good read.)

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Well, now we have a problem, I once sat and watched an author have long arguement with his writings as they were want to mean one thing while he another. Finally, the words got so angry they up and walked out on him, leaving the page as white as the moment he sat down on his word processor.

As Plato tried to explain, and Aristotle mentioned, there are three categories of names. Let us take a thing as any modle. We can name the thing, or we can name what we can abstract from a thing and take those abstractions and concatenate them and use them as the name of the thing as a whole. The sum is equal to the whole of the parts.

What we can abstract from anything are two, and only two elements, its form and its material difference.

Now we have a distinction between definition and description. Since a definition equates one naming convention to the other, i.e. if we call the class of names of things subjects, we call the classes of names for the abstractions predicates. Definition, as was said is simply equating the two naming convention, or the name of a thing is equal to the names of that things various material differences and the names of the forms within which they reside.

Now we have two categories of names that cannot be defined, as one cannot abstract from an abstraction. One must participate in the naming convention to learn the association. This is what description does, help preserve the naming convention by giving instructions on where to make the abstraction. For example, the definition of a circle is not a definition at all, it is a description.

Now, we use language to effect human will, and names have no will, thus cannot possibly mean a thing. And I see many people agree with me on this as they pay so little attention about names as to even know the basics of reasoning.

Language is part of a crafting system. Just like any other craft, we bring together form and material to make some thing. And as each person differs in their ability to craft a thing, what we have is called linguistic diversity, where there is a great deal more dust and stone chips than statues. Statues are so rare that people generally prefer to applaud a pile of dust and fragments than a statue.

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:-k To me the synonym is the definition of the word. But the general core word has it’s own definition. There’s a visual thesurus en.wikipedia.org/wiki/thats excellent as unscrabbling a puzzle. I am into sentence contruction more than syntax. Thoughts pljames

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I once found a bucket of synonyms, but for life of me, they all looked the same. Perhaps we can have the “core” word dress differently?

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I think we are resonating on similar frequencies here. This is very similar to my view of language.

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Excellent post. :-k I am fanatical at being (understood)! I am now into everything is related to the subject line. I feel my mind dedicates itself to using the subject as the absolute core word related to all other related words in our memory. We have a unlimited supply of words since we were born. The mind mimics our other writings and places the word that fits that sentence in the appropiate (where is the spell checker?) place in the sentence. pljames

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When my microwave magnetron burned out, I ordered a new one and replaced it.

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I recall the feeling, when I first read about semantics, that it had this inevitable circularity. Definitions, no matter how articulate, tended towards making the defined word even more obscure. They also ignored the complications of word placement - that syntax affected the meaning. To me, words are like art - everybody interprets them in their own way, especially when they are written and thus divorced from the visual elements of body language, facial expressions etc. There was this ridiculous(in my opinion) attempt to create a universal language, in a world where cultural nuances are infinite, where even the boundaries of meaning for words for colours are not universal. I don’t know the answer, except that there probably isn’t one.

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:-k I object that words cannot have meaning. One word can have meaning (take the word exponential paraphrased, outward). Cannot the words within a sentence have just one meaning instead of several? Cannot the subject be one word or sentence to epitomize the post? Why can’t I say what I mean with one word and then paraphrase? There’s a webpage called Visual Thesaurus that brakes the synonyms of a core word into exponential parts. One cannot judge or dissect every word in a sentence. (I say what I mean by using that word and did not infer any other meaning of that word).

Could the reader misjudge what they thought if I made it clear and understood without questioning why I used that word? How about a analogy? (To many cooks (linguists) spoil the broth (discipline)! I love my language (English) faults and all. Feedback please. pljames

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:-k I would argue that language is systems based. System=parts of a related whole. There is no perfect language or person to write that post. Why can’t linguists just go with the flow of imperfection of the language and the writers? Be the order of the post (ABC or 123) does it matter if the writer is understood? To me that’s the epitome (understanding and perfection (pun intended) of the writer). Feedback please. pljames