Meaning = how patterns relate.
The recognition and appreciation (judgment) of how phenomena relate to each other.
Meaning is not arbitrary.
A misinterpretation results in costs, no subjective hoping, or redefining of words, can protect you from, but only an external entity, such as an institution, or another individual who correctly judges and evaluates can intervene, if it so chooses, and with its own motives, to protect the mistake from being experiences as cost, or as negative consequences.
Meaning is how the noumenon, the abstraction harmonizes, agrees with, the interacting patterns.
Meaning is about relationships between external, to the mind, phenomena, patterns, and how the mind can translate them into internal mental models, or abstractions.
Therefore, the arbitrary use of symbols/words referring only to internal constructs with no external references, are meaningless to all but those sharing the same arbitrary constructs.
In such cases one must understand the meaning only if and when he or she buys into the esoteric arbitrary connections, corresponding to nothing external.
They are totally subjective, and based on fabrications, emotion, shares needs and desires, common weaknesses and insecurities.
Realists require no arbitrary meanings, because whatever names you give the same observable phenomena, how they relate is not based on the whims and preferences.
Meaning is found, out in the world, not constructed in the mind, without considering the world.
Meaning is world interpreted, not world created.
World is, and mind emerges as a connection of body, the physical, to its dynamism.
Mind is the point where the fluid is converted to static abstraction (image) or into sensation, emotion, and then given a symbol, given a word/number to represent it.
Mind is the point of contact of past, manifesting as presence/appearance, with an ongoing interactivity (flux).
The nervous system, with the brain as its hub, is the dynamic point of conversion, from body (physical) to mind (abstraction), with the symbols are the nervous system’s representation of the dynamic fluid interactive.
Organism is in continuous dialogue, interactions interpreted continuously, between otherness and self - presence/appearance, and past/nature.
The idea(l) is the meaning projected forward as prediction, offering choices, options, of probability to the organism.
Idea refers to mental abstractions combined into more sophisticated mental models corresponding to external interactive phenomena.
Ideal refers to the judgment, evaluation of ideas, projected as desirable, or good, in relation to other ideas considered undesirable, bad, or evil in the Abrahamic Nihilistic paradigm.