| 2005/07/15 10:50:00 PST by PegasusHoplite28 Edited at 2005/07/15 11:20:02 PST |
Transcript from Stephen Law's The Philosophy Gym:
The Meaning Mystery
Language is an extraordinarily powerful tool - the most important tool we possess. How do our sounds, squiggles, and other signs come by their astnoishing power to mean something? Indeed, what is meaning exactly? This chapter intruduces some of the key ideas of two philosophers: John Locke (1632-1704) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951).
Where Does Meaning Originate?
Take a look at the folowwing sequence of straight and curved lines.
I AM HAPPY
In English these lines mean I am happy. But there could be other languages in which this same combination of lines conveys quite a different thought. There might be an alien civilisation for which they mean my trousers are in tatters (I don't say this is likely, of course, but it's possible). the lines are in themselves devoid of any particular meaning.
The same is true of other forms of representation, including diagrams, illustrations and samples. They don't have any intrinsic representational power or meaning.
You might wonder about this. Here's a well-known example from the philosopher Wittgenstein.
You might think that this simmple combination of lines just has to represent a person climbing a hill. But as Wittgenstein points out, this same image could also be used to represent a man sliding down a hill backwards.
Indeed, we can imagine one-eyed aliens for whom this combination of lines is used to represent a face or a map-maker for whom this image represents where the treasure is burried ('O' marks the spot).
There's nothing intrinsic to the lines themselves that makes them mean one of these things rather than another.
What of a simple patch of red? Surely that can mean only one thing: red.
Not so. A red patch might have all sorts of meanings. If the patch is square, for example, then it might mean red square. Or it might simply mean square (the sample just happens to be red). If the patch is scarlet, then it might be used to represent just that shade of red. Or it could also be used to represent a much wider section of the colour spectrum, such as red, purple, and blue. A red patch might be used to symbolise blood or to warn of danger. I could use a red blob to record in my diary those days on which I ate a chocolate biscuit. In fact, a red match might be used to mean pretty much anything.
The moral is that nothing is intrinsically meaningful. Anything can be used to represent or mean more or less anything under the right conditions.
Meaning as an 'Inner' Process
But if nothing intrinsically means or represents anything, then how do our words and other symbols come by their representational powers? What gives them meaning? The answer, of course, is that we do. But how?
Here's one traditionally popular suggestion.
Suppose that a parrot starts to mimic the expression 'I am happy'. Of course, the parrot doesn't mean anything by these words. It's proabably unaware even that the words have a meaning. On the other hand, when I say 'I am happy', I don't just say something: I mean something.
So, although we say the same words, only one of us means something by them. Why is this? Why do I mean something but the parrot doesn't? After all, both the parrot and I engage in the same outward, observable process. We both say, 'I am happy'.
It seems, then, that the essential difference between us must be hidden. In meaning something, I must be engaged in an additional process, a process that accompanies the outward process of saying the words, a process that the parrot doesn't engage in. When I say 'I am happy', the outward physcial process of saying is accompanied by an inner mental process of meaning. It is the inner mental process that breathes life into our words and transforms them from mere sounds into significant utterances.
Locke's Theory of Meaning
An example of the view that meaning is essentially 'inner' is provided by the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke.
In Locke's view, the mind is like a container. At birth, the container is empty. Gradually, our senses begin to furnisg this inner space with objects. Locke calls these mental objects 'Ideas'. We have simple Ideas, such as the Idea of the colour red. Locke seems to think of the Idea of red as being a mental image of some sort. We also have complex Ideas that are built out of simple Ideas. For sxample, my Idea of a snowball fight is made up of simplier Ideas, including those of white, cold, hard and round.
In Locke's view, Ideas form the building blocks of thought. Our thoughts are made up of sequences of Ideas. And words obtain their meaning by standing for these Ideas:
"Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Idea in the Mind of him that uses them..." - John Locke, An essay Concerning Human Understanding
The difference between me and the parrot, in Locke's view - the difference that explains why I mean something by and understand what I say and the parrot doesn't - is that, unlike the parrot, I have correlated the outward string of words 'I am happy' with the sequence of mental objects. The outward process of saying the words is accompanied by an inner parade of Ideas. No such mental parade takes place inside the mind of the parrot.
This is called the Ideational theory of meaning.
How to Pick Out a 'Red' Object
The Ideational theory provides an explanation of how we are able to understand and aplly a word correctly. For example, suppose I ask you to pick out something red from your environment. No doubt you did so effortlessly. Yet all I gave you were some squiggly lines: 'red'. How did you know what to do with them?
It seems that in the Ideational theory, something like the following must have happened. You engaged in a sort of internal 'looking-up' process. On receiving the word 'red', you looked up in your memory - which functions, in effect, as a storehouse of Ideas - the Idea with which you have previously learned to correlate that word. This Idea, a sort of memory image of the colour red, provides you with a template or sample with which other things can be compared. You then compared this Idewa with the objects around you until you got a match. You then picked the object.
You may not be conscious of having engaged in such an inner 'looking-up' process. But perhaps that is because, for a mature language user like yourself, the process is so quick and habitual that you no longer need to pay it any attention.
A Popular Picture
Down through the centuries, many thinkers have been drawn to the 'inner process' model of meaning and understanding sketched out above. Indeed, the inner process model might well strike you as being 'just obviously' true. How else, you might wonder, are we to think of meaning and understanding, if not in terms of such processes taking place in the mind? Almost everyone finds themselves drawn to the inner process model when first they start to think about meaning and understanding.
It may surprise you then, to discover that the inner process model is now rejected by the bast majority of philosophers. One of the main reasons for this is the influence of the later work of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein constructed powerful arguments that show that the inner process model doesn't explain what it's supposed to. Here are two of Wittgenstein's best-known criticisms of the inner process model.
Argument 1: How to Pick the Right Inner Object?
Let's return to the suggestion that to understand a word is to engage in an inner looking-up process. Think about the following scenario:
Pedro runs a paint shop. Pedro receives lots of orders for paint written in English. Unfortunately, Pedro cannot read English. So John, who can, set up a little filing cabinet in Pedro's office. In the cabinet are cards. On each card is a blob of paint. The cards also have labels taped to them. On each label is printed the English word for the colour that appears on the cards. When Pedro gets an order, he simply checks the English colour on the order form against the labels in his file. When he finds the right card, he pulls it out and compares the colour on the card with the tins of paint in his shop. Pedro then dispatches a tin of that colour.
It was suggested a moment ago that a similar looking-up process must explain your ability to apply the term 'red' correctly. Only we supposed that the looking-up process must take place in your mind. You have a mental filing cabinet, if you like - a storehouse of Ideas - in which you have previously filed memory images of colours correlated with their English names. When you receive the word 'red', you went to your mental filing cabinet and pulled out the right sample. You then compared the pbjects around you with the memory image until you found the match.
But does this inner looking-up process really explain your ability to pick out those things to which the word 'red' applies? Not according to Wittgenstein, who points out that the process actually presupposes what it's supposed to explain. To see why, ask yourself the following question: how did you pick out the right memory image?
'I don't see the problem,' you might say. 'Why can't I just go to my mental filing cabinet and look up the right mental image, the one I previously correlated with the word "red"?'
The difficulty is that a mental image is not objective. It's not the sort of thing you might attach a label to and put in a drawer for future reference. Once you're no longer aware of a mental image, it's gone. So when next you want to conjure up a mental image of 'red', how do you know what sort of image you are supposed to be imagining? You need already to know what 'red' means in order to know that. Yet it was your knowledge of what 'red' means that the mental image was supposed to explain.
So the 'inner process' explanation of how you are able to apply 'red' correctly is circular. It's suggested that you are able to pick out the right external object by comparing it with an inner object. But this takes for granted your ability to pick out the right inner object. We've taken for granted precisely the ability we're supposed to be explaining. The situation is quite different when it comes to an objective sample, like a piece of coloured card. Pedro doesn't need to know what 'red' means, in order to find the right coloured sample in his filing cabinet. This is because the word 'red' is physically, objectively taped to the right piece of card.
Argument 2: How Does the Inner Object Come by Its Meaning?
Even if you can somehow manage to call up the right memory image without already knowing what 'red' means, there remains a problem. The suggestion that words and other signs ultimately come by their meaning by being correlated with inner objects - Ideas - seems satisfactory only while one forgets to ask: and how in turn do these inner objects come by their meaning?
Suppose that you correlate the word 'red' with a mental image of a red square. Do you thereby give 'red' a meaning?
No. We have already seen the public samples - a red square painted on a piece of card, for example - can be interpreted in innumerable ways. But exactly the same difficulty arises with respect to mental samples. They are no more intrinsically meaningful than are public samples.
Let's suppose, for example, that your mental image is of a scarlet square. Should you then apply 'red' only to scarlet objects? Or would an orange object do? Or perhaps your sample just happens to be red, and it really represents squareness. So should you pick out only square objects? And so on. Your mental image fails to provide the answers to any of these questions.
It's clear that we have again gone round in a circle. This time, we have explained how words and other signs come by their meaning only br presupposing that certain signs - the mental ones - already have a meaning. So the mystery of how meaning ultimately originates remains.
Round and Round in Circles...
Wittgenstein points out that the explanations provided by the inner process model are circular. The model tries to explain how public words and signs have meaning by appealing to private, inner objects, but then takes the meaning of these inner objects for granted. It also tries to explain how you are able to identify which external objects are 'red', but only by presupposing that you already possess the ability to identify which internal objects are 'red'. Here are two more examples of circular explanations. We once tried to explain how the earth is held up by suppsing that it sits on the back of a great animal: an elephant. Of course, this explanation didn't really remove the mystery with which we were grappling, for we then needed to explain what help the elephant up. So we introduced another animal - a turtle - for the elepgant to sit on.
But then what did the turtle sit on? Should we have introduced yet another animal to support the turtle, and another animal to support that animal, and so on without end?
The problem is that our explanation really just took for granted what it was supposed to explain: why anything at all gets held up.
A similar circularity plagues the suggestion that the behaviour of a person can be explained as the result of the behaviour of lots of little people running around inside controlling the full-size person much as if they were controlling a ship.
The explanation is circular because we now need to explain the behaviour of these little people. Do we suppose that they have still smaller people running around inside their heads? If so, do these still smaller people have people running round in their heads?
Of course, to point out that these explanations are circular is not to prove that there is no elephant or that there are no little people running around inside our heads. But if the only reason for introducing the elephant and those little people in the first place was to explain certain things which, it turns out, they don't explain but just take for granted, then whatever justification we thought we had for introducing them is entirely demolished.
The same, of course, goes for the inner, mental 'looking-up' machinery introduced by the inner process model. By showing that this machinery takes for granted what it's supposed to explain, Wittgenstein demolishes the justification we thought we had for introducing it.
Meaning and Use
The temptation against which Wittgenstein warns us is that of thinking of the meaning and understanding as mysterious inner activities or processes.
"We are tempted to think that the action of langauge consists of two parts: an inorganic part - the handling of signs - and an organic part, which we may call understanding these signs, meaning them, interpreting them, thinking them. These latter activities seem to take place in a queer kind of medium, the mind. And the mechanism of the mind - the nature of which, it seems, we don't quite understand - can bring about effects that no material mechanism could." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books
So in what does the difference between myself and the parrot essentially consist, in Wittgenstein's view, if not in something inner? Broadly speaking, it consists in what we are able to do. I possess a whole range of abilities that manifest my grasp of what is meant by 'I am happy'. For example, if asked, I can explain what the expression 'happy' means. I can point to examples. I can use the expression appropriately. I can also use these words to construct many other different sentences. Parrots, on the other hand, can do noe of these things.
The revolution in thinking about meanings brought about by Wittgenstein's later work likes in this shift in focus from what goes on 'inside' to our publicly observable abilities. Meaning isn't 'hidden'. It lies on the surface, in the use to which we put our words and other signs. In Wittgenstein's view, to grasp the meaning of a word is not to have correlated it with some mysterious inner object, but, roughly speaking, to know how it's used.
-- The author believes that you might be short-changed because Wittgenstein's view that "we don't need a theory" prevents him from explaining further. Comments, opinions?