Language & Meaning: Crash Course Philosophy #26 – link
- How do we define “a game”?
- Question of meaning.
- What do they mean?
- How do we know what they mean?
- Who gets to decide?
“How do words — a collection of sounds or symbols — key into the mental concepts that we want to communicate?”
“20th century German philosopher Gottlab Frege helped parse out this difference [what words mean] by drawing a distinction between what he called sense, and reference.”
Reference (noun)
The reference of a word is the object or concept that its meant to designate.
Words such as cat, kitty, mouser, feline, is the physical manifestation of “cat”.
Sense (noun)
The sense of a word is the way in which the words tie us to the object or concept.
But they have difference sense which means kitty might be a small or baby cat while mouser might live in a barn and kill rodents.
Definition
A definition is traditionally understood as whatever meets the conditions for both necessity and sufficiency.
Necessary Condition
What’s needed – what must be present — in order for a thing to be a thing. In order for X to be X.
To be a bachelor you must be unmarried, for eg.
Sufficient Condition
Something that’s enough for X to be X, but its not required for that thing to meet that definition.
Being born ins the US is sufficient to be US citizen but not required as you’re able to become a citizen through other means.
BUT this definition is too rigid.
“Any definition you give, someone’s going to come up with a counterexample — either some game that’s excluded by the definition, or something that the definition includes that not everyone would agree is a game.”
Doesn’t matter. Everyone knows what a game is and we draw example from other examples. So our brain pieces together the concept and we understand a “family resemblance”.
Word meanings are “cluster groups”. “There’s no one element that everything the cluster has in common, but they all share something with some other members of the group.”
Paradigm and Fringe — everyone agrees on Paradigm BUT there’s a shift in who might agree to the fringe cases.
Meaning is use.
Meaning is tied to community. Communities may not agree.
No-one else can see each others personal meaning though. I don’t know if the colour red is the same as yours but it doesn’t matter.
Words can only refer to the aspect of it which is publicly acceptable to others.
Example – Pop
Mariah Carey calls her followers Lambs.
Beyoncé Beyhive
Ariana Grande Arianators
Example – Motorcycle
- Adventure Touring Bikes / Dual Sports
- Choppers
- Cruisers
- Power Cruisers
- Dirt Bikes
- Enduro Bikes
- Motocross Bikes
- Naked Bikes
- Scooters
- Power Scooters
- Sport Bikes
- Super Sports
Then modified and custom bikes fall into their own categories and can come from any of their counterparts.
- Scramblers
- Cafe Racer
- Tracker
- Brat-bob
- Brat
- Chopper
- American Bobber
- European Bobber
Speaker Meaning
What the speaker intends when using a word
Audience Meaning
What the audience understands when hearing the word.
Language is communication, our goal is for the speaker meaning and audience meaning to match up.
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Philosophy – Language: Meaning and Language
Katie Richie
Foundational Meaning — what serves as determiner or foundation of meaning.
Dictionaries classify our descriptive meaning question. We’re asking what it has.
Foundational Meaning what gives a word or utterance meaning.
Internalist answers determine mental or psychological states which are inside a person.
Externalist answers require something outside which determines meaning, such as the object tor specialist definition.
Speaker intentions specify meaning. These account for sounds, marks or images provide meaning based on the account.
An utterance means P if:
- you come to believe P
- my audience recognises that I want you to come to believe that P
- you come to believe P given your recognition that I wanted you to understand P
This would mean the same thing if I restated the same thing to somebody else.
Intention
Meaning depends on the way speakers and writers use it.
Externalists
“Meanings just ain’t in the head!”
1) Knowing the meaning of a term is just being in a psychological state
2) The meaning of an expression determines what things the expression applies to.
“Creature with a kidney”. All creatures which have a kidney.
“Renate” means creature with a kidney. Which is the same.
Thought Experiment
Hypothetical stations that philosophers use to help determine what would make something true and what the conditions for accurately applying the concept are.
Twin Earth theory—can bother almost be referring to the same thing, but are not.
If I say “milk” for example, perhaps I’m referring to milk as it comes from a cow or milk as it comes from a nut or from soy.
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Representation. ‘The work of representation’. Stuart Hall, 2013
Representation, Meaning and Language
Commonly ‘Representation means using language to say something meaningful about, or to represent, the world meaningfully, to other people.’
‘Representation is an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture. It does involve the use of language, of signs and images which stand for or represent things. But this is far from simple or straightforward process.’
Reflective
reflect a meaning which already exists in the world of objects, people and events?
(“Twin Earth thought experiment example)
Intentional
express only what the speaker or writer or painter wants to say, his or her personally intended meaning?
(Joan Miro’s symbolic approach to painting, for example)
Constructionist
Meaning constructed through language.
Constructionist approach has two major variants
- Semiotic (Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure)
- Discursive (French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault)
Representation is ‘the production of meaning through language’.
1. (description) to represent something is to describe or depict it, to call it up in the mind by description or portrayal or imagination to place a likeness of it before us in our mind or in the senses; as, for example, in the sentence, ‘This picture represents the murder of Abel by Cain’.
2. (symbolise) To represent also means to symbolise, stand for, to be a specimen of, or to substitute for; as in the sentence, ‘in Christianity, the cross represents the suffering and crucifixion of Christ’.
The figures in the painting stand in the place of, and at the same time, stand for the story Cain and Abel. Likewise, the cross simply consists of two wooden planks nailed together; but in the context of Christian belief and teaching, it taken on, symbolises or comes to stand for a wider set of meanings about crucifixion of the Son of God, and this is a concept we can’t into words and pictures.
‘… give meaning to things through language.’
‘You can only think with the concept of the glass. As the linguists are fond of saying, “Dogs bark. But the concept of “dog” cannot bark or bite.’ Because it is not the thing itself, we are only using words to represent the thing which we are intending. Only the thing which we are representing can actually doing the barking or biting.
‘you can only speak with the word for glass – GLASS – which is the linguistic sign which we use in English to refer to objects out of which you drink water.’
Definition
‘Representation is the production of meaning of the concepts in our minds through language. It is the link between concepts and language which enables us to refer to either the ‘real’ world of objects, people or events, or indeed to imaginary worlds of fictional objects, people and events.
1. real world (objects, people, events)
2. imaginary world (fictional objects, people, events, concepts)
Two Systems of Representation
1. Mental representations we carry around in our head
Meaning depend son the system of concepts and images formed in our thoughts which can stand for or ‘represent’ the world, enabling us to refer to things both inside and outside our heads.
Easy for things like people and objects. Difficult for concepts like war, death, friendship, love, relationship. Also, things we’ve never seen such as angle,s mermaids, God, Devil, Heaven, Hell, and fictional characters.
System because ‘consists not of individual concepts, but of different ways of organising, clustering, arranging and classifying concepts, and of establishing complex relations between them.’
In regards to birds and planes and the similarities and differences between them ‘…mixing and matching of relations between concepts to form complex ideas and thoughts is possible because our concepts are arranged into different classifying systems.’
— flying / not flying
— natural / man-made
‘Meaning depends on the relationship between things in the world — people, objects and events, real or fictional — and the conceptual system, which can operate as mental representations of them.’
Shared culture provides us the ability to interpret these complex systems within the same framework, as ‘each of us probably does understand and interpret the world in a unique and individual way. However, we are bale to communicate because we share broadly the same conceptual maps and thus make sense of or interpret the wold in roughly similar ways.’ We are ‘… able to build up a shared culture of meanings and thus construct a social world which we inhabit together. That is why “culture” is sometimes defined in terms of “shared meanings or shared conceptual maps” (see Du Gay et al. 1997).
2. Language provides a ‘shared conceptual map’ which may translate ‘common language, so that we can correlate our concepts and ideas with certain written words, spoken sounds or visual images.’
Signs are these things which carry meaning. They ‘stand for or represent the concepts and conceptual relations between them which we carry around in our heads’. They ‘make up the meaning-systems of our culture.’
Language incorporates a wide range of things which we understand to express meaning and communicate thoughts including: spoken, written, visual, hand signs, facial expression, digital and electronic transmissions, codes, traffic lights, music, etc. ‘Any sound word, image or object which functions as a sign, and is organised with other signs into a system which is capable of carrying and expressing meaning is, from this point of view, “a language”.’ This meaning is linguistic turn.
So, two systems of representation. 1) a system for concepts and conceptual maps 2) corresponding signs arranged into language systems which represent these concepts. ‘The relation between “things”, concepts and signs lies at the heart of the production of meaning in language. The process which links these three elements together is what we call “representation”’.
Language and Representation
‘Visual signs and images, even when they bear a close resemblance to the things to which they refer, are still signs: they carry meaning and thus have to be interpreted.’ Interpretation requires access to both the conceptual map and the language to decode them.
1. Iconic are visuals signs which resemble the thing to which they refer
2. Indexical signs are written or spoken and bear no direct resemblance. These are also arbitrary as it doesn’t matter particularly what sign is used only that we agree on its use.
‘It is we who fix the meaning so firmly that, after a while, it comes to seem natural and inevitable. The meaning is constructed by the system of representation.’
Culture is defined ‘in terms of these shared conceptual maps, shared language systems and the codes which govern the relationships of translation between them.’ Codes ‘fix the relationships between concepts and signs. They stabilise meaning within different languages and cultures.’
Codes ‘make it possible for us to speak and to hear intelligibly, and establish the translatability between our concepts and our languages which enables meaning to pass from speaker to hearer and be effectively communicated within a culture.’
Example might be to learn the various words used within a culture to express meaning but you have to learn how to navigate with them effectively to get the nuance of their use.
However, if meaning is not fixed to a specific concept out there in the real world then its meaning can shift culturally depending on use. For example, ‘gay’ may mean being happy or it may mean homosexual. ‘Wicked’ may mean terrible or evil or it might mean cool, similar to the use of ‘deadly’ within indigenous communities.
‘Social and linguistic conventions do change over time. In the language of modern managerialism, what we used to call ’students’, ‘clients’, ‘patients’ and ‘passengers’ have all become ‘customers’.
Theories of Representation
1. Reflective (or mimetic) approach where meaning lies within the object, person, idea or event in the real world and language functions like a mirror to reflect the meaning as it exists. However, our description is only a sign standing in for the real thing, it is not the real thing itself.
2. intentional approach places meaning with the speaker or author. Words mean what the author intends they should mean. However this is flawed as ‘we cannot be the sole or unique source of meanings in language, since that would mean that we could express ourselves in entirely private languages.’ And so, ‘our private intended meanings, however personal to us, have to enter into the rules, codes and conventions of language to be shared and understood.’
3. Constructionist approach ‘acknowledges that neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix meaning in language. Things don’t mean: we construct meaning, using representational systems — concepts and signs.’ Do not confuse the material world with symbolic practice and processes. Language system conveys meaning as determined by systems of culture and objects and people.
‘Representation is the production of meaning through language. In representation, constructionists argue, we use signs, organised into languages of different kinds, to communicate meaningfully with others. Languages can use signs to symbolise, stand for or reference objects, people and events int eh so-called ‘real’ world. But they can also reference imaginary things and fantasy world or abstract ideas which re not in any obvious sense part of our material world… meaning is produced within language, in and through various representational systems which, for convenience, we call ‘languages’. Meaning if produced by the practice, the ‘work’, of representation. It is constructed through signifying — i.e. meaning-producing — practices.’
1. We have a concept of something for which we know its ‘meaning’ but we need a system of representation, or language and codes, which allow us to translate this meaning and transmit it, which is in turn decoded and understood.
This is why the words which we use and how we use them are incredibly important. Despite what some people might say.
Saussure’s Legacy
A sign is;
1. Signifier. The form (the actual word, image, photo, etc.)
2. Signified. Idea or Concept in your head.
Both are required to produce meaning.
‘…the sign is the union of a form which signifies (signifier) … and an idea signified (signified). Though we may speak … as if they are separate entities, they exist only as components of the sign … [which is] the central fact of language’ (Culler, 1976, p19)
Signs do not exist in relation to something but in contrast to it according to the system. We define things by which they are not.
A ‘language consists of signifiers, button over to produce meaning, the signifiers have to be organised into a “system of differences”. It is the differences between signifiers which signify.’ These relations are fixed by our cultural codes but are not permanent. This shift equates with our cultural shift, including historic moments.
We engage with an active process of interpretation to read, interpret and understand the sign.
“… it is not a ‘closed’ system which can be reduced to its formal elements. Since it is constantly changing, it is by definition open-ended.’
Barthes
Denotation (description)
Connotation (wider level of cultural understanding and concepts)
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Bliss child says creature, night, consumes, blood.
