What is “meaning” anyway? Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), writing 1921, the “Analysis of Mind,” says meaning is a “relation,” and immediately goes on talk about the nature of “words.” You may think that the relata in this relation subsists somewhere or somehow in that mighty triad between Self, the World, and God. But no, says philosophy, especially in the analytic tradition, you won’t find your prey (the answers) in the clouds, but only by fishing in the deep and mighty sea of language.
Long ago, at the putative dawning of philosophy, in a Greek colonial town on the Aegean, the “master,” Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), put forth, in somewhat simple form, a theory of meaning, or what is termed today, a “semantics.” The written word, the physical pattern of marks, inscribed (or chiseled) on the stone, papyrus, or paper before you, are signs or symbols of the spoken word, and the spoken word, in turn, is a sign or symbol of a mental event transpiring within you — in the mind, or as he would say, the soul or pshuche. It is this mental event, the “thought” or “judgment,” which refers to or points to some corresponding “thing,” “event” or state of affairs in the external or sensible world “outside of us.” A thousand years later, Aristotle’s semantics still held sway. The scholastics defined truth as “adaequatio intellectus ad rem.” That is the “adequation” of the judgment, through speech, to the presented reality. “A judgment (apophanic speech, or, as we would say, that which is asserted in a declarative sentence),” says Aristotle, “is true when it lets something be presented together that is presented together in the thing.” In those days, it seems, there was a sturdy bridge between the physical and mental, between the invisible, incorporeal realm, and the real, extended, physical world; a bridge that would eventually crumble, leaving us stranded either on the banks of spiritualism or on the shores of materialism, each side longing for the other.
The “flip-flop” that broke the bridge, turning everything topsy-turvy, that pointed to the ascent from bottom-up, rather than the descent from top-down, may be traced through all those war-torn winding paths that led to what we call the Enlightenment. As heroes of this journey we point to those like Galileo, Kepler, Newton; and for those who cleared the brush away, we have that stalwart trio of British or Scottish common sense, namely Locke, Berkeley and Hume. So armed, we entered the era of secularization and the disenchantment of the world. At the same time, the Enlightenment gave birth to those ideals, still imperfectly realized, we hold so dear, such as Freedom, Equality, Democracy, and Human Rights.
John Locke, who got the ball rolling in 1690 with his, “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” tells of the circumstances which gave rise to his decision to investigate the nature of the human mind. He says he was sitting around with friends, discussing profound and abstruse matters, when they got stuck, confused. Afterward, says Locke, “It came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course; and that, before we set ourselves upon enquiries of that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see what objects our understandings were and were not fitted to deal with.”
In others words, Locke was looking for a criterion for “meaningfulness.” Some mark or marks that would allow us to sort out the meaningful ideas from those which are meaningless, a way to distinguish “sense” from “non-sense.” Just as today, we are assailed by all sorts of knowledge claims on the mass market, all promising magic cures and a life of bliss. (One modern philosopher, Simon Blackburn, gives the following list of outlandish claims that may confront us: “Astrology, homeopathy, Feng shui, conspiracy theories, flying saucers, voodoo, crystal balls, miracle-working, angel visits, alien abductions, management nostrums and a thousand other cults.”) Are we so gullible? Well, in the absence of a strong mythology to guide us in our assessments, we are caught between the waters (as if you were stranded between Tinian and Saipan without a boat).
Lock’s discovery was to trace the origin of all our ideas to experience (as opposed to, say, authority, that would tell us what to think or not to think). Any idea, derived from experience must also allow for a clear path back to that experience to be considered meaningful.
The philosophy of Empiricism, as it is known, dominates our world today. It provides the ground for the scientific world-view. But all is not well. The gap between the humanities and the sciences has not been bridged. Yet the sciences progress, getting closer to the point of creating life in a laboratory, or determining the biological conditions necessary for the emergence of consciousness. This would make it easier, no doubt, for God; allowing us to reconnect the soul with matter, our inner lives of emotion and feeling to the objective, outer world.
Puzzle
1. Jazmine went to cash a check at the Bank of Guam, but the teller made a mistake: He gave her back dollars where the check had cents, and cents where the check had dollars. Then Jazmine bought a Variety for 50 cents, and was surprised to see she now had exactly three times the amount of the original check. So what was the amount of that check?
Answer to last week’s puzzle
1. Happy 1*2 – (3 – 4 – 5) * 6*7*8 – 9.
