16. The Meaning Mystery
Where does meaning
originate?
Take
a look at the following sequence of straight and curved lines.
ILLUSTRATION:
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
civilization 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.
[ILLUSTRATE: STICK FIGURE ON
SLOPE]
You might think that this simple 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 the above combination of lines is used
to represent a face
[ILLUSTRATE: ONE
EYED-MARTIAN RESEMBLING THE ABOVE.]
or a map-maker for whom this image represents where the treasure is
buried (‘O’ marks the spot).
[ILLUSTRATE: BUILDINGS
ARRANGED AS ARE THE LINES].
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 symbolize 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 cookie. In fact, a red patch might be used to mean pretty much
anything at all.
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
parrott doesn’t mean anything by these words. It’s probably unaware even that
they have a meaning. On the other hand, when I say, “I am happy”, I don’t just say something, I mean something.
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 of the words, a process that the
parrott doesn’t engage in.
Locke’s theory of meaning
An example of the view that meaning is essentially
“inner” is provided by the Eighteenth Century philosopher John Locke.
On Locke’s view, the mind is like a container. At
birth the container is empty. Gradually, our senses begin to furnish 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 which are
built out of simple Ideas. For example, my Idea of a snowball is made up of
simpler Ideas including those of white, cold, hard and round.
On Locke’s view, Ideas form the building blocks of
thought. 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…[i]
This is called the Ideational
theory of meaning. On the Ideational
theory, the main purpose of language is to allow us to communicate our inner
thoughts to others.
How to pick out a “red” object
The Ideational theory
provides an explanation of how we are able to understand and apply a word
correctly. For example, if I now ask you pick out something red from your
environment, no doubt you can do so effortlessly. Yet all I gave you were some
squiggly lines: “red”. How did you know what to do with them?
It seems that on 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 learnt to correlate that word. This idea, a sort of memory
image, provides you with a template or sample with which other things can be
compared. You then compared this Idea with the objects around you until you got
a match. You then picked that 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 this picture of meaning and understanding sketched
out above. Yet the picture is now rejected by the majority of philosophers. One
of the main reasons for this is the later work of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein constructed
powerful arguments that show that the inner process model of meaning and
understanding doesn’t explain what it is supposed to.
Here are two of Wittgenstein’s
best-known arguments against the inner process model.
Argument one: 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 card. When Pedro gets an order, he simply checks the English colour word 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 store.
Pedro then dispatches a tin of that colour.
[ILLUSTRATE]
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 received the word “red” you went to your mental filing cabinet and pulled
out the right sample. You then compared the objects around you with this memory
image until you found a 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 just 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 may 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
to which you might attach a label 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.
The
problem, in short, is that the mental “looking up” process presupposes what it
is intended to explain: your ability to apply “red” correctly. It was suggested
that you are able to pick out the right external object by comparing it with an
inner object. But this just takes for granted your ability to pick out the
right inner object. So the explanation is circular.
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.
Criticism two: 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 – only seems
satisfactory 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. Does
that give “red” a meaning?
No.
We have already seen that 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 you should 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 their meaning only by 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 supposing 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 held the elephant
up. So we introduced another animal – a turtle – for the elephant 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?
[ILLUSTRATE]
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.
[ILLUSTRATE]
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?
[ILLUSTRATE]
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 actually 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 meaning and understanding as mysterious inner activities or processes.
We are tempted to think that the action of
language 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. 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 which no
material mechanism could.[ii]
So in
what does the difference between myself and the parrot essentially consist, on
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 none of these things.
The
revolution in thinking about meaning brought about by Wittgenstein’s later work
lies 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. On 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.[iii]
An excellent and detailed discussion of the issues
raised in this chapter can be found in:
·
Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1982), chpt 2.
[i] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975), III.ii.1.
[ii] Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue
and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), p. 3.
[iii] Some readers might
feel a little short-changed. And perhaps rightly so. Wittgenstein has pointed
out why one particular explanation of how I am able to identify that that is
red (I am looking at a red object as I speak) fails. But how am I able to do
this, then? Wittgenstein doesn’t offer an alternative theory. In fact,
Wittgenstein’s view is that we don’t need a theory. But that’s another story.
Comments
The parrot does use the expression “I am happy” with the same meaning as the human.
Here is my own anecdote. An acquaintance of mine who lives on the outskirts of my village owns a Grey Parrot. His parrot occasionally escapes. One evening this happened. However, this time the parrot flew a bee-line to my cottage. My cottage is situated in the centre of the village but is in woods (you would not know you live in a village). His parrot ended up sitting outside on my living room window ledge. I noticed the parrot and to cut a long story short I proceeded to sneak outside with a towel making my way around the parrot and behind him without being noticed and flung the towel over him to capture him.
As soon as the towel covered him, the parrot exclaimed:
“OH BOTHER!!!!!”
It would appear the parrot realised that for him….”The war is over…” and he knew it!
Moral of the anecdote: There is NO private-langauge.