fairness and meaning

[From Bill Powers (2003.09.27.0855 MDT)]

Bruce Nevin (2003.09.26.2249 EDT) --

As Rick correctly points out, you can't use the words fluently and
appropriately unless you have their meanings. Yes, meanings are also in
the realm of perception. But they are not identical with those perceptions
that we take to be the referents of words.

I think that people can use words fluently and appropriately even when the
only referents of words are other words, or even nothing at all but
familiar sounds. An excellent example is in a science-fiction story called
"The Gostak and the Doshes," by Miles J. Breuer, M.D. (Amazing Stories,
March 1930). Here is a sample, from the part where a man gets transported
to another world and is learning from its inhabitants. He has heard someone
saying, "The gostak distims the doshes", and asks a new friend

···

==========================================================================
"John, what's a gostak?"
  ...
"The gostak!" he exclaimed. "Hooray for the gostak!"

"But what _is_ a gostak?"

"Not _a_ gostak. _The_ gostak. The gostak is -- the distimmer of the doshes
-- see! He distims 'em, see?"

"Yes, yes. But what is distimming? How do you distim?"

"No, no! Only the gostak can distim. The gostak distims the doshes, see?"

"Ah, I see," I exclaimed. Indeed, I pride myself on my quick wit. "What are
doshes? Why, they are the stuff distimmed by the gostak. Very simple!"

"Good for you!" John slapped me on the back in huge enthusiasm. "I think it
is wonderful for you to understand so well after being here only a short
time. You are very patriotic."

Patriotic? There is much more like this in the story, which I must have
read when I was about 9 or 10 years old. It made an impression on me,
obviously. Since then, it's been evident to me that people use a lot of
words that don't actually mean anything -- there is no perception to which
they point, other than the words they might use to explain or define them.
I also learned about the "trip around the dictionary" some time later: look
up any word with a meaning that seems a little vague, then look up the
words that are used to define it, and so on. You won't get very far before
the definitions start using the word you began with. Sometimes you will run
into words with clear perceptual meanings, so even if the trip is circular
you can tie the whole collection of words to some kind of experience. But
sometimes, especially with very important-sounding words like "patriotic,"
or "intelligence," you can't.

This should be obvious for another reason: a referent of a word is a
singular perception; its meaning encompasses any possible referent of the word.

You seem to be saying that a referent is a lower-level perception, while a
meaning is a category in which many lower-level perceptions belong
together. But can that be true? What are the referents of the word "learn?"
One is memorizing; another is practicing to achieve competence; another is
reacting correctly to a stimulus. So are you saying that there is a single
meaning for the word "learn" which encompasses all of these very different
referents? I can't imagine what that meaning would be.

I think we have a clear example here of a word that everyone uses, thinking
it must have some meaning, when in fact its meaning is very fuzzy and
faint. That word is "meaning." I've read more than one usage of the term
that makes it sound like something sticky that adheres to a word so it is
carried by hearing or vision into the brain. Apparently, to many people it
is a property of a word, as if a word were like an object that gets passed
around and that has properties of its own, independently of any speaker or
hearer, like the squeak without the wheel. "Meaning" seems to be used as if
it were something in itself, rather than a name for whatever a word brings
to our minds. Of course these are all examples of a word that does indicate
perceptions, but the perceptions vary all over the place and none of them
is very clear. And the more we talk about what "meaning" means, the more it
just means a bunch of other words.

The blind people learn the meanings of vision words entirely from the ways
in which these words are combinable with other words, in their
conversations with sighted people. They couldn't learn all word meanings
in this way. There has to be some grounding of word meanings in nonverbal
perceptions.

But what have they learned when they learn these so-called meanings? It's
Searle's Chinese speaker paradox in a different context. I can learn to say
that John has a _green_ sweater, or that John has a _red_ sweater, but if I
am blind I have no more reason to use one adjective than the other unless
someone tells me John does not have a red sweater. Then I will say he has a
green sweater, but I have still not learned what green means. You could
have told me he has a perspective sweater and I would believe you and echo
your word. But I would not know the meaning of perspective, either. A
computer could know the likelihood of occurrance, or transition
probabilities, of words and thus construct sentences about English writers
that sounded as if they had meaning, but in the computer that constructed
them they would never be more than likelihoods or transition probabilities.
They could have no referents beside other words or symbols.

I think I decided some time ago not to take words too seriously if I
couldn't find any experience that they indicate (I decided also not to
assume I was a dummy for not understanding what people were trying to get
across by words like "holy"). Once having realized that people use many
words without any notion of an experience they might designate (high or low
in the hierarchy), I became much more suspicious of the whole game. I think
we could almost do without the term "meaning" -- it doesn't refer to
anything specific, and there are much more informative ways to talk about
the same phenomena.

The meaning of a new noun can be learned contextually before any referent
is experienced.

But doesn't this ignore the fact that "context" is not just the other words
used, but the experiences referred to by the contextual terms, the other
words? If you have no contextual terms with perceptual significance, you're
back to "the gostack distims the doshes." The contextual terms evoke
perceptions which are put into relationships with each other, for instance,
and you can then tell someone the word for that perceived relationship. At
the configuration level, I learned that "a person with his elbows sticking
out and his hands on his hips" (get the picture?) is standing with his arms
"akimbo." Even if you've never seen a person with his arms akimbo, the
description ("hand ON hips") uses specific perceptual referents and words
describing relationships, so that akimbo becomes becomes a pointer to the
perceived relationships, not to the words. If you're smart, you can figure
out a little of what "akimbo" means from less direct descriptions: "He was
standing with his arms akimbo, so when John spoke, he turned and hit John
in the chest with his elbow." So how would he have to be standing for that
to happen? One plausible imaginary picture is the right one.

The learning of the meanings of operator words over these nouns
(adjectives, prepositions, relational nouns, intransitive and transitive
verbs of the simpler sort that only allow concrete nouns in their
argument) depends as much on context as on example referents.

I would interpret "context" as "direct perceptual examples." I'm sure
imagination plays a large part in this way of learning referents for words,
and I know from personal experience that this can lead to misunderstandings
when you don't imagine the right experiences. I may have told the story
about my father but it's worth another hearing: when he saw the printed
word "misled", he had always imagined something like a missile flying
off-track instead of where it was aimed, so he pronounced it "missile-d".
Of course that perceptual referent for the term worked well enough in all
contexts he encountered, so he didn't realize his error until he was a
well-known scientist past 65. Knowing how my dad was, I would guess that
when he heard someone say "mis-led," he just smiled to himself at the poor
fellow's lack of education. When the realization finally dawned on him, I
happened to be present and I'm afraid I was delighted in a mean sort of way.

The meanings of higher-order operator words (adjectives like true, verbs
like doubt, indeed, adjectives like fair) can hardly be learned
ostensively, in part because even if a referent can be singled out it can
hardly be sufficiently an exemplar.

We shouldn't think of perceptual referents only as concrete things. They
can be as complex as perceptions can be, and can be of any level of
perception from intensities to system concepts. I don't see, model-wise,
how a word or phrase (a configuration or event perception) can come to
evoke a perception of a system concept, but that whole area in the model
needs work, and we can be sure that "Catholic Church" is a printed
configuration that definitely evokes a system concept, whether we can
explain that or not. And don't tell me it's an association -- you'd only
have to explain how association works, and nobody knows that, either.

Realizing this, it actually is not a surprise that the blind people
learn the meanings of words for which they have no perceptual referents.
That itself, however, may be a surprise.

I think the (latent) surprise is that they think they know what the words
indicate to other people, when they don't and can't know. Francis (?)
Galton, who discovered color-blindness, wrote about how he learned to use
color words as others used them, and used them in such a convincing way
that neither his friends nor _he_ realized that he did not see colors as
they did. He was so good at deducing the usages of color words from context
that his color blindness was completely concealed even from himself. I have
conversed with more than one blind person for a while without realizing the
person was blind, because the person had learned the language of the
sighted, both verbal and body, with exquisite thoroughness. Yet the
giveaway always came when the perceptual significance of a word became
critical: "I see that you're skeptical," said when I was nodding in
agreement, for example. "I see" cannot "mean" the same thing to a blind
person as to a sighted one.

The other side of this is that perceptions above a certain level are
independent of sensory modality: "fairness" does not refer to vision or
sound or touch or smell, but to relationships among people and strategies
by which they deal with each other in any modality. We perceive these
relationships, categories, sequences, strategies, principles, and so on,
and -- to be a little more germane -- use a word like "fairness" to refer
to certain experiences at those levels -- I can't be more specific. The
experiences come first; when we hear people talking about "fairness" or
"unfairness" when those experiences are happening, we can acquire a direct
perceptual meaning for the term. Or we might acquire a perception of a
logical proposition: "A is being fair to B and C if A punishes or rewards B
and C exactly the same way for the same behaviors."

But then we may fail to recognized the same term when used with other
experiences: A 13-year-old girl forbidden by her parents to dress like a
prostitute may well complain of "unfairness," when the only perception she
refers to by this term is that of not being allowed to do whatever she
wants to do. It makes no difference that her parents apply the same rule to
all the girls in the family: it's still not "fair." People often use words
simply to give themselves any advantage they can. Consider the "Clean Air Act."

I think that "meaning," like many other words we casually use, is not very
useful, and that we can deal with the same phenomena in other and clearer ways.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Rick Marken (2003.09.27.1740)]

Bill Powers (2003.09.27.0855 MDT)--

Bruce Nevin (2003.09.26.2249 EDT) --

As Rick correctly points out, you can't use the words fluently and
appropriately unless you have their meanings. Yes, meanings are also
in
the realm of perception. But they are not identical with those
perceptions
that we take to be the referents of words.

I think that people can use words fluently and appropriately even when
the
only referents of words are other words, or even nothing at all but
familiar sounds. An excellent example is in a science-fiction story
called
"The Gostak and the Doshes," by Miles J. Breuer, M.D. (Amazing Stories,
March 1930). Here is a sample, from the part where a man gets
transported
to another world and is learning from its inhabitants. He has heard
someone
saying, "The gostak distims the doshes", and asks a new friend

I agree. My point to Bruce was simply that this couldn't work if word
order were all that were involved. But your example makes me realize
that, in English (not Latin, I hear) a lot of information about the
_kind_ of perception to which a word refers comes, at least in part,
from word order and other grammatical pointers (like the articles and
plurals) . In the "gostak" sentence, we know that "gostak" is some kind
of entity because it follows "the" and it's in the first part of the
sentence. Similarly, we know that "distims" refers to some kind of
activity done by the "gostak" because it must be a verb. Similarly,
"doshes" must be another kind of entity that is "distimed" by the
"gostak"; "doshes" is a direct object (and plural). So I do imagine
something going on when I hear this sentence; the sentence has meaning
in the sense that it does evoke some kind of perceptual imagery in me.
It would be much harder to get any meaning if all the words were
nonsense: "retrem gostak distim doledred dosh". By removing just the
articles and pluralization the meaningfulness of the sentence (in terms
of imagined perceptions that are evoked by these "words") decreases
substantially.

Best regards

Rick

Richard S. Marken

marken@mindreadings.com
Home 310 474-0313
Cell 310 729-1400

[From Bill Powers (2003.09.28.0819 MDT)]

Rick Marken (2003.09.27.1740)--

your example makes me realize that, in English (not Latin, I hear) a lot
of information about the _kind_ of perception to which a word refers
comes, at least in part, from word order and other grammatical pointers
(like the articles and plurals).

True. "The" or "An" would never be followed by a verb, would they? And word
order is a sequence-level perception. which can indicate the direction of
an action: John ate chicken is not the same as chicken ate John. It might
be interesting to see a grammar based on levels of perception.

B estg,

Bill P.

···

In the "gostak" sentence, we know that "gostak" is some kind
of entity because it follows "the" and it's in the first part of the
sentence. Similarly, we know that "distims" refers to some kind of
activity done by the "gostak" because it must be a verb. Similarly,
"doshes" must be another kind of entity that is "distimed" by the
"gostak"; "doshes" is a direct object (and plural). So I do imagine
something going on when I hear this sentence; the sentence has meaning
in the sense that it does evoke some kind of perceptual imagery in me.
It would be much harder to get any meaning if all the words were
nonsense: "retrem gostak distim doledred dosh". By removing just the
articles and pluralization the meaningfulness of the sentence (in terms
of imagined perceptions that are evoked by these "words") decreases
substantially.

Best regards

Rick

Richard S. Marken

marken@mindreadings.com
Home 310 474-0313
Cell 310 729-1400

[Bruce Nevin (2003.09.28 23:12 EDT)]

Bill Powers (2003.09.28.0819 MDT)--

···

At 08:25 AM 9/28/2003 -0600, Bill Powers wrote:

ord
order is a sequence-level perception. which can indicate the direction of
an action: John ate chicken is not the same as chicken ate John.

What do you do about languages with VSO, or OVS, or OSV as the preferred word order, rather than SVO (subject-verb-object) like English? Does sequence indicate the direction of an action in those as well?

         /Bruce Nevin

[From Bill Powers (2003.09.29.-643 MDT)]

Bruce Nevin (2003.09.28 23:12 EDT)--

order is a sequence-level perception. which can indicate the direction of
an action: John ate chicken is not the same as chicken ate John.

What do you do about languages with VSO, or OVS, or OSV as the preferred
word order, rather than SVO (subject-verb-object) like English? Does
sequence indicate the direction of an action in those as well?

I would think so, although the word-sequence doesn't have to be the same as
the sequence it indicates. A configuration of letters doesn't have to look
like the real configuration it names. I meant "indicate" only in the weak
sense that the sequence dimension of language is available to designate the
order in which events occur without any explicit statement about the order
per se. The sentence "John saw Mary" might be understood by a speaker of an
OVS language to indicate that Mary was the seer, and that same speaker
would understand the reverse word order to indicate the reverse order of
action.

Best,

Bill

···

        /Bruce Nevin

This is Phil Runkel in answer to Bill Powers of 2003.09.28.1039.

But I am addressing Bruce Nevin.

Hey Bruce: I felt needled by Bill P's remark that you would get more
replies from people who felt needled than from people who felt
enlightened. Or words to that effect. Of course, I suppose some feel
both.

Anyway, I felt urged to say that I enjoy reading your remarks about
origin of language and neighboring topics. I hope other lurkers are
having as happy a time with them as I. Persist! Persist!

--Phil R.

[From Rick Marken (2003.10.06.2220)]

Phil Runkel in answer to Bill Powers of 2003.09.28.1039.

Anyway, I felt urged to say that I enjoy reading your remarks about
origin of language and neighboring topics. I hope other lurkers are
having as happy a time with them as I. Persist! Persist!

Hi Phil --

I've been having a somewhat less happy time with Bruce's posts on
language (though I have appreciated them very much), maybe because I'm
not sure I know what Bruce is trying to say. I thought Bruce was saying
something like: word meanings are not the perceptions (or imaginations)
to which the words point, rather they are something else. I couldn't
figure out what that meant. I'd really appreciate it if you could tell
me what you think Bruce is saying. Maybe if I had a second explanation
-- from another good explainer like yourself -- I could effectively
"triangulate" Bruce's meaning. I think that would be fair;-)

Best regards

Rick

···

---
Richard S. Marken
marken@mindreadings.com
Home 310 474-0313
Cell 310 729-1400

[From Rick Marken (2003.10.07.0845)]

Bruce Nevin (2003.10.07 11:05 EDT)
Bruce Nevin (2003.09.28 23:01 EDT) (Subject: Meaning)–

The environmental perceptions to which a word
refers are part of the word’s meaning. The perceptions that constitute
the referential meaning are specific referents to which the words
refer on this occasion. There are also other perceptions that might be
specific referents of the words on other occasions.

The rest of that post is about non-referential aspects of meaning
in language. These aspects of the meaning of an utterance are perceived
(they are perceptions), and the experiments I cited seem to show that they
are controlled, but they are not perceptions that this word or that word
in the utterance points to.

OK. So would it be fair to say that meaning is always a perception that
is pointed to in some way by words but that there are meanings (perceptions)
that are not pointed to by single words. If so, I agree, of course, and
examples are easy to find. “Joe kissed Mary” means something quite different
(points to a different imagined perception) than “Mary kissed Joe”. The
individual words “Joe”, “kissed” and “Mary” point to the same perceptions
in both cases but the perceived (imagined) relationships between those
perceptions are different depending on word order. I would say this is
a difference in the referential meaning of the two sentences.
Best regards

Rick

···

Richard S. Marken, Ph.D.

Senior Behavioral Scientist

The RAND Corporation

PO Box 2138

1700 Main Street

Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138

Tel: 310-393-0411 x7971

Fax: 310-451-7018

E-mail: rmarken@rand.org

[From Bruce Nevin (2003.10.07 1058 EDT)]

Thank you, Phil. As you know, writing to be understood takes time.

I prefer not to reply just when needled. What's the point? I'd rather turn needles into pitchforks. Write all that 'response' stuff down, or think it through, and then pitch out the sodden crap. (Sorry, too much time watching my daughter muck stalls.) If I fling it back, more returns, what a mess, can anything of worth be found?

I think it was Mark Twain who closed a letter saying "I would have made it shorter, but I didn't have time."

         /B

···

At 06:04 PM 10/6/2003 -0700, Philip Runkel wrote:

This is Phil Runkel in answer to Bill Powers of 2003.09.28.1039.

But I am addressing Bruce Nevin.

Hey Bruce: I felt needled by Bill P's remark that you would get more
replies from people who felt needled than from people who felt
enlightened. Or words to that effect. Of course, I suppose some feel
both.

Anyway, I felt urged to say that I enjoy reading your remarks about
origin of language and neighboring topics. I hope other lurkers are
having as happy a time with them as I. Persist! Persist!

--Phil R.

[From Bruce Nevin (2003.10.07 11:05 EDT)]

Rick Marken (2003.10.06.2220)–

I thought Bruce was saying

something like: word meanings are not the perceptions (or
imaginations)

to which the words point, rather they are something else.

Bruce Nevin (2003.09.28 23:01 EDT) (Subject: Meaning)–

The environmental perceptions to which a word
refers are part of the word’s meaning. The perceptions that constitute
the referential meaning are specific referents to which the words
refer on this occasion. There are also other perceptions that might be
specific referents of the words on other occasions.

The rest of that post is about non-referential aspects of meaning in
language. These aspects of the meaning of an utterance are perceived
(they are perceptions), and the experiments I cited seem to show that
they are controlled, but they are not perceptions that this word or that
word in the utterance points to.

    /Bruce

Nevin

···

At 10:18 PM 10/6/2003 -0700, Rick Marken wrote:

[From Bill Powers (2003.10.07.0919 MDT)]

Rick Marken (2003.10.06.2220)--

I thought Bruce was saying something like: word meanings are not the
perceptions (or imaginations) to which the words point, rather they are
something else. I couldn't figure out what that meant.

As we left our hero in the last episode, I believe Bruce had asserted that
the "meaning" of a word is the sum of all its referents of all kinds. And I
had asked how that could be, since a word can indicate totally different
and even incompatible things over all its usages.

While I echo Phil Runkel's admiration of Bruce's writings, and of his very
wide familiarity with his field and those tangential to it, this does not
mean that I automatically accept everything in the accepted wisdom that he
reports. I think that discussions of meaning that I have seen in the
literature (perhaps an unlucky selection because the sample is small) tend
to fade off into ectoplasm. And I definitely don't believe either that
words "have" meanings, or that a word has "a" meaning. What I do sort of
believe is that this thing people have quested after for so long, calling
it "meaning", is just the set of all nonverbal perceptions at all levels of
perception. Perceptions in a hierarchy are many-to-one functions of
lower-level perceptions, and so fit Bruces criterion that the same
perception can arise in many different situations. So what he means by
"meaning" is identically what I mean by "perception."

Best,

Bill P.

[From Kenny Kitzke (2003.10.07.0919 MDT)]

For Bill Powers:

Bill, I tried to answer a post to you privately. It was bounced back as undeliverable. I used your E-mail address that appears in the CSGNet messages next to From: powers_w@EARTHLINK.NET.

I seem to recall you did change your personal E-mail address but did not save it thinking I could always reply to you privately from a CSGNet post. So, is this one above current or old?

Could you please send me privately, or post on the List, to confirm your current E-mail address? And, if you have a different one, perhaps you can change the address shown on CSGNet which might be helpful for others who want to reply in private to you.

Thanks,

Kenny

[From Bill Powers (2003.10.07.1056 MDT)]

Bruce Nevin (2003.10.07 11:05 EDT)--

The rest of that post is about non-referential aspects of meaning in
language. These aspects of the meaning of an utterance are perceived (they
are perceptions), and the experiments I cited seem to show that they are
controlled, but they are not perceptions that this word or that word in
the utterance points to.

Rick Marken (2003.10.07.0845) --

So would it be fair to say that meaning is always a perception that is
pointed to in some way by words but that there are meanings (perceptions)
that are not pointed to by single words.

Are we all in agreement now? Individual words directly point to perceptions
(if they actually have any meaning -- not all words do). Combinations of
words can indicate perceptions to which no single word points. All meanings
are perceptions, and those that are not words or linguistic entities in
themselves (such as the meaning of "adjective") are nonverbal perceptions.
What have I left out?

Also, I take it that "referential" refers to low-order perceptions that we
may experience as part of the environment. Would a word like "safety" be
considered to have a specific environmental referent? How about "fear"? In
PCT, of course, they would refer to higher-order or internal perceptions,
respectively.

Best,

Bill P.

[From Rick Marken (2003.10.07.1510)]

Bill Powers (2003.10.07.1344 MDT)

We expect words, phrases, and sentences to call _some_ sort of
experience to mind, and when they do not, we are quite likely to imagine
something, as we imagine "intelligence" to refer to something.

I agree. That's why I think there is no such thing as a "meaningless word". If
something is seen as a word then it is assumed that it points to some perception
or contributes to this pointing in combination with other words. If "skergs" is
seen as a word then it would be presumed that it points to some perception (a
think, an action, a principle, etc) or contributes to that pointing (as do
articles like "a" and "the"). If it's not seen as a word then there is no question
of whether means anything (in terms of how it contributes to pointing to a
perception). It's like asking what the the first few notes in the 4th Brandenberg
Concerto "mean". They don't mean anything; they just _are_ the perceptions that
they are.

I think the catch here is in "known and recognized as a word and not as a
meaningless sound". All "actual words" are meaningless sounds until they
are assigned a meaning, aren't they? And if they have been assigned a
meaning, they can't possibly be meaningless.

Yes.

The fact that we know what we want a sentence to mean before we have even
tried to formulate it tells me that words and sentences do not "have"
meanings; meanings govern our use of words.

Well said. I definitely get (and accept) your meaning.

Actually, I'm rather pleased
with the way that sentence turned out, even though I suspect that you're
going to argue with it.

Well, I certainly am not going to argue about it. That sentence evokes in my
imagination a concept of language that is completely consistent with my own
concept of what I am doing when I'm using language: I know what I want to mean
when I speak (or write) and I try to evoke that meaning in myself (and, thus,
presumably in others) by selecting the appropriate words (given my knowledge of
the meanings evoked by various words) and constructing the appropriate sentences
(given my knowledge of the meanings evoked by particular arrangements of words and
word types).

Best regards

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken, Ph.D.
Senior Behavioral Scientist
The RAND Corporation
PO Box 2138
1700 Main Street
Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138
Tel: 310-393-0411 x7971
Fax: 310-451-7018
E-mail: rmarken@rand.org

[From Bruce Nevin (2003.10.07 15:21 EDT)]

Bill Powers (2003.10.07.1056 MDT)--

Are we all in agreement now?

You and Rick seem to be converging on agreement.

Paraphrase can demonstrate understanding. This is often (always?) the basis for successful communication. It works kind of like the coin game. Person A says something. Person B paraphrases it. Oversimplifying somewhat, A says "no" or "yes" until the paraphrase is right.

The simple answer is no, neither of you has paraphrased what I said. I tried to say it carefully and clearly. In the demand for rapid response things get less carefully said, so rather than try to restate them I'd like to leave those posts out there as a common reference point. The main one for this thread is
Bruce Nevin (2003.09.28 23:01 EDT) Meaning
Also relevant are
   Bruce Nevin (2003.09.28 23:12 EDT) Re: fairness and meaning
   Bruce Nevin (2003.09.28.1140 EDT) Language origin & change
   Bruce Nevin (2003.09.28.1157 EDT) Stories, explanations, concepts

I've provided some help. In
   Bruce Nevin (2003.10.07 11:05 EDT) Re: fairness and meaning
I juxtaposed relevant passages to Rick's paraphrase. They show plainly some differences between his paraphrase and what I had said. I thought this would help him to make a more successful paraphrase. (In the coin game, this would be like pointing out some salient feature that all the coin configurations had in common. We don't do that in the coin game, but after all one of its purposes is to demonstrate the difficulty of identifying the controlled variable. In the understanding game we're expected to be more helpful.) If Rick makes what I recognize as a paraphrase, it would show me that he had understood what I said.

I'll provide some more help. In your post, Bill, you said that not all words actually have any meaning. Here, I'll quote the passage:

Individual words directly point to perceptions
(if they actually have any meaning -- not all words do).

I think this follows from your assumption that the only meaning of a word is its referential meaning, that is, its 'pointing to' some perception or perceptions. This assumption, of course, is what I have been challenging, and it appears that you and Rick are defending it, so perhaps it is a controlled variable. To take the heat off of potential conflict between us -- polarization can interfere with understanding -- let's look at it from a different angle.

Suppose a certain word is, indeed, meaningless. If it has no meaning, then it can occur anywhere in an utterance: at the beginning, between any pair of words, at the end, even inside a word. Like the sound of clearing your throat. That can occur anywhere. Irrelevant to anyone listening. Or like a coffee stain on the page. Irrelevant to anyone reading. (Assume the words aren't obscured, you aren't worried about the person's health or the damage to your book, and other such extraneous things.)

To put some precision on it, the chances of its occurring in one place or another are equally probable, relative to the words. So call this the equiprobability test. If you can plunk it down anywhere in any random sentence or utterance, then it's meaningless. And for it to be indeed meaningless, it must pass the equiprobability test.

Propose a candidate for a word that has no meaning. It must, of course, be a word by other criteria that I think must be acceptable to you -- spelling, phonology, being known and recognized as a word and not as a meaningless sound, things like that. An actual word, but one that you say has no meaning. Now, apply the test of equiprobability to it.

What constrains your control of the location of the word relative to other words is your control of its meaning.

Please look again at what I said before and try some other paraphrases. It's like the coin game. I'll play fair.

         /Bruce Nevin

···

At 11:13 AM 10/7/2003 -0600, Bill Powers wrote:

[From Bill Powers (2003.10.07.1344 MDT)]

Bruce Nevin (2003.10.07 15:21 EDT)--

I'll have to track down those posts, since my archiving is done outside the
mail program. In the meantime, it's good of you to provide something to
work with...

I'll provide some more help. In your post, Bill, you said that not all
words actually have any meaning. Here, I'll quote the passage:

Individual words directly point to perceptions
(if they actually have any meaning -- not all words do).

I think this follows from your assumption that the only meaning of a word
is its referential meaning, that is, its 'pointing to' some perception or
perceptions. This assumption, of course, is what I have been challenging,
and it appears that you and Rick are defending it, so perhaps it is a
controlled variable. To take the heat off of potential conflict between us
-- polarization can interfere with understanding -- let's look at it from a
different angle.

Suppose a certain word is, indeed, meaningless. If it has no meaning, then
it can occur anywhere in an utterance: at the beginning, between any pair
of words, at the end, even inside a word.

This is a rather odd, or perhaps I should say specialized, way of defining
"meaningless." I should think that a meaningless word would be skomigh
partcherel, since inserting it into a sentence could send the reader's
brain off into a vain attempt to turn it into some perception, whether it
occurred by itself or in a meaningless combination of words (was that Low
Swedish?). We expect words, phrases, and sentences to call _some_ sort of
experience to mind, and when they do not, we are quite likely to imagine
something, as we imagine "intelligence" to refer to something.

As I recall, in the examples you discussed, what was designated as a
"non-referential" meaning was in each case simply a reference to a
higher-order perception -- a referential meaning if you include _all_
perceptions in the definition of referential, not just aspects of the
environment. But my memory could be faulty so I'll leave that point for later.

Propose a candidate for a word that has no meaning. It must, of course, be
a word by other criteria that I think must be acceptable to you --
spelling, phonology, being known and recognized as a word and not as a
meaningless sound, things like that. An actual word, but one that you say
has no meaning. Now, apply the test of equiprobability to it.

I think the catch here is in "known and recognized as a word and not as a
meaningless sound". All "actual words" are meaningless sounds until they
are assigned a meaning, aren't they? And if they have been assigned a
meaning, they can't possibly be meaningless. You could possibly know and
recognize "skomigh" and "partcherel" since I used them just above, but if
you were just learning English you might waste some time in trying to
remember what they mean, or what the two-word phase means. To realize that
they have no meanings is to recognize that they are meaningless sounds --
of course. But by the definition you seem to be offering, this implies that
they are NOT WORDS, so you can't lose. Any sounds or marks that look like
words but have no meanings are not words: therefore, all words have
meanings. By your definitions there can be no such thing as a meaningless
word, although there can be meaninless sounds and meaningless written
configurations.

I don't buy the test of equiprobability, because inserting meaningless
sounds and marks into a sentence is not the same as not inserting them.
They stand out as what one might at first mistake for a word (using your
definition), but which then prove to be unfamiliar. If you are not
completely confident that what you see or hear is not a word (perhaps
because you're not very confident of your spelling skills or your grasp of
an accent), you will try to _make_ it into a word; that is, see it as a
possible misspelling or a mispronunciation, and imagine that the originator
mean some other word that is familiar. If I write "hte word" you will
kindly assume that I meant "the" and not the meaningless "hte", since "the"
has a meaning and "hte" does not.

What constrains your control of the location of the word relative to other
words is your control of its meaning.

Of course the location of a word relative to other words is not itself a
word, although it is a perception. So the location can have meaning, or it
can have no meaning, depending on whether it is part of a language
convention. Tjhe relative location points to the perception we have agreed
it shall point to.

I think meaning is slightly more complex than a simple "constraint". We
know what meaning we want to express, and we adjust the reference states
for our utterances until the meaning we get from hearing what we say
matches the meaning we intend to get. This is an indirect constraint: the
intended meaning constrains the sentences we utter, but not simply by
having a direct influence on them. The constraint works through a control
process whereby we vary the utterance until it has the intended meaning. Of
course we learn many output functions that will produce intended meanings
without much effort when what we're trying to express is simple, trite, or
extremely familiar so we always express it with the same words in the same
order. But when we try to express less familiar meanings, meanings we may
never have attempted to communicate before, a lot of trial and error goes
on, some overt but a great deal of it covert and invisible to other
Observers. For all you know, I wrote this paragraph in one take -- but that
is very far from the truth. I knew what meaning I wanted to convey, but I
did not know immediately a way to convey it. That took a few tries.

The fact that we know what we want a sentence to mean before we have even
tried to formulate it tells me that words and sentences do not "have"
meanings; meanings govern our use of words. Actually, I'm rather pleased
with the way that sentence turned out, even though I suspect that you're
going to argue with it.

Or maybe not: is this "error" or "no error?"

Best,

Bill P.

This is Phil Runkel responding to Marken's request of 2003.10.06.2220.

Rick: Oh, sorry. I have not kept copies of those contributions of
Nevin's. I have not been reading critically. Bruce's descriptions have
struck me as internally consistent and as matching very well the way I
think people behave with language, and he portrayed behavior sequences
that I had previously known nothing about. So I have been happy with
that state of affairs, and have felt no need to protest. If a sentence
or two did not seem just right to me, I did not feel a need to complain.

Sorry not to help. --Phil R.

[From Bruce Nevin (2003.10.07 15:21 EDT)]

Bill Powers (2003.10.07.1344 MDT)--

This is a rather odd, or perhaps I should say specialized, way of defining
"meaningless."

Not at all. A word that is meaningless conveys zero information. The information 'carried' by a word correlates directly to (is measured by) its combinability with other words. Our perception of the meaning of a word is what constrains us from putting it in one place rather than another. Thornbushn't that right?

I should think that a meaningless word would be skomigh
partcherel, [etc. etc.]

I didn't think this would be so complicated for you. You said that not all words have any meaning. Or, more exactly, you said

Bill Powers (2003.10.07.1056 MDT)--

Individual words directly point to perceptions
(if they actually have any meaning -- not all words do).

My paraphrase of "not all words do [have meaning]" is that you know some words that you judge to be meaningless. All you have to do now is list some of them. Very simple. I assume you meant words in our common language, English. That's what I meant. Perhaps one of them was "patriotism". I think you mentioned that in an earlier post. Or "intelligence".

We expect words, phrases, and sentences to call _some_ sort of
experience to mind, and when they do not, we are quite likely to imagine
something, as we imagine "intelligence" to refer to something.

That line of thought could lead in an interesting direction. Connect it to the blind child learning to control the semantics of "look" and "green," and to Gleitman's experiments.

         /Bruce Nevin

···

At 02:51 PM 10/7/2003 -0600, Bill Powers wrote:

[From Bruce Nevin (2003.10.07 23:45 EDT)]

[Re-sent with corrected timestamp.]

Bill Powers (2003.10.07.1344 MDT)--

This is a rather odd, or perhaps I should say specialized, way of defining
"meaningless."

Not at all. A word that is meaningless conveys zero information. The information 'carried' by a word correlates directly to (is measured by) its combinability with other words. Our perception of the meaning of a word is what constrains us from putting it in one place rather than another. Thornbushn't that right?

I should think that a meaningless word would be skomigh
partcherel, [etc. etc.]

I didn't think this would be so complicated for you. You said that not all words have any meaning. Or, more exactly, you said

Bill Powers (2003.10.07.1056 MDT)--

Individual words directly point to perceptions
(if they actually have any meaning -- not all words do).

My paraphrase of "not all words do [have meaning]" is that you know some words that you judge to be meaningless. All you have to do now is list some of them. Very simple. I assume you meant words in our common language, English. That's what I meant. Perhaps one of them was "patriotism". I think you mentioned that in an earlier post. Or "intelligence".

We expect words, phrases, and sentences to call _some_ sort of
experience to mind, and when they do not, we are quite likely to imagine
something, as we imagine "intelligence" to refer to something.

That line of thought could lead in an interesting direction. Connect it to the blind child learning to control the semantics of "look" and "green," and to Gleitman's experiments.

         /Bruce Nevin

···

At 02:51 PM 10/7/2003 -0600, Bill Powers wrote:

[From Rick Marken (2003.10.07.2200)]

Bruce Nevin (2003.10.07 23:45 EDT)

A word that is meaningless conveys zero information.

Apparently, you believe that the information conveyed by a word is
where it can be used in a sentence. You call this information
"meaning". I call it "part of speech" (verb, noun, preposition, etc).

Our perception of the meaning of a word is
what constrains us from putting it in one place rather than another.
Thornbushn't that right?

It's right if you want the meaning of "meaning" to be "part of speech".
But I couldn't even answer that question unless I assumed that
"Thornbushn't" points to the meaning (in perceptual terms) of the
sentence that precedes it. And the meaning of that sentence (to me) is
that "meaning" is the perception of a word's part of speech. Given that
definition of "meaning", my reply could be something like "The
swordfish plays canasta" and it would be perfectly appropriate and
meaningful.

My paraphrase of "not all words do [have meaning]" is that you know
some
words that you judge to be meaningless. All you have to do now is list
some
of them. Very simple. I assume you meant words in our common language,
English. That's what I meant. Perhaps one of them was "patriotism". I
think
you mentioned that in an earlier post. Or "intelligence".

So words like "patriotism" and "intelligence" have "part of speech"
meaning but no "denotative" meaning. Is that right? So the meaning of
"The man handed the patriotism to the President" and "The man handed
the intelligence to the President" are indistinguishable to you? They
should be if "patriotism" and "intelligence" are denotatively
meaningless but "part of speech" meaningful. They are both nouns.

Best

Rick

···

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