Meaning of meaning (was Wending one's weary way?)

Re: Meaning of meaning (was Wending one’s weary
way?)
[Martin Taylor 2004.08.03.0955]

[From Bruce Nevin (08.03.2004 07:39
EDT)]

Martin Taylor 2004.08.02.1624]

Since when did “wend” become
archaic? Must have been in my lifetime, and I never noticed, because I
still use it when the circumstances are appropriate. It doesn’t mean
the same as “go”, anyway, at least not nowadays. Maybe it
once did, since “go” is cognate to Germanic words that refer
to walking as opposed to being transported.

Thus, present-day went is in
origin the past tense of a different verb with a meaning that hasn’t
been in use for many centuries, and present-day wend is a much
later revival of a different sense of that word.

After the past tense went was assigned the broader meanings
of go, its other tenses were restricted to increasingly narrow
usage, and it was on the way to disappearing altogether when the
alliterative phrase wend their way, etc. was revived as an
idiom around 1800. Subsequently, we even have wended as a
back-formation in this restricted usage, completing the separation
from went, so that wend is now unarguably a different
word.
This sort of thing has no explanation in
a theory that sees the forms of language as a byproduct of controlling
meanings: go has its meaning, -ed has its meaning, and
to control the composite meaning one can only saygoed.

Fascinating linguistic history, but I don’t follow the steps
leading from the historical discussion to the claim in the last
paragraph. It’s not obvious to me that there is, in principle,
“no explanation.”

I keep harping on the ambiguity of the word “meaning”
as used by you and Bill P. Perhaps if its “meaning” were to
be clarified, the two of you might have an easier time coming to an
agreement.

Is “meaning” a categoric perception or an
analogue perception?

Is it determined by the relations of a word to other
words within a finite network such as is provided by an extensive
dictionary?

Or by the relation of a word to other words as
encountered in an unbounded network consisting of the words
encountered by a listener/speaker during a lifetime?

Is “meaning” simply the effect of a word
in context when offered to the sensory apparatus of another?

If the latter, can the “meaning” of a word
be extracted from its verbal and situational context?

Is the “meaning” of a word I utter (or
write) the effect I anticipate it having on my perception of my
interlocutor?

And so forth.

Is the last paragraph a sentence? Does it have any
“meaning”? Do these questions suggest why I have a problem
with “no explanation in a theory that sees the forms of language
as a byproduct of controlling meanings.” If the last listed
question about the meaning of “meaning” has a “yes”
answer, the required explanation falls out as an unforced consequence
of the theory (See the 1993 CSG meeting tape).

[From Bruce Nevin (08.03.2004 08:33 EDT)]

At the extreme, a single phoneme can be a
complete syllable, a complete morpheme, a complete word, a complete
phrase, a complete sentence. “Oh,” you might reply.
“Ah.” (There are better examples in other
languages.)

I am reminded of what is said to have been an exchange of letters
between Victor Hugo and the publisher of his recently published book.
Here is the complete text of the letters:

Hugo: “?”

Publisher: “!”

Even if this story turns out to be apocryphal, it does illustrate
the problem in trying to assign a “meaning” to a word apart
from its context. I think both letters are completely intelligible
(carry all the necessary “meaning”) in context, and say all
that needed to be said.

Would that our dialogues would wend to a similarly succinct
conclusion.

Martin

···

At 04:28 PM 8/2/2004 -0400, Martin Taylor wrote:

[From Bruce Nevin (08.03.2004 17:30 EDT)]

Martin Taylor 2004.08.03.0955–

Fascinating linguistic history, but I don’t
follow the steps leading from the historical discussion to the claim in
the last paragraph. It’s not obvious to me that there is, in principle,
“no explanation.”

I keep harping on the ambiguity of the word “meaning” as used
by you and Bill P. Perhaps if its “meaning” were to be
clarified, the two of you might have an easier time coming to an
agreement.

I think that Bill and I have both taken the position that meaning is any
perceptions that one associates with an utterance.

(More broadly, any perceptions associated with other perceptions. Clouds
mean possible rain, carry an umbrella. John’s car in your driveway means
he is visiting. This is an obverse side of the observation that there are
many means of communicating aside from language. We’ll limit the
discussion to meanings that are associated with language.)

Such aspects of meaning are associated with language for all sorts of
idiosyncratic reasons reflecting differences of personal history and
temperament. I have distinguished an aspect of meaning called by Harris
linguistic information. The structure of language results from several
contributory layers of redundancy – departures from equiprobability in
the combination of elements. Not all phoneme sequences constitute
morphemes. Not all morpheme sequences constitute words and sentences. Not
all sentence sequences constitute coherent discourse.

The departures from equiprobability at the level of word combination and
sentence combination of course accord roughly with what we think of as
the meanings of what is said (roughly: incommodities of the
correspondence pass mostly without notice). However, there is great
consistency in the structure of a language from one fluent language user
to another, and by contrast there is notoriously no such consistency in
the broader types of meaning that different language users associate with
what is said and written in their language.

The informational structure of language is an aspect of meaning. As such,
it is included in the above description of meaning as “perceptions
that one associates with an utterance.” However, in this case the
perceptions that one associates with the utterance are perceptions of the
elements of the language and of the dependences among them that
constitute the structure of language. They are perceptions of conventions
in a public. They are not averages, and they are not exceptionless rules
like laws of nature. They may be followed or flouted, but they are
ignored only by foreigners. And of course by non-human animals.
(Historically, these have been confused more than once.)

Another way to see the distinction between linguistic information and
meaning more generally is to consider that you can know a language
without knowing all the meanings that can be associated with utterances
in that language (the meanings that, as we fondly say, can be
“expressed in” the language).

Is “meaning” a
categoric perception or an analogue perception?

Both, although language is categoric (“digital”). Some who have
developed supposed representations of meanings have got confused about
this. When they reify their favorite representation of meanings as the
meanings that it represents, they conclude that meaning itself has the
categorial nature that their language-like system of representation
has.

Is it determined by the relations
of a word to other words within a finite network such as is provided by
an extensive dictionary?

No. Although this is to a great extent true of dictionary definitions,
definitions are not meanings (as in the previous item, the map is not the
territory).

Or by the relation of a word to
other words as encountered in an unbounded network consisting of the
words encountered by a listener/speaker during a
lifetime?

Distributional analysis of a corpus comparable to this can identify the
redundancies in a language that correspond to meanings. The problem then
is how to represent those redundancies. Such a representation is not
itself the meanings, it is a representation of the information immanent
in language, and is thereby related to the more structured aspects of
meaning.

Is “meaning” simply the
effect of a word in context when offered to the sensory apparatus of
another?

If by “effect” you mean the perceptions that the recipient
associates with the utterance (word plus context), this is a restatement
of the position that I stated at the outset, on which I think Bill and I
agree: meaning is any perceptions that one associates with an
utterance.

If the latter, can the
“meaning” of a word be extracted from its verbal and
situational context?

What does such an “extract” look like? Such proposals run into
the problem of representation alluded to above. A representation of
meanings in language requires a system of representation which itself is
language-like, and which is obviously derived from language and dependent
upon its prior existence in a public.

Is the “meaning” of a
word I utter (or write) the effect I anticipate it having on my
perception of my interlocutor?

It depends upon whether your perception of anticipated effects on the
other exhausts the perceptions that you associate with the word. If you
say that it does, then you are saying that your perception of such
anticipated effects is the meaning of the word for you at that time. Few
would agree that this completed the definition of the word, and the
reason of course is that the word is a public property, while these
particular aspects of meaning are very private to you.

For most subject-matter domains, the combinability of any given word with
other words can be represented as a distribution function. In the
successive periods (roughly, predication structures) of a discourse,
recurrences of the given word in combination with specific other words
restricts the subsequent co-occurrence possibilities for the word. As my
friend Stephen Johnson (Director of Medical Informatics at Columbia
Presbyterian) put it in a recent email reply to both of us,

Contrary to what many lay persons believe,
words do not have

precisely defined meanings. Instead, each word has a distribution

with regard to likelihood of occurrence with other words in the

dependence structure. As a rough analogy, each word is a wave. As

words are used together in sentences and discourse, they

interfere, and become increasingly particle like: the distribution

collapses to a point.

The wavelike nature of words allows for enormous flexibility, and

the ability to be increasingly precise as needed by adding more

words that are mutually constraining. The key point is that these

waveforms are largely fixed by social convention. These behaviors

are observable, allowing one to investigate empirically the

transmission of objective information.

In a disciplined domain such as the sublanguage of a science, meanings
can approach the categorial “selection restriction” that
certain linguists and philosophers have looked for, a binary demarcation
between sense and nonsense. One reason is that for such a sublanguage a
priori metalanguage statements are available outside the sublanguage,
restricting the grammar and specifying precise definitions of terms. This
is not possible for language as a whole. To some extent, it may be
possible to understand language in part as the envelope of its
sublanguages, but in most domains there is a great deal of borrowing from
other sublanguages and metaphor creating analogic extensions of what is
most strictly within the domain sublanguage.
A feature of language that has in fact been extensively used in the
language of dictionary definitions is the various kinds of classifier
vocabulary, familiar to us in the dachshund-dog-mammal-animal kinds of
terminological hierarchies (yet another type of hierarchy that is
orthogonal to the perceptual hierarchy). This has suggested to many
investigators the possibility of a kind of inheritance of distribution
(co-occurrence potential) upward and/or downward in the hierarchy. There
are obvious (and some not so obvious) difficulties, especially when this
is represented by a scheme of “semantic features”, e.g. the
existence of intersecting and inconsistent hierarchies, arbitrary gaps
and other defects, etc., stemming from the conventional and historically
contingent nature of language and the social context of language change,
borrowing, etc. And of course when such features are imagined to be
universal the scheme becomes completely bankrupt.
However, the classifier vocabulary for a subject-matter domain appears to
coincide reasonably well with the co-occurrence classes of the
sublanguage grammar, at least for sublanguages that have been
investigated, and these are found also in the organization of discourses
in the given subject-matter domain. Thus, in a medical sublanguage
classifier words like symptom, patient, body part are used in
metalanguage sentences stating the grammar and as names of the
recurrence-types of information structures in discourses in the domain,
permitting automated organization of various texts (including
hastily-written notes of doctors and nurses) into a structured database
used for epidemiological and administrative and other purposes. The
success of projects like this over the years constitute a kind of
existence demonstration of the validity of this sort of approach.
The classifier vocabulary is commonly used for cross-reference, and in
this light, pronouns and indefinites like one, some,
someone, any are the most general of classifier
words.

    /Bruce

Nevin

···

At 10:16 AM 8/3/2004 -0400, Martin Taylor wrote:

[Martin Taylor 2004.08.03.1756]

[From Bruce Nevin (08.03.2004 17:30 EDT)]

Martin Taylor 2004.08.03.0955--

Fascinating linguistic history, but I don't follow the steps
leading from the historical discussion to the claim in the last
paragraph. It's not obvious to me that there is, in principle, "no
explanation."

I keep harping on the ambiguity of the word "meaning" as used by
you and Bill P. Perhaps if its "meaning" were to be clarified, the
two of you might have an easier time coming to an agreement.

I think that Bill and I have both taken the position that meaning is
any perceptions that one associates with an utterance.

And I think your eloquent discussion is beginning to bring out the
complexities inherent in using the term "meaning" as if it had some
meaning of its own!

OK. So "meaning" (singular) is the set of perceptions (plural) that
one associates with an utterance (not a word). It is at least a
vector, then. That's useful to know.

Can "the same" utterance ever be repeated? In other words, is the
transform between an utternce and its meaning invertible? Or will the
fact that the situational context is inevitably different the second
time going to change the meaning of the utterance?

Can any third party guess the meaning of an utterance in a dialogue
to either of the parties involved in the feeback loops of the
dialogue? Does an utterance have a "meaning" that can be
distinguished from its function in a transaction between speaker and
listener?

I have distinguished an aspect of meaning called by Harris
linguistic information. The structure of language results from
several contributory layers of redundancy -- departures from
equiprobability in the combination of elements. Not all phoneme
sequences constitute morphemes. Not all morpheme sequences
constitute words and sentences. Not all sentence sequences
constitute coherent discourse.

The departures from equiprobability at the level of word combination
and sentence combination of course accord roughly with what we think
of as the meanings of what is said (roughly: incommodities of the
correspondence pass mostly without notice).

Of course, these probabilities change on all scales, from "spoken
English" (which differs from "written English") to, say, "cooking
English", to "my family cooking English", and between themes such as
"cooking", "banking", "canoeing" and so forth. The changes involve
not only the substantives related to the themes, but probably many of
the structural features. Structural features provide the redundancy
necessary when the listener is less well known to the speaker, either
personally or in thematic understanding, than when the speaker has
worked closely with the listener on the current topic.

However, there is great consistency in the structure of a language
from one fluent language user to another,

(given similar circumstances)

and by contrast there is notoriously no such consistency in the
broader types of meaning that different language users associate
with what is said and written in their language.

Another way to see the distinction between linguistic information
and meaning more generally is to consider that you can know a
language without knowing all the meanings that can be associated
with utterances in that language (the meanings that, as we fondly
say, can be "expressed in" the language).

   Is "meaning" a categoric perception or an analogue perception?

Both, although language is categoric ("digital").

Two perceptions, at least, then. And at different levels of the
"classic" HPCT hierarchy.

   Is it determined by the relations of a word to other words
within a finite network such as is provided by an extensive
dictionary?

No. Although this is to a great extent true of dictionary
definitions, definitions are not meanings (as in the previous item,
the map is not the territory).

OK. I had been getting the impression Bill P. thought that dictionary
definition had something to do with meaning.

   Or by the relation of a word to other words as encountered in an
unbounded network consisting of the words encountered by a
listener/speaker during a lifetime?

Distributional analysis of a corpus comparable to this can identify
the redundancies in a language that correspond to meanings. The
problem then is how to represent those redundancies. Such a
representation is not itself the meanings, it is a representation of
the information immanent in language, and is thereby related to the
more structured aspects of meaning.

I don't think this answer is responsive. I was asking about the kind
of approach computational analysis often uses, of the tendency for
words of, say, financial connotations to occur together more often
than those words co-occur with words relating to cooking or
paleontology. You talk a bit about this when you mention sublanguages
below, but even there you don't answer this question.

   Is "meaning" simply the effect of a word in context when offered
to the sensory apparatus of another?

If by "effect" you mean the perceptions that the recipient
associates with the utterance (word plus context), this is a
restatement of the position that I stated at the outset, on which I
think Bill and I agree: meaning is any perceptions that one
associates with an utterance.

"One" being independently the speaker, the intended hearer, and a
third party? To me the answer to this sub-question is definitively
"Yes, separate and distinct for all three, and different again for
different third-parties".

   If the latter, can the "meaning" of a word be extracted from its
verbal and situational context?

What does such an "extract" look like?

You answered this above, by asserting that a word has no meaning, but
an utterance does.

   Is the "meaning" of a word I utter (or write) the effect I
anticipate it having on my perception of my interlocutor?

It depends upon whether your perception of anticipated effects on
the other exhausts the perceptions that you associate with the word.

OK, we are back to "meaning" as being a long vector.

However, I have to disagree with your answer, in that I would argue
that meaning is related to the interpersonal transaction quite
separately from any intrapersonal transaction. More simply, I may
want to get something across, but to myself the word has many other
connotations that I am not interested in getting across. The
"meaning", to me, would involve only those elements I want to get
across to my interlocutor. The "meaning" to my interlocutor, would
not involve all her perceptions evoked by the word, but only those
that she perceives me to have intended to evoke.

If you say that it does, then you are saying that your perception of
such anticipated effects is the meaning of the word for you at that
time. Few would agree that this completed the definition of the
word, and the reason of course is that the word is a public
property, while these particular aspects of meaning are very private
to you.

AHAAAAH! "The word is a public property!!!" Now we come to the core
of the contention between you and Bill P., I think.

For most subject-matter domains, the combinability of any given word
with other words can be represented as a distribution function. In
the successive periods (roughly, predication structures) of a
discourse, recurrences of the given word in combination with
specific other words restricts the subsequent co-occurrence
possibilities for the word.

All of this is true, but we do have to come back to the notion of the
word as "public property."

Let's analyze what this means, because it is at the core of my
contention (with which I think you probably agree) that language,
along with other cultural features, can be treated as a perceptual
artifact in the same way as can a rock. We've talked at length about
this before.

What is "public property", in my view, is that in a given situation I
can use similar forms of behaviour (including using similar language)
with more or less predictable effect, when interacting with more or
less any member of what might be called a cultural group. In fact,
the interchangeability of people with whom I can use similar forms of
behaviour to get reasonably predictable effects is what defines "the
group."

As my friend Stephen Johnson (Director of Medical Informatics at
Columbia Presbyterian) put it in a recent email reply to both of us,

Contrary to what many lay persons believe, words do not have
precisely defined meanings. Instead, each word has a distribution
with regard to likelihood of occurrence with other words in the
dependence structure. As a rough analogy, each word is a wave. As
words are used together in sentences and discourse, they
interfere, and become increasingly particle like: the distribution
collapses to a point.

The wavelike nature of words allows for enormous flexibility, and
the ability to be increasingly precise as needed by adding more
words that are mutually constraining. The key point is that these
waveforms are largely fixed by social convention. These behaviors
are observable, allowing one to investigate empirically the
transmission of objective information.

I like this description. And it corresponds to the notion of "coarse
coding", which is an effective way of getting precision out of
low-resolution descriptions. (And incidentally, it corresponds to a
proposed weapon of the Second World War--see below).

At the end of this, I understand Stephen Johnson's analogy to be a
way to arrive at any one of the possibly many perceptions that you
say constitute the "meaning" of an utterance. To what he says, I
would argue that the process is one that occurs in the listener. The
speaker is attempting to generate the appropriate pattern of waves.

The proposed Second World War weapon was based on the fact that when
a stone is thrown into a pool, it excites a circular pattern of
ripples that lap against the shore. Reversing that pattern of
"shore-laps" in time ought to produce waves that coalesce at the
point where the stone slashed, and should recreate a splash. The idea
of the weapon was to line the English Channel coast with flapper
boards, compute the wave patters that would arrive at the shore if a
shell were to burst under an enemy ship, and to invert that pattern
to create a burst of water to up-end the ship! Of course, it was
never actually built.

I don't know if any of this is helping to clarify the dialogue betwee
you and Bill P., but it does make clear to me that it would be very
hard, if not impossible, to create two utterances with "the same"
meaning.

Martin

···

At 10:16 AM 8/3/2004 -0400, Martin Taylor wrote:

[From Bill Powers (2004.08.03.1956 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2004.08.03.1756 --

I'm about typed out for the day, but one last observation:

However, I have to disagree with your answer, in that I would argue
that meaning is related to the interpersonal transaction quite
separately from any intrapersonal transaction. More simply, I may
want to get something across, but to myself the word has many other
connotations that I am not interested in getting across. The
"meaning", to me, would involve only those elements I want to get
across to my interlocutor. The "meaning" to my interlocutor, would
not involve all her perceptions evoked by the word, but only those
that she perceives me to have intended to evoke.

My observation is almost the inverse of yours: it seems to me that much of
this discussion is organized around the implicit idea that words must be
connected systematically to meanings if meanings are to be understood. But
that's the old causal approach, isn't it? I think it's much more likely
that we will vary our communications in whatever ways are required to get a
sense that our meanings have been comprehended. I think there's been too
much emphasis on words evoking unique meanings. That's no more necessary
than it is to require that actions have unique consequences in the world.
If the consequence is not quite what we want, we vary the action to correct
the error. I think the same happens with meanings. If another person
doesn't seem to grasp the meaning we're trying to get across, we try
varying our words to see if some of the error can be eliminated. The point
of communication is not the words (outside linguistics), but meanings. When
we control meanings, the words become a means of control, so we can't
afford to be rigid about how we use words. There is no one right way to
produce a meaning.

Best,

Bill P.

[Martin Taylor 2004.08.03.2252]

[From Bill Powers (2004.08.03.1956 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2004.08.03.1756 --

I'm about typed out for the day, but one last observation:

However, I have to disagree with your answer, in that I would argue
that meaning is related to the interpersonal transaction quite
separately from any intrapersonal transaction. More simply, I may
want to get something across, but to myself the word has many other
connotations that I am not interested in getting across. The
"meaning", to me, would involve only those elements I want to get
across to my interlocutor. The "meaning" to my interlocutor, would
not involve all her perceptions evoked by the word, but only those
that she perceives me to have intended to evoke.

My observation is almost the inverse of yours: it seems to me that much of
this discussion is organized around the implicit idea that words must be
connected systematically to meanings if meanings are to be understood. But
that's the old causal approach, isn't it? I think it's much more likely
that we will vary our communications in whatever ways are required to get a
sense that our meanings have been comprehended. I think there's been too
much emphasis on words evoking unique meanings. That's no more necessary
than it is to require that actions have unique consequences in the world.
If the consequence is not quite what we want, we vary the action to correct
the error. I think the same happens with meanings. If another person
doesn't seem to grasp the meaning we're trying to get across, we try
varying our words to see if some of the error can be eliminated. The point
of communication is not the words (outside linguistics), but meanings. When
we control meanings, the words become a means of control, so we can't
afford to be rigid about how we use words. There is no one right way to
produce a meaning.

I don't know why you say that your observation is the inverse of
mine. You have expressed more succinctly what have I tried to say,
except that you included the whole feedback loop, whereas I referred
only to one pass through one link in the loop.

The point of the bit you quoted was that Bruce N. proposed that the
"meaning" (to me) of my utterance incorporated _all_ my perceptions
of the word or utterance, whereas I argued that it ought to include
only those of my perceptions that were involved with what I wanted my
interlocutor to perceive.

My intervention in your dialogue with Bruce was intended to
illustrate the many-faceted possibility for the meaning of "meaning".
In your comment here, you use "meaning" as if its meaning was
obvious, but I don't think it is obvious (or perhaps it's not agreed"
what is involved in "the meaning we're trying to get across". In LPT,
I finessed that issue by eliminating all talk of "meaning", and
treating language as an action that would have some effect on some
perception that involved the overt behaviour of the intended target
of the communication.

If you want to incorporate "meaning" into the LPT framework, I
suppose you could refer to the intended effects of the utterance on
the perceptions you are trying to control by the action of uttering
it. The "meaning" of "Can you open the window" is not (usually) that
the hearer should answer "Yes", but that the hearer should open the
window. I don't think this is the everyday implication of "meaning",
but it does seem to avoid a lot of irrelevant issues, and to cover
the everyday meaning into the bargain.

Martin

[From Bill Powers (2004.08.04.0232 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2004.08.03.2252--

I don't know why you say that your observation is the inverse of
mine. You have expressed more succinctly what have I tried to say,
except that you included the whole feedback loop, whereas I referred
only to one pass through one link in the loop.

OK,maybe inverse had a meaning for you that I didn't intend, which
illustrates both of our points. What I am pressing for is abandoning the
idea that words somehow carry meaning or information. The more we talk
about this, the more clear it seems to me that assigning meanings is
something each individual has to do independently, through experience with
the way others use words and even through private experimentation with the
uses of words as tools for creating mental pictures. We've seen a number of
amusing examples on CSGnet in which people report on words to which (they
belatedly discovered) they had assigned meanings different from the ones
other people have assigned, but with a rationale to take care of puzzling
usages. This is much like the way Dalton reported his discovery of
color-blindness, speaking about the way he worked out ways to reconcile
various inconsistencies in the way people described colors before he
discovered that he was color blind. I think this is how we come to
understand all words; we work out meanings to assign to them that make
sense to us and so that others seem to be using the words as we use them in
various contexts, in connection with actions, and so forth. I think this is
very similar to your view, and really to Bruce N.'s view too although Bruce
and I are having some difficulties finding sets of meanings that make sense
of the other's declarations. We have different vocabularies.

One thing I am very dubious about is the whole concept of redundancies as a
way of finding meanings. I think that phenomenon is real and interesting
but that it has little to do with the way the brain handles language. It's
a side-effect, not a mechanism. The picture forming in my mind is nowhere
near that complicated, which I hope does not end up revealing me as
simple-minded. If the picture I have in mind is correct, then we could
expect statistical studies to turn up stochastic regularities of the kind
Bruce mentions, but they would not be explanations; they would be
consequences of the real mechanisms. Wasn't all this talked about long ago,
in terms of transition probabilities, and eventually dropped as lacking
explanatory value?

Bruce mentions that meanings are much less consistent than the structure of
language (remember, this is all what I have constructed out of his words in
terms of my own experiences and may be different from his meanings). I find
this fact, as seen by a linguist, entirely consistent with the idea that
the primary purpose of using language is to evoke meanings that we wish (in
vain or not) to convey. We vary our uses of words until we think others
have experienced the meaning we intend; we also practice with words until
we have facility in recreating for ourselves the meanings that we intend,
by the same mechanisms through which we deal with words from other people.
This implies that when we compare meanings with word structures, there will
be considerable variance: we use different word structures to convey the
same meanings, and the same word structures to convey different meanings,
in different contexts in both cases. The words we use depend on the
meanings we intend to convey, but also on properties of the environmental
feedback loop -- the understandings of the other person as we perceive them
in various ways, and disturbances of various kinds, including
misunderstandings and confusions of words that sound too similar or have
multiple usages. It includes the way we understand our own varying
utterances. This is not because meanings are less consistent than words. It
is because words are being varied due to their imperfect properties as
evokers of the meanings we want, and also because of disturbances.

It is the words that end up varying the most, while the meanings are being
controlled more or less effectively. A perfect example of a feedback
control process. The words and word-structures may seem the most
consistent, just as the physical properties of muscles and bones make the
mechanisms of movement more regular and repeatable than the movements they
produce. But movements and their effects end up being the most repeatable
phenomena of all, while muscle forces are varied in unpredictable ways
(because we can't predict or even detect most disturbances that we have to
counteract). So I say it is with meanings. Language may have a very regular
structure (relative to meanings), but it is the meanings we control, and
that turn out to be the most regular in terms of our intentions. If you
normalize to language, this makes meanings seem the most variable, but
actually it is the other way around. Basically, I don't care what words I
use if I think my meanings are getting across and are clear at least to me.
I will change my words and word-structures however required to maintain the
"right meaning." That is the consistency I care about.

···

-------------------------
I think that Bruce is right in saying that meanings include all perceptions
passively evoked by communication or actively assigned to communication,
and I think you are right in saying that some part of the evoked meanings
turns out of be irrelevant to the intended communication. That distinction
of passive and active assignment of meaning, by the way, just occurred to
me and is worth giving some thought to.

Passive assignment of meaning would occur through "association", an
automatic response to a stimulus occuring perhaps in memory. This sort of
assignment would seem to support a notion that words "carry" meaning, which
is to say evoke standard meanings through built-in mechanisms. Active
assignment would be what a control system does: it performs a learned
process that converts a set of inputs (words) into a set of perceptual
signals (meanings) of (usually) other kinds. That kind of assignment
involves effort, an attempt to understand, to find among one's experiences
a meaning that will "make sense" of the words. It involves a whole feedback
loop, as opposed to association, which is basically an open-loop
phenomenon. I don't have a clear picture of what that feedback loop is, but
clearly this idea suggests something that one has to understand control
theory to grasp.

I don't know why my brain has decided to start having ideas at 2:30 am, but
writing them accomplishes at least one end: I'm sleepy again.

Best,

Bill

[From Bruce Nevin (08.06.2004 17:12 EDT)]

Martin Taylor 2004.08.03.1756–

[From Bruce Nevin
(08.03.2004 17:30 EDT)]

I think that Bill and I have both taken the position that meaning is

any perceptions that one associates with an utterance.

Can “the same” utterance ever be repeated? In other words, is
the

transform between an utternce and its meaning invertible? Or will
the

fact that the situational context is inevitably different the second

time going to change the meaning of the utterance?

Of course the utterance can be repeated. But the meanings that the
speaker and hearer associate with it may very easily change. Those
associated meanings are not in the utterance, they are in the speaker and
hearer. The formal structure of the utterance, however, is the same, and
therefore the formal and “objective” aspect of meaning, the
linguistic information, is the same in the repetition.
The resolution of ambiguity may also be private rather than public. One
person says Anne loves visiting relatives, thinking of the good
time Anne had with cousin Fred. The other person may repeat Yes, Anne
loves visiting relatives
, remembering Anne’s last visit. The
ambiguity is present in the utterance in both cases, even if neither is
aware of it. Ambiguity is generally resolved correctly as meanings are
sharpened during successive reiterations of words in different
combinations. The second person says In fact, she just really enjoys
travelling
. This can take a while, especially in dramatic
comedy.

Can any third party guess the meaning of an
utterance in a dialogue

to either of the parties involved in the feeback loops of the

dialogue? Does an utterance have a “meaning” that can be

distinguished from its function in a transaction between speaker and

listener?

A third party can perceive the words and the word-dependences correctly,
including those that are implicit and present in zero form. They may not
perceive the correct choice for an ambiguity. There may be references to
which the observer is not privy. For example, if I say “Aaron had
some good advice” you don’t know who Aaron is or what the advice
might be about.

Is “meaning” a categoric perception or an analogue
perception?

Both, although language is categoric
(“digital”).

Two perceptions, at least, then. And at different levels of the

“classic” HPCT hierarchy.

Meanings, as “any perceptions that one associates with an
utterance”, can be any perceptions at any level of the hierarchy. By
associating analog perceptions with words one imposes the appearance of a
categorization on them, though they continue to be analog perceptions.
Now the light is bright; now it’s dim. The elements of language
are discrete, and therefore are controlled at levels of the hierarchy
where there are discrete, “digital” perceptions.

Is it determined by the relations of a word to other words

within a finite network such as is provided by an extensive

dictionary?

No. Although this is to a great extent true of dictionary

definitions, definitions are not meanings (as in the previous item,

the map is not the territory).

OK. I had been getting the impression Bill P. thought that
dictionary

definition had something to do with meaning.

Bill will have to answer, then.

Or by the relation of a word to other words as encountered in an

unbounded network consisting of the words encountered by a

listener/speaker during a lifetime?

Distributional analysis of a corpus comparable to this can identify

the redundancies in a language that correspond to meanings. The

problem then is how to represent those redundancies. Such a

representation is not itself the meanings, it is a representation of

the information immanent in language, and is thereby related to the

more structured aspects of meaning.

I don’t think this answer is responsive. I was asking about the kind

of approach computational analysis often uses, of the tendency for

words of, say, financial connotations to occur together more often

than those words co-occur with words relating to cooking or

paleontology. You talk a bit about this when you mention
sublanguages

below, but even there you don’t answer this question.

Your question was not clear to me. Yes. Some vocabulary is specialized to
certain subject-matter domains, of course. Less obviously,
acceptabilities of word-dependences differ from one domain to another.
One approach to this is to identify those dependences that are
“normal” or of highest acceptability in each domain. Other
word-combinations that nonetheless occur in the given domain can be
borrowings from other domains or metaphor and other analogic
extensions beyond the “normal” core. Such extensions depend
upon classifier relations in the vocabulary of the
carp-fish-vertebrate-animal sort, but more finely tuned. Many of the
things you can say about this new something can also be said of fish, so
perhaps this other thing that can be said of fish can be said of this new
something. When we first had airplanes, why did people come to say that
they fly, rather than that they glide or float? Probably by analogy to
what is said of birds. Of balloons we say both fly and float.

Is “meaning” simply the effect of a word in context when
offered

to the sensory apparatus of another?

If by “effect” you mean the perceptions that the recipient

associates with the utterance (word plus context), this is a

restatement of the position that I stated at the outset, on which I

think Bill and I agree: meaning is any perceptions that one

associates with an utterance.

“One” being independently the speaker, the intended hearer, and
a

third party? To me the answer to this sub-question is definitively

"Yes, separate and distinct for all three, and different again
for

different third-parties".

Yes. But many things can support convergence in the perceptions that they
associate with the utterance, and most important among these is the form
of the utterance itself, the “objective” linguistic
information. It can be “objective” because language is a social
artifact in a public, and every member of the public controls for
conformity of their reference values for language perceptions to what
they perceive to be “the language” that others in that public
are using. Since they are all doing this more or less continuously and
concurrently, the structure itself is quite reliable among them. This
reliability is an outcome of control for reliability.

If the latter, can the “meaning” of a word be extracted from
its

verbal and situational context?

What does such an “extract” look like?

You answered this above, by asserting that a word has no meaning,
but

an utterance does.

I wouldn’t say that a word has no meaning but – sorry! – that would
plunge us into recursion about the meaning of meaning again.

Is the “meaning” of a word I utter (or write) the effect I

anticipate it having on my perception of my
interlocutor?

It depends upon whether your perception of anticipated effects on

the other exhausts the perceptions that you associate with the
word.

OK, we are back to “meaning” as being a long vector.

However, I have to disagree with your answer, in that I would argue

that meaning is related to the interpersonal transaction quite

separately from any intrapersonal transaction. More simply, I may

want to get something across, but to myself the word has many other

connotations that I am not interested in getting across. The

“meaning”, to me, would involve only those elements I want to
get

across to my interlocutor. The “meaning” to my interlocutor,
would

not involve all her perceptions evoked by the word, but only those

that she perceives me to have intended to evoke.

Those are the meanings that you and she associate with that utterance. In
Stephen Johnson’s wave metaphor, the waves of different words in a
discourse intersect so that the meanings are progressively (and mutually)
sharpened. Meanings of non-language aspects of the situation also come
into play in eliminating irrelevant aspects of meanings. But you said you
liked this description.

AHAAAAH! “The word is a public
property!!!”

Let’s analyze what this means, because it is
at the core of my

contention (with which I think you probably agree) that language,

along with other cultural features, can be treated as a perceptual

artifact in the same way as can a rock.

I do agree.

What is “public property”, in my
view, is that in a given situation I

can use similar forms of behaviour (including using similar
language)

with more or less predictable effect, when interacting with more or

less any member of what might be called a cultural group. In fact,

the interchangeability of people with whom I can use similar forms
of

behaviour to get reasonably predictable effects is what defines
"the

group."

OK, as far as it goes. Outside of language, things are not always so
consistent. There are no “phonemes of culture”. Conventional
gestures are probably the closest thing. A portion of continuous action
may be perceived as a discrete gesture that may be repeated (vs.
imitated).

One criterion in all of this is universality. Culture varies from one
community to another, biology for the most part does not.

Once you have control systems perceiving how others perceive them (more
explicitly: perceiving in the behavior of others evidence of how those
others perceive them and constructing perceptions partly on that evidence
and partly in imagination), there is a higher-level motivation for them
to control perceptions of their own control outputs relative to
perceptions of the control outputs of others. That is how conventions
become established in a public. Convergence follows as an intended result
– a result intended by each participant for him or herself, and
therefore a result intended by all participants concurrently.

    /Bruce

Nevin

···

At 09:36 PM 8/3/2004 -0400, Martin Taylor wrote:

From[Bill Williams 6 July 2004 6:30 PM CST]

[From Bruce Nevin (08.06.2004 17:12 EDT)]

Martin Taylor 2004.08.03.1756--

        Bruce Nevin says,

        >OK, we are back to "meaning" as being a long vector.

        John Dewey discussed the meaning of a situation in terms of "a widening circle of consequences."

Once you have control systems perceiving how others perceive them (more explicitly: >perceiving in the behavior of others evidence of how those others perceive them and >constructing perceptions partly on that evidence and partly in imagination), there is a >higher-level motivation for them to control perceptions of their own control outputs >relative to perceptions of the control outputs of others. That is how conventions >become established in a public. Convergence follows as an intended result -- a result >intended by each participant for him or herself, and therefore a result intended by all >participants concurrently.

Despite my being sympathetic with the general intension and direction that your argument travels, I have doubts concerning your account regarding "...how conventions become established in a public." I suspect that the phrase "...to control perceptions of their own control outputs..." may be subject to criticism. And, perhaps correctly so.

It occurs to me that an active airtraffic control system provides an example, in addition to economics and a language, of a group of agents with formal and informal conventions seeking to transfer aircraft from one airport to another in ways that demonstrate convergence with publicly stated intensions and the agreement on most occasions, but not perhaps always , "...by all participants concurrently."

In my view a control theory sophistology that can not provide a satisfactory account concerning the operation of an air traffic control system should not be considered to be an adaquate sophistology.

You've raised the question of control theory and dramatic comedy. Perhaps you are thinking that a control theory ontology would provide the approach needed to explain the methods employed in the the novels written by Henry James?

Bill Williams

···

At 09:36 PM 8/3/2004 -0400, Martin Taylor wrote:

Bruce Nevin,

Are you familiar with the Columbia School of Linguistics?

It has a website at:

http://www.csling.org/

I was always attracted to this approach to linguistics as being compatible with PCT.

What do you think?

Your roommate for a night,

David

David M. Goldstein, Ph.D.