What Meaning Means

And Why It's a Mess

The following are notes on communicative meaning originally sent to a friend in philosophy last summer. In these notes you shall be told what I think meaning is.

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I’ll tell you what I think “meaning” is in a second, but first let’s do a few familiar usages.

“Verde means green.” In other words, the idea in the word verde is the same as the idea in the word green. In other words, “mean” means “in other words.”

We could also put it in causal terms: Verde gives green. When I hear verde, I remember the translation, and I think about green. This might seem a little weird, but it will be helpful soon.

“I meant to do that.” Here you intended to do that; you wanted to, and acted accordingly. But perhaps, “I meant to do that, but didn’t.” Here you intended to do it, but something stood in the way; perhaps you forgot, or something else prevented you.

All of this should feel pretty familiar, but I hope you notice an oddity: “This is equivalent to that” is rather different from setting out to do something. But there’s some vibey overlap in gives where you can set out to convey that by this.

Something like:

• “By verde I mean green” as “By saying verde I am equally saying green.”

• “By verde I mean green” as “By saying verde I am trying to get folks to think green.”

Here, the first is just a special case of the second (where things are meant equivocally), but of course, there are other ways of putting things into people’s heads, e.g.:

“He certainly didn’t get a good night’s rest,” says winking Terrence, about Hector, to an amused Georgine. Prior knowledge of Hector’s activities and Terrence’s propensity to humorous innuendo combine with the words as spoken such that, “By saying ‘he certainly didn’t get a good night’s rest,’ I am trying to get Georgine to think, ‘Hector did in fact go home with the woman he had been pursuing.’”

But does that sentence mean that? Not Terrence, but the sentence?

If you’re like me, you’re starting to get a little anxious right now. So far things have been pretty safe, with a speaker meaning something, that is, trying to get folks to think X by uttering some set of words. But now stuff’s getting weird. Sentences can’t think, try, intend, mean, etc., right? They have no thoughts by which to exert those actions. What’s going on here?

Reification.

Reification very naturally emerges whenever it’s cumbersome to track persons in our habits of thinking & conceptualizing. For example, “When I eat that fruit, it tastes really good to me” is more awkward than “that fruit is delicious,” even though plenty of people may hate that fruit, and deliciousness is clearly a relative predicate (when we stop and think for a few seconds). For another example, “I cherish this collectible for many reasons, including my aesthetic affinity for it, its scarcity (and thus the difficulty of getting another if this were to be lost or ruined), and its ability to fetch many things in return were I to trade it, due to how others would similarly cherish it” is more awkward than “this collectible is valuable,” even though its value is also clearly a relative predicate, as it may fluctuate wildly, including tanking completely, if any of those factors were to change in bearish ways.

Similarly, “The sentence’s author’s words are a stand-in and/or provocation for a certain set of things X that he wants in the minds of those who know enough context to ‘get it’” is more awkward than “The sentence means X.”

Dwell with this connection for a beat. Instead of conceptualizing “The sentence means X” as some well-formed proposition to semantically dissect, we are free to see it more like slang or shorthand, cousins with, “The sentence screams X,” “The sentence hides X,” or “The sentence drips with sarcasm,” “The sentence oozes contempt,” “The sentence radiates confidence,” or “The sentence reeks of privilege.”

Once we do that, we can, every time, stop ourselves from taking it literally. Sentences don’t literally mean things. Words don’t literally mean things. People mean things through sentences, words, pictures, intonation, gestures, etc., and the thing they are doing is trying to put something in someone’s head.

Now we’re inoculated enough to deal with, “This sentence is meaningful”; we’re wearing a conceptual radiation suit that protects us from taking this text at face value. So what’s underneath the surface? It looks something like this: “Meaningful sentence” is the name we give sentences that we believe have a relatively determinant interpretive impact on the readers & listeners we’re concerned about in some context, that is, they can all interpret it and, when they do, they get the same thing out of it (or at least, “similar enough,” as the context demands).

Already I’m thinking of a dozen counterexample usages with which this proposal doesn’t really work. But something like that is a good starting point, perhaps. It explicates the context-dependence, and puts it in terms of what can vs. can’t be understood.

I wake up suddenly one night, shouting, “I’m a genius! I’ve got to write this down so I don’t forget.” I quickly grab a piece of paper and scribble down my dreamborn epiphany.

The next morning I pick up the piece of paper: “MAKE ‘RIBBITS’ BUT ONLY SOME,” it says (it doesn’t literally “say,” of course). Now, is this sentence “meaningful”? Perhaps my half-asleep counterpart found it meaningful. Perhaps the words he wrote did not reflect what was in his head. We’ll never know.

“Cryptic Command” by Wayne England

In any case, we tag this sentence as “meaningless” because I, as the reader, can’t make heads or tails of it. I might be able to come up with a few interpretations, but it’s so wide open that I can’t count on any particular one. Furthermore, none of the interpretations I come up with seem particularly “brilliant,” a feeling I still remember having during the night outlasting any comprehension of the message (if indeed it was comprehensible to begin with, and if we can even call it a message).

And that’s what this really is, right? Comprehensibility, intelligibility, “gettability.”

So, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. But could this be a freight train coming our way?

All words that end in “-ibility/-ability” have hidden modal ambiguities due to underspecification about what conditions for success need to be provided by the thing granted this property vs. conditions for success are being provided or assumed.

Let’s explore that for a minute.

In the most “needy” sense, a slab of material being “sculptable” depends not just on the material’s texture, weight, brittleness, etc., but also on the strength, tools, skill, and intentions of a sculptor. If there is no adequate intent, nothing gets done, and the slab sits there unsculpted forever; if there are no adequate tools, the sculptor can only weep; and so forth.

But contexts often provide many of those “needs” by assumption. If in a context we are concerned primarily with the features of the material (texture, weight, brittleness, etc.), then we generally assume a competent & equipped & interested sculptor and hinge “sculptable or not” on those material features alone. But even here, the sculptor’s prowess may come up, e.g., “This material is too brittle for some sculptors, but a highly-skilled sculptor will be able to make do.”

Finally, the answer may be qualified by the quality of what one can expect. “Sculptable or not?” is bivalent, but our array of conditionals may be more like:

• This material, in the hands of a novice sculptor, is not sculptable into anything resembling a statue. It will end up a lump.

• This material, in the hands of a skilled sculptor, is sculptable into something resembling a statue, but not with the fine detail a skilled sculptor might prefer; at best, things will be rough and somewhat unsatisfying.

• This material is not sculptable into a statue resembling what the patron’s sketch is asking for, no matter who you hire to sculpt.

Words like “comprehensible” and “intelligible” have the same kind of hidden polysemy, different meanings for every combination of ingredients that would be required to transmit information into someone’s mind.

Let’s take the following string of text: “ker rgw gNNWE Dll.”

• This string, to a reader presently uninformed about the method required to decipher it, is incomprehensible.

• This string, to a reader presently informed about the method required to decipher it, is comprehensible by applying that method.

• This string, to a reader presently uninformed about the method required to decipher it but then informed of that method, willing to listen, and able to learn it, it shall be comprehended, and therefore is comprehensible on those provisions.

• But this string, to a reader presently uninformed about the method required to decipher it, then informed of that method, and yet unwilling to listen or unable to learn it, it shall remain occluded, and hence is incomprehensible if impoverished so.

And of course “incomprehensible or not?” is bivalent, and thus a bit facile; whatever list we come up with of the above kind, however massively long, can be multiplied by spectra of the quality of the comprehension!

Okay, this is exhausting.

But it also primes us to be as exhaust-ive as we need to be. When it comes to “what ‘means’ means,” things are a bit of a mess, but within that mess, we find a few things to build on:

• It’s about communication & fidelity. Conferring meaning is about hitting “send” and intended “receives,” whether it’s you and others, or you and your next self in contemplation (or from the wee hours to the waking hours). “They got it.”

• Reification creeps (into our thinking & talking) from depersonalized framings. Sentences, phrases, words, pictures, etc., can “send”; this isn’t a literal framing, but is common & expected shorthand for a more thorough description of what’s going on. Our framings (“This sentence says…”) tend to kill the author.

• Reification creeps (into our thinking & talking) from superficial modality. The question of whether a mind signal “can be received” via a sentence, phrase, word, picture, etc., is a question of potence, and potence questions are modal messes, highly ambiguous & context-dependent, with many different answers and qualifications of those answers depending on what’s “assumed” and what’s being “tested.” When we forget all of this, we can be tempted to tag those items themselves as “Unintelligible? True or false,” when really, there is a level of intelligibility for innumerable sets of contextually involved factors, including not only the text or image or composition itself, but also the reader/listener and their preconceptions & aptitudes.

And this is where we should expect to land with perennial questions of fundamentals that continue to drive hot discourses: It is a mess, it’s about something rather important to us, reifications have evolved over time that foster & worsen the mess, and all of this molds how we think & talk (with aphorisms, non-literalism, truncations, and other goopy stuff).

And this in turn is a problem because familiar habits of thinking & talking are glammed up as “philosophical intuition.”

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