Peirce can be mind-enthralling. I remember when I was a freshman in college,
it was Peirce who provided me with my first new philosophical insight, and it
bowled me over. (The insight was this: A belief is anticipation of future
experience. I'd simply never thought of belief that way, and it seemed to fit
wonderfully.)
But exposure to a great deal of Peircean theory early on has a peril,
something like the one of being deeply immersed in a religion during
childhood and
youth. Many young people drilled in notions of God, sin, the after-life,
heaven, hell, the soul etc can never thereafter quite free themselves from
their
convictions enough to question those fundamental elements of their "faith".
Among the fundamental elements in Peircean theory are the assumption, for
example, that "signs" "have meanings". As an undergraduate I never questioned
that, say, words "have meanings". Today, it nearly astonishes me when I see
textbooks on philosophy of language begin with the statement, "The central
feature
of bits of language -- what makes them language -- is that they have meanings;
so linguistic meaning is something you encounter more often and are more
familiar with than just about anything else. It is remarkable, then, that it is
so
difficult to explain exactly what linguistic meaning is." ("The Meaning of
Language", Robert M. Martin)
Martin doesn't question that words "have meanings". He simply accepts that
they "have" them, and he takes his job to be to discover what these "meanings"
-- that in some sense each word "possesses" -- "ARE". But
why doesn't he ask just why he has come to believe this? My position is that
indeed words DON'T "have meanings", that it is the repeated association of the
utterance of word -- "milk", "hot", "doggy" -- with a given word that causes
the notion of milk, hot, or dog to arise thereafter in our minds when we hear
those words. If I utter "doggy" to a shepherd in the remote Andes, no picture
of a dog will arise in his mind. But if 'doggy' "has a meaning", why doesn't
that happen? Because he hasn't been exposed to repeated association of the
sound, "doggy", with real dogs that his parents pointed at when they said the
word.
The rise of electronics has resulted in numerous neologisms being created --
'input', 'internet', 'blog', 'email'. It's only because of their repeated
association with certain notions -- an associating that is common to almost all
of
us here in the U.S. -- that a somewhat common notion arises in the minds of
all of us when exposed to the word. To me, it's almost dizzying to see that
people believe that when these neologism were created they somehow came with a
mind-independent "the meaning of" the word. No, someone may say, they
"acquired" the meaning. When? At the moment some lexicographer decided to put
it in
his dictionary? How can one tell if a certain utterance/scription like
'foopgoom' "has" a meaning, "is" a word/sign? Answer: you can't discover it,
because
that "having", and the mind-independent "meaning", are chimerical.
Similarly, I shake my head at the seemingly unquestioned assumption by some
Peirceans that "signs" DO things, call it "signify", and they signify specific
mind-independent "significations", what others might call the various "THE
meanings of" the signs. This error is all but identical with the error of
believing "words have meanings".
Okay -- don't agree with my conclusions, but at least question the belief.
But, as I say, like the belief in God, sin, damnation and salvation, once
inculcated early on, these beliefs in "meanings" and "signs" and "symbols" and
"icons" etc as words that label mind-independent entities -- objects and
related
actions -- seem exempt from doubt, from asking, "Why do I believe it?"
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