William is right as he laments the fuzziness of my shorthand. I wrote: The word 'carrots' was > constantly associated with an > experience of that vegetable, so when someone hears > 'carrot' the image etc of > the vegetable comes to mind.
And William questions: "Alright, now tell us about that "image". What IS in fact an image? And what about that "etc" following "image"?" My "image etc" was meant to point at whatever comes to mind when you hear the word 'carrots'. I personally am poor at "visualizing", "seeing" in my mind's eye. But I do it in my blurry way. As it happens the first visual image that comes to my mind is of "baby" carrots, because they're what usually get served in my house. I also remember the special taste of carrots. Their pleasant crunchiness to the bite. The whole multiplex notion is quite different from, say, what arises in my mind when I hear the phrase, "scrambled eggs". Or the word 'Iraq'. Or "Cleopatra'. William goes on: "And how can meanings be separate from images or words unless they are already shaped (as words or image/words)?" I'm not altogether sure what William has in mind when he says this, but this much of a reply seems pertinent: If by "meanings" he has in mind the notions occasioned by my hearing various words, I'd say the "meanings" -- in the sense of "my notions" -- are identical to the notions. I would accept saying "They are the meanings FOR ME". Since I don't believe in the existence of any non-notional "meanings", I don't have to grapple with how they "can be separate". William says: "I use the word carrot to convey my associative memory/feelings of a particular vegetable." I agree with that. William: "Cheerskep calls that an "Image, etc" That's where we get stuck again." Again -- agreed. I was being lazy in using "image etc" instead of spelling out as many aspects as I could of the multiplex notion occasioned by the word 'carrots'. William: "We don 't know what an image IS since we may be imagining a picture of a carrot but nowhere in the brain is there a space for such an image if it's like a picture/word of a carrot. So what's an image? Is it a recollection of a word? Oh-oh, there's that bugaboo again, a word AS meaning. Now what?" I don't know what William's thought is when he says, "nowhere in the brain is there a space for such an image if it's like a picture/word" because it's incontrovertible to me that part of a my notion is the visualization of carrots, albeit with the clarity of 1950's television compared to today's High Def. And again: I'm willing to accept the use of the word 'meaning' in the context of "the meaning of 'carrots' FOR ME isb&" and then listing the elements in the notion occasioned in my mind by the word. William: "We can say that meanings (and we don't know what they are if they are not images and other words) are either non-existent without images or words or are in excess of any capacity to convey them. That would suggest that any utterance fails to convey full meaning -- or to create it. In this respect all language is messy and ambiguous." Agreed: The result of using language is always messy and ambiguous -- to a degree. But it's often serviceable. If I say to a housekeeper, "Please buy some carrots today," I know the notion stirred in her mind by hearing "carrots" is not exactly the same as the one in my mind when I said it, but I'm confident my utterance will result in an outcome to my satisfaction. William: "We always end up with a linguistic musical chairs, where the chairs, as images and words, are too few for the ghostly meanings scrambling to fill them. This is such a mess." That's why such things as philosophy are so hard. 'Carrots' usually works okay, but the more abstract the word, the more fuzzy and various the notions that will be stirred in various listers. William: "Happily, humans decided long ago to work with the most practical notion, realizing it was inadequate. They said "let words create meanings" and so civilization was born." I buy the first sentence. There has been a phrase in biology: "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." I sometimes muse that watching my children learn to speak replicated in a rough way the way our species developed language. The use of language acquired by children is initially by ostension -- the parent pointing at something and saying "Doggie!" or "Milk!" Thus is forged the serviceable association of that sound with the visual experience of the child at that moment. Trouble is, there comes a point where primitive ostension doesn't serve: we can't simply point at abstractions like relations, properties, meaning, justification, reference, etc. So we have to labor by other means to convey what we have in mind -- especially by describing as well as we can the notion we're trying to communicate. I don't believe "words create meanings" in the sense of bringing into being any mind-external entities. But insofar as we reserve 'meaning' for the notional associations with an utterance or scription the words we wield in our mind do influence the "shape" of notions. For example, I wrote earlier about how they tend to "discrete" and stabilize notion that is inherently indefinite and transitory. This can be misleading, but also helpful in a way comparable to the effect of a snapshot. We may look at an action photo and say, "There's Danny running in a track meet." Of course the figure in the photo is still, not "running", but it can serve to convey what Dan looked like that day, running. William: "What Cheerskep insists on is truth, the truth of the impossibility of adequately using utterances or words to transport meanings (that invisible primordial stuff we can't use without balling it up into the clay of images or image/text). If humans had agreed (and how could they) to stick to the truth instead of what works, we'd have a perpetual Babal, and be ranked somewhere below cats. Meow." In truth, I seldom use 'truth' on this forum, as a glance at the archive should corroborate. But to address the apparent thrust of that paragraph as a whole, I'll repeat: language sometimes fails us almost totally, but most of the time it is what I've been calling "serviceable". That's when it "works", results in sufficient communication to satisfy us. Even there, there's an inherent fuzziness, but "pass the carrots, please," generally does the intended job. ************** Need a new ride? Check out the largest site for U.S. used car listings at AOL Autos. (http://autos.aol.com/used?NCID=aolcmp00300000002851)
