The Meaning of Meaning
In Arlo Guthrie's great song Alice's Restaurant he's being processed for the draft. The army is judging whether he's moral enough to be a soldier after he was busted for littering.
He says, "arlo said
I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm
sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench
'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women,
kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug."
I know what he means. But the word is hard to pin down,
When I see lightning flashes and hear thunder it means that there is a thunderstorm happening. That meaning depends on having experienced thunderstorms before. It's a prelinguistic form of meaning. Memory forms a link between our present experience and what we already know.
Signs are meaningful in a different way. Thunder and lightning are meaningful because they are a direct consequence of a storm. I think most of the world recognizes a red octagon as a stop sign even if we can't read the word.
That sort of meaning is common among animals. Even a bee understands the meaning of the pattern that certain flowers present.
Language ads a new dimension. A sentence is meaningful in a way that's different from a stopsign. With language you need to understand the language before a statement can be meaningful. A statement in Russian is meaningless to me. I can get a translation so that I can say that the russian statement means _this_
Meaning in language is somewhat detached from making true statements. Bullshit, for instance, provides many instances of meaningful statements that have no connection to reality. So do lies.
Since Nixon and Watergate I've been fascinated by American politics. A lot of my reading of the news is not reports of actual events. I read commentary that tries to make the events meaningful.
On Saturday a guy tried to attack a fancy dinner that Trump was attending. What's the meaning of that? One meaning I take is that there are a lot of people with delusions of grandeur - they can make a difference even if it means their own death.
But immediately the internet was flooded with all sorts of conspiracy theories about the event. Conspiracy theories tell us the hidden meaning of events. The first conspiracy theory I heard was about how 7 Armenians secretly ruled the world. Why hadn't I heard of them as rulers? Reply: That's how good the conspiracy is. Some say that the attack was motivated by the Democrat's vocal dislike of Trump. Others say it was a false flag attack designed to distract from the Iran war.
Meaning is in the eye of the beholder - sort of like beauty.
Once disasters like droughts and floods were seen as meaningful - those events were messages that the gods are displeased. These days many people take that a rich person's wealth means that God is pleased with them.
I must admit that though I am hooked on reading the news lots of time I feel like Arlo ; I mean, Imean, can't you people just be reasonable and sensible?
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.