[Fis] Re: meaning of meaning

Dear Pedro and all,

about your question concerning the meaning of meaning. There is a key
contribution in the philosophy of language of 20th century, namely Hilary
Putnam's (a Harvard philosopher) "The Meaning of Meaning" (in: Philosophical
Papers, 1975, 3. vol. include some 57 papers between 1957 and 1981). Putnam
was confronted in the 60s with logical empiricism which he considered a kind
of idealism and argued at that time in favor of realism. According to the
verificationist theory of meaning the meaning of a linguistic utterance
(i.e. its reference or denotatum) is established in the end by a person.
But, according to Putnam, this theory just forgets no less than the world
and the other human beings! In other words, the meaning of words cannot be
disconnected from the linguistic community as well as from the 'Umwelt'.
Putnam changed later on this view towards an 'internal realism' that is more
near to Kant than to Hume, and also more near to Gadamer and hermeneutics
than to analytic philosophy. In his book "Representation and Reality" (MIT
1988) he argues that the concepts of object, relation, meaning and reason
are characterized by their "porosity" which means that these concepts (and
with them language altogether) cannot be fixed once forever. In order to
visualize this conceptual relativity he tells the following story. Suppose
you take someone into a room where there is a chair, a table, a lamp, a
notebook and a pencil. You ask then:
"How many objects are there in this room?"
Your friend probably answers: "five".
New question: "And they are?"
Answer: "A chair, a table, a lamp, a notebook, and a pencil"
New question: "what about you and me?"
Your friend laughs and says: "I did not know that for you persons are
considered objects. Well, then seven"
New question: "And what about the pages of the notebook?"
etc.

But, of course, there are also noses in this room as well as elementary
particles... that can also be considered as the "meaning" of the word
"object"... In other words, as we say in German, "wir sind nicht alle
dicht." This is a pun meaning: we are not completely close and we are all a
little bit mad... How far this 'madness' (or 'porosity', well probably,
'madness' is more a situation of someone who is almost 'closed') is also in
'lower levels' of organization?
Putnam turns the question of the relation between the 'intension' and the
'extension' of a concept into a question of socially mediated "stereotypes."

In a famous paragraph (� 66) of his "Philosophical Investigations"
Wittgestein says that when we call something a "play" (in German: "Spiel")
(like in the utterances used in composed words in German like:
"Brettspiele", "Kartenspiele", "Ballspiel" etc. i.e board game, card game,
ball game..) and then we ask: "What is common to them?", we should not say:
"there *should* be something common, otherwise they would not be called like
this", but "*take a look * ("schau") if this is the case." This is, as you
know, Wittgensteins theory of family resemblances which is at the opposite
of Plato's theory of ideas which is the basis of most theories of meaning in
our tradition: the meaning of something is related to a 'meta-physical'
concept ('idea') that allows us to re-cognize things in their being AS this
or that.

The question in fact is, that *meaning* for us is concerned with our
capacity of grasping things in their being: a cat is a cat, not a sign or a
symbol or whatever. But, indeed, neither things nor we are isolated and
'worldless' but embeded in a network of (social) relations which makes
'porosity' possible.
What is a tree for a cat? We do not know, but we can conjecture as cats
cannot speak, well with the exception of Dinah, the Cheshire cat. But even
in that case Alice was not amused with its habits: "It is a very
inconvenient habit of kittens (alice had once made the remark) that,
whatever you say to them they *always* purr. "If they would only purr for
'yes', and mew for 'no,' or any rule of that sort," she had said, "so that
one could keep up a conversation! But how *can* you talk with a person if
they *always* say the same thing?" (Chapter 12: Which Dreamed It?)
The answer is: we can't because there is no *meaning* there. For a cat, I
would say, a tree is not a tree but...? Wittgestein put it like this: if a
lyon could speak we would not understand it.

Grasping things in their being in such a 'porosity' way means finally, that
we do not only things AS what they are, but also 'Being' itself (Aristotle's
question about 'being AS being' 'to on he on': the whole question of meaning
concerns this *as*). Heideggerian hermeneutics makes a difference between
two kinds of *AS* the explicit and the implicit one. This means that we
primarily are 'practical beings' having to do with things AS what they are
in an implicit network of meaning (we call this in science for instance a
presupposition or the paradigm implicit in *normal science*) while the
thematization (and with all epistemology itself) arises when we want to
share something or also in case of a 'breakdown.'

This difference between the 'apophantic' (or explicit) and the 'hermeneutic'
(or implicit) *AS* was used by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores in their
book "Understanding Computers and Cognition" (Ablex 1986) for explaining the
way we (pragmatically) deal with information technology, and particularly
with programms, when they 'breakdown.' The ability of a good programmer
should be to foresee such 'breakdowns' in order to keep technology
transparent. The best technology is one that 'disappears.' We also say that
some times in our lives, the best understanding is the one 'without words'
which does not mean 'without meaning.' In 'lower level' of organization, a
cat for instance, we might conjecture that the absence of meaning (although
we do not know exactly what this means and therefore we say it as a
*negation*) does not mean an absence of a 'world': cats have their 'own'
('closed' ='meaning-less') world (I think this is the point where we join
Maturana and Varela again...).

So, finally, Putnam's (and Plato's and...Pedro's) question: how does meaning
arise or 'what is the meaning of meaning' is a tricky one, as meaning arises
in a local context (a cat is a cat) but also due to the fact of a system
capable of looking beyond determination (our 'porosity'), and this during an
evolutionary process of socialization and practical 'handling' in the world.

This argument has not a strong explanatory power but I do not know a better
one!

Cheers

Rafael

Prof. Dr. Rafael Capurro
FH Stuttgart, Hochschule der Medien (HdM) University of Applied Sciences,
Wolframstr. 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany
Universit�t Stuttgart, Institut f�r Philosophie, Dillmannstr. 15, 70049
Stuttgart, Germany
Private: Redtenbacherstr. 9, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
E-Mail: rafael@capurro.de; capurro@hdm-stuttgart.de
Voice Stuttgart: + 49 - 711 - 25706 - 182
Voice private: + 49 - 721 - 98 22 9 22
Fax: + 49 - 721 - 98 22 9 21
Homepage: www.capurro.de
Homepage ICIE (International Center for Information Ethics):
http://icie.zkm.de
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stanley N. Salthe" <ssalthe@binghamton.edu>
To: "S�ren Brier" <sbr.lpf@cbs.dk>
Cc: <fis@listas.unizar.es>
Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2004 11:25 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] Brier, Part 1

>
> >Please tell us how you hierarchy is same or differs from mine, and what
> >you think is the most fruitful way of proceeding with this problem. I
> >have a paper on this forthcoming in Axiomathes that are interested in
> >this kind of work.
> >I do not understand your remarks on scalar and specification hierarchies
> >and the inconsistency you see in the paper. You have to state this
> >clearer for everyone to follow you remarks, please.
>
> OK. You said:
> >> 1. A non-manifestlevel with hypercomplex or chaotic interactions. The
> >> concept of vacuum in Quantum field theory is one attempt by science to
> >> describe this state, albeit without a synechistic frame.
> >> 2. An energy level with energy-based causal interaction by natural
forces.
> >> 3. An informational level with signal and/or code causality.
> >> 4. Semiotic level with sign-game-causality within and between living
> >>systems.
> >> 5.A linguistic level with language-game-causality based on meaning
between
> >> conscious social systems.So, 1. is a transcendental level, 2. the
physical,
> >> 3. the chemical, 4. the organic and psychological and 5 the social
> >> objective knowledge to relate to Hartmann's hierarchy.
> >> SS: For the record, this is a specification hierarchy, not a
scalar
> >> one (which is used later in the paper without distinguishing it. [See
> >> General Systems Bulletin 31: 13-17 (2002)]
> SS again: The specification hierarchy is, in general: {more general
> <-- {{{increasingly more particular}}}, or {more vague --> {{{
increasingly
> more definite}}}. ( the brackets, {}, represent classes, arrows indicate
> drection of construction). What you have here is:
> {physical level {material level {biological level {sociocultural
level}}}}.
>
> >> >Critique of current approaches
> >> Descriptions of these levels did exist in different areas of modern
> >> science, but they have never been brought together into one theoretical
or
> >> paradigmatic framework.
> >> SS: Sorry! -- see my 1993 book Development and Evolution:
Complexity
> >> and Change in Biology, MIT Press, where I discuss this, as well as the
> >> scale hierarchy, and contrast them.
> SS: For the record here, the scale hierarchy is, in general [whole
> [[[parts]]], which can have either spatial or temporal interpretation.
> Again, see my short paper in General System Bulletin 31: 13-17. 2002.
> As well, Figure 16 in my 1985 Evolving Hierarchical Systems shows in
> capsule form the relationsip between these hierarchies, which several
> people have told me gave them the AHA! experience.
>
> STAN
>
>
>
>
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Received on Wed Jan 28 09:57:59 2004