Valid point. Meanings, concepts and definitions can change through time, and can be multi layered. Good is what is right and just. Just is what is good and right. Good can also be beneficial, favourable, productive, advantageous, pleasurable, healthy, positive and desirable.
But what is good for me, could be bad for you, and neutral for someone else. In that case, you could reject on what I defined as good, saying it is not good for you, and doesn’t affect others.
So what is your view on meanings, concepts and definitions? What seems clear is that not all of them are necessarily truths. Because truths cannot be denied or rejected by anyone on the planet, such as 1+1=2 or bachelor is unmarried man.
That point still holds regardless of how meanings shift or layer over time.
I think we actually agree on this: meaning isn’t a substance, material or immaterial.
But what kind of relation makes it meaning? Are you suggesting it’s a relation of complete and agreeable? Mine succeeds by holding against something real, capable of missing.
What counts as two people meaning the same thing?
By my account, meaning is a mark keyed to a non-mark thing. Truth is the fit holding. Falsity is the fit missing, hamartia, not a flaw in the thing, a failure of aim.
So when two people are trying to mean the same thing, it isn’t enough that both marks are complete, agreeable, well described. What matters is whether both are keyed to the same target, and whether the fit holds for each, independently, not because the wording matched, but because something real, existing on its own, backs both of them up the same way.
Two agreeable descriptions can still miss each other, pointed at different things, or at the same thing with something neither caught yet. Matching words can happen without matching targets, and disagreement in wording can happen while pointing at exactly the same thing from two different angles.
This isn’t about whether your definition of good is right. Beneficial, favourable, desirable, that can be a complete, accurate description and still get applied wrong. Someone can be good to me, exactly as your definition has it, and quietly harmful to you at the same time, and calling that act good, unqualified, is false, even though every feature in your definition was satisfied.
The definition isn’t the problem. Whether it was checked before being applied, that’s the question I don’t see your account asking. Not asking it over and over, once is usually enough, just asking it at all.
That’s complete and agreeable, by your own test, but it never leaves the circle, good defined by just, just defined by good. Nothing outside the three words to check any of them against. That’s not a flaw in the wording. It’s exactly the kind of thing your account can’t tell apart from real meaning, since satisfied and self-contained isn’t the same as keyed to anything real.
My view: not all meanings, concepts, or definitions are truths.
But what sorts them isn’t whether they can be denied, everything can be denied. It’s whether they hold against something real, capable of missing, whether or not anyone’s willing to see it.
What confirms two people were ever tracking the same thing isn’t either reading alone, and it isn’t settled in a single moment either. It’s whether, coming back, again and again, what each of us finds keeps matching what the other finds. Whether it keeps holding, each time we look.
Where I think this actually lands, for us: we might just be tracking two different things, under the same mark, “meaning.” Yours closer to what a word can express. Mine closer to whether it holds against something real.
How do I know something is real? For me, to exist is to make a difference. Something’s real if it makes a difference, whether or not I’ve described it.
How do I know my account is tracking that? I don’t. What I have is narrower: a mark can be checked against what it’s keyed to, and found wanting, later, even after it looked complete.
That sounds like time to me . Time is what makes a difference. Time always makes a difference. I like Husserl’s definition of the real as a constructed abstraction, i.e. that which persists self-identically. The real is a derived product of our interactions in the world. What is primary isn’t reality but experience.
Let’s suppose you had long hair. You decided to cut it short. After having haircut, you look different. Which is real appearance of you? The one with the long hair? Or the one with the short hair?
Appearance connects to meaning by functioning as the mark, and to “real” by being checked against whether it fits the person at the time it’s asserted, not by being some fixed, permanent property that has to stay the same to count as real. An appearance would only be a problem for “real” if it failed to update.
Let me offer this and get your feedback to see if I am on the same page with you.
Jill makes the sound for Jack that is transcribed as “there is an unopened gallon of 2% milk in the fridge.” Now Jack has been trained into the “representational effect” of this kind of sound-making. He also wants a tall glass of milk just now. So he reacts to the sound by walking toward the fridge.
If he doesn’t perceive the promised milk, he will be annoyed and switch into a troubleshooting mode. Inquiry begins, because the expectation of milk was violated.
I derive time as a necessary structural feature of individuation itself, not as a byproduct of minds or language. Given that derivation, time counts as existing in exactly the sense “to exist is to make a difference” require. So, yes: if time exists, it makes a difference.
The oldest sense of “time” is division. I take that temporal ordering is derived from that operation. The etymology isn’t proof of the philosophical claim, but it’s an honest resonance.
I’m with you. This is sort of what I mean when I say that objects are “ideal” manifolds. Objects are “between us.” The “real” in the sense of the “also for others” is constantly re-affirmed. The object that was taken for granted can become suspect. The suspicious possibility can solidify.
To me it’s worth emphasizing that “1 + 1 = 2” is just marks. These marks tend to have the same-enough effect on “people like us” that we say that the “meaning” of these marks is “true by definition.”
“Truthiness” is not in the marks themselves but in the role these marks play in the interpersonal lifeworld. The mark “truth” is subject to the same point.
I interpret Husserl’s framework to suggest that experience can be “invalid” if it fails to allow harmonious concatenations.
That’s experience still answerable to something—constraint, coherence, resistance—even after the physical world’s been set aside. Whether we call what’s resisting “the physical world” or “the coherence-conditions internal to experience itself,” something’s still doing the pushing back.
Experience which fails to allow harmonious concatenations is just a different sort of experience than that which reveals a stable pattern. The latter is no more true or authentic than the former, and both are secondary to and derivative of a more fundamental basis of experience, which Husserl calls transcendental subjectivity. For Husserl, objectivity reality will always be subjective and relative.
What is pushing back is neither located strictly outside the self nor inside the self. It is a function of the relationship between an outside and the expectations we project onto that outside. So the external constraints are already normatively shaped by what we bring to our construal of them. What pushes back and how it pushes back is relative to the system of intelligibility we approach it with. The answers the world provides us, and the ways it is able to surprise us, are dependent on the ways we address our questions to it.
From this perspective the word ‘real’ has more to do with the various ways the world responds to our questions than to any properties it has independent of how we approach it. What appears more or less real is a function of the recognizability of an event, how consistent it is with our anticipations.
From 3rd party’s view, your appearance is the only criteria for your identity.
If you changed your appearance, then there could be a doubt on your real identity. If your face appears to be different from your passport ID photo, then you will be held up for questioning in the airport.
Harmonious concatenation is the successive fitting-together of glimpses into one continuous, identical object. When it fails, locally, that’s not a different object showing up. It’s the object failing to get constituted at all. Concatenation either builds a stable object across the glimpses or it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, that’s what “invalid” is naming in Husserl’s own text, not a variation, an absence.
I agree with all of that.
The relational framing, what pushes back depends on the system of intelligibility approaching it, doesn’t require giving up independent properties altogether. It just requires that what gets noticed, and how, depends on the approach. Something can have properties independent of any question being asked of it, and still only reveal certain of those properties to a given approach. The dependency runs through what’s noticed, not through what’s there.
If what’s real tracks consistency with anticipation, shouldn’t the case where concatenation fails hardest, the least consistent outcome, register as least real? It seems to do the opposite, that’s exactly where something asserts itself, by refusing to fit what was expected.
Meaning, correspondence, concatenation, they all need the same thing. Something capable of resisting, of not holding together, independent of whether any particular experience anticipated it.
True enough, in reality, this is always intertwined with someone’s observation and account of it.
But the concept of identical object is contributed by the subject pole, not the object pole. It s a striving on the part of the constituting consciousness to fulfill a belief in the ‘identity’ of the object, and this belief can never be completely fulfilled. Not because of our limited subjective perspective, but because the object pole transcends the concept of identity. If we are projecting forward the belief that the object we are dealing with is what Husserl calls a ‘real’ spatial object, then that expectation can be disappointed or invalidated by some new perceptual data which reveals that we were mistaken to take it as a unified spatial object. But if we were not approaching the experience with the belief and expectation of identity , then the perceptual data does not disappoint.
So failure and invalidation are substantive meanings which get their sense from the particular system of belief which they disappoint. Neither validated construing of a self-identical object nor its invalidation say anything about what the world is really like independent of the harmonious or non- harmonious constructions we put together.
Independent properties get their independence from within the framework of sense projected forward by the subjective pole of perception. Put differently, the independence of their properties is itself dependent for its sense on the subjective scaffold of subjective anticipations. These properties aren’t simply noticed, they are constituted via synthetic acts of consciousness.
“The question now is whether a thing, which indeed remains one thing under all circumstances, is the identical something of properties and is actually in itself solid and fixed with respect to its real properties; that is, is a thing an identity, an identical subject of identical properties, the changing element being only its states and circumstances? Would this not then mean that according to the various circumstances into which it can be brought, or into which it can be thought to be introduced, the thing has different actual states, but that in advance-a priori - how it can behave, and, further, how it will behave, is predelineated by its own essence?
But does each thing (or, what is equivalent here: does any thing at all) have such an essence of its own in the first place? Or is the thing, as it were, always underway, not at all graspable therefore in pure Objectivity, but rather, in virtue of its relation to subjectivity, in principle only a relatively identical something, which does not have its essence in advance or graspable once and for all, but instead has an open essence, one that can always take on new properties according to the constitutive circumstances of givenness? But this is precisely the problem, to determine more exactly the sense of this openness, as regards, specifically, the “Objectivity” of natural science.”(Husserl, Ideas II)