What are signs ? What is meaning?

Philosophy of Language
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A dictionary defines ‘meaning’ as the thing one intends to convey especially by language. Note this metaphor (?) of conveyance. The meaning is “carried” by the sentence, for instance. I suggest that this buried metaphor of meaning as immaterial passenger tempts us into confusion.

We start with Saussure, who echos and yet troubles the simplicity of the dictionary’s dualism.

The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses…

Still the expected dualism, with the concept securely isolated, but now the sound-image is “sensory” ?

Psychologically our thought—apart from its expression in words —is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language. … Neither are thoughts given material form nor are sounds transformed into mental entities; the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that “thought-sound” implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses.

Somehow the “shapeless masses” determine one another. No recognizable and repeatable sounds with concepts but no concepts without repeatable sounds. Despite a residue of dualism, the concept has lost its independent “immateriality.”

Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound…

Recto and verso, heads and tails. It’s as if the single sign has two aspects. If the “thought” and the “sound” are so intensely fused, how did we ever arrive at the metaphor of a signified ( the repeatable sound ) carrying a signifier ( the meaning) ?

Not only are the two domains that are linked by the linguistic fact shapeless and confused, but the choice of a given slice of sound to name a given idea is completely arbitrary…The arbitrary nature of the sign explains in turn why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system.

In other words, the sound pattern of the English greeting “hello” is not important in terms of sound except that it’s the sound that the community happens to use.

I can “translate” hello into salut. To translate is to “carry over” the “meaning” from one language to another. This social-pragmatic (blurry) equivalence of hello and salut, each considered in their typical context, explains the dominance of this metaphor of carrying and therefore the concept of concept itself as an “immaterial” passenger. So Saussure leans on this concept of concept, in his explication of the sign, even as he explains that

there are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.

What can we make of all this ? Can we reduce the tension in Saussure’s description without losing what is valuable in it ? First I get some help from Sellars.

The key to his view is that semantic terms and descriptions provide functional classifications of linguistic tokens. His analysis of meaning statements such as

‘Rot,’ in German, means red

or

‘Brother’ means male sibling

treats them as statements that convey the information that the word mentioned on the left-hand side has a relevantly similar usage to the phrase on the right-hand side.

So ‘salut’ translates ‘hello’ because French speakers ‘do the same-enough thing with’ salut that English speakers do with hello. The different sound patterns play the same role in their respective contexts. Does this mean that concepts are roles ? And are roles immaterial ?

I suggest that signs are “blurry equivalence classes” of empirical events." Moreover, empirical objects, because perceptual, are best understood in terms of “aspects.” So the “meaning” of a sign, because no longer separable or immaterial, becomes “perspectival.”

Informally, everybody knows that the same sentences “registers differently” on different listeners. This tends to get understood as a “failure of transmission.” The thing in here, in my “mind,” the “meaning,” is not getting over there. The sound-pattern vessel made the journey from my mouth to your ear, but the passenger did not survive the ( longer ? ) journey from my “mind” to yours.

Why the claws around “mind” ? Because the idea of mind is tied up with the idea of meaning. “Meaning is what minds are made of.” The problem of explicating the sign is a miniature version of the problem of explicating the shared empirical world. A bifurcated conception of the sign almost forces on us a bifurcated conception of the world. Because the subject is a container of meanings, the ‘external’ world loses its primary “significance” so that it can function as arbitrarily instituted vessel.

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I add more from Saussure to support the suggestion that meaning is best understood in terms of equivalence classes of empirical events. These events are “significant” in the sense of early Heidegger but not meaningful in the sense of full of meaning.

In addition, it is impossible for sound alone, a material element, to belong to language. It is only a secondary thing, substance to be put to use. All our conventional values have the characteristic of not being confused with the tangible element which supports them… This is even more true of the linguistic signifier, which is not phonic but incorporeal—constituted not by its material substance but by the differences that separate its soundimage from all others.

Why is language incorporeal ? What can’t sound alone get the job done ? For different concepts, understood is different roles, we need different and so distinguishable sounds. But surely we can just arbitrarily assign sounds to roles ? Ignoring the problem that we’d need to use a language we already have to do, we find another issue lurking here.

The same sound ? But the sound of your greeting is not the sound of mine. Even if we both said '“hello.” This means that two different sounds have the same sound-image. No particular saying of “hello” exhausts this sound pattern, so this sound pattern is “ideal” or “form rather than substance.” But doesn’t this get us right back to the issue of meaning ? Are two distinguishable sounds playing the same role by both being saying of “hello” ? So it seems, and this implies that “categories” are the players here. The soundimage is a type and individual sayings are tokens. I “reduce” a million soundings of “hello” so that I can describe them as sayings of “hello” — and not some other word. So this idea of a blurry equivalence class also works just on the signifier, which is already “immaterial,” even without the traditionally immaterial concept.

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I’m not really sure what you’re asking. That might be on me. Are you asking how language maps onto the world, given its metaphorical, arbitrary status?

I guess the deep question is whether language represents reality at all. Some of us are inclined to think that what we call “reality” is, at least in part, the product of linguistic practices, among other things. In some ways we use language to impose a structure upon chaos. But what it all means, if anything, is not clear to me. Is meaning simply a case of shared practices that seem to match up but are never exact?

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I probably tried to say too much in the OP, because I was afraid of not saying enough. The gist is that I am opposing a standard view of sentences as carriers of an immaterial meaning-stuff. The sentence as carrier is conceived of as a “vessel,” perhaps made of “physical” stuff. So the dualism is “baked in” to our conception of language and almost “forces” us into ( what I’d call) pseudo-problems or bad questions.

The alternative view, found in thinkers like Sellars or Derrida, is that signs are things in the world that play a special role. What we think of as “immaterial meaning” can be demystified in terms of the pragmatic interchangeability of empirical events. Roughly speaking, meanings are “roles.” It doesn’t matter exactly how I write the numeral ‘9.’ Or how you “copy down” this ‘9’ in your own handwriting. The “actual number” 9 is “there” in the way we treat these numerals. The not-mattering “is” the number which is there “qualitatively” in the total context of our actions in the world.

This is not a reductive quest, however. Physicalism is the “shadow” cast by “immaterialism.” I suggest a genial pluralism, which is easier to make sense of if the sign is understood in this second way.

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A classic issue ! To me the representional metaphor makes sense in some cases. If I tell someone that I ate the last plum, I am re-presenting what was originally perceptually present to me. And predictions ( try) to pre-present. “We’ll have that package on your porch around 6 PM this evening.”

Noncontroversial reports of past or expected or simultaneous but distant “states of affairs.” Someone tells me on the phone that they see a tornado coming at my house. I act pretty much as if I’d seen it myself, if I trust them, etc.

But I think we might agree that metaphorical claims are more complex, arguably “pointings” that potentially “disclose the total context of the world” in a new way for the listener.

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So I’m trying to put linguistic practices smack in the middle of reality, where they already are. The metaphysical use of “reality” usually wants to erase some part of the world as “unreal.” A dualist conception of the sign tempts us toward a bifurcation of reality into the “there without us” and the “there because of us.”
To me this has come to look pointless. Why bi-furcation ? The normative structure presupposed by rational inquiry looks irreducible to me. Is this “mind” or “matter” ? What are norms made of ? I’d say they are performed in the “qualitative” world which we navigate with signs. Even just stop signs.

I can almost sum up the issue with stop signs. Each single appearance of a single stop sign is “qualitatively there.” But we treat these qualitative events in the “same enough way” so that we “enact” the enduring singular stop sign and also the category or role of stop sign. Nothing looks to me in all of this as lacking “quality” in the sense “sensory-affective presence.” But also nothing looks “physical” in the desiccated sense of “lacking meaning.” Heidegger used “significance” to try to get at this “other” conception of “meaning.”

seem to match up but are never exact?

Right. We “perform their close-enough-ness.”

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I hear you. Not sure I have much to add to your framing there at present.

I like that formulation.

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“A metaphor is an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting.”

Nelson Goodman, in his book Languages of Art.

Here are some thoughts on signs and meanings.

Signs can be natural, e.g. some red spots on the skin can be a sign for measles. That’s what it means.

An artist’s painting can be a mix of natural and artificial signs. Cracks in the paint can be a natural sign of its age. A thick brush stroke that gets thinner and thinner can be an artificial sign for distance according to the rules of perspective. A depicted skull can be an artificial sign for death, rosy cheeks depict a natural sign for health and so on.

Almost any thing can be a sign, and signs can mean almost any thing. But they have syntactic and semantic differences.

Letters and words are syntactically and semantically disjoint. They don’t do the same work as pictures, which are syntactically dense or continuous. There is no grammar for pictures. The curved or zig-zagy lines of diagrams are continuous symbols representing continuous processes. The thickness of the lines is not significant, but in a perspective drawing also the thickness of the line matters.

Meanings are context-dependent. Most of the signs we use as means for communication are social constructs with conventionally entrenched meanings.

Music contains natural and artificial signs, disjoint and continuous structures. It’s often referred to as a universal language. I’m not so sure.

Some signs or expressions don’t necessarily have meanings. Instead they evoke meanings or create a realm open for exploration. Like philosophy.

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Good stuff, but how would you define or explicate or expand on meaning ? What “is” meaning ?

Do you accept the two-layer approach, with the signifier as vessel for the signified as passenger/meaning ? Or something else ?

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Well, that’s semiotics. I’m more familiar with Goodman’s approach, but let’s see if I can make sense of vessels and passengers.

A sound, for instance, can have a “disposition” to cause certain effects on listeners. I suppose we could say that the sound is a vessel and its meaning(s) are passengers (the relevant properties of the sound) on their way to listener(s).

Likewise, certain wavelengths in the visible spectrum have dispositions to be identified as colours, with certain physiological effects and so on. To be able to talk about colours, we invent labels for them, and some meanings arise from our use of these labels (i.e. neither from the vessel, nor from its passengers). Doesn’t exclude that a colour can simultaneously have other meanings depending on its properties under certain conditions of observation or in say cultural contexts.

The meaning of meaning is a huge topic. What a meaning is, how it arises etc. depends on context, use, user’s abilities, interests etc. It is whatever one identifies for its own sake, but also revises in order to use it for other purposes.

Are you interested in something specific about meanings?

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I am reminded of Heidegger’s account of reference and signs in Being and Time. There, signs (signifiers) don’t link up to signifieds, they enact their own meanings. Signifiers only ever refer to other signifiers. Linguistic meaning is a groundless ground.

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Yes. What I present here is basically how I appropriate Heidegger. But Derrida and Saussure and Sellars are important too.

We might put this as “thinking is material,” with an emphasis on temporality. But this can be misread in a dualist fashion, so that “material” refers not to “quality” but to a scientistic-theological notion of “true/a-perspectival reality stuff.”

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Does Heidegger use “signifier” to refer to “sign”?

Take the semantic triangle: word - thought - thing (or some such). For Saussure’s structuralism focuses on word and thought, and bundles them both into the “sign”: the signifier (word) and the signified (thought). The thing would be the referent, but that’s explicitly not part of the theory. The thing falls by the wayside.

I’m unfamiliar with Heidegger, but looking past the terminology confusion, I’d say the quote is fairly compatible with Saussure, kinda like one hat Saussurean structuralism might wear for a particular purpose.

Heidegger, in Saussurean terms, seems to be talking about (signifier + signified) ↔ (referent), if I’m not misinterpreting it.

It is possible, though, that Heidegger really does have a reduced concept of the sign (comparative to Saussure), such that we just juggle signbodies without any meaning attached. I’d be very curious how that would work out, given our experiences.

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Yes, the implications of this position could be interesting. Does it simply mean that meaning comes from use and context rather than some fixed reference point?

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Saussurean structuralism just looks at language as system of sign-relations. That’s already decontextualised. But that’s more a restriction on its subject matter than a statement on what we do with language outside of that.

Take, for example, the words “cat”, “dog”, “mammal”, and “vertebrate”. These words stand in a relationship to each other such that a cat isn’t a dog, but both are mammals, and both are vertebrates (with the implications that there are vertebrates that are not mammals). According to Saussure, that whole building is refined by the signbodies (either the spoken or written word), but the meanings are there, too. We know that all mammals are vertebrates, and all cats are mammal, and all dogs are mammals, but no cats are dogs, and so on.

If you were to reduce that relationship to the sign-bodies, that would mean that the knowledge about mammals, vertebrates, cats and dogs somehow emerges out of the logical framework established above: something like “cat =/= dog” “cat ← mammal”, “dog ← mammal”, “mammal ← vertebrate” and so on. Basically, we couldn’t figure out something like that by looking at the world and then refine it by anchoring it with words; we’d need the whole word-structure up front and then encounter the world and fit it into those structures (or modify those structures). Fit the world into a pre-existing set of logical relationship centred around arbitrary signbodies.

This, too, is a possible hat Saussurean structuralism could wear.

ETA: I think I misread you. I’ll let this post stand, nonetheless.

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This led me to think of the limitation of dyadic models of signification. I haven’t read every post in this thread, but I haven’t encountered any mention of Peirce’s triadic model of signification. I’m out of time right now, so I’ll just leave that hanging there for others to respond to if they are so inclined. I’ll be back…

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As I read him, the (life)world is “already significant.” But this “significance” is not “internal mind-stuff.” Significance is a “wider” concept. The dog leaps and wags its tail. The car ahead of me wiggles “suspiciously.” I don’t have to “think” the “meaning” in “mindstuff.” I “live” it. I throw the dog a treat. I give the car some space.

Verbal significance would not be “purer” than this. There is no “signified” and hence no “signifier.” There’s just the sign as empirical thing that takes on a conventional role in the communal lifeworld. One stops the car and takes turns at a red octagon with S T O P on it.

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You touch on some of what I am interested in.

I reject dualism ( and every monism), so explicating meaning “away” from those isms is important to me.

But philosophy is “made of” “meaning,” so it looks like a fundamental issue.

“What is science ?” leads into “What is meaning ?” Yet we want to answer “What is meaning?” scientifically or rationally !

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IMV, this issue is “the” issue “in miniature.” An alienated dualism, perhaps the dominant view, “flows from” a “two layer” conception of the sign. The “signified” is “mind stuff.” The “mind” is a container of “meanings.”

This dualism is alienated from pre-theoretical life, where things themselves are “meaningful” in a general sense.. In pre-theoretical life, my dog’s wagging tail is “significant.” The wind in the trees as I walk alone is “significant.” The way that woman smiled at me. That uncanny self-portrait of Rembrandt.

Which doesn’t mean “internal mindstuff” is “pasted on” something otherwise “meaningless.” Even scientistic physicalism “projects” the “mindstuff” of “math meaning” as the “substrate” or “only genuine” world. Implicitly idealistic. Which is weird given their usual gospel of anti-anthropocentrism.

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Yes indeed. I’m with you on that. Bakhtin is a recent discovery for me. Fascinating thinker of the concrete speech act.

I may not be expressing it well, but I’m trying to emphasize that “ontological perspectivism” gives us the empirical object as an “ideal manifold” of its “aspects” or “moments.”

A sign is a empirical object that plays a role in a communal lifeworld. So the sign too manifests in terms of “aspects.” What Larry said and also a saxophone solo “manifest” differently, in a large “total quality,” to different hearers.

From this POV, it’s “impossible” to summarize a philosophy. The concepts involved undergo a shift in “meaning-for-the-reader” within the exposition. To leap to the “end,” to the “conclusion,” is not to leap to the end after all.

This change in “the-meaning-for-the-reader” of these iterable signs is a change in the-world-from-the-POV-of-the-reader. This changed reader can’t “just say it.” To be understood, they need others to undergo a similar shift in the effect of the dangerously familiar signs.