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.