This is an excellent article, and I’d like to apply your ideas to part of your message.
I’ll start with this quote:
> I don’t think the words themselves mean things. I think people mean things, and the words they use are a method of conveying what they mean. I’ve been repeating this slogan for some time now: Words don’t mean things; people mean things.
But in your article you talk about “meaningful language”:
> As a result, the passage as a whole is nonsensical, for much the same reason one could not make complete sense of the demand that one “Please put the leerigs in the meldrif.” Yet, curiously, it mirrors meaningful language closely enough that it is still capable of giving the odd sense of being almost meaningful.
You talk about the language itself being meaningful, and this is a perfectly reasonable and practical way of speaking. But it is in tension with the claim that words don’t mean things.
To resolve this tension, I’d like to apply a definition analogous to the following:
> Irreducibly normative facts are facts which cannot be reduced to or cashed out in non-normative terms.
I don’t like to say that words don’t mean anything at all, but rather that they don’t have irreducible meanings. That is, the meanings of words must be reduced to what their users mean when they successfully convey that meaning. Word-meanings are reduced to person-meanings.
The speaker has some meaning that they’d like to convey to a listener. They express their meaning with words in the expectation that the listener will interpret those words into the same (or sufficiently similar) meaning of their own.
If they choose words poorly (using “wrench” instead of “hammer”, say, or “marshmallow” instead of “mushroom”), then the meaning in the listener may well be different than the meaning in the speaker. Perhaps the listener knows enuf of the speaker’s context to be able to correct for the speaker’s mistake. Perhaps she only knows enuf to infer that he made some kind of mistake. Or perhaps she just assumes that he meant what she heard.
In that vein, I’d like to complain about your use of the phrase “garbage in; garbage out”. It does not mean (to me) what you say it means in the article above. To me (and, I believe, to other computer programmers) it means that the answer a method gives depends on the input being correct. As a particular example, in the c programming language, arrays do not check their bounds. If you ask for arr[-3] the program may well extract the value that is three locations before the beginning of the array arr, even tho that is not actually part of the array. Garbage in: -3; garbage out: (some value, but not taken from the array). The method for extracting values from the array is fine, so long as you use indices that are in the array’s bounds. Hence Java’s requirement that the method for extracting a value from an array throw an exception when the index is out of bounds: Garbage in; failure.
Had you not explained what you meant, I would have taken your related claim to be odd or even nonsensical.
Anyway, the meaning the word (or phrase) conveys to listeners may be different from the meaning the speaker intends to convey. It is in this sense that the words used have meanings. People extract meanings from the words, and insist that the use of those words to attempt to convey different meanings is a mistake. Similarly, a person with moral attitudes largely in agreement with those of their community may say that some moral claim is a mistake. As I believe you understand, saying so does not entail a belief in irreducible norms.
Finally, based on my own beliefs about words and their meanings, I find your claim [that irreducible normativity is a nonsensical concept] problematic. When you explain in detail what you mean I’m right there with you. There’s no such thing, and there cannot be any such thing. But the word “nonsensical” seems to mean something different to me than it does to you. To encourage people to think more about what you mean instead of just relying on their own interpretations, perhaps you could use the term “irreferential” meaning (I recommend) that it not only does not refer to anything real, but that its supposed meaning is such that it could not possibly refer to anything real.
>>Anyway, the meaning the word (or phrase) conveys to listeners may be different from the meaning the speaker intends to convey. It is in this sense that the words used have meanings.
This does not mean that words themselves mean anything. There are facts about what a person is trying to do when communicating, and facts about what people interpret them to mean or to be trying to do. But at no point do the words themselves ever mean anything independent of the psychology of different people.
When I say it is nonsensical or meaningless, for it to fail to refer might be taken to imply a concept that is intelligible but doesn't refer to something real, like unicorn. So I'm not sure that suggestion would help people understand what I mean.
> But at no point do the words themselves ever mean anything independent of the psychology of different people.
And it was certainly not my intent to say that they did. I did explain what I meant.
> for it to fail to refer might be taken to imply a concept that is intelligible but doesn't refer to something real, like unicorn.
Hence the addition of the part where its supposed meaning makes it impossible for it to refer. AFAICT the term "unicorn" does not satisfy that part of my proposed term.
> So I'm not sure that suggestion would help people understand what I mean.
I wasn't to make them understand what you mean. It was to make them stop and ask "What does he mean?" It was meant to make them look at your explanation and try to understand that. To not just look at the summarizing words and conclude that they know what you mean and you're wrong.
This is an excellent article, and I’d like to apply your ideas to part of your message.
I’ll start with this quote:
> I don’t think the words themselves mean things. I think people mean things, and the words they use are a method of conveying what they mean. I’ve been repeating this slogan for some time now: Words don’t mean things; people mean things.
But in your article you talk about “meaningful language”:
> As a result, the passage as a whole is nonsensical, for much the same reason one could not make complete sense of the demand that one “Please put the leerigs in the meldrif.” Yet, curiously, it mirrors meaningful language closely enough that it is still capable of giving the odd sense of being almost meaningful.
You talk about the language itself being meaningful, and this is a perfectly reasonable and practical way of speaking. But it is in tension with the claim that words don’t mean things.
To resolve this tension, I’d like to apply a definition analogous to the following:
> Irreducibly normative facts are facts which cannot be reduced to or cashed out in non-normative terms.
I don’t like to say that words don’t mean anything at all, but rather that they don’t have irreducible meanings. That is, the meanings of words must be reduced to what their users mean when they successfully convey that meaning. Word-meanings are reduced to person-meanings.
The speaker has some meaning that they’d like to convey to a listener. They express their meaning with words in the expectation that the listener will interpret those words into the same (or sufficiently similar) meaning of their own.
If they choose words poorly (using “wrench” instead of “hammer”, say, or “marshmallow” instead of “mushroom”), then the meaning in the listener may well be different than the meaning in the speaker. Perhaps the listener knows enuf of the speaker’s context to be able to correct for the speaker’s mistake. Perhaps she only knows enuf to infer that he made some kind of mistake. Or perhaps she just assumes that he meant what she heard.
In that vein, I’d like to complain about your use of the phrase “garbage in; garbage out”. It does not mean (to me) what you say it means in the article above. To me (and, I believe, to other computer programmers) it means that the answer a method gives depends on the input being correct. As a particular example, in the c programming language, arrays do not check their bounds. If you ask for arr[-3] the program may well extract the value that is three locations before the beginning of the array arr, even tho that is not actually part of the array. Garbage in: -3; garbage out: (some value, but not taken from the array). The method for extracting values from the array is fine, so long as you use indices that are in the array’s bounds. Hence Java’s requirement that the method for extracting a value from an array throw an exception when the index is out of bounds: Garbage in; failure.
Had you not explained what you meant, I would have taken your related claim to be odd or even nonsensical.
Anyway, the meaning the word (or phrase) conveys to listeners may be different from the meaning the speaker intends to convey. It is in this sense that the words used have meanings. People extract meanings from the words, and insist that the use of those words to attempt to convey different meanings is a mistake. Similarly, a person with moral attitudes largely in agreement with those of their community may say that some moral claim is a mistake. As I believe you understand, saying so does not entail a belief in irreducible norms.
Finally, based on my own beliefs about words and their meanings, I find your claim [that irreducible normativity is a nonsensical concept] problematic. When you explain in detail what you mean I’m right there with you. There’s no such thing, and there cannot be any such thing. But the word “nonsensical” seems to mean something different to me than it does to you. To encourage people to think more about what you mean instead of just relying on their own interpretations, perhaps you could use the term “irreferential” meaning (I recommend) that it not only does not refer to anything real, but that its supposed meaning is such that it could not possibly refer to anything real.
Thanks for the comment.
>>Anyway, the meaning the word (or phrase) conveys to listeners may be different from the meaning the speaker intends to convey. It is in this sense that the words used have meanings.
This does not mean that words themselves mean anything. There are facts about what a person is trying to do when communicating, and facts about what people interpret them to mean or to be trying to do. But at no point do the words themselves ever mean anything independent of the psychology of different people.
When I say it is nonsensical or meaningless, for it to fail to refer might be taken to imply a concept that is intelligible but doesn't refer to something real, like unicorn. So I'm not sure that suggestion would help people understand what I mean.
> But at no point do the words themselves ever mean anything independent of the psychology of different people.
And it was certainly not my intent to say that they did. I did explain what I meant.
> for it to fail to refer might be taken to imply a concept that is intelligible but doesn't refer to something real, like unicorn.
Hence the addition of the part where its supposed meaning makes it impossible for it to refer. AFAICT the term "unicorn" does not satisfy that part of my proposed term.
> So I'm not sure that suggestion would help people understand what I mean.
I wasn't to make them understand what you mean. It was to make them stop and ask "What does he mean?" It was meant to make them look at your explanation and try to understand that. To not just look at the summarizing words and conclude that they know what you mean and you're wrong.
Wittgenstein discusses Lewis Carroll quite a bit too. This post seems very Wittgenstein inspired.
It is true that once you leave the cloister, you can't unsee what it looks like from the outside.
I don't know enough about math to even hazard reasonable speculation.