Talk:Meaning (philosophy)

Need for cleaning-up

Now that this article has been safely moved to the philosophy category, I urge members of the philosophy project to make four changes immediately:

1. Delete discussion of linguistics, and simply have a link to the lintuistics article on meaning.
2. Delete all material that is found in the Truth article, that is, all of 1.2, 1.3.1 and 1.3.3 and just have a link to that article
3. Rewriote the introduction so that it introduces the philosophical debates concerning meaning; this introduction ccan provide a plan for further developing the article and of course can be revised as the article grows
4. begin editing the article so that it does not read like one person's essay.

Good luck! Slrubenstein | Talk 16:02, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

A convenient distinction of two kinds of meaning

Link...-->      --Faustnh (talk) 19:47, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

A psycho/socio-linguistic definition of meaning

Meaning is a latent thought/behavioral pattern (as opposed to the non-latent speech act) resident in an individual that was actively placed by him or herself into his or her own human context at some point in time. A particular individual’s context at any particular point in time consists of the cumulative set of thought/behavioral patterns he or she has learned over time. The referent of any particular learned thought/behavior pattern may correspond to an object, or it may correspond to the perception of a social convention. An example of a social convention is the thought/behavior pattern that results in a motorist putting on his or her car brakes depending on the color and position (top, middle, bottom) of a light placed at an intersection. An example of a thought/behavior pattern of correspondence is the perception of a red ball which an individual may touch and look at. Embedding these thought/behavioral patterns is called learning. Learning context has four dimensions from which it may be viewed: over the span of an individual’s childhood (linguistic and behavioral ontogenesis), over the span of the history of tool making where tools refer to each and every tool human society has sanctioned the creation of. Sanctioning the creation of a tool may be deliberate or ostensibly spontaneous. For example, the building of a space shuttle tool was deliberate, whereas the first time the word ‘punk’ was used and was thereby installed in the linguistic corpus, was not. Viewing the collection of tool making produced from the beginning (linguistic and behavioral phylogenesis) is the third dimension of context. Intangible tools refer to linguistic expression in all of its modes (reading, writing, understanding and speaking). The fourth viewing dimension of context is that of reflexivity which refers to the fact that human perception and learning of tangible as well as intangible tools is filtered by the very apparatus that is creating the next tool. The depth of knowledge one has of each and every one of the four context viewing dimensions limits ones understanding of meaning. Rtischer (talk) 21:57, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Opening paragraphs

Who inserted their own awful college essay in here? Surely someone can throw up a better intro. Frankly replacing the current opening with nothing would be a real improvement, right now. 69.122.244.46 (talk) 06:46, 10 January 2014 (UTC)