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Article 3406 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Generosity, a theory. ( Never MIND ! , "the mediu
Message-ID: <yFZiFB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 2 Feb 92 16:24:45 GMT
References: <1992Feb1.195159.8328@husc3.harvard.edu>
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zeleny@brauer.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

> In article <koj9v9INNn24@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> 
> silber@orfeo.Eng.Sun.COM (Eric Silber) writes:
> ES:
> >Nous Autres:
> >
> > Remember McLuhan's conundrum, "the medium is the message" ?
> > I do not believe that the King's decrees have clearly "dispatched"
> > the prospect that the way in which the "meaning" inheres in the mind
> > of the cogitator is via the specification and activation of a possibly
> > infinite computation.  The REPRESENTATION, in the brain, of such a 
> > computation IS the "meaning"/"structural association" at issue.
> > Underlying this theory of meaning would be congenital Ur-meanings
> > which are hard-wired, axiomatic bootstraps. 
> >
> > "the meaning's residence (in
> > some intelligible sense of the term) in his mind" (the cogitator) 
> > may be fullfilled by a cerebral representation which ENTAILS some
> > finite OR infinite computation.
> 
> Please note that I am certainly not suggesting that the representational
> mind eo ipso performs an infinite computation somehow connecting its
> internal representations to the objects represented by them.  As I
> explicitly stated, my intention was to give a reductio ad absurdum of
> materialist semantics.  Please try to disregard the conventional
> connotation of the term `meaning': my problem has to do with a simpler,
> more fundamental question: how can a material sign, be it a name, a
> declarative sentence, or any other symbol like a computation, stand for
> something else, i.e. an object in the broadest possible sense, a
> proposition, or a truth-value.  To say that the sign represents solely in
> virtue of "the specification and activation of a possibly infinite
> computation" is not to say anything terribly meaningful, since the
> computation itself, insofar as it is taken to be a material event, rather
> than a denizen of the Platonic realm of Ideas, must then be taken as yet
> another sign, and so on.  If you must seek a classic antecedent of this
> argument, one can be found in Plato's Third Man argument in the
> "Parmenides".

The Ur-meaning probably isn't all the different from the
"referent" -- our prehistoric ancestor's grunt of satisfaction
came to stand for unspoiled meat, his stylized expectoration came
to stand for spoiled meat.  When he made these oral gestures in
the absence of any meat at all they gradually came to stand for
the "idea" of meat.  It isn't really that complicated.

You are dealing with entities, complex words far removed from any
overt behavior, which are so abstract that their involvement in
the bodily origins of Ur-meaning is too far removed into the past.
Logical analysts have identified meaning with propositions, which
probably emerge comparatively late in the evolution of language.
Those grunts of satisfaction and the imperative snarls and the
cooings of courtship are the more obvious remnants of primal
language.

--
Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.COM
Midtown Medical Center |    {rutgers,ogicse,gatech}!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia       |
(404) 881-6877         |


