Meaning

Meaning arises when I say something congruent, and feel a congruent response from an interlocutor. When this happens, I think (if I reflect on it at all) something like: "We both know how to talk about this."

We cannot give an 'external' account of this - there is no behavioural, syntactical, or 'physical' story we can tell about meaning that will capture it correctly. It's actually quite easy to demonstrate this formally (I've discussed this, and related issues, in another blog: 'A True Account'), but the formal account only sheds a very indirect light on the subjective experience - the feeling of meaningfulness.

Here's the formal difficulty:

Any account of meaning has to be given in words that, well, mean something. If the account of meaning determines how these words should be interpreted, then it becomes immediately ambiguous - we don't know what the account means without knowing what the words mean, and we can't pin down the meanings of the words without knowing what the account means.

At the same time, we must be able to know what words mean. Otherwise, we wouldn't even know what the question "Do we know what words mean?" meant.

You can see why this neat paradox is frustrating to anyone who wants to get to grips with the big question.

The thing is: we do know how to talk. If we didn't we couldn't ask whether we did. And if we know how to talk, then we know - to some minimal extent - what the words and sentences we use mean. That knowledge has a certain feeling associated with it - a feeling of getting it right. The exact feeling, I think, that I described in the first paragraph of this post.

And if the feeling isn't there, the meaning isn't there either. It cannot be imposed from outside by literal instruction.