Meaning Explained (Finally)

It’s really very strange that we can’t say what meaning is. Surely, we know what we mean! Meaning is a mental act and we know our mental acts, don’t we? Yet all attempts hitherto have foundered, often embarrassingly so. Mental images, sensations, definite descriptions, objects in the world, rules of use, behavioral dispositions, words in the language of thought, infusions from above (okay, I made that one up)—all these theories have come and gone, covered in shame. One might therefore suppose that the answer must be unobvious, hidden, a matter of far-out conjecture, because nothing on the surface does the trick (or else we go eliminative—the “myth of meaning”). We might even stipulate it as a condition of adequacy that the nature of meaning should be something far away from our common conceptions (compare consciousness). It should be something not evident to ordinary thought—a bit like the chemical structure of the genes. Meaning is clearly somewhat of a mystery, so we would expect that some ingenuity is going to be required in order to get it right, and some adjustment of theoretical expectations. We might have to reconfigure what we think a theory of meaning should look like—its methodology and structure. The key concept may not be what we have been led to expect; paradigms might shift under our feet (like tectonic plates). In other words, prepare to be shocked, even outraged (like being told the center of the universe is not the earth).

Let’s go back to basics. Take a simple proper name, say one that belongs to a family member or close acquaintance; and imagine the early days of human language. You make a sound, or perhaps a hand gesture, in hopes of securing reference to someone. This (putative) name is supposed to “stand for” a certain individual. How does it do so? Well, we might imagine a pre-linguistic background: up to now you have impersonated or mimicked the individual in question, and you are quite talented in this regard. You perform certain actions intended to resemble the individual; this will cause your audience (the term is apt) to bring that person to mind. If you utter the would-be name and get looks of incomprehension, you might trot out your little impression, thus securing uptake. Your hearers will then remember your act and associate it with the sound or gesture you produce. The reference of your utterance is the person you impersonated. It is in virtue of this association that the name means what it does in your close-knit community. If you are a good mimic, the association will stick, perhaps eliciting mild amusement. Here we see the germ of what I will boldly call the impersonation theory of names. Names mean (express) the impersonation they are linked to: not knowledge of a description but an ability to mimic. This is the psychological background to the institution of naming; one could write an article called “Naming and Mimicry”. We might loosely say that names are impersonations of their bearers—they evoke memories of such impersonations, or actual impersonations. People use them so as to avoid having to do an impersonation—they are “short for” such impersonations. These names are synonymous with impersonations. They “stand in” for impersonations. Impersonations symbolize the individual impersonated, and names partake of this symbolic power. Names rely on an underlying psychological capacity—the capacity to copy or imitate other people.[1] This capacity predated names and language generally, and indeed goes back to primitive capacities to mimic (like butterflies that mimic other butterflies because those others are poisonous to predators). Mimicry is common in the animal world and would no doubt have been present in pre-linguistic humans. It provides the foundation of meaning in simple cases. Language doesn’t picture objects; it impersonates them. Mimicry is the cradle of reference and hence meaning. It is the “cognitive architecture” on which meaning rests—what the meaning mind must be like in its deep structure. This structure is hidden, as promised, and it will take some persuasion on my part to get the theory accepted as a general theory of meaning.

I think that if it works for names of persons it will work for other words, because it provides necessary and sufficient conditions for meaning in one area of language—and meaning is uniform. But how? Here I must be brief. Consider names of places: these can be handled by invoking the notion of personification and extending impersonation to geographic formations (e.g., imitating the shape of the British Isles or the manners of its people). Names of shapes and colors are explained by the mimicking of shapes with the hands and pointing to color samples so as to provide a performance denoting the color intended (the sample mimics the color). Consider what people do when trying to communicate with others in the absence of a common language: they put on a theatrical performance attempting to mimic what they intend to communicate—for example, imitating someone eating to indicate hunger. They use the common language of mankind embodied in acts of mimicry. In this way facts can be impersonated not just objects—say, an accident witnessed. This repertoire of skills underlies the communication achieved by sounds and marks. Linguistic meaning piggybacks on this. It is the machinery of meaning, supplemented by sensorimotor skills, memory, etc.

There is a further component to be added to this theory, viz. the social nature of meaning. It may be objected that many users of language cannot impersonate the things they mean and don’t know anyone who can. Here we must invoke causal chains, experts, the division of linguistic labor, semantic deference, and linguistic history—the whole social web in which meaning occurs. Impersonation is essential at some point, but it need not be available to every speaker; we must allow for derived meaning, parasitic meaning. We can also bring in analogy, metaphor, intelligible extensions (impersonating a number with the fingers or a moral value with a facial expression). Human language is complex and made up of many things; I am only considering the basic mechanisms here—the deep roots of meaning. The great advantage of this theory is that it views meaning as a special case of something more general and antecedent, something practical and bodily, where it belongs. We can easily imagine communicative acts, in humans and animals, that involve the impersonation of dangers, like predators or precipices; and meaning can spring from these elementary beginnings (it has to spring from somewhere). The basic idea is to derive one kind of symbolism from another—meaningful words from imitative acts. Syntax no doubt stems from somewhere else, but the imbuing of meaning is a matter of imitative symbolism—meaning from mime. It is mime extended, elaborated, and attenuated. If butterflies had a language, it would be closely tied to their imitative wing coloration (we might even say that this is their language—“Keep away if you know what’s good for you!”). Nature is actually highly communicative, mainly by dint of imitation; language is one form of this general trait (plus some). Meaning is what happens when syntax meets impersonation in pragmatic acts of speech. For impersonation (imitation, mimicry) takes us from the thing doing the impersonating to the thing being impersonated—from the individual to the environment. Imitation is the root of reference. The other theories fail, in various ways, to achieve this result.

Humans are great imitators, the best of the best: it’s how we learn. The child in learning to speak imitates his or her elders, remarkably well. It is as if we are all born ready to imitate those around us, professionally. And we can imitate many things—noises, movements, facial expressions. Clearly, imitation comes into language acquisition; according to the impersonation theory, it also comes into the creation of meaning. It is odd that Wittgenstein never mentions this fact of human “natural history”, along with “walking, eating, drinking, playing” (PI 25). It is part of our “form of life”—the “imitation games” we play. Imitation clearly has much in common with speaking; sign language makes this particularly obvious. In the Tractatus meaning is held to consist in picturing, but picturing is a form of imitation. He could have preserved this insight in the Investigations by invoking natural mimicry instead of pictorial geometry; then he would have had an imitation theory of the basis of meaning. Would this be vulnerable to the semantic skeptic? It is hard to see how: the impersonation relation is not indeterminate. Language may not be all onomatopoeia (pure impersonation), but it’s not far off. Speech acts are acts of impersonation, or rely on such acts as a pre-condition. The linguistic brain is really an expert mimic. To understand a sentence is to know what imitative acts would convey its meaning, or to be suitably connected to someone who knows that. Other animals are limited in their powers of imitation (mentally or physically), so they are unsuited to be speakers except to a very limited extent. Humans, though, have an elaborate imitation module in their head, which they put to work when they speak and understand speech. We are certainly extremely good at interpreting impersonation and other forms of imitation; we can see it instantly without thinking. To be impersonation-blind is to be virtually subhuman (I doubt that other animals impersonate each other as we do). Our distinctive sense of humor is bound up with it (jokes often involve impersonation). We have a language-imitation-humor mental faculty. Meaning arises from this suite of capacities and acts back on them. Could there be a language without the possibility of jokes?[2]

[1] You might object that normal human powers of impersonation only extend to a few people, whereas we are typically masters of many names. I reply that probably names were first introduced only within families so that only a few needed to be backed by a distinctive impersonation (see below on the role of social interactions in extending the range of names).

[2] You see what I mean about paradigm shifts and surprising surmises; this is a far cry from formalistic denotation and connotation theories of what meaning ultimately consists in. Meaning is part of human nature in the round not an isolated formal system. It would be hard to develop a scientific theory of it, still less a mathematical theory. It is biologically messy. This is not ordinary language philosophy but ordinary people philosophy—a species of animal indeed. Not Frege but Darwin.

A page from my first (unpublished) novel, written circa 1984–punk existentialist as someone once described it.

Sent from my iPhone

Consciousness and the Origin of Philosophy

What causes philosophy—the subject—to exist? I shall argue that consciousness is what causes philosophy to exist, or rather consciousness-in-the-world. The consciousness-world nexus is the origin of philosophy. It isn’t the world by itself or consciousness by itself; it’s the situation of consciousness in the world, or the situation of the world in consciousness. It’s the relation between them. I will give two obvious examples: the mind-body problem and the problem of knowledge. In the mind-body problem, we seek to understand how the mind relates to the body: we know we have a mind (consciousness) and we know we have a body (part of the external world), but we can’t see how they are situated in relation to each other. In the case of knowledge, we seek to understand how our consciousness manages to know the world outside of it: how can this(consciousness) know that (the world)—how is the knowing relation to be understood? It’s all about the consciousness-world relation: we are looking for relational knowledge in seeking philosophical knowledge. That is the basic thesis. In order to obtain this knowledge, we will need to understand both consciousness and the world, but the motivation for that comes from the problematic relation in question. In the philosophy of perception, say, we want to know how perceiving consciousness relates to the world perceived: is the world seen directly or is the relation mediated? Hence: what is seeing and what is the thing seen? I know myself and I think I know the world; what I don’t know is how one relates to the other—that is opaque and not contained in the two separate pieces of knowledge. Put bluntly, I don’t know how I am related to it. It is the juxtaposition that puzzles me.[1]

This doesn’t sound like too daring a proposal; it might even sound truistic. But notice how it sets philosophy apart from other subjects. In the sciences we want to understand the world (reality) not our relation to it—the physical world, the biological world, the psychological world. We use our consciousness to do that, but we don’t mention it. The results of science are not a set of relational truths about consciousness and the world, and the method is not to scrutinize that relation. In science we focus on the world side of the relation (this includes psychological science). The same is true for history, economics, and English literature. In philosophy we focus on the relation because it is not clear—not conceptually or logically clear (we are not concerned here with empirical facts). The relation suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity—intelligibility. We can’t make senseof it. This meta-philosophy contrasts with the one standard in twentieth century philosophy, namely that philosophy arises from language, or the relation between language and the world. Either language is about the world but we don’t know how, so we need to get clear about meaning; or language is defective and misleads us about the world, so we need to correct it. So, language is the origin of philosophy: it exists because of language—not because of the world or the mind or their relation. Now it may be true that some linguistic puzzles lead to philosophical rumination, but au fond the problem lies deeper—in our grasp of the consciousness-world relation. We would be confronted by philosophical problems even if we had no language. The problems lie at the level of ontology not semantics. That, at any rate, is the view I am defending.

This proposal faces two kinds of objection, both serious. The first is that it implies that if there were no consciousness there would be no philosophy; the second is that it implies that if there were no world, only consciousness, there would be no philosophy. The second objection is easier to deal with: if we only had concepts of our own consciousness (per impossibile), we would lose the vast majority of philosophical problems and it is not clear what would remain; our conceptual scheme would be just too impoverished. Would we even have the concept of truth, let alone objectivity and subjectivity, self and other? How could we ask whether the will is free in an objective deterministic world, or how the mind is related to the body? We need concepts of the world if we are to formulate standard philosophical problems, not just concepts of consciousness.  The first question is tougher: is it really true that without consciousness philosophy is impossible? Couldn’t an intelligent being devoid of consciousness entertain philosophical questions? For many problems concern the world as it is in itself—necessity, existence, identity, causation, space, time, right and wrong, and so on. Couldn’t these problems be considered by an alien being that thinks only unconsciously and has no concept of consciousness? Such a being might have a language that has no conscious expression but can formulate philosophical problems about these things. This objection is not to be lightly dismissed, strange as it is, but I think it has an answer. The problems are only philosophical if they spring from an awareness of consciousness and its objects; they would not be our philosophical problems in the absence of consciousness. They would not trouble the alien intellect as our problems trouble ours. For they would not arise from a felt mismatch between how things consciously seem and how they are in themselves: their subjective appearance and their objective nature. Causation strikes us a certain way consciously, as manifesting necessity, but we are at a loss to find a counterpart for this in objective causal reality (constant conjunction etc.). Our hypothetical aliens would merely suppose that causation consists in constant conjunction, having no conscious impressionof causal necessity. If they had no conscious impression of existence, wouldn’t they take it to be unproblematically such-and-such (say, spatial occupation)—a question of science. It is existence as we experience it that forms the philosophical problem of existence.  If they had no consciousness of freedom, wouldn’t they just assume it was impossible?  The subject of philosophy as we know it would not exist, though some allied subject might. The general form of a philosophical problem is that consciousness makes it seem that such-and-such but reflection on reality seems not to confirm this. It consciously seems to us that right and wrong are simple moral categories yielding truths and falsehoods, but when we turn to the world it is hard to find anything to back this up—hence moral philosophy. Without consciousness the world is philosophically flat not philosophically taxing. Color seems like an external feature of things so far as consciousness is concerned, but when we reflect on the world it is hard to find a place for it. Space and time are not problematic for consciousness, but considered as real external things they fail to live up to what consciousness suggests (or unimaginably exceed it). To paraphrase Russell, consciousness contains the metaphysics of the Stone Age (right or wrong); the answer, he thought, was to discard that metaphysics. But that is none too easy a thing to do. It’s the clash between consciousness and the world that powers philosophy. Without consciousness philosophy as we know it does not exist. Thinking philosophically requires thinking of consciousness, and hence thinking consciously; not so science. Science can in principle be carried out by unconscious beings (“insentient intelligence”).[2]

The way to think of it is this: consciousness depicts the world in a certain way, but the world may have other ideas. We have thoughts about both and can appreciate tensions and disharmonies and outright disagreements. In this intersection philosophy arises—not from each alone, nor from language or science or dreams or politics or history. It arises from a certain cognitive predicament that distinguishes philosophy from other subjects. Thus, we get attempts to reduce the world to consciousness or to eliminate consciousness altogether or downplay it. There is a kind of competition at work here, and philosophy is the upshot. So, philosophy has deep, primitive roots, and yet is a sophisticated performance, requiring a specific cognitive structure on the part of the philosopher. It is not essentially a linguistic product. Even kids can do it. Every department of it demands an oscillation between mind and world, a consideration of both in tandem. The problem of perception is perhaps the most characteristic area of philosophy, because it expressly considers consciousness on the one hand and the external world on the other—and the problem is remarkably recalcitrant, almost defiant. What is the relation of perception, that most basic of consciousness-world relations? This is a quintessentially philosophical problem. But the same basic pattern runs through everything in philosophy: knowledge, action, realism and anti-realism, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of science and mathematics, philosophy of language and logic, phenomenology. We could describe philosophy succinctly as the study of conceptual problems of mind-world relations and not be too wide of the mark.[3]

[1] Exactly why that juxtaposition is so problematic is a further and difficult question; I won’t consider it here. It probably has something to do with evolution.

[2] Artificial intelligence, as it now exists, is incapable of properly philosophical thought, but it might be capable of scientific thought (unconsciously). There is no such thing as unconscious philosophy.

[3] It is a popular idea that philosophy is a kind of pre-science, but if what I say here is correct this is a misconception. Philosophy is distinctively concerned with conceptual problems of the consciousness-world nexus not with the world considered in itself (including the mind), so it isn’t doing the same kind of thing as science. It could be called the science of this nexus, but then it is not continuous with the other sciences. Also, when people say that philosophy is about conceptual problems, they omit to specify what kind of problem; the current proposal fills in that lacuna. At last, we have an answer to the question of what philosophy is—the conceptual study of mind-world relations. For example, meta-ethics is the conceptual study of the relation between ethical consciousness and ethical reality. Notice that this definition need not include everything that is traditionally taught in philosophy departments—that is another question.

Oliver Sacks’ Fabrications

I have just come across an article by Rachel Aviv in the December 15 edition of the New Yorker about Oliver Sacks’ dubious case histories, especially in Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Apparently, Sacks acknowledged that he made things up in his private journals, to which Aviv had access; I refer you to her article for details. As it happens, I reviewed Hat in the London Review of Books in 1986, explicitly raising the question of fabrication—exaggeration, embellishment, gilding the lily. You can read a section from my review below. At the time I wrote the review (I was 36) I had not met Sacks, but later in New York we became friends and stayed friends, despite some initial friction over my critical review. Now I see my well-founded suspicions amply confirmed. He never admitted to me that my strictures were justified, though he didn’t deny them either. He did, in later work, avoid this kind of inaccuracy, as well as the rather gushing nature of his prose. I subsequently reviewed both Musicophilia (New York Review of Books) and On the Move (Wall Street Journal) and found nothing similar to complain about. But this is not the main point of the present piece, which concerns the author of the article in question. No mention is made of my review in her long article, though others are cited as having comparable concerns. Why? It’s not as if my review appeared in an obscure place, or was not clear, or was by someone without credentials (I was an Oxford professor at the time). I find it hard to believe Aviv knew nothing of my review; if so, she didn’t dig very deep journalistically. Shouldn’t she have cited me, since I raised these concerns long ago, and independently of other people? And why didn’t she? Another suspicion recommends itself: it’s because of you-know-what—the disrepute cast upon my name in the last twelve years. I would like to believe this isn’t so, but my suspicions were well-founded before. So, Rachel, did you know about my review or not? If not, I suggest you read it and make the appropriate citation; if you did, why the lack of citation?