Locating Meaning

Locating Meaning

Where is meaning? Where is it located? This is a good question, because not easy to answer; maybe answering it would give us some idea of the nature of meaning. Is it in the external world, or in the mind (conscious or unconscious), or in the soul (immaterial substance), or in the body (behaviorism), or in the brain, or in the community, or in the abstract Plato-Frege realm, or somewhere else entirely? Or is it in many places, or none? People talk about whether meaning is “in the head” (the skull, the brain, the inner ego?), but that doesn’t exhaust the location question; we should approach the question more broadly and comprehensively. To that end, I will consider an alternative intellectual history with some echoes of recent discussions; this should help us gain a better perspective on the issues.

Consider a group of Cartesians firmly convinced that the mind (the soul) is an immaterial substance having neither extension nor location. They accordingly believe that meaning resides in this substance along with anything mental. So long as the substance remains unaltered it will contain the same meanings, even posthumously. You can change the body, the brain, the environment, or anything external to the soul thus conceived and you won’t change meaning. It all depends on the internal make-up of the immaterial substance. They are savagely “internalist”. Now a renegade comes along, call him “Mantup”: this chap has come up with an ingenious thought experiment he wants to try out on his colleagues, involving a place called Twin Earth. You know the story from Mantup’s Earth counterpart (H. Putnam), so I won’t repeat it. Suffice to say that it shows that meaning is (partially) determined by the environment in such a way that “water” has a different meaning on Earth and Twin Earth. This goes against the prevailing immaterialist internalism. Mantup’s argument is found persuasive, but disturbing, for two reasons. First, it undermines the entrenched semantic internalism: “Meaning just ain’t in the soul!”, people exclaim. Meaning is in the world, the physical environment, a matter of causal interactions with physical things, at least partly. So, meaning seems to be an amalgam of the inner and immaterial and the outer and material—a metaphysical hybrid. But how can meaning be both material and immaterial, extended and not extended, located and not located? This goes against everything they believe—and yet it seems true. The resolution breathlessly proposed by some members of our imaginary group is that the soul cannot be immaterial! I know, crazy right? But they have an argument: it’s the only way to avoid metaphysical absurdity—because we can now say that meaning is uniformly material, extended, and located. That strange furrowed organ in the head (they have no name for it) actually plays a role in the formation of mind: it is the mind, or at least is vital to the mind’s powers. Who would have thought? They are now externalist materialists where once they were internalist immaterialists. Quite a volte face. If meaning has a location after all (a region of space next to a planet), then so must the mind have a location—right where the relevant part of space is. The correct theory of meaning has led to a revision in the metaphysics of mind. Meaning turns out to be physical and located in the brain. Syntax was already ensconced in the brain (no Twin Earth cases for syntax), and now semantics follows suit.

Now let’s go back to Earth and our own intellectual tradition. When we say that meaning is in the head, or deny this, what do we mean by “head”? I think there are three possibilities: the conscious, the unconscious, and the brain. Either meaning is in the conscious mind, or in the unconscious mind, or in the physical brain. What is the truth? I don’t think it is plausible that meaning is a creature of consciousness like sensation; it has a partly submerged nature. We don’t consciously assemble complex meanings from an array of simple meanings; our unconscious does that for us (compare seeing an object). A lot of linguistic processing goes on unconsciously—that is a truism. Yet meaning is not completely divorced from consciousness; consciousness comes in at some point—as when you consciously hear what someone says or carefully construct a line of poetry. This unconscious level is affected by external factors, as in Twin Earth: “water” differs in meaning in the unconscious minds of speakers on Earth and Twin Earth, as well as in their conscious minds. The physical environment forces a difference of reference in the two places, and this conjoins with the unconscious and conscious content of the speakers’ mind. In fact, I would say that the unconscious existence of meaning is aptly described as “physical”: not that it is reducible to physics but that it is “of the body”.[1] It operates at a subconscious cerebral level, like the subconscious processing of visual data. Moreover, the unconscious semantic level is larger and more important than the conscious level (as with phonetics and syntax). If so, meaning is mainly located in the unconscious physical world—the world of space, extension, and spatial location. The external component is clearly physical (water impinging on the senses) and so is the internal component in so far as it is unconscious (which it preponderately is). In short, meaning is (mainly) physical and located where matter is located. It is “bodily” in the way vision is. It is true that meaning can appear at the conscious level, and perhaps necessarily so, but it must also have an unconscious existence, as revealed in its combinatorial powers. As in all human skills, there is a vast reality of unconscious know-how lying behind any complex skill, from walking to talking. We only catch glimpses of it at the conscious level. How much of the child’s grasp of language is consciously represented? Not much. Does the child consciously know what he is doing when he speaks? Of course not. Meaning is located in the brain below conscious awareness (except when it reaches consciousness). Control of the larynx and other vocal organs is clearly unconscious and clearly body-directed, hence “physical”. Really, the whole contrast between “mental” and “physical” is out of date; the important point is that meaning is something that has a reality outside of what we can introspectively report. What we call “language mastery” is something wider than what crosses our conscious minds as we speak and understand. Indeed, I myself would happily say that meaning is not “in the mind”, though it is mainly “in the head”, because it is fundamentally “in the brain”, i.e., “physical” (it isn’t caused by non-physical supernatural agencies). Where is meaning? In the physical (biological) world, both internal to the organism (spatially) and also external to it. Thus, I am a kind of “physicalist” about meaning—not in the reductive sense but in the sense that meaning is a matter of actions of the brain. It is a sensorimotor skill. It isn’t like thought in this sense. That is why we don’t really introspect meaning: it isn’t a content of consciousness but a congeries of habits governed by the brain, though habits of a high cognitive order. It isn’t an attribute of an immaterial substance and it isn’t a bunch of qualia; it’s a body-involving sensorimotor skill of a specific kind. Thus, we may as well describe it as “physical” in the weak sense I have gestured at. It is not a divine disembodied attribute of something immaterial but a biological capacity rooted in the brain. Meaning is located in the head-world nexus.

Some theorists have contended, not without reason, that externalism extends beyond the semantic into the psychological. But this point can be overdone. Beliefs can be de re and so can meanings, but there are reasons why psychological externalism is less immediately appealing than semantic externalism: for language is clearly more tied to the body than mind is. We speak but we don’t do anything analogous with thought and belief—we don’t have bodily organs that are dedicated to these activities. We refer to things in speech publicly, but we don’t do the same with our thoughts. We don’t warm to “use” theories of thought, but we do for language. Languages vary from place to place, but thoughts don’t; thought is more universal. Words are more tied down to things than concepts are, more local. Language is public but thought is not. In other words, there are reasons to adopt an externalist conception of language that don’t apply to the mind. Language is more “outside the head” than thought is, though thought can be de re and hence environment-dependent. Calling thought “physical” is more of a conceptual strain than describing meaning this way. And remember that the language capacity is largely independent of other cognitive capacities like rational thought (or irrational thought). A behaviorist theory of language is marginally less repellent than a behaviorist theory of thought (though still repellent). Meaning is closer to behaving than thinking is (a statue called The Speaker would not portray him with his head in his hands completely silent and immobile). So, let’s not exaggerate the externalism of thought, ignoring the differences from language.[2]

[1] See my “Truly Physical”. Actually, we discovered in the nineteenth century that the mind was physical—as opposed to divinely (or devilishly) ordained and supervised. We discovered too that mental illness is not possession by evil spirits but an organic disorder. This is a type of “physicalism” in a perfectly good sense.

[2] There are ways of being an externalist about meaning but not about thought, such as being a causal theorist about words but a description theorist about concepts. Not that externalism about thought is a false doctrine; it is just not a simple deduction from externalism about meaning. Intuitively, meaning is embedded in the world in a way that thought isn’t (it is more inward). Language is all about hearing and speaking, but thought is more removed from the senses and the body.