37. Meaning change

Here I end the series on meaning with an analysis of the change of meaning, for which I combine some points from previous items.
Ferdinand de Saussure made a distinction between langue, the shared, common order of meaning in language at a certain moment (synchronically) and parole, individual, creative language use that shifts language over time (diachronically). He next focused more on the order than on change, and it is the second that concerns me here. How does meaning change?

In search for an answer I return for a moment to the earlier discussion of universals and individuals. Universals, kept in semantic memory, arise from abstraction from specific individuals in specific situations, which are kept in episodic memory. I claimed earlier that universals are subject to change. How does that work?

Abstraction has several functions. One is the reduction of a complex of features to a few simple, most characteristic and most relevant ones (for a certain purpose). That furthers economy of thought and speed of interpretation and action. A second function is to cut ourselves loose from specific, familiar circumstances where no longer anything new happens, to move to novel conditions where we can still learn something new. Here universals function as steps we stand on to step away to novelty. We use universals to try and fit a novel situation into known frameworks that we carry along from previous experience.


This brings me back to the Cycle of invention that I discussed earlier, in items 31 and 35. That yields a ‘logic’ of change of knowledge, practice, technology, product, etc. I propose that it is also applicable here, to the change of meaning.

The connection is as follows. Both the hermeneutic circle, discussed in the preceding item of this blog, and the cycle of invention indicate that a change of content (knowledge, meaning) arises because known content is applied to a novel context and by adaptation to that and inspiration from it new content arises.

The cycle adds a few elements. In the beginning new content is ambiguous, diffuse, ill understood, and disordered, with gaps, overlaps, incongruities, or straight contradiction. In the course of experiments with the novelty more order arises by the solving of puzzles, elimination of redundant, irrelevant or extraneous elements, in consolidation. That also is economic, in offering simplification. That is the process of constructing universals. The loosening from the peculiarities of a specific context makes it possible to carry over experience to a novel context, in generaliszation.
The cycle shows that adaptation to a novel context can happen proximately, by making other choices from existing repertoires of practices/meanings, in differentiation. When that fails, in more distant adaptation we adopt novel connotations (sense) from foreign concepts or practices that we encounter in the novel context, in reciprocation. This is my proposal for how parole works.

In communication we put the content of our concepts into the novel contexts of what others think, say and do, and with that we may shift the content of our views. That is making sense.