168. Word as process

 Following the preceding item in this blog, the puzzle now is this. On the one hand words can refer to things (objects or abstractions) that have some identity, i.e. some stability across different contexts. On the other hand meanings are context-dependent. They arise in relation to meanings of other words in specific action contexts or ‘language games’. So how can we reconcile this ‘identity’ across contexts with dependence on context?

What is the identity of these spooks that change as they move from room to room, while retaining their appearance?

The solution I proposed earlier in this blog, using established theory of meaning, is that meaning has two faces. One face is static reference to something, when one identifies something as something (a chair, say), and the second face is the dynamic sense or of how one does the identification, and how that is affected by contexts of action old or new. Reference stands to sense as a picture to a film.

Features by which we identify, in making sense, constitute the connotation of an expression. Which features are picked out depends on the context. ‘Chair’ refers to one thing in talk of academic appointments and quite another in talk of interior decoration. And new kinds of objects may turn up to serve as a chair. Connotation is a moving penumbra, as it were, which accompanies a word as it is applied across contexts. It is a bundle of shifting potentialities.

Saying that features are selected for identification would suggest some deliberate, rational choice. In fact the features are picked up, largely tacitly, in ‘framing’, prompted by the context.

I elaborated this in terms of the hermeneutic circle (in item 36 of this blog). Meanings of sentences are functions of the meanings of individual words in it, as recognized in analytic philosophy, but at the same time the meanings of the words depend holistically on that of the sentence, which does not sit well with analytic philosophy.

As recognized by Wittgenstein and Heidegger, the crux and cradle of meaning lie in practice. Semantics (theory of meaning) follows and arises from pragmatics (language use). There, I think, lies the fundamental basis for pragmatism.

While analytic philosophy neglects the birth of meaning in practice, pragmatic philosophy neglects the abstraction of concepts from practice. In that abstraction most of the fuzzy set of connotations is shed. The sun is at its zenith and the penumbra is slight. Abstraction violates, kills perhaps, what Wittgenstein called the ‘form of life’ of words.

But we need abstraction to go from one context to another, plucking experience to employ it elsewhere. But when applied in a novel context the abstraction needs to be enriched again, cloaked in connotation, as a form of life, as it is absorbed in the crucible of the context, being amalgamated with other words there.

All this is reflected in the double meaning of being as a thing and being as a process. Old philosophy was built on the first, and later philosophy (of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger) on the second. It is both, along the hermeneutic circle.