Life is a search for meaning – the meaning of existence, for instance. But what chance do we have of ever answering the big questions if we have no explicit way of knowing what words mean?
Think of a word, any word, and ask yourself what it means. Go on, do it. The task is more difficult than you might imagine. I am also, at random, choosing a word – it is snow. What does snow mean? You can turn to the dictionary for help, and there you will find: “water falling in the form of white flakes consisting of small ice crystals formed directly from the water vapour of the atmosphere …” etc.
This may be true and useful as a definition, but it is useless as a formulation of meaning. To get the drift of my argument, I must ask you to play along with me, as it were, so go on – in your search for the meaning of snow, immerse your consciousness in the word; think snow.
Snow
I guarantee that as you challenge yourself to evoke the meaning of snow you don’t skirmish with words like “flakes” or “crystals” or “vapour”. Instead, you are subject to an amorphous and imaginative recreation or creation of memories, emotions, images and tactile perceptions. Snow embodies a world of connotation by no means semantically consistent: it can mean glorious snowcapped mountain peaks in Switzerland and it can mean sludge that blocks your driveway in Ontario.
Your understanding of the meaning of snow is not a cognitive process characterized by internally voiced words; it is a miasma of feeling, and you might even find yourself angered by what seems like a dumb question. “Snow is snow”, you may say, and I agree. That’s my very point: snow is snow, it is not flakes or crystals or vapour.
In short, the meaning of snow is experienced, and all meaning, I propose, is an experience. This will be a disarming proposition for all people who seek meaning in explicit cognition, and it represents a minor victory for the poets, the lovers, the artists, the madmen and the dreamers who refuse to be tyrannised by the material world of definition and binary code.
If meaning is an experience, it is an experience evoked not by the paraphrasable meaning of words, but by their sound and their appearance, to say nothing of circumstantial factors such as context.
Every word that we use, including snow, represents an eon of immemorial living, not just the individual’s, but the lived experience of everyone who has ever used that word, going back to the dawn of time when a person coalesced into a sound his or her experience of cold white stuff lying on the ground in winter. It is fascinating to consider why he or she formulated the sound snow for that stuff, not, say, gravel, and in that moment of genesis when a sound instantiated an external reality, meaning was born.
In a similar vein, ask most people what water is, and they are likely to say, “H2O”. But H2O is a definition which might tell us what water is, but not what water means. If a visitor to Earth with only a rudimentary grasp of earthly language were to say, “But what is the meaning of ‘water’?”, how would you answer the question?
The answer does not lie in words, it lies in showing him the stuff under question, and sharing your experience of what it is with him, for the meaning of the word water can only be known by experience – by an amalgam of sight, feel, and touch, to say nothing of memory and imagination.
Help from Aristotle
We all know that when learning a foreign language it is not enough to learn the meaning of a word cognitively – by means of explanation. You only really feel you have internalized its meaning when you have successfully said it aloud.
If “A” is to mean “B”, then “A” is made redundant; to borrow from Aristotle’s laws of discourse, everything in the world is either “A” or “not A”, or, in the words of my argument, everything in the world is either “snow” or “not snow”, and no word that isn’t snow can express the meaning of snow.
Are you brave or are you courageous?
Snow and water are simple nouns. But what of more complex words, adjectives, for example? What do you mean when you use the word courageous? In their answer to this question, most people, I believe, would find themselves reaching for the word brave, and in their terms courageous would mean brave and brave would mean courageous. But, no, not so, for the words are not interchangeable.
There are no true synonyms in the English language, and if there are no true synonyms the meaning of every word is unique, and, being unique, its meaning cannot be rendered by any combination of other words. Seeking to find meaning in definition is to embark upon an infinite journey of the regressive definition of words.
We experience the words courageous and brave differently, perhaps radically so. The words sound and look so different. Courageous is derived from cor, or heart. The heart is traditionally and even today the seat of love and sincerity, perhaps even of nobility. Courageous is spiritual, intangible, mysterious, courtly, gallant and yes, maybe even feminine.
These associations are all born of the soft open sound of the word. Brave is markedly different. Listen to the sound. It is surely no co-incidence that it is cognate with “brazen.” Bravery – implacable, masculine, and physical – is a characteristic of the flesh, not the spirit. One might also consider the use we make of the word when we say: “The multi-coloured bunting made a brave sight.” That which is brave is visible, that which is courageous is covert, maybe even shy.
My point is that the meaning of these two words is quintessentially an experience derived from their sound and even their shape on the page, and the words I have used above in an attempt to differentiate them represent approximations. The real thing lies in the words themselves.
What about scientific words
You may rightfully expect the propositions I have outlined above to be seriously challenged by meaning as it is formulated in scientific or technical language, but again I must make much of the difference between definition and meaning. Is it possible to read the word triangle without – however momentarily – confirming its meaning by imagining a triangular shape?
That, I know, may be a banal example, but I am only trying to establish a principle of understanding, not provide a universe of evidence. Scientific concepts, however complex, make sense to me when they can gain some foothold in my imagination, and when they can’t I have no idea what they mean, and I am not convinced that scientists know what they mean. I can wrestle with the word infinity all day, but I cannot experience its meaning, and it remains for me a truly meaningless concept.
Ironically, I can imagine and thereby experience the meaning of the formulation “the big bang”, but the very fact that I can experience it is the living proof that it is a meaningless formulation, for I experience it as an explosion, but an explosion must take place in space and in time, and this (apparently) is exactly what the big bang isn’t. Extreme cognitive dissonance is the consequence!
Of course, I am in the puzzling situation of having to use words to explain all of this, and if you have taken my proposition to mean that words have no knowable meaning at all then you can legitimately blame me for contradiction.
But of course, I have not been arguing that words have no meaning, only that the meaning we all need so desperately to share with each other and to understand our world is located in the mysterious hinterland of consciousness and feeling, not in words on a page, but are no less real for that.
We need to remind ourselves that a veritable galaxy of thought of this nature resides in and is evoked by non-verbal means – by music, for instance, or fine art. I have long believed that a vivid understanding of the culture and the mores of Georgian England can be derived from Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, and similarly an understanding of 19th Century America from Dvorak’s New World Symphony. The depth of that understanding is not the less real for not being expressed in words.
People vs software
All of this being the case, I object to the widely shared assumption that contemporary software – call it AI if you want to – has a power or force somewhat akin to the power of human thought, by which I mean human understanding, characterised as it is by a grasp of meaning. A software system, no matter how complex or brilliant, can only deal with snow by its definition, not by its meaning. Only people can do that.
Let me close with what some may regard as a piece of tendentious fantasising by harnessing the support of Michael Polanyi.
Somewhere in his writings Polanyi says (I quote from memory): “If science were to reach so elevated a pitch of perfection that it could predict the position of every atom in the universe it would not solve a single problem of the human world and it would be an achievement irrelevant to the world of meaning.”
As a humanist, I find that a comforting thought.
[Image: By https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/e3/eb/41aa24187f17795c57e5477c665f.jpgGallery: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0000205.htmlWellcome Collection gallery (2018-03-23): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/bcf6uctj CC-BY-4.0, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36382115]
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