Words Don’t Have Meaning

I have to start with a warning to those brave readers who have decided to accompany your humble guide on this introductory tour of analytic philosophy. Periodically on this tour, you will hear this noise.....YEEAARGGGHH! Do not be alarmed. That is the sound of your ernest tour guide having a mild heart attack at the necessity of having to glaze over fascinating details that deserve more attention but cannot be addressed in the interest of time. Okay? Got it? Okay, let me do it one more time so you remember.....YEEAARGGGHH! Okay, then? Let’s proceed.

First, let’s review the title of this chapter....

Words Don’t Have Meaning

Well that looks patently ridiculous doesn’t it? Of course words have meaning. Right? Right!

Uh.....right?

Well, let’s just see about that.

When confronted with such a stupid claim, we might rightly retort that of course words have meaning. After all, don’t we know, for example, that the word hammer means a tool that is used for hitting nails and the word pig means an oh so tasty farm animal?

But here we have to pause and make a crucial distinction. Upon review, we will notice that what is being offered in the examples above is not the meaning of the words, but rather the definitions of the words. In other words, just those things we would expect to see following the words in a dictionary.

Now before we continue, I have to mention something that will be very important from this point on. You see, in the world of analytic philosophy, there are two important skills to develop and we will be using them both. The first skill is the ability to stop in the middle of several naturally connected thoughts and look closer at the steps we are actually taking. When doing so, we will discover that there are interesting things to learn from specific distinctions that we’ve just been too lazy in our habits of thinking to notice before. These new insights can be very enlightening.

Conversely, we also often assume that many concepts that we regularly rely on must have elaborate explanations and justifications for their authority and power, though we rarely dwell on them ourselves. So the second main skill we will develop is to see that many of those presumed elaborate underpinnings can be completely whitewashed over and forgotten and then discover that we have lost nothing as a result. We’ll see that in many cases, everything still works and that, not only were the assumed complex underpinnings unnecessary, they were never there to begin with. What we assumed was complex, will be found to be quite simple. Insights of this kind can be very liberating.

We’ll employ specific examples of both of those techniques in much of what follows. But for now let’s get back to that dictionary and those definitions.

We are all familiar enough with how to use a dictionary. When needed, we look up a word and read the definition that follows. English speakers learn very early on that there are many words that have more than one definition. So when we come across a word like Light, it doesn’t confuse us to understand that the word can be defined as: of little weight; easy to lift, as well as: the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible.

This standard structure of dictionaries and their organized word definitions is both familiar and deeply ingrained in our habit of mind. I would suggest that this habit of defining words is actually so ingrained, that when we contemplate individual words in isolation, we often imagine the definition is somehow hanging off of the word invisibly just behind it, and it is just this invisible definition that gives the word its meaning. Or, an alternative conceptual illustration of this idea is to think that the definition is actually “in us,” or “in our brains,” and then when we come upon a word in a book or online, the word gets its meaning from us mentally pushing the definition onto the word, if you will, and thereby giving it meaning.

Both of these illustrations of how words have meaning are wrong, but are still tenaciously persistent in our thinking. You might be surprised to learn now that these mistaken ideas actually lead to a wide variety of problems in our real day to day lives. I think we’ve all had the experience of getting into an argument with someone who suddenly wants to stop the argument, or not even start an argument, until certain key words are defined and agreed upon first. Do not fall for it! You can be sure that this is always a power play or a devious and sly way to change the subject and that the conversation will now get bogged down in trivial arguments about the definitions of words. The original argument will never be addressed, let alone resolved. Watch out for this slippery interjection, especially in your own thinking! (By the way, the correct approach to successful arguing, especially with someone you love, is always in previously mutually agreed upon rules of engagement, never in the mutually agreed upon definitions of words. I’ll have much more to say about the very real consequences of some of the abstract lessons we will be learning here in a later chapter.) YEEAARGGGHH! What? ....No...no, I’m alright. Let’s continue....

Lets return to the tenacious, though incorrect, idea that words get their meaning by having their definitions close by, either by hiding invisibly behind the word, or by hiding in our heads until we come upon a word.

Let's look at the word Light, and then, let's place each of it's definitions right after it.

Light: of little weight; easy to lift

and

Light: the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible

When viewed in this way, I can never help feeling that here, it is the definition that is working in service to the word. As if the word, coming first, is the boss, and the definition is there to hold it up and keep it from blowing away.

Not only that, but also when viewed in this way, we naturally walk away from the experience with the conclusion,"The word Light has two definitions."

Fine. But let's play for a bit and see what happens when it is not the word we come upon first, but the definition instead.

of little weight; easy to lift: Light

and

the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible: Light

The curious thing to discover when looking at these examples is that now the word Light looks as though it is in service to the definition. As if the definition, now coming first, is the new boss. And the service it requires is a shorthand way to be represented, since those pesky definitions can be so long and detailed. Here the word Light seems to say,"Ohh, ooh! I can represent that idea for you! I can convey that!"

Now see this. Those definitions aren't definitions now. They are two totally different concepts! And those two concepts might be represented by any old word. Even made up ones, like this…

of little weight; easy to lift = FLURB

and

the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible = TEKK

So now it looks as though it was just a coincidence of historical happenstance that each of those two concepts got represented by two words that ended up being spelled the same way. For haven't we just decided that they are, in fact two different words?

Try a little exercise here and try to “see” the word on the left as meaning “not heavy” and the word on the right as meaning “the stuff that comes out of lightbulbs.”

LIGHT LIGHT

At this point, we might be inclined to conclude with the very peculiar statement...

“Just because two words look the same, are spelled the same and are pronounced the same, it does not mean that they are the same word.”

Now how are we to know which word is which? How are we to know which of the definitions of the word Light is being used when we look at the word? And the answer to that of course, is that we can’t. And this leads us to another apparently ridiculous statement, except this time, in spite of our insistence to the contrary, this time, the statement is, in fact, true.

Words do not, by themselves, have meaning.

No matter how counterintuitive and patently false that statement looks. it is actually true. Further more, it is true in every case. Because we are all so familiar with the practice of defining words, and perhaps because of our familiarity with the structure of dictionaries, we all know too well how to attach a definition to a word. This practice is simply called defining a word. But it is not the definition that gives the word a meaning. And consequently, it is not our familiarity with the definition of a word that helps us know the meaning of the word when we encounter it in our day to day lives. In fact the familiar practice of defining a word comes long after we learn how to use the word in sentences.

And that is the crux of what needs to be realized here. Namely this: We only understand what concept a word brings to a sentence when, and only when, they are employed in a sentence. For example

Please turn off the light.

Oh, this package is light.

Because we understand each of these sentences, we can accertain which definition of the word light is approprite here.

BUT BUT BUT!!!! And this is critically important! That is not to say that we understand sentences because we understand the words they are composed of. Rather, we understand sentences because it is the sentences themselves that have a sense, i.e. a meaning. Complete sentences are the lowest common denominator of meaning.

To put it another way, even though a sentence is made up of parts, i.e. words, this does not mean that we can smash a sentence with a hammer and break it into smaller meaning pieces, with a bit of meaning being attached to individual words. And consequently, we do not assemble sentences by assembling little meaning pieces (like we mistakenly believe words are) like so many lego bricks.

So let's restate the conclusion mentioned above. We can't even say what the definition of a word is until after it is employed in a sentence. But even then, the word still doesn't get to have a meaning! Because the whole phenomenon of meaning something cannot exist until after a period has been placed at the end of a sentence and at that point, it is the sentence that has a meaning, not the words.

This amazing realization, that meaning is an exclusive property of complete sentences and not individual words, was the fruit of the enormous labors of two intellectual giants; Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell, both of whom lived and worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. And it was just this realization that destroyed a specific concept of philosophy and logic that was accepted as infallible ever since it was invented by Aristotle two thousand years earlier. YEEAARGGGHH! ...oh...just wait....give me a minute....huff, huff, huff....oh that was a bad one. I’ve got so much to say about those guys. Okay, let me just catch my breath. Okay, let’s continue....

With these new, uncharted concepts of meaning, logic, truth, reference, definition, and the foundations of what it is to understand anything, analytic philosophy was born.

Thanks to Frege and Russell, we now know….

Words don't have meaning.

And here we started out thinking that sentence looked patently ridiculous. Ha!

Does it look a little more reliable now? Well hold onto your britches because I've got a little surprise for you much later in chapter four where we will discover that….

The sentence Words don't have meaning. is actually a meaningless sentence.

See you soon.