Literature/Tables/I-mean-it
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| minds | ||
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make | |
| words | mean | things |
Notes
[edit | edit source]- It is minds that have words mean things. That is, "Words ... 'mean' nothing by themselves." (Ogden & Richards 1923, p. 9) This is indeed the very seed of their seminal contextual, "causal theory of reference" or meaning, as they mentioned and likely coined, but strangely few mention the fact. No causal theory without minds causing and caused. Person and Object (Chisholm 1976) challenged Word and Object (Quine 1960) mindless of minds.
- Arguably in other ways, it is words, say, "word magic" that have minds mean things, or it is things in themselves, say, "affordance" that either minds or words mean them. Nevertheless, things cannot cause words directly, and vice versa, but always via minds as their center or mediator in action, fully sensitive, cognitive, creative and adaptive in context otherwise than matters and machines. Cognitively speaking, the "machine that thinks" is as true as a machine that drinks drunken indeed.
- Some milestones:
Words mean nothing by themselves. (Ogden et al. 1923) This [image] is not a pipe. (Magritte 1929) The map is not the territory. (Korzybski 1933) Words have power to mould men's thinking. (Huxley 1940) In saying something we do something. (Austin 1955) The word is not the thing. (Hayakawa 1965) The word is not the thing. (Krishnamurti 1975) Or, minds have words mean things. | |||||||||
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