Philosophical Ramblings Thread

[Montmorency]

Your comment strikes me that you are blending semantics and pragmatics

I think I see why you got that impression. However, I see it as a principled distinction between formal semantics - a system for describing verbal meaning - that is derived at and abstracted from communicative semantics, or the concrete verbal meaning induced in both listener and speaker/conveyor by a particular utterance or other such linguistic unit.

The difference between communicative semantics and pragmatics is that pragmatics is context, particularly social context, serving as a filter for formal semantics, while communicative semantics (as I am conceiving of it) is the archetype from which formal semantics emerges, just as the axioms of deductive logic emerge from concrete experiences of some regularities present in natural phenomena. My idea is that whereas deductive logic is analogous to causality, formal semantics is analogous to itself, such that it inherently forms a sort of recursive spiral into itself. Thus, formal semantics is really only studying how formal semantics affects communicative semantics in a metasemantic way, and how this in turn affects formal semantics to transform formal semantics...but what does all that tell us about meaning 'in the wild'?

It might help to rephrase my original notion in terms of the Sub-Goldilocks Principle and cognitive insensitivity:

The human brain is sensitive to patterns, more so than most any other creature, yet it is simultaneously dull. Suffice to say here that being good enough to discern complex regularities in the environment while being crude enough to gloss over the true variation that abounds is highly advantageous for us humans.

Now, take the circle. In our environment, there are only what we will come to call ovals, yet by analyzing the properties of what we will come to call ovals we are able to arrive at the conception of a special oval with special properties. On the other hand, we then see no problem in labeling some of the ovals around us circles, because approximation is not just tolerable but necessary - we are perpetually Sub-Goldilocks. Thus ovals become ovals become circles.

To schematize the idea, then: concrete > (concrete-as-)abstract > abstract-as-concrete

With formal semantics, then, I suggest that the case is that the shape of the concrete melds into an especially broad generalization - but there are no ovals for this generalization, only circles, and the circles are actually spirals turned on their side, so to speak. Thus Meaning becomes Meaning' becomes Meaning'', but inward-looking unlike the sort of meaning that is exchanged between communicators.

Hence, formal semantics as a system representing linguistic meaning is a 'gerrymandered compromise with itself'.

That's my understanding at the moment.


@Kadagar: OK, but that's not really what I was getting at.