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meaning of a word
psychological states

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meaning of a word

non_existence
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Posted 10/03/06 - 01:38 PM: Subject: meaning of a word	#1
Is knowing (or understanding) the meaning of a word necessarily equivalent to being in a particular psychological state? It's not clear to me whether it is, because one can be in any number of different mental states while invoking or using the meaning of the same word. However after a while words tend to trigger the same mental states, so maybe the meaning of each word merely corresponds to a dynamic set of psychological states (which changes and evolves all the time) ? It gets too complicated though trying to figure out a possible set of psychological states corresponding to an entire sentence, what is the relationship between the psychological states of each individual word of the sentence, and the set of states of the entire sentence taken as a whole ?
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ying
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Posted 10/03/06 - 03:01 PM:	#2
Please define your notion of a 'psychological state'. I don't understand what you mean by that, since every experience/phenomenon can be defined as some or the other 'psychological state'.
*"I determined nothing."* -Sceptical expression

The Milk Oracle
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Posted 10/03/06 - 04:37 PM:	#3
ying asked the crucial question: what is a psychological/mental state? I think you'll respond by saying something along the lines of "mental state is the stuff in your head, the experiences, thoughts, whatever". So, for simplicity's sake, I'll just talk about "thoughts", being aware that this is just phrasing things differently and not explaining anything, and that it carries the danger to ignore the nature of the mental state, which, I suppose, also includes less "thoughty" things such as associations or emotions and what not. So, for the sake of argument, let's assume there is such a thing as a "thought". If I'm not mistaken, you're asking whether we can explain meaning as one word being always followed by one particular thought. You deny this, arguing that one word can be followed by several different thoughts, and that the way in which these thoughts "happen" in our brains is very dynamic. Then you question your own theory with respect to sentences: sentences are made up of words, so the meaning of sentences seems to be made up of the dynamic thoughts that are evoked by each word -- and that appears to be a bit of a mess. So in conclusion, you're asking for a "grammar of thought", that explains (a) the correspondence between word and thought and (b) the rules of how words -- and hence thoughts -- are combined in sentences and to what this adds up to. One question I'd raise here is whether we should really think about language in terms of word to thought correspondence. That seems a very natural way to think about it, no doubt; it's the way dictionaries work. But I'm tempted to argue that when we understand a sentence, we don't really process individual words but entire word chunks. Let me try and think of an example. Consider the sentence "Stop!" -- here, no doubt, there is one word and one thought -- "to stop". Consider next the sentence "You there, stop!". Now, in your theory, what happens in our brain is that we process the meaning of the words "you", "there" and "stop" and the relationship between them. So we end up with a range of thoughts evoked by each word (myself, here, stop) and the overall thought evoked by the sentence (that I'm being addressed, that I'm moving and that I'm requested to stop, whatever). So there seems to be a lot happening here, and yet we only need a second to grasp the meaning of the sentence. What I'm wondering is whether we really "do" all of that stuff. Don't we understand that sentence, rather, because we've been trained our whole life to respond to being addressed and made to stop? Or think of it this way: is a phrase such as "it is" really two words and two thoughts, which we process anew each time we encounter them, or shouldn't we rather look at "it is" as one word and one thought, because we've encountered it so many times that we read it as one and process it as one. This idea can be expanded to include entire sentences: we've seen so many things written in our lives that we can process entire sentences without really thinking about the words. The counter argument, of course, is that we create new sentences all the time and that if we didn't know how words make up sentences, we couldn't understand these new sentences. I'd respond to that by asking: (a) how new are these sentences really? and (b) that if I do process a new sentence word by word it does not follow that I do this in old sentences as well. I guess I'm willing to concede that my idea applies to short phrases only and not to whole sentences; but even then the idea sheds some doubt on the notion of a neat word to thought correspondence. A handy comparison to support my argument is how we imagine a chess player thinks: unlike computers, chess players don't think about every single move. They grasp the position as a whole and only consider a small amount of possible moves. What I'm saying is that our brain does the same when confronted with a sentence: the reader doesn't think about the role of each word, there's only an overall assessment. Hence the amount of thoughts does not necessarily have to correspond to the amount of words, because our brain knows how to "ignore" individual words in favour of understanding the sentence as a whole. This does not rule compositionality out, but it reduces the amount of compositionality involved. So the next question: how much of a thought is there really in meaning?
We that have done and thought, That have thought and done, Must ramble, and thin out Like milk spilt on a stone. -- W. B. Yeats

philosophemer
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Posted 10/04/06 - 04:30 PM:	#4
non_existence wrote: Is knowing (or understanding) the meaning of a word necessarily equivalent to being in a particular psychological state? A tripartite theory of meaning is actually something I first heard from my philosophy of language professor, G.W. Fitch. His book is called, "Naming and Believing." I haven't read it, but it might be a decent jump start.

litkey
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Posted 10/05/06 - 03:49 AM:	#5
The meaning of the word is in one sense what the word refers to, and in another sense how the word is used: "That is an apple." 'apple' trivially means the object within this sentence, however 'how' the word is used within the sentence is what conveys the meaning, for consider: "That is an apple?" "That is an apple!" Indeed, the more times i use apple, or think or say "apple" the less meaning it will have, because i am not using the word in any meaningful event. As far as brain states are concerned i think intentionality is significant in determining whether a person (s) can be in the same BS when using words/sentences; the words are meant to convey beliefs, so when two people EG., use the same meaning we infer that they are in the same BS. "That is a lego piece." "That is a lego piece." (externalism) What is the difference here? Nothing in regards to what they believe, however what one person is pointing to when they use the words is not what they think it to be; one person is actually pointing to Flego, when they actually mean Lego. So, one person is wrong, we might infer in their belief, while another person is correct in their belief- but they both have the same beliefs i.e., they both are pointing to something in which they both believe to be lego. intention is crucial to meaning, however the external environment can determine whether our beliefs correspond to reality or not.
That's what tyrants get! - John Wilkes Booth Something cannot come from nothing. Nothing can only come from nothing.

Hypothesis
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Posted 10/15/06 - 03:23 PM:	#6
non_existence wrote: Is knowing (or understanding) the meaning of a word necessarily equivalent to being in a particular psychological state? Yes indeed, according to psychologists, if a person had two states of mind, for example drunk and sober, in the drunk state he could derive some meaning from a particular word, whereas in a sober state the same word wouldn't ring a bell. I think this is also referref as mood-dependant memory, but can also be used in the meaning of words, as words and memory are related.
over and over and over and over and over like a monkey with a miniature cymbal the joy of repetition really is in you - Hot Chip

msartlit
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Posted 10/15/06 - 04:26 PM:	#7
When thinking of the word apple, I can conjur up an number of things, fruit(green,read,yellow and potato(pomme de terre)), ipods, and computers. So really words are ambiguous, the meaning is always left to interpretation. But perhaps this is just an example of why the English language is so screwed up and there is such rampant misunderstanding. Other languages have many more words that refine the meaning, I hear Romanian has an abundant choice of words to embellish a converstaion. In English we use the word love to mean so many things, but in Greek there are different words for different kinds of love. Imagine someone saying "I love your hair", do you really think they "love" your hair ? or is it more likely they appreciate it artistically, or are they being facitious, or just trying to say something nice .... in any case, it's up to someone else to interpret what was said and it may not have anything to do with what was actually meant.

litkey
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Posted 10/24/06 - 06:05 AM:

msartlit wrote:
When thinking of the word apple, I can conjur up an number of things, fruit(green,read,yellow and potato(pomme de terre)), ipods, and computers. So really words are ambiguous, the meaning is always left to interpretation. But perhaps this is just an example of why the English language is so screwed up and there is such rampant misunderstanding. Other languages have many more words that refine the meaning, I hear Romanian has an abundant choice of words to embellish a converstaion.
In English we use the word love to mean so many things, but in Greek there are different words for different kinds of love. Imagine someone saying "I love your hair", do you really think they "love" your hair ? or is it more likely they appreciate it artistically, or are they being facitious, or just trying to say something nice .... in any case, it's up to someone else to interpret what was said and it may not have anything to do with what was actually meant.

English is the best language in the world.

"i love your hair"

and

"I love your hair!"

Both mean different things, but the "words" are the same.

Its context.

That's what tyrants get!
- John Wilkes Booth

Something cannot come from nothing. Nothing can only come from nothing.

natureculturenothing
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Posted 10/24/06 - 08:28 AM:	#9
This is going to sound like complete insanity... There is a reality that we can share and know, not as seperately interpreting entities, but as the same person inhabiting different vehicles. This is the highest form of love, an experience many of us are familiar with on some level; for example when sitting calmly, hand-in-hand with a loved one watching a sunset and just knowing that you are experiencing - being - the same thing, all soft-like. Or another example; when a group of friends, happy and alert, find themselves expressing each other's thoughts. This "highest form of love" is not a utopian dream, or an nice artistic idea, it is the greates pleasure and final truth of existence. How do psychological states affect the meaning of words? Words do refer fairly precisely to facts and states, but there is room for tone. Although words do hold ingrained tonal connotations (an attribute that mantras take advantage of) tone in itself communicates more meaning than words do (this is something, I've noticed, women seem to understand better than men). I can say "I love you" to someone and make it very clear that I not only hate them, but intend to kill them. Misunderstanding comes when a) the meaning, and possible meanings, of a word is not known b) when the tone is not understood. The solution to a) is a technical problem, and is solved by very simple debate or perhaps a dictionary (although they are dubious) b) is a personal problem, and is only solved, perhaps after years (lifetimes?) by fully experiencing reality as is; from where completely appropriate tone is expressed and understood. In other words, as far as words are concerned, we are doomed to misunderstanding while a) we do not understand what words mean or can mean b) we are not free of reality-clouding tone-obscuring emotions and addictions. Edited by natureculturenothing on 02/02/08 - 03:48 AM

wuliheron
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Posted 11/24/06 - 11:00 AM:	#10
Words only have demonstrable meaning according to their function in a given context. The word "meaning" itself can change according to the context in which we use it. We can look up the meaning (ie definition) of a word in a dictionary, however most words have multiple definitions and we must first place the use of the word in a specific context before we can choose the correct definition. If someone says "doorknob" over and over the word has no meaning unless it can be placed within a specific context. For all I know, that person has no understanding of english whatsoever, and just likes hearing the sound of doorknob. Thus, because context is so all important to meaning, indeed we must first achieve a certain psychological state before we can understand the meaning of a word. If nothing else, we must first believe that, indeed, words have meaning.

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