Thursday, January 09, 2025

WORK IN PROGRESS: Chapter 2 - The Meaning of the Meaning of Meaning

 Chapter 2: The Meaning of ‘The Meaning of Meaning’

The Australian Textbook that I am reading for no particular reason begins, rather ambitiously, by explaining “what language is”.

It is easy to think that words are a kind of telepathy: when I speak, a thought is magically transferred from my mind into your mind. And for centuries, most people uncritically assumed that particular words had simple one-to-one correspondences with particular things. Something in the nature of a lion required it to be called “lion”; the study or contemplation of the word “lion” could uncover truths about leonine nature. We would now call that kind of thinking magical, or indeed, superstitious... 


This is the beginning of Chapter 2 of my current Work in Progress. If you want to read the first four chapters, they'll be appearing on Patreon over the coming weeks. They will appear here (or possibly on Substack) in due course, and in book form further down the line.  If you are interested, or want to encourage my writing more generally, please consider joining Patreon. Experts have calculated that if a hundred people pledge $1 a month, this time next year I would have £918.54 meaning that in eight thousand million years I would be rich enough to buy Greenland.     www.patreon.com/rilstone