Where does linguistic meaning come from?

[goldingds]

Yeah this is probably a simple question but

When we have a sentence or some other sort of group of words, the reciever attempts to extract a meaning from it. Where does the meaning of this sentence come from? Initially I thought it was simply from the sender of the message: A reciever comprehends the meaning of a sentence perfectly once he or she understands the message just as the sender intended.

But then I thought: what if the sender spewed out something meaningless, such as: "The blackest rabbit has the shortest fur." The sender could have intended nothing in his mind, but a reciever could think: "hmmm, i think the sender is saying that because the rabbit is black, he doesn't need as much fur to keep him warm. The sender is saying that there are more than one ways to solve the problem."

Where did this unintended meaning come from? Is it valid because it is in the mind of the reciever, or invalid because the sentence comes from a sender with no intention of a meaning like this? This seems to happen a lot in the real world, with songs and poetry and such.

Thanks in advance for the replies!

[Black Badger]

The meaning is in the mind of the receiver. What the sender intended to say, and what the receiver interprets, are two different things.

Of course, most of the time, it is hoped that the two will correspond closely enough for genuine communication to take place — and, generally, such is the case, since most people make an effort both to speak clearly and to speak with people who will understand them clearly.

As for whether the interpreted meaning is "valid" or not — it's hardly clear what "valid" means, in this context.

If it means, did the receiver correctly interpret what the sender meant to say? Then, of course, no.

But words aren't always used for clear, no-nonsense communication. Often, with songs and poetry and such, the meaning will be different to different people. Does that make the differing meanings necessarily invalid? It doesn't seem so.

[Preno]

This meaning was, clearly, not present (or at best was only potentially present) in the sentence itself - it is the actual use of the sentence that determines this meaning. The speaker intends the hearer to infer what he had in mind, in this case by presenting him with a linguistic stimulus. The hearer is assumed to realize that claiming that it is literally true that "the blackest rabbit has the shortest fur" would be rather irrelevant, so he is encouraged to find (infer) a more suitable interpretation of this utterance.

[Edit]Of course, if the speaker didn't mean anything by the utterance, then we're not dealing with actual communication here. But why the hell would a speaker say something without meaning anything by it?

[mirage]

Yeah, I agree with most of the posters here.

The meaning in the mind of the interpreter is no different in principle to any other perceptual evidence which s/he interprets in the context of their world model. In the case of language, the interpretation usually alters their model of the speaker's mind, and by inference, something about the world.

I.e. if someone I find reliable says "there's a car coming", I (probably unconsciously) infer both that they think there is a car coming, and that the probable cause of this is that there is actually a car coming.

This is a particular postion on the problem of "intentionality". I.e. that there seems to be something missing in a description of the world that just details its state but omits the "meaning" of various things. I.e. what makes a map or a story, or a picture, "of" or "about" something.

I think that there is no intentional property intrinsic to the world, and that what makes something "about" something else is our cognitive model, which includes a model of other people's minds.

As to what this "intentionality" is, it is a form of relationship, which is a basic notion (i.e. cannot be reduced or explained in other terms.) Other forms of this same "relationship" basic notion are: association, set or class (which is taken to be basic in set theory).

This primitive of association or relation is also at the heart of the most basic cognitive process, induction, which constructs relationships between things (e.g. a bell ring and food for Pavlov's dogs, the sun rising and the start of a 24hr period for us, etc. etc.)

It is this very same inductive process that lets us learn language, which is rooted in ostensive (i.e. pointing to) definition. We have to learn some basic words by associating the stimulus with the sound inductively ("Mama") before other words can be learnt by definition, interpolation and extrapolation.

IMO any complete account of philosophy must start somewhere near here. It must say why certain concepts must be primitive notions. Name association as one, explain how induction works from it, and from there how meaning is associated to words.

Only once it has established what giving an account is and how the process works, can it go on to give accounts of stuff like "what can we know" and "what exists".

The idea of starting with ontology, i.e. "what exists" before you even really know what meaning is, or what "exist" could mean, is building your house on sand.