creativesoul wrote:With appropriate respect Terrapin...
And likewise with the maximum amount of respect due to you, you seem to reason about as well as a slug.
A commonly shared observation:
A non-nominalistic "manner of speaking" that you're trying to sneak in there by the way. It's superfluous for what follows, though, so we can ignore it for now.
Hearing a single utterance can change the brain state of the listener. The same holds good for reading. Those changes couldn't possibly take place if it were the case that meaning itself was a brain state.
There's no
can about it. Listening to something (listening is different than hearing, by the way, but you say "the listener," so let's stick with listening, and it doesn't make a different for my comments here anyway) and reading something
do change the brain state of the listener/reader. Why is that? Well, it's because one's ears and eyes, respectively, receive soundwaves and lightwaves, respectively, which they then "turn into" nerve signals that are sent to one's brain. One's brain receiving those signals from one's nervous system
is necessarily in a different state at that point than it had been previously.
So there's no disagreement on that part except that it's a "
does change brain state" affair rather than a "
can (but doesn't always) change brain state" affair.
Of course, it doesn't at all follow from this that the brain states in question are
semantic brain states, and the idea that one's brain couldn't possibly receive non-semantic signals from one's visual or auditory nerves is--well, frankly, with all due respect again--apparently just pulled out of your ass. There's zero support for this claim in your comment.
One way we can know that the signals we receive from our visual or auditory nerves are not necessarily semantic is that we can be aware of text (again, where we're talking about visual signals with respect to reading, since that's what you brought up) or sounds as just text or sounds, with no meaning attached. For example, when I read "Truth is presupposed and begins emergence therein" I pretty much just read it as "just text," just a string of words with no meaning attached to the overall sentence, because it seems simply like nonsense--almost as if you were randomly selecting words, or taking something from the random pomo essay generator or some such. I experience this very often with continental literature. It doesn't take me reading Hegel or Heidegger or Sartre or any of those folks very long before it just starts to seem like a string of arbitrary words.
So for one, if we were to claim that the signals we receive from our visual or auditory nerves were necessarily semantic, we'd have to be able to account for how we could read or listen to something, so that we're aware of the words as words or sounds as sounds, yet attach no meaning to it.
Instead, meaning is something that our brains can do (but something they don't always do) once we've received visual and auditory signals (and not only, of course, but that's our example).
Brain states would be causing brain states.
Which certainly happens, and which is well-established. For one example, that's the whole gist of particular chemical imbalances causing particular mental phenomena.
The same meaningful statement would necessarily presuppose the same brain state in every utterer and/or reader.
Now here is definitely someone who is not a nominalist. I'm a nominalist, however.
Another mistake you're making here in your sluggishness is that you're conflating observable expressions correlated to mental content with the mental content itself. For example, let's say that you're in your remedial literature course, and the teacher says, "Write down what you think the 'meaning' of Dr. Seuss's
The Sneetches is and pass your paper to your neighbor." And then when your teacher asks, "Billy, what did Joey say the meaning was?" and Billy reads off of Joey's paper, "Not to get tattoos." And then she asks Joey, "What did Billy say the meaning was?" and Joey says, "Billy also said 'Don't get a tattoo," you take that as demonstrating that Billy and Joey
have the same mental content. It doesn't show that though. It shows us something about an observable expression correlated in some way to mental content. But Billys "Don't get a tattoo" might be correlated to Billy's mental content @ (merely a symbol to represent something unexpressable "literally") while Joey's "Not to get tattoos" is correlated to Joey's mental content *, where @ and * are not at all similar.
But they don't. Thus, meaning cannot be a brain state.
The problem here is that there's no way to know (via acquaintance) anyone else's mental phenomena. All we know (by acquaintance) is the observable correlations of their mental phenomena, and then we make knowledge claims (a la propositional knowledge) based on those observable correlations, making assumptions about it, etc. But nominalism aside, we don't actually know that anyone else has the same mental content. And nominalism
not aside, and it shouldn't be pushed aside, because nominalism is correct, we can know that no one has the same mental content, although it might be similar enough in some cases to be "manner of speaking 'the same'."
Utterances are chock full of meaning.
Actually, as sounds we make, or marks we make on paper or computer screens, etc., they have no meaning. Meaning is only assigned by individuals thinking about as much.
Well, you're wrong. Arguing about the location of meaning necessarily presupposes the existence of meaning. Meaning is existentially contingent upon things other than itself.
Being contingent upon something else tells us nothing about what the thing in question is or where it's located. For example, a particular elm tree in my yard is contingent upon a huge chain of things, including the existence of the Earth, the presence of water on the Earth, etc. But talking about how water obtained on Earth tells us nothing about that elm tree or its location.
true statements about the location of meaning are bound by the actual location of all of it's elemental constituents.
Yeah, constituents, but not contingency-relations. Those are two very different things. There are no non-mental/non-brain-state constituents for meaning.
The position I'm arguing for has everything to do with what meaning consists of
If it posits something other than brain states there, it's wrong about what meaning consists of.
What good comes of talking about it's location?
"What good" has nothing to do with whether it has a location of course. You didn't argue that it does no good to talk about its location. You argued that it has no location.
I'm setting out what your position necessarily presupposes, regardless of whether or not you're aware of those presuppositions.
Hey look, it's not only a box of rocks, it's an arrogant box of rocks. If only the Internet had a shortage of those.
Since it is the case that all statements necessarily presuppose correspondence to fact/reality,
Um, where the hell are you getting that idea from? What balderdash.
Let's see if you can claim something that isn't wrong in your reply.
