User:KYPark/Self

Gigantic views

 * Standing on the shoulders of giants
 * Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants (Latin: nanos gigantium humeris insidentes) is a Western metaphor meaning "One who develops future intellectual pursuits by understanding the research and works created by notable thinkers of the past," a contemporary interpretation.


 * Socrates
 * Know yourself.


 * Lao Tzu
 * He who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know.


 * John Locke
 * Men content themselves with the same words as other people use, as if the very sound necessarily carried the same meaning.


 * Jeremy Bentham
 * Error is never so difficult to be destroyed as when it has its roots in Language.


 * Henry James
 * All life comes back to the question of our speech -- the medium through which we communicate.


 * Arthur Schuster
 * Scientific controversies constantly resolve themselves into differences about the meaning of words.


 * C. K. Ogden & I. A. Richards (1923)
 * All experience ... is either enjoyed or interpreted ... or both, and very little of it escapes some degree of interpretation.


 * H. G. Wells (1938)
 * The human individual is born now to live in a society for which his fundamental instincts are altogether inadequate.

The human context

 * cf. René Magritte (1933) The Human Condition (painting).

However constant the meaning of a statement may be intended by the author, it may vary from context to context, that is, depending on the projective, subjective, and objective states of affairs, as may be suggested by the uniformly gray strip whose shade appears as variant as our sight prefers a sharper contrast with the color-gradient background so as to see it clearer.

Our intuitive illusions, delusions, and cognitive biases in general are born and grown (natured and nurtured, or programmed and progressed) to render ecologically conditioned reflexes, however subjective and selective. We may not do without selection. We may be blessed and cursed to live by unaccountable modular prejudices or points of view.

The subject looks like walking on two legs, coping and coding. Or, the coping and coding subject keeps:
 * coping in general with implicit natural signs, and
 * coding in particular with explicit cultural designs.

The coping with interpretivism, including thinking, knowing, learning, understanding, interpreting, and so on, is simply experience and experiment with life. The coding with symbolism, including encoding and decoding, is simply an explicit, meaningful abstraction of the coping. We are learning (by being conditioned) by coping and coding.

Meaning
The meaning may be defined as the sum of the vectors, the coding and coping sides. That is, the meaning of the symbolist coding on the left hand may be so uncertain that it should be supplemented or complemented by the interpretivist coping (with life in general) on the right.

Analytic philosophers, logicians, philologists, grammarians, lexicographers, judiciaries, scriptural fundamentalists, and so on try to confine or define the meaning of words and statements radically invariant and crystal-clear.

For example, Putnam (1975) argued for semantic externalism such that water should be nothing but H2O exactly. His dictum reads "Meanings just ain't in the head," hence no room for any subjectivity. So reacted he at the moment when a number of scholars suddenly started rethinking symbolism especially in favor of subjectivism and metaphors as its main symphtom, as probably much affected by Pirsig (1974) who argued that the unjust subject-object divide should disappear. In this perspective, Pirsig was revolutionary whereas Putnam was reactionary, as may be suggested in the following:


 * The late philosopher of mind and language Donald Davidson, despite his many differences of opinion with Putnam, wrote that semantic externalism constituted an "anti-subjectivist revolution" in philosophers' way of seeing the world. Since the time of Descartes, philosophers had been concerned with proving knowledge from the basis of subjective experience. Thanks to Putnam, Tyler Burge and others, Davidson said, philosophy could now take the objective realm for granted and start questioning the alleged "truths" of subjective experience. (Excerpt from Hilary Putnam)

It may be that the subject or self entails the meaning, which is simply a mind map, or orthogonal projection of a subject engaged in coding (encoding and decoding) with the project on the one hand and coping with the object on the other. That is to say, it is not only projective and objective but, perhaps most vitally, subjective from the practical perspective.

The (en- and de-) coding deals with the design of projects, while the coping with the sign of objects. While the cultural design may be explicitly or uniformly recognized, the natural sign that is mostly implicit may not. Simply, the design is not the sign. Or, the project is not the object. In other words: All these suggest that the meaning is variable in principle and variant in practice from context to context. Unwise is to confine or define it rigid. So is to refine so that it should not be:
 * 1) subjective as per subjectivism or interpretivism, but
 * 2) projective as per cognitivism, literalism or textualism, and
 * 3) objective as per objectivism or semantic externalism.