🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BxGnLw.J8A@unixhub.SLAC.Stanford.EDU| sschaff@roc.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Stephen F. Schaffner) writes:
|In article <74170@hydra.gatech.EDU|, cegtitd@prism.gatech.EDU (Tim Dodd) writes:
||| In article <BxB855.7Mq@unixhub.SLAC.Stanford.EDU| 
|sschaff@roc.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Stephen F. Schaffner) writes:
|
|
||| |It seems pretty clear to me that the concept of meaning that you espouse is 
||| |itself meaningless under your own definition (meaning does not, after all, 
||| |refer to anything observable), and is in fact a philosophical rather than 
||| |a scientific statement.  
||| 
||| Au contraire:  I defined "meaning" in an earlier post.  It most certainly
||| refers to something real.
||| 
|
|	I'm sorry, I must have missed the part where you showed that the 
|concept of meaning was empirically verifiable (I believe that was one of your 
|requirements for meaning).  Could you run that part by me again?

Alright, one more time!  :-)

"Meaning" refers to the semantic mapping, or correspondence, between a word
and the thing to which the word refers.  If it cannot be shown that a word
has a referent, then it is by definition meaningless.

If you regard this definition as rendering "meaning" meaningless, stop &
think about how you understood this sentence.  If there were no semantic
mappings between words and their referents, this entire note would have
been meaningless drivel.

Tim
-- 
Tim Dodd, Research Scientist, Georgia Tech:  cegtitd@prism.gatech.edu