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> demonstrating that meaning was neither atomic nor discrete, with interlocking contingencies that span multiple words and sentences. How is that original? Of
by idoubtit 7y ago
> demonstrating that meaning was neither atomic nor discrete, with interlocking contingencies that span multiple words and sentences.
How is that original? Of course, the exact meaning of a word and a sentence depends on the context.
If I remember correctly my studies about Mesopotamia, in one the oldest bilingual dictionaries of the world there was a word with two translations, which mean the author knew that there was two distinct meanings for the same word. Centuries later, many of the various authors of the Bible were fond of playing with words. Their writings are full of double-entendre and of reusing the same word in a different context to change its meaning. Aristophanes wrote parodies of the classical Greek tragedies, and he certainly knew how to instill comedy into plain or epic words. It's hard to imagine none of these processes were conscious. More recently, Littré's dictionary at the end of the 19th century had a stress on the context: most definitions include many examples of use across time and places, to show the intrinsic complexity of words.
- ivalm 7y agoHere atomic means that objects can be denoted with a finite set of predicates all of whose objects exist (ie you have proximal relationship with) [0]. This is as opposed to objects that subsist (eg everything that is abstract) [1] Symbols (words) can point to different objects depending on context (what you call words having multiple meanings), this has nothing to do with logical atomism. The point of logical atomism (and as it turns out this is not a complete picture) was that a particular meaning of the word can be described unambiguously (in the sense of using entirely existing objects). This discussion is largely language agnostic (in a sense that I think every natural human language supports it). [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-atomism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-atomism/ [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-objects/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-objects/