Language and Meaning
The mysteries surrounding language have been left to the cobwebs for long. We employ it during our every waking second, our dearest ally in a world of chaos, oblivious to its towering mysticality until our plight hits us one day; we are not much unlike a captain aboard a storm-struck ship, relying almost entirely upon our intuition to keep ourselves floating.
Language is what we make it, and we have made it such that it has reduced us to questioning the meaning of the very words we utilize on a day-to-day basis; such is its infinite strangeness. Language not only evolves, but is also public property, and the societal warping of word-meanings is a process that often confounds one in this manner. In this article, our primary goal will be to un-warp the given word and expose it bare; to extricate purity from this word. We shall free it by decimating those extraneous implications we never intend, for the truest meaning of a word is the intuitive, inarticulable one one has; an intuition shaped and molded by society itself.
But language is a wily thing. The precise connotations of any given word differ from time to time and place to place. Is it, one wonders, possible to restrain and quantify any aspect of something like this?
Let us turn towards the aspect in question: Meaning. Here is a word that has been sending mankind’s collective intellect into turmoil with its ceaseless production of
A. Dwarkesh (B)
R. N. Podar Institute, Jain Derasar Marg, Mumbai, India
e-mail: aditya.dwarkesh@gmail.com
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 169
A. Aguirre et al. (eds.), What is Fundamental?, The Frontiers Collection,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978- 3- 030-11301- 8_16 insoluble quandaries since time immemorial. When the meaning of a word is spoken of, the prevalent picture in one’s mind is that of a connotation that is common between the seemingly disparate utterances of the word; this is, in fact, a rough rephrasing of the Wittgensteinian sense of meaning, which is again a rather teleological one: The meaning of a word, says he, is equivalent to its use in communication [1].
This is a most agreeable notion that can fit into almost any conceptual scheme of meaning; all that is left is to be more explicit about the word “use” over here. This statement was, however, followed by a precaution: Wittgenstein added that while this was applicable to a large class of cases, it was not true for all of them. And where Wittgenstein feels the need for caution, so should we. What are those fringe cases wherein the meaning of a word is not its use in communication?
Consider this situation. A group of people find an old coin during a trek. It is reminiscent of the currency used in their native land and they deem it to be just that. One of them keeps it and it goes into circulation. One day, it falls into the hands of a numismatist. He spots certain intricate symbols that the untrained eye would find it hard to not miss and immediately recognizes it to be a rare coin that was used in ancient India, despite the appearance that makes it look like an everyday coin.
Now the question arises: Is the meaning of the utterance ‘The coin’—the object referred to by it—an everyday coin or a rare coin used in ancient India? Certainly the latter—if I uttered ‘The coin’ with reference to it with the image of an everyday coin in my head and later realized what it actually was, I would undoubtedly say that I had been mistaken in thinking that the coin was an everyday one; I do not think anybody would make the claim that the meaning of the utterance changed after they learnt the true identity of the coin. And thus its meaning is ‘rare coin’ as opposed to ‘everyday coin’ despite the fact that most people mistake it to be the latter; despite the fact that its use in communication is usually as that of an everyday coin.
This societal aspect of meaning was exposed more fully by Hilary Putnam in his landmark paper, ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’ [2] in which he first postulated his hypothesis of the division of linguistic labor. The essential claim is that the meaning of a word is determined by the experts in the relevant field. In most cases, the meaning determined by the expert becomes general knowledge and the word is used accordingly—and so the usage of the word matches with the usage of it the expert expects. However, in some cases, the expert is either misunderstood or not heard at all, and there arises a disparity between him and the society—and of course it is the expert who must be having the right of the matter: That is what makes him an expert.
Now, with these matters settled in our minds, let us turn towards the word ‘Fundamental’. In this article, my duty will be to view the given word in the way an expert would; I shall attempt to analyze and integrate its connotations in the way an expert would; my primary objective will be to produce a satisfying and precise explication of its meaning not very much unlike how an expert would.
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