Is all meaning just comparison/measurement? (Reference request)

Question

I've had an idea and I'm almost certain it might not be a novel one, so I'd like some pointers to read more about it. Maybe some philosophers/writers already explored the subject and elaborated it a lot better?

The idea is that "meaning" itself is just measurement / comparing to archetypes of ideas that we have. When we say that something is a "dog", we're saying that it matches fairly closely a shared idea of dog that we have.

Every meaning ascribed to words, phrases, expressions, metaphors and so on are just more complex examples of us comparing the concept we talk about with another concept (archetype), which need not to be a perfect representation of the concept, just a general one.

What I'm interested in reading is about an exploration of these comparisons. Are they classified in different types? Are there special characteristics to these archetypes? Are all comparisons of the same nature?

I'm mostly looking for references, but if you'd like to provide some brief explanations on author's points of view, it would be very appreciated.

Answer 1

Here is an example adapted from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations:

Someone asks you to watch over their young children for a little while and play a game with them to keep them occupied. You teach them poker. The parent returns and exclaims, "I didn't mean that kind of game!".

When the parent said "game" they meant game, presumably, but not all games. How did they do that---how did they mean a particular thing by that word? Did they have to consciously consider poker and then exclude it? Did they have a specification in mind (eg, "child-friendly") that they didn't think it necessary to include in the sentence? And even if they did "have it in mind", how did they have it in mind?

These questions aren't easily answered. And even if you do find an answer to one of them, that answer need not apply in a similar case.

These questions also hit on the notion of a shared image or concept. What is the shared image we have in the case of game? Is there such a thing as an archetypal game? Are there features that all games have in common? Don't say "There must be, or we wouldn't call them games!", or immediately conclude "There isn't, so 'game' must be equivocal!". Just look and see, and ask yourself if you understand what somebody says when they use the word "game" in a sentence.

Even if there is an image, how does it guide us in applying the word? Imagine you are in a room filled with triangular prisms and rectangular prisms. You want to take out all the rectangular prisms. So you form an image in your head of a triangular prisms and proceed to take away everything that does not match that image (ie, all the rectangular prisms). In that case are you still thinking of rectangular prisms?

If you find these questions interesting you'll like PI. It's the deepest reflection on these issues that I know. Wittgenstein does not believe in the view you ascribe to, but he understands its motivations very well and walks the reader through all the puzzles associated with it.

Answer 2

It looks like a mixture of two ideas:

1. The correspondance theory of truth, so that an idea, word or concept has an actual referent

2. That language needs to be public for communication to be possible

Answer 3

Novel or otherwise, I think it's wrong. Since you're apparently into programming, just consider dentotational semantics, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denotational_semantics That provides a syntax-->semantics (predicatbly called the "semantic function") from syntax into a domain (see, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_domain) of meanings. And for programs, that semantic domain's typically (continuous wrt Scott topology) functions N-->N. And these aren't physically "measurable", per se, in your sense (the measure theory meaning of "measurable" notwithstanding), and there's no notion of archetype (that I'm aware of) distinguishing one such function from another. They're just abstract meanings with no (unlike Plato's cave) physical-world manifestations that could be "measured".

Edit related to @Canyon's comment below. Programming language syntax is typically specified in BNF, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_form, or some other similar formalism. And (I'd probably say) it's pretty likely that can't be extended to typical natural languages like English, although there's arguably some debate about that, e.g., https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/32447/.

So, just for the purposes of this post, let's suppose BNF (or similar) can be used to specify the wff's comprising syntactically correct English. Then the existing machinery of Denotational Semantics (see link above) can immediately be used, without any further formalism whatsoever, to determine/"compute" the meaning of any English language sentence (via the semantic function, as briefly discussed above, and more thoroughly discussed in the links). And that supposition really ain't too much of a stretch, just for the purposes of an se post. Moreover, even if it's wrong, denotational semantics can still serve as a good "toy model" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_model), illustrating an approach to determining meaning "ascribed to words, phrases, expressions, metaphors and so on" (to quote the op). Indeed, that's precisely what denotational semantics already does do, with mathematical precision, for programming language syntaxes.

Answer 4

You want to read "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" and "I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. He broadly argues that understanding (being able to grasp meaning) is expressed in the ability to perform translation i.e. from a geometric expression to an algebraic function or coding a picture into a .jpeg

Also Plato, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms