I've actually been able to recommit myself to doing some serious philosophy reading and actually having respect for it and not just gagging on it's dryness. W. V. O. Quine's Word and Object is what I'm muddling through right now. He's very much of an empiricist. It's interesting to see some ideas I've had in an underdeveloped stage come to some actual development in his writing. To be less general he uses the concept of a class of sense experience time intervals in order to come to some clearer idea of what it means for two sentences (the degenerate form--i.e. one word sentence such as "Ouch."--is all that I have seen him deal with so far) to be synonymous and thereby he could derive the idea of meaning. Actually he does away with "meanings" per se altogether (see e.g. his "Two dogmas of empiricism.") and focuses on gaining a precise notion of what it means for two terms or sentences to be synonymous. I certainly find myself classing myself under the heading of "empiricist" these days, which is possibly due to my rationalist tendencies of yore: I'm just swinging to the opposite end like a pendulum; but I don't feel myself at the extreme end of the empiricist side. Perhaps I've already done that: with my late infatuation with the equation "use = meaning", which is very radically empiricist since it equates meanings with something very much observable in contrast to the ethereal atomic propositions.

In the paper I referenced below (like the second entry of this blog) I have already fallen out someone with that equation, and I have supplanted it with some sort of correlation: "use -> understanding -> meaning" to which I still hold very much for a number of cases. I have not, however, completed a sufficient investigation in order to say that such a correlation is helpful (let alone correct, whatever that might mean) in most or all cases. We shall see, hopefully.

Actually I've sort of been thinking of some sort of general purpose of meanings, whatever they may be; however they are defined. This derives from how we apply (use) the word 'meaning' or 'mean.' I haven't been able to consicely state in literal terms what my idea is but I do have a rather good metaphor I think. Meanings are castles, or houses, or generally any place for a person to live (i.e. some structure fashioned for that purpose). Ironically for me (being somehow empiricist) this is a very unempirical way of saying what meaning is. Once again, it is a metaphor. This theory of meaning works very well for religious texts or other doctrinal matter, but it seems to be a stretch to bring it down to sentence meaning or word meaning. But I don't have to do this because who is to say that 'meaning' should be reduced to one formula?

I say that meanings are like houses or shelters because people really do live in meanings, or through meanings, or by meanings. Meanings are a sort of shelter from some sort of problem of existence. I.e. without meanings we are homeless in an undifferentiated universe.

Just like real shelters, meanings come in many styles and sizes. Christianity is quite possibly the biggest and most ornate (i.e. diverse) structure in the Western world, but it is slowly beginning to deteriorate and the temple of Capitalism and Democracy has been put up on a higher hill and somehow the former has been established as a gate to the latter.

Other examples abound, more later.