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meaning is a tricky category.
much depends on the use that you are making of the term.
i don't think we have an essence--i don't think human beings are objects with a sequence of predicates that distinguish them from other objects--i think we are processes, collections of processes one function of which is to generate pattern.
one of the mechanisms we use to generate pattern is language--we force our experience of pattern through it and stabilize ourselves, generate a theory of action (via the relation of subject to verb) and of relations to the world through statements: if you generate recursive statements, you start assigning meanings. assuming that i understand what is meant by meanings here.
much of what and how we are disappears in this translation process--temporally oriented process is not captured via syntax relations--instead they are replaced with particles that set up and describe relations between states.
if you want to talk about how we generate meanings in a bigger sense, that is about how we establish relations between phenomena as we move through a perceptual field (a miniature version of the social-historical), then you are in a framework of process and constraints, the relations between catastrophe/modalization at the process level and the production of stability at a higher order of neural network functioning, etc.
you also have a problem of how to describe this space, since its logic/dynamics are sheared off by the ordering you impose on them through the sentences that you make.
i like this: consider how you'd account for the processes that go into making a sentence in terms shaped by the sentence you made.
it's all very strange, this place where complex dynamic systems and experimental writing run into each other.
careful how much you play with it lest you end up in a land far far away.
philosophy is therapy in many ways---imagining that you can talk about meaning production (bringing phenomena into relation) using sentences as a base-line is a therapeutic exercise.
maybe more later.
who knows?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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