I’ve been finding it difficult to get in front of a computer lately, although I’ve wanted to write about the Goodman Book Wittgenstein and William James while it’s still relatively fresh in my mind. Now, I find a few minutes and I don’t have the book.
But, what sticks with me the most are the nuanced differences in the way James and Wittgenstein discuss meaning. James identifies meaning as being static and dynamic, much of the time we make meaning of the world (we come to our understandings) based on the dynamic stream of conscious experience. Words interact with actions and we come to understand what their meaning is. This is akin to Wittgenstein’s thought that to learn a language is to be initiated into a particular mode of living (though Goodman points out that Wittgenstein does not think that we make meanings.) To freeze the stream and take meanings statically, what I would say is looking for the “essence” of a word, is often misleading. Most words have many uses, many definitions, and we only understand them fully in context. We can’t talk about things statically, as Wittgenstein would say we are always talking about “those” things, or “this” particular thing.
Wittgenstein I think talks about static meanings as being replaceable or exchangeable, we seek to know if someone understands a meaning by asking them to substitute it. Dictionaries do this for us, giving us one set of words which have the same meaning as the single word being defined. We ask our elementary school students to do this constantly. But Wittgenstein also uses the term meaning to describe that which is irreplaceable, that which we can only react to. Discussing a particular melody, or the meaning of a poem is perhaps only available to us when we begin to change notes and substitute words we find in a thesaurus, then to note the different affects. In this sense we understand meaning as a set of relations, similar, though not quite the same, as James’s dynamic meaning.
I think of James’s dynamic and Wittgenstein’s irreplaceable Maxine Greene would have said we are discussing a “lived” meaning. But I’m not sure. To take a static approach I tend to prefer the terms “Technical” meaning and “Qualitative” meaning. To me, these all bare relation to one another, but I get a sense that the technical and the qualitative are two parts to a whole and neither of them is independent from one another.
The discussion in Goodman which led to this post are on pages 133-135.
