User:Dunning/meaning

Meaning is the first and most direct product of sentience. The rorschach inkblot test is a popular example of the individual creation of meaning. There are many types of meanings - some are true, some have beauty, some are verifiable, some can be used to make decisions. Meaning has the whole range of possible emotional intensities, from data to revelation to psychotic obsession. Some meaning seems to have an inborn potential within the mind (this is the usual explanation for why small children learn language so rapidly). Instinct, however, is considered to operate as a reflex without the need for meaning.

The subjective construction and later recognition of meaning is the foundation of each person's mental health and therefore lies close to the roots of the studies of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychology. Since all meaning is perceived through a filter of subjective/personal observation certain categories of meaning, like objective truth, may be difficult to perceive. Solipsism would be a very extreme example of this problem. More often the problem is called personal bias.

Communication is structurally coupled with meaning, but personal meaning does not depend upon communication. Semiotics and its branches are the study of the more or less intentional communication of meaning. Conversely, some meanings are never communicated. The experience of music often evokes meaning that can not be spoken. The same is true of some religious meanings. As an example, koans are verbal paradoxes that attempt to indirectly communicate mystical meaning.

Meaning may be also be communicated subconsciously or unintentionally: as a gaffe or as an unwitting act of creativity (see spoonerism). Some meaning is communicated through the resonance of shared experiences or the resonance of biological and/or ethnic similarity and is inaccessible to people without the shared distinction. Examples include lovers, families, religious believers, and oppressed groups.

Meaning may stand alone or participate in a larger and more or less well developed framework of ethics or value systems. When meaning is held and shared among multiple people it is necessarily communicated. Elaborate semiotic edifices have been constructed to support this communication: mythologies, law systems, epic poems, sacred texts, philosophies, and the mass media. The process of adapting shared meanings to new circumstances has been described as "land-náma" by Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, a cultural equivalent to the reading of a rorschach inkblot.

Generic meaning is studied in philosophy, mathematics, and semiotics - especially in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, logic, and communication theory. The study of the social construction of meaning is one of the foundations of sociology (along with official statistics). Fields like sociolinguistics tend to be more interested in non-linguistic meanings. Linguistics, a branch of semiotics, is the study of linguistic meaning - in the fields of semantics (which studies conventional meanings) and pragmatics (studies in how language is used by individuals). Literary theory, critical theory, and some branches of psychoanalysis are also involved in the discussion of meaning. However, this division of labor is not absolute, and each field depends to some extent upon the others.