One thing which used to annoy philosophers (back when I was one of them) was to be asked about the meaning of life.
There were a couple of reasons for this. One is that the question is usually dishonest: what the questioner is interested in finding out is the meaning of her life, not in the meaning of life in general. What she really needs is a psychologist, then, not a philosopher. Another problem with the question is that is that it’s vague: what does “meaning” mean? We talk of “meaningful experiences,” but it is impossible to say what makes an experience full of meaning, other than that we remember it fondly. Or when we condemn some action as “meaningless,” aren’t we just calling it stupid?
Philosophers have attempted to produce a determinate concept of meaning by restricting meaning to words. The meaningfulness of experiences, and the meaninglessness of stupid actions, as well as the meaning of life, can then be left aside, just as the theory of banking can leave aside the nature of river banks. The result is that when philosophers talk about meaning, they are not talking about what many non-philosophers would think they are talking about. For many cases which the non-philosophers think are examples of meaning have, for the philosophers, nothing to do with it.
The vagueness of non-philosophical meaning means (!) that reasons for its exclusion cannot be given, for any rationale for such reasons would have to define what is being excluded. and then it wouldn’t be vague any longer. The vagueness of non-philosophical meaning must then be some sort of intuitive aperçu or basic postulate.
This is not the only case in which philosophers begin by diverging from ordinary practice. Logical inference. for example, is not ordinary inference, because in logic, if the protasis of a conditional is false, the inference it expresses is true: if the moon is made of green cheese, then Trump was elected president in 2020. For most people, this utterance is false, but in logic it is true. Similarly for truth itself: as I have discussed in previous posts, a language such as English has many ways to refer to degrees of truth: “That’s absolutely true,” “That’s sort of true,” “truer than most,” “not true at all.” But in most current philosophy, a sentence is either wholly true or wholly false; there are no degrees of truth.
This is the logical doctrine of bivalence, and its departure from ordinary language is no mere accident or gesture of convenience. It makes logical inference possible. Consider the sentence “The cat is on the mat.” Unless bivalence holds, this is a three-fold matter of more-or-less; it would really mean something like “the more-or-less cat is more-or-less on what is more-or-less the mat.” In which case, inferences made from it would be uncertain. If we assigned a probability of 60% to each of its three components, for example, the probability of the whole sentence being true would be their product, 21.6%, No conclusions could ever be drawn with certainty or even confidence, and inference would be useless.
In practice, moreover, we cannot assign such probabilities, and so certain inference cannot even begin. Such inference depends on determinate truth values, and determinate truth values depend on bivalence (attempts to come up with non-bivalent logics usually involve assigning probabilities to truth-values, which is ultimately a return to bivalence). So bivalence is necessary if logic is to be more than a series of air-castles.
These founding gestures bring clarity to logic, but at the cost of distancing philosophy from ordinary language, to such an extent that philosophers sometimes drastically mischaracterize it as “natural language.” A language like French, Mandarin, or Bojpuri is about as “natural” as a cathedral. It has been built, like a cathedral, over generations, but with poets and political leaders doing the work instead of stonecutters and architects. True, unlike cathedrals languages are not constructed according to a single master plan thought out in advance; but the many improvisations which build up a language may have, as Heidegger and von Humboldt argued, deep unities of their own.
So what if there were a definition of meaning which applied both to the philosophical and non-philosophical acceptations of the word? Would that be a good thing or a bad thing to have? Good, perhaps, because it brought philosophy into closer communication with non-philosophers? Or bad because it sacrificed rigor?
Before evaluating that enlarged concept of meaning, we should clarify it; and in order to clarify it we must construct it. My construction will be dialectical in the sense of Hegel’s Pheomenology: I will take one trait which applies to all members of the complex set of philosophical theories of meaning, negate it, and see what happens.
The feature in question has to do with time. In all the standard theories of meaning around today (and there are a lot of them—see Jeff Speaks’ article on “Theories of Meaning in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2021)—an utterance “bears” it meaning, by which I mean (!!!) that the meaning of an utterance is something that it has when it is asserted: the meaning of an utterance is contemporaneous with the utterance itself.
As opposed to this, I suggest that the meaning of an utterance may follow the utterance in time. I would characterize such meaning more specifically as the set of events that typically follows on an utterance. Utterances do not “bear” their meanings, but incite them. This is a “consequentialist” view of meaning, one of what is actually a whole family of views. It was held by Pragmatists such as C. S. Pierce, who in his “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” writes:
The whole function of thought is to produce habits of action... To develop [a] meaning, we have, therefore, simply to determine what habits it produces, for what a thing means is simply what habits it involves. Now, the identity of a habit depends on how it might lead us to act,
The meaning of a thing for Pierce is ultimately the set of actions it leads to. If we replace “actions” by “inferences,” we arrive in the vicinity of Robert Brandom, the most distinguished advocate of consequentialism these days. Neither word, I think, yields a broad enough definition of “meaning” for present purposes.
Consider “those clouds mean rain.” This informs us that rain typically follows on the presence of clouds like those. The rain is not produced by any inference, nor is its production a matter of habits leading to action. It is a matter of tendencies, which can be natural as well as human. Thus, my use of “utterance” above was too narrow. Anything which tends to produce a typical response from other things has a meaning. Meaning is not restricted to words, nor is it specific to people, as Pierce and Brandom have it. Nature is meaningful, even when we’re not around.
We may view utterance-meaning as one species of this broader class, occurring when the signal is produced by a human being, and the response is produced by another human being. This response may take the form of an interpretation in the mind of the second human being, and the recurrent features of such an interpretation are the “meaning” of the term as philosophers understand it.
The version of meaning sketched above is thus broader than Pierce’s or Brandom’s. It is as broad, I claim, as the non-philosophical uses of “meaning.” And it is almost broad enough to include the “meaning” of life—almost, but not quite, for the meaning of a human life is not typical. A human being is complex enough to be unique, and so to have unique effects on the world. Though there are certain sorts of thing that typically follow on the death of a human being, such as various patterns of grieving, a human life also has effects and repercussions that only it could have created. This is the core of Arendt’s view, in The Human Condition, of the “work” of art: something unique and meaningful that testifies to the uniqueness of the person who created it. Every human life, I suggest, is a work of art in this sense.
When we allow unique effects into our concepts of meaning, we can understand the meaning of “the meaning of life.” Someone who asks that question is wondering what difference their life is going to make in the world. The good news, then, is that their life will have a meaning, for few people live without affecting the world in some way. The bad news is that the meaning of your life follows on your life, which means it will not be evident until you are dead, perhaps long dead.
If then. We are still debating about the difference that Martin Luther King, or John Kennedy, or for that matter Julius Caesar, made in subsequent history. So your life has a meaning, but you will never know what it is. The “meaning of life,” which is really the meaning of my life, is worse than vague; it is, for me at least, inscrutable.