What does it mean for a word to have meaning? This simple question affects almost everything we do, every day. Now here’s something mind-blowing: For the past 2,500 years (including up to the present) most of the people studying this question (“How is it that words have meaning?”) have analyzed meaning from their armchairs, content to assume, and then conclude, that meaning is best studied by defining words in terms of other words, without considering human biology.  Long distinguished careers have come and gone without making the human body an essential part of the analysis.

Philosopher Mark Johnson describes this failure:

The overwhelming tendency in mainstream analytic philosophy of language is to begin with concepts more-or-less well formed, and then to analyze their relations to one another in propositions and to objects of reference in the world. This leads one to overlook the bodily origins of those concepts and patterns of thought that constitute our understanding of, and reasoning about, our world . . . when I found myself immersed in linguistic philosophy as a graduate student in the 1970s, I did not even realize that I had been plunked down in a landscape that had been invaded by the body snatchers.

Johnson, Mark. Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason (2017).

You would think that this overlooking of the human body when discussing meaning would be impossible, especially

over the past few decades, during which new cognitive science findings are everyday occurrences. Isn’t it obvious that the oral and written words we use, the grunts and scribbles we produce, don’t have any inherent meaning? Isn’t it obvious that it is only when those grunts and scribbles interact with a human body that those grunts and scribbles trigger meaning? Well, apparently not.  It hasn’t been obvious for thousands of years and it is still not obvious to many people. Why not?

Here’s my suspicion. Many of those who study language want to believe that each word has one “objective” meaning, the same meaning for each person who uses that word (if not, it’s the fault of the user, not the word). This biologically un-anchored belief in objective meaning guarantees that one can study words without the much more taxing need to study human bodies and brains. It means that we can sit in our armchairs and draw trajectories from words to other words and declare that we are studying word meanings, without considering, for even a second, that words have something to do with brains, which are situated in bodies, which are situated in social environments. To the extent that a linguist simply declares that meanings inhabit words much like souls supposedly inhabit bodies, without any reference to brains, bodies and societies, the whole enterprise is immensely simplified to such an extent that we don’t need laboratories, but only dictionaries to do our research. More specifically, in this cartoon world, linguists don’t need to roll up their sleeves to study any neuroscience [collective sigh of relief].

This reduction in workload makes it much easier for linguists to believe on faith that objective meanings pre-exist and that they refer to the particular things, objects and events in the world. It’s much easier to pretend that objects and events out there in the world are somehow pre-labeled and that our grunts and scribbles extend out invisible tentacles of meaning that somehow latch onto their precisely intended targets in the world. In this simplistic way of believing in meaning, words seem like cannisters that are put inside of something like the pneumatic tubes at bank drive-in windows, and the meaning-cannister magically follows the tube to the right target. When I say Fido, an invisible meaning-cannister magically rainbows over to my dog Fido. This approach is easy, simple and wrong. There is no scientific evidence that this is how word meaning works. Grunts and scribbles no more contain meaning than light waves contain color. There are no inherently meaningful grunts or scribbles and there are no colored wavelengths of light. It takes a human body to make meaning or color. Human brains and bodies are critical to this process of meaning-making. Mark Johnson writes:

“What is it about the character of this language-oriented philosophy that led it to almost completely ignore the body? The answer, I shall argue, is that (1) its exclusive focus on language as the object of philosophical analysis turned attention away from anything that was not linguaform, and (2) it operated with a remarkably impoverished, and scientifically unsound, view of language as entirely conceptual and propositional.”

Johnson, Mark. Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason (2017). Kindle Edition. Loc 102.

Another non-trivial source of evidence is this: Those who suffer brain damage often suffer deficits in understanding meaning. So, why haven’t all modern linguists recognized the need to also become experts in cognitive science? Is it fatigue/laziness, arrogance, fear of the unknown, or is it deeply rutted Kuhnian “normal science” path-dependence fostered by well-funded careers based on the old school model? Maybe it’s some combination of all of these, but a cataclysmic paradigm shift is underway, one triggered by the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson: authors of Metaphors We Live By (1980), Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) and many other works, individually and collectively.

Back to that pneumatic tube example. Lakoff and Johnson refer to this way of understanding communication of meaning as the “conduit metaphor.” They caution that this is not how things physically work, but this is how we understand the transfer of meaning from one person to another through the use of words. We understand this process as though word meanings are placed into something like a container in a tube, and then the container whooshes from the speaker to the listener via the tube (the “conduit”). They have developed this idea in great detail, pointing out that we conceive of linguistic expressions and communication as though they are these tangible real-world things:

IDEAS (or MEANINGS) ARE OBJECTS.
LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS.
COMMUNICATION IS SENDING.

Lakoff and Johnson explain: “The speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and sends them (along a conduit) to a hearer who takes the idea/objects out of the word/containers. Here are some examples of how we use the CONDUIT Metaphor in ordinary speech:

• It’s hard to get that idea across to him.
• I gave you that idea.
• Your reasons came through to us.
• It’s difficult to put my ideas into words.
• When you have a good idea, try to capture it immediately in words.
• Try to pack more thought into fewer words.
• You can’t simply stuff ideas into a sentence any old way.
• The meaning is right there in the words.
• Don’t force your meanings into the wrong words.
• His words carry little meaning.
• The introduction has a great deal of thought content.
• Your words seem hollow.
• The sentence is without meaning.
• The idea is buried in terribly dense paragraphs.

Lakoff and Johnson make the bold claim that there is no way to understand abstract concepts without metaphors. The conduit metaphor is one example of many such metaphors. They also caution that many people make the mistake of taking these “conceptual metaphors” to be literal truth.

In other words, to the extent that that we take the conduit metaphor literally, we are buying into the idea that words have “objective” meanings (words have specific meanings that apply to all people exactly the same way). Objectivism has been thoroughly disproved (a topic for a separate day). But see here and here. I am mentioning this only to suggest a motive for believing that meaning resides inside of words (or maybe somewhere in the sky as a Platonic Ideal) and that word meanings somehow generate their own trajectories such that they always attach to pre-existing pre-labeled objects and events in the real world.

If we agree with Lakoff and Johnson that the conduit metaphor should not to be taken literally (meaning that objectivism is false), how is it that words can have meaning? The short version is this: We all have similar bodies that survive day-to-day in comparable environments. We are all constantly barraged with similar stimuli pursuant to the laws of physics as interpreted and engaged by our similar bodies, in which (to give only a few examples) some things are up and others are down and we need to push against gravity. This orientation of up and down shows up in much of our abstract thinking: When we are sad, we are down in the dumps and depressed. When we are happy, we are walking on air, or even high as a kite. We all have fronts and backs, and we impose these body orientations upon many objects, including buildings (we go into the front of the church or we go around the side.

We constantly deal with containers such as bottles, rooms and backpacks. Containers are an example of an “image schema” (often repeated sensory-motor routines) that serves as the foundation for our understanding of physical things, for sure. We also experience often-repeated sensory-motor routines, such as walking down a path and (sometimes) encountering obstacles that impeded us. But we also use these sorts of often-repeated simple experiences to understand abstract concepts such as love, which we intuitively see as a container: We are in love or we fall out of love. When we are falling in love, we are about to go into the container. How do we understand a complex relationship? Metaphorically, we intuitively see relationships as journeys involving travelers moving from a source, down a path, to a goal. The clues are ubiquitous. They are conceptual metaphors hidden in plain sight. They are in the words we commonly speak:

THE LOVE IS A JOURNEY METAPHOR

• Love Is A Journey
• The Lovers Are Travelers
• Their Common Life Goals Are Destinations
• The Relationship Is A Vehicle Difficulties Are Impediments To Motion

Examples:

• Look how far we’ve come.
• It’s been a long, bumpy road.
• We can’t turn back now.
• We’re at a crossroads.
• We’re heading in different directions.
• We may have to go our separate ways.
• The relationship is not going anywhere.
• We’re spinning our wheels.
• The marriage is out of gas.
• Our relationship is off the track.
• The marriage is on the rocks.
• We’re trying to keep the relationship afloat.
• We may have to bail out of this relationship.

Lakoff and Johnson present numerous word usages as strong clues that bodily experiences anchor our understandings of abstract concepts. They also present numerous other types of scientific evidence supporting their claim that meaning is not “out there.”

Meaning is in the body. It is wired into our muscles, bones and nerves. In place of objectivism, Lakoff and Johnson offer “experientialism”: Our bodies are similarly tuned, through our very similar (though not exactly the same) experiences of growing up and surviving in the same (or at least similar) world. My experiences are not perfectly the same as yours, but they are similar enough that I understand word meanings by reference to my bodily experience much the same as you understand word meanings through your bodily experience. Our experiences are similar enough, often enough, whenever you and I hear the same word. It is classic satisficing. This is especially true when we talk using words referring to basic level categories such as dogs, chairs, flowers and cars, things with which we have much direct physical familiarity.  For more, see here. 

In short, meaning can be understood solely by reference to the natural world.  Meaning is embodied. We use our bodies and brains to understand meaning. We extend this physical meaning to abstract things through the use of metaphor. Without our bodies, however, there would be no understanding, no meaning anywhere to be found.

I plan to write more about this topic in future posts because of its immense importance, as discussed here.