Hey, Baby!  And I do mean hypothetical baby, because I’m using the idea of a newborn infant as a foil so that I can subtly confess to readers that I spent a lot of time, energy experience untold frustration learning things that now seem like second nature.  BTW, there’s nothing in life quite like asking obvious questions to shake things up. When I was young, I assumed I was slow and that everyone else knew things that I didn’t understand (like the word “meaning”). Now I know that most people shy away from the simple questions because their ”meaning” often runs deep.  Words like “person” or “thing” or “good” or “unfair.”  You will start using these effortlessly when you are 2 or 3 years old, but you’ll rue the day when someone comes up and asks you to “define” these words.  And many other words.

This is my 18^th Chapter. Doesn’t that sound pretentious for someone who it tapping away at night, sipping tap water and listening to the sweet jazz recordings of the recently-deceased piano player, Lyle Mays?  If you are intrigued and not too disturbed by this growing series of what will be 100 articles, you can access all of them at this link. And if you someone else who might enjoy articles like this, please share them. As you might have noticed, I’m funding this entire operation myself. There are no ads on this website. I’m avoiding any risk that I would be financially influenced by advertising.

Let’s start with the word “define,” because I think that’s where things got off track with the word “meaning.” Academics might get really complicated about this, but what it has historically boiled down to is this:  When you “define” a word, you are either pointing to it (where it is a thing you can point to) or your are describing that word in terms of other words. The second meaning is the predominant one and unfortunately, it leaked over into the way most people (and academics) understand the word “meaning.” Most people you ask will assume that when you ask for the “meaning” of a word, you are asking them to use other words to describe that word. If your eternal regress alarm bells are going off, good for you! Let’s look into it further.

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 preach it, that meaning is best studied by defining words in terms of other words, without considering the neurophysiology of the human biology.  Long distinguished careers of many philosophers and linguists have come and gone without making the human body even a tiny part of their analysis of this question.

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 overlooking of the human body while discussing meaning would be impossible, especially over the past few decades, during which dramatic 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? 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 every person who properly 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 word meaning without knowing anything interesting about human bodies and brains. It means that “professionals” can sit in their armchairs and draw trajectories from selected words to other words and declare that they are studying and establishing word meanings, as though a grunt means nothing more than another grunt or a scribble. QED!

Many academics studying meaning have ignored horn-blaring necessity that means must absolutely have something to do with human 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 cartoonish world, linguists don’t need to roll up their sleeves to study any neuroscience, and that makes everything a lot easier. That’s as absurd as claiming that in order to understand the human sense of taste, you only need to feed Cheez-its to people and then ask them what they think. “My dissertation proves that when you feed people Cheez-its, they sense a Cheez-ity taste on their tongues and it makes them reach for more.  QED!”

Many of them of accepted as a matter of faith that objective meanings somehow exist (maybe that they pre-exist in the Platonic sense) and that each word has a single set (or a multiple set) of meanings that are understood by every reasonable person in the same way, and that these words refer to specific things, objects and events in the world. This minimal workload required for this alleged study of “meaning” has made it much easier for “experts” to take up various hobbies, such as birding and croquet.

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 magically 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 might 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).

Another non-trivial source of evidence is this: Those who suffer brain damage often suffer deficits in understanding word meaning, so apparently meaning has something to do with brains. 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, and
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.

Or take this example:

“We need new alternative sources of energy.” This means something very different to the president of Mobil Oil from what it means to the president of Friends of the Earth. The meaning is not right there in the sentence—it matters a lot who is saying or listening to the sentence and what his social and political attitudes are.

Johnson and Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By (pp. 10-11).

Lakoff and Johnson make the bold claim that there is no way to understand any 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 somehow 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. In short, all meaning is “embodied.” This term, “embodied,” is so critically important to understanding “meaning” that I will now set forth an awesome series of quotes from Johnson and Lakoff discussing embodied meaning:

The source domains of common cross-cultural metaphor systems are typically based on our sensory, motor, affective, and interpersonal experiences and cognitive capacities, all of which involve our embodiment. In other words, metaphors are shaped by the nature of our bodies and brains as we engage our physical and social environments. Metaphors thus “recruit” sensory and motor experience and inferential patterns to perform abstract conceptualization and reasoning. It is in this sense that they are body based.

Johnson, Mark. Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason.

The claim that the mind is embodied is, that . . . the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world.

Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy In The Flesh

One important way that the body undergirds languages and systems of meaning the world over is the use of body-part projections for understanding objects, events, and scenes. It is also common to experience objects such as mountains, trees, towers, poles, and people as being oriented up and down, as having tops and bottoms, and often as having heads and feet (as in the foot of a mountain, tree, or tower).

Johnson, Mark. Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason

What we understand as the front of a stationary artifact, like a TV or a computer or a stove, is the side we normally interact with using our fronts. … The concepts front and back are body-based. They make sense only for beings with fronts and backs. If all beings on this planet were uniform stationary spheres floating in some medium and perceiving equally in all directions, they would have no concepts of front or back . . . the spatial relationships in front of and behind, between cat and car or between cat and tree, are not objectively there in the world. The spatial relation is not an entity in our visual field.

Philosophy In The Flesh

Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment.

Philosophy In The Flesh

One more note before moving on. As discussed in Chapter 11, bodies are permeated with emotions. We tap into our own bodily emotions in order to understand word meaning. For example, Affection is warmth and intimacy is closeness.

The key idea in this chapter is that understanding a concept does not consist in accessing a list of abstract essential features or properties that define a thing. Rather, to have a usable concept that you can apply to a particular object is to be able to simulate the kinds of perceptual, motor, and affective interactions you typically have with that kind of object. This simulation is not run in some abstract conceptual domain, but instead is enacted in the very bodily processes (employing the same functional neural clusters) involved in physically engaging that object.

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 possible that words can have meanings that are most of the time useful to most of the people? 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 same 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. These 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.

Notice how the “vehicle” can change (from car to train to boat) yet we still understand the metaphor. We can even use a spaceship if we want: “This relationship is taking off!”

Lakoff and Johnson have compiled enormous lists of conceptual metaphors 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,” but in you.  When they use the term conceptual metaphor, that is to distinguish the metaphor from what one might call fanciful metaphors, one-off imaginative creations.

Meaning is in the body. We can only understand a word to the extent that our body has had experiences and we had sensations. We understand non-metaphorical things like dogs because we see their fur and we hear their bark.  We have no direct physical experience of love or justice or time, so we make use of the things we DO directly experience and we metaphorically extend those sensory-motor experiences to cobble together (often diaphanous and ephemeral) meaning based ultimately on what a body can experience.

Here are two more examples to demonstrate our systematic use of conceptual metaphors. We cannot experience time, but all of us have, until recent times, physically exchanged money.  Therefore, one way to understand time is by metaphorically extending the sensory-motor sensations we all know well to that mysterious thing we call time:

TIME IS MONEY

You’re wasting my time.

This gadget will save you hours.

I don’t have the time to give you.

How do you spend your time these days?

That flat tire cost me an hour.

I’ve invested a lot of time in her.

I don’t have enough time to spare for that.

You’re running out of time.

You need to budget your time.

Put aside some time for ping pong.

Is that worth your while?

Do you have much time left?

He’s living on borrowed time.

You don’t use your time profitably.

I lost a lot of time when I got sick.

From Metaphors We Live By (pp. 7-8).

Here’s one more.  Most of us constantly have sensory-motor experiences of seeing with our eyes.  But what about “understanding”? What does it mean to understand something? We would be at a loss to explain “understanding” unless we could metaphorically put it in terms of something of which we are intimately familiar: Seeing.  Here are many examples of

Understanding is Seeing

I see.

I cannot see what you’re getting at.

There is more to this than meets the eye.

That is my point of view.

I do not agree with your viewpoint.

That’s the way I visualize it.

It all depends on how you look at it.

Seeing is believing.

I cannot quite picture that.

I do not see the point of your argument.

We never see eye to eye on matters.

I view things differently.

Here’s one last conceptual metaphor related to understanding is seeing.  Another way to understand the word “understand” is in terms of illumination. Hence:

That was a brilliant idea.

I take a dim view of that whole affair.

What you are saying is not very clear.

These examples are from Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh

[T]he vast majority of metaphors are not based on similarities, but rather emerge from common experiential correlations occurring between the source and target domains. So, for example, it is not that vision and thought are “similar” or share literal similarities as the basis for metaphorical mapping; instead we have certain vision metaphors in cultures the world over because people routinely experience the correlation between seeing something and thereby gaining an understanding of it.

The source of all meaning is ultimately our muscles, bones and nerves. In place of objectivism, Lakoff and Johnson offer “experientialism”: Our bodies are similarly tuned, through our very similar (even though not exactly the same) experiences of growing up and surviving in the same (or at least a 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 by reference to your body experiences. Our experiences are similar enough, often enough, whenever you and I hear the same word. When we say good enough, that is classic satisficing, and that works well enough in the real world.

Meaning is usually much more precisely agreed upon when we talk using words that refer to basic level categories such as dogs, chairs, flowers and cars, things with which we have constant, direct physical familiarity.  For more, see here. 

Exactly where is word-meaning tied to the body? Lakoff and Johnson refer to “the imagination”:

We must not think of imagination as merely a subjective, idiosyncratic private “mental” operation to be contrasted with objective thought and reason. Imaginative activity occurs, instead, in the ongoing flow of our everyday experience that is neither merely mental nor merely bodily, neither exclusively cognitive nor emotional, and neither thought alone nor feeling alone. All these dimensions are inextricably tied together in the perceptual and motor patterns of organism-environment interaction, which provide the basis for our patterns of understanding and thought.

Mark Johnson, Embodied Mind, Meaning and Reason

There is a lot more to this story of meanings and metaphors and I will revisit these ideas in future chapters. Here’s the take-home for now: meaning can be understood solely by reference to the natural world.  Meaning is embodied.  We use only our bodies and brains and their interactions with our environments to understand meaning. We extend this direct physical meaning to abstract concepts through the use of metaphor. Without using conceptual metaphor, we would have no way of knowing many of our most-commonly used words.