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.
