Chaos Theory and The Deep Structure of Meaning in Languages

Meaning has been called the ‘holy grail’ not only of linguistics, but also of philosophy and neuroscience.  Of particular interest to scholars in linguistics, philosophy and other domains that study language and literature is the nature of the linkage between sound and meaning in a language.  We know that the two are related.  How else could such units of sound and meaning be traded so seamlessly with other protagonists who ‘know’ the same language?  And this is true whether the currency is the spoken or written word.  Yet the nature of that linkage remains a mystery because any knowledge of the linkage of sound to meaning in words, if it ever existed, has been lost both to time and to a collective species amnesia.

In addition to the enigmatic nature of the linkage, a number of interrelated factors have conspired to make the path to a viable solution more difficult for the interested researcher:  (1) There is no fossil record of sound and hence no evidentiary trace of the provenance of words.  As a result, there is a dearth of evidence upon which to base a scientific inquiry; (2) Meaning is an intrinsically difficult domain to study.  It appears on its face to be random and chaotic.  One commentator has described the domain as ‘the vast and tangled jungle that is the problem of meaning’; and (3) Linguistics, the science of language, has determined by a foundational canon in its credo that the linkage of sound to meaning in any given word — the word ‘onion’ and the thing onion for example — is ‘arbitrary’, i.e. a product of convention or tacit agreement among speakers. If that were indeed the case, there would be nothing to be gained by further inquiry into what has been predetermined to be an unstructured set. 

My investigation into how meaning is instantiated in words in the English language reveals that the matrix of sound-meaning relations is neither unstructured nor arbitrary.  Behind the inherent complexity of sound-meaning relations, and hidden deep within the architecture of the system of meaning (or Meaning System) that we colloquially call English, lies an archetypal map to meaning that documents the emergence and developmental growth of the English language from a meaning-centered perspective. It is as though each word in the language incorporates a tiny fraction of the coding for the Meaning System as a whole.  It takes an aggregation of all the fractionated parts of the coding system to reveal the ‘big picture’ narrative.  A reductionist analysis cannot penetrate the interior holistic quality of a Meaning System that lies behind the diversity of outward expression of languages.

Chaos theory teaches us that order often arises spontaneously out of disorder.  My research indicates that languages, reframed as Meaning Systems, exemplify this dynamic.  While on one axis they may present as opaque and complex systems without a guiding center, such systems nevertheless maintain at any given time a stable and coherent platform for the purpose of thinking and communication on the other axis.  In this paper I present evidence of the various meaning-related structures brought to light by my research, including the general configuration of the System and other key elements such as ‘polarity of meaning’ (POM), ‘fields of meaning’ (FOM) and ‘abstraction of meaning’ (AOM).  In addition, I discuss what the big picture narrative reveals about the emergence and development of Meaning Systems generally, and what it teaches us about the deep structure of Meaning.  I conclude by looking at what this new insight portends for our understanding of the nature of languages and for the role they play in cognition.

Keywords:  Chaos and meaning, order in chaos, meaning-sound relations, architecture of meaning, meaning as a proxy for thought, languages as systems of meaning, history and growth of meaning, origin of words