Meaning Systems 101

All human beings perceive themselves and their relation to the mind-external world through the lens of ‘Meaning’.  We construe the world in terms of independent entities in a contextual background defined by space and time; we imbue people with certain physical qualities and psychological characteristics — they are tall, beautiful, arrogant, emotional, pleasant, or crotchety; we grant certain attributes to things — they have dimension, shape, color and texture; and we infer relations between people and between people and things. 

I argue in this paper that what gives rise to and regulates our perception of reality is the domain of Meaning, an ontologically distinct domain posited to form the substructure of all natural languages.  I identify this self-organizing domain of sound-meaning relations as the principal agent responsible for synthesizing and interpreting the raw input of the senses and building as output a composite, interactive picture of reality. In this capacity, it functions as a kind of higher order organ of perception through which we ‘see’ and relate to the world. 

Although modern linguistics and cognitive scientists do not currently recognize the existence of an independent domain called Meaning, I present evidence for the existence of such a domain gleaned from my research, and discuss the key elements of Meaning that combine to create the domain (all of which are deemed common to all natural languages).  Finally, I explain how languages are able to construct such highly complex and integrated systems of Meaning using a relatively small number of symbolic sounds.