7 - Meaning and psyche
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"it's the book in itself that arouses your curiosity;
in fact, on sober reflection,
you prefer it this way,
confronting something
and not quite knowing yet what it is" 1.
Let us now see some possible conceptions of meaning that
involve directly the individual's psyche , the subjective vision of reality.
| 1. |
Meaning is the emotion aroused by a word.
Some words are very difficult to define because they have, for the most
part, an emotional connotation: for example, the words "love", "God",
"liberty" "leave a trail of affective meaning. We may quite properly
speak of the emotional connotation of such words as the funded meaning
of previous emotional reactions and the affective abstracts which
constitute the psychical correlates of this meaning as the survivals
of former judgment-feelings" 2. |
| 2. |
... what is related to a sign in reality: for example,
smoke and fire. In like manner psychoanalysts speak of the meaning of
dreams, introducing the notion of "unconscious desire". In this way
they substitute the cause for the meaning. The meaning of a dream is
the (supposed) cause that has determined it, i.e. the unconscious
desire. For the psychoanalysts, as for all natural scientists - Ogden
and Richards argue - "the causal sign-relations are those which have
the greatest interest" 3. |
| 3. |
...the mnemic effect/s of a stimulus. In this
view, reference is a consequence of adaptation to a psychic context,
and "the meaning of A is that to which the mental process interpreting
A adapts itself. This is the most important sense in which words have
meaning". These effects are introspective judgments, i.e. interpretations
of a given type, sometimes nonverbal judgments, "obscure feelings
accompanying the reference". Sometimes we can express such feelings
with words, but that is not always the case: sometimes words are not
appropriate for the reference they must symbolize. In this view, we
could define a communication act as the use of symbols to originate
referential acts in the receiver that are similar to those representing
the symbols intended by the sender 4. |
Ogden and Richards then find more senses to the word "meaning": what the
user of a symbol believes himself to be referring to, what the interpreter
of a symbol refers to, what the interpreter of a symbol believes himself
to be referring to, that to which the interpreter of a symbol believes the
user to be referring. In all these latter cases the psychic activity of
both the sender and the receiver plays an important role.
The intended meaning of a thing does not always coincide with
the receiver's intention to decode. And, on the other hand, sometimes the
interpretation of an utterance is based on the sender's (sometimes
fallacious) predictions. In psychology such activity is called "projection".
In a way, an attempt to understand the other's intentions is
necessary in order to communicate but if, in so doing, our own intention
interferes with such attempt, overshadowing the other's supposed intention,
the result is a sort of short circuit in the communication.
Having taken an overview of the possible meanings of "meaning"
in the different definitions revised in the previous unit, let us now see
how Ogden and Richards present their "context theory of interpretation",
i.e. a view of the semiotic act of assimilation of a verbal text 5.
The preliminary phase to the understanding of words is that
devoted to sensory discrimination, or sensory recognition. By discriminating
among sounds and graphic signs we are interpreting an initial sign. To be
able to use words, a conscious or unconscious distinction of a sound or
image is necessary.
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Usually the discrimination is unconscious, our use of words being habitual;
it can, however, become conscious, as in learning a foreign tongue 6.
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Another distinction is made between scientific prose and poetry: in the
former case we can ignore the sensorial features of words, while in poetry
we must pay conscious attention, even if that hampers further interpretations.
In a way, the fact that poetry has a different aspect on paper
from prose, the fact that an important part of the page remains blank is a
sensory clue to alert that the attention due to these words is not normal,
but comprises their sound as well. To follow the track of purely acoustical
perception can however be misleading. In poetry, words are not just sounds.
To decode them it is necessary to pay attention both to the meaning of
their sound and to the meaning of their symbols.
Bibliographical references
CALVINO I. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, translated by William Weaver, London, Vintage, 1998, ISBN 0-7493-9923-6.
OGDEN C. K. e RICHARDS I. A. The Meaning of Meaning. A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism.
London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960 [first edition 1923].
1 Calvino 1979, p. 9.
2 Urban, quoted in Ogden and Richards 1960, p. 199.
3 Ogden e Richards 1960, p. 200.
4 Ogden e Richards 1960, p. 205-206.
5 To specify "verbal" is not redundant because in semiotics every object, not only verbal objects, is viewed as a text.
6 Ogden e Richards 1960, p. 209-210. See also the first part of the course, unit 5.
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