Semantics: The Science of Meaning

from Knatz.com

Teaching / Thinking Tools / Semiotics

1998 06 10

Semantics: The Science of Meaning
Mission: to promote the science of meaning, to emphasize the abstract nature of symbols — in contrast to concrete existence.

Thought, Talk

versus

Existence, Events ...

My module on Map / Territory confusions was the first semiotics module at Knatz.com, and was among the first Thinking Tools modules. It never got very far off the ground though. I was forever starting new drafts without ever finishing any old ones. That's a typical pk liability and its frequency of appearance is proportional to the importance of the subject: very important, very hard to do right. What I mount here today is a scrapbook from those drafts on semantics:

Oh, you're just quarreling about semantics. How many times have you heard people say that? Hundreds? How many times have you said it yourself? Was ever a science held in such contempt by the general public?

Semantics is the study of meaning, especially different meanings of a word. Is meaning trivial? Does ambiguity pose no problem? Are all meanings equivalent?

(Ambiguity can solve problems! But not nearly so many as it creates.)

Different specialties mean different things by semantics: linguists, psychologists, semioticians ... What I mean by semantics has been governed by Gregory Bateson and Alfred Korzybski. My start on what I have to say about it has already been up for months under the title Description vs. Thing. Bateson's additional step will come next: in harmony with Jung, he distinguished between Creatura, the world of life, and Pleroma, the world of extensional objects. We'd be wise to follow suit.

1999 04 30

I'll combine the two distinctions as follows:These days even car and burger ads talk about saving the planet. Does the planet need saving? Could we do it if we tried?

I can't see how the planet is in any danger. The third rocky satellite out from the medium yellow star Sol has taken direct hits in the past by major asteroids and comets. Its orbit has barely wobbled. One day the star Sol with expand, swallowing the inner rocky satellites. I doubt that we'll be around to worry about the switch to an ambient temperature of one million degrees. Mankind doesn't have a very good chance of lasting another millennium let alone those additional hundreds of millions of years. No: any danger the planet is in is beyond our concern. The planet is mostly molten iron and nickel. A big billiard ball. A pebble we couldn't even see from another star. One of thousands of billions in the universe.

The planet belongs in the class of Pleroma: things, objects ...

What those meteor hits did do in the past was severely disrupt the biosphere: that thin skin of life which until recently was flourishing beautifully on and around the planet's crust.
250,000 million years ago.
70,000 million years ago.

Is the biosphere in danger? Of being killed? That's not yet in our power and may never be.
Is the biosphere in danger of being disrupted? That's already in our power: we've already done it.

2009 08 01

Can we, we humans, survive the disruption?

I've switched sides. I used to hope we would survive: now I hope the biosphere survives: which I take to mean I have to root against us. Which I take to mean that I have to root against myself, hoping that all my hopes fail: that my writing will never be understood, that none of the messages God gave me to deliver ever get received: until it's too late. Then I hope they are received. I hope we'll see that we were offered an exit just as we burn to death in the fire.

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Lots more scrapbook remains to be mounted.