Meaningfulness

Let me first introduce myself. I'm Matt. I know JK because we went to high school together. Currently I am attending college at Bloomsburg University. I'm a philosophy major who spends most of his time playing a trading card game called Magic: the Gathering. I might just give that topic a whirl some time, but today I’m going to talk about some philosophy. For some of you, you may know exactly what philosophy is. For others, philosophy is a word that you’ve most likely have heard, but don’t really know what that word means. That’s okay, don’t be scared away by that fact. Historically philosophers have fought over the definition so hard it’s really hard to give it one anymore. That’s not to say I can’t give you a general idea. The easiest way to explain philosophy is to explain the kinds of things philosophers do. These things typically fall into a three categories: metaphysics, epistemology, and logic. The first two might scare you. They are pretty big words. So to keep that from happening let me spell them out. Metaphysics is the study of the nature of all matter in the universe. More specifically it is a bunch of hypothesis about the nature of things within the universe. Epistemology is the study of what can be known, a bunch of hypothesis about the nature of our capacity for knowing things. Logic as you probably have guessed is the study of arguments, how they work and such. I tell you all of this not because I’m about to jump into an entire history of it, but because; I want to talk about a specific philosophical problem. You see I am one of those people who loves their major and spends a lot of their spare time doing things that concern it. Well with philosophy that means a lot of introspection. (Also reading a whole lot of really old texts.) The problem I want to discuss is one in metaphysics.

A few days ago I attended a speech by a not so famous professor from Ohio, Dr Nathaniel Goldberg. His topic was dubbed “Meaningfulness as a Secondary Quality.” Now to understand this topic you have to understand two things, which I will explain. First meaningfulness here is just the meaning that words in any language have. And second a secondary quality is a type of condition that certain types of properties have. Properties such as color, taste, texture and smell all have been famously argued to be secondary qualities. This is because the philosophers who were arguing wanted to distinguish them from Primary qualities. The best way to define both secondary and primary qualities is to contrast the two. Primary qualities are purely objective. We believe that even if we weren’t around to sense the objects with these properties they would still have those qualities. A secondary quality in some way is both subjective and objective. With secondary qualities there is something objective out in space that acts on the subjective senses of some observer. In the case of color light waves bounce off some object and we observing them experience color. A good example of primary color is shape, shape can be deduced from two different senses, we can both feel and see shape. Shape doesn’t rely in any way on us like color does. This secondary quality distinction was very famously argued by John Locke.

To say that meaningfulness is a secondary quality is to say that meaningfulness does not exist solely as an objective property. This, to me at least seems pretty obvious. If you believe that there is a secondary quality distinction it’s very hard to say that meaningfulness is a primary quality. Yet, the part that complicates this debate and in my opinion makes it very exciting is that there is a third viable option: Meaningfulness as a purely subjective property. This objection is not as easily dodged as meaningfulness and a primary quality was. This objection can be highlighted by the difference between meaningfulness and color as properties. Color’s objective component as a secondary quality is most obviously the object and the light waves it reflects. Meaningfulness’s objective component is much harder to define. The words on the page, the sounds that we make when we talk and the gestures we make with our body all seem to be things that convey meaning. Also our natural languages in some respect were developed by ourselves. We may not have initially went about designing our language, but as it developed there are many cases in which we purposefully designed certain words. These lead some to speculate that the objective part of meaningfulness is arbitrary at best. The actual meaningfulness is just a subjective construct of our minds, the words or symbols are just a vehicle we’ve devised to share these meanings. The only objection I can think to raise to this is that even our own minds have an objective element, brain states. So if we could in principle do a brain scan to figure out what kinds of brain states cause different meanings to be interrupted, then we could use that as the objective component of the secondary quality of meaningfulness.

I hoped you understood and enjoyed what I was talking about. More than that I hope it got you thinking.
- Thanks for reading, Matt