How do we mean? A constructivist sketch of semantics

hen people ask about the meaning of life, they have to be given a metaphysical answer. Whether the answer will seem plausible or not, depends on their mindset. It cannot be checked in the domain of experience because the question explicitly leads beyond that domain. Questions about language and how words come to have meaning, are of a different sort and they deserve an answer that speakers of a language can check out by reviewing their own early experience of constructing meanings for the speech sounds they learned to hear and to produce. The domains of metaphysics and semantics are essentially different in my view. Different, too, is the way most people come to think of them, if they think of them at all. Many of us reflected at least briefly (and inconclusively) about the meaning of life when we reached puberty and wondered who we were and what the world was about. And we may later have returned to these questions in times of crisis. In contrast, very few people, have spontaneously come to examine the general problem of meaning in language. This may be due to the fact that by the time metaphysical problems raise their head, we are already so thoroughly familiar with the use of language as a tool in everyday interactions that " communication " has become a commonplace and we take for granted that it works. This may be one reason why many accept the notion that language has some form of 'existence' apart from the people who use it. At a time that is more and more often referred to as the 'information age', an examination of the assumption that language is the main carrier of information, does not seem out of place. Some fifty years ago, Claude Shannon published the first 'scientific' Theory of Communication (1948). It may have been superseded by more sophisticated methods of calculation in radiotelegraphy and satellite linkages, but it formulated a logical condition that is as relevant in today's communicatory interactions as it was then. The following diagram shows some aspects of the theory: W