The word ‘meaning’ has only recently become meaningful for me.

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by coberst, Aug 25, 2008.

  1. coberst Registered Senior Member

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    The word ‘meaning’ has only recently become meaningful for me.

    In school I would ask Sister (I was raised as a Catholic and was taught by nuns) “what does this word mean” and she would give me the dictionary definition of the word. Until a few years ago the word ‘meaning’ had only one meaning and that was the dictionary definition.

    What has changed in my world is that I have begun studying cognitive science, which has led me down many different intellectual paths in search for answers to many questions that has arisen as a result of my studies.

    SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) as described in “Philosophy in the Flesh” by Lakoff and Johnson, details a new paradigm for cognitive science. This new paradigm for cognitive science might be called the embodied mind.

    This new paradigm constructs a world view based upon the empirical evidence that there is no duality of mind/body but that we are in fact an embodied mind.

    The foundation of SGCS cognitive science rests on the concept of meaning. The concept of understanding rests on meaning, and the concepts of truth, created reality, knowledge, objectivity, and subjectivity follows as a result of our understanding.

    I did a Google search for quotes about meaning and I will share a few of these with you.

    http://thinkexist.com/quotations/meaning/

    If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is a part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
    Hermann Hess

    There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”
    Anais Nin quotes (French born American Author of novels and short stories, 1903-1977)

    “The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
    Carl Gustav Jung quotes (Swiss psychiatrist, Psychologist and Founder of the Analytic Psychology, 1875-1961)

    “Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.”
    Alfred Adler quotes (Austrian psychiatrist whose influential system of individual psychology introduced the term)

    Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day.”
    Dalai Lama quotes

    “The essence of intelligence is skill in extracting meaning from everyday experience.”
    “Meaning is not what you start with, but what you end up with”
    Peter Elbow quotes

    “Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life”
    Elie Wiesel quotes (Romanian born American Writer. Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986. b.1928)

    “What we see depends mainly on what we look for.”
    “What we see depends upon what is meaningful to us.”
    John Lubbock

    Meaning is what touches us in a fundamental way
    coberst

    “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is a part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
    Hermann Hesse

    “Love is just a word until someone comes along and gives it meaning.”
    Chuck Palahniuk quotes (American freelance Journalist, Satirist and Novelist. b.1961)

    “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it”
    Isadora Duncan quotes (American Dancer, best known as one of the founders of modern dance. 1877-1927)

    “I miss the meaning of my own part in the play of life because I know not the parts that others play”
    Rabindranath Tagore quotes (Indian Poet, Playwright and Essayist, Won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, 1861-1941)

    “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it [is] he who is asked.”
    Viktor Frankl quotes (Austrian psychiatrist and psychotherapist. 1905-1997)
     
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  3. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    Hesse is worth quoting twice with the same phrase?
    Nah, especially as he's wrong.
     
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  5. Xelios We're setting you adrift idiot Registered Senior Member

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    Meaning is completely subjective. Most of the time we all use the same meanings for words because we were taught them that way, but other times personal experiences or opinions will influence meaning and you end up with misunderstanding.

    It's one of the weak points of language.
     
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  7. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    The Albatross has a long history of sowing confusion amongst itinerant cauliflower farmers. I suppose, given the current price of coal, that this is only to be expected. Does this represent a de facto abrogation of epistemological needs. I rather think not, but then I wouldn't, would I?
     
  8. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    Dang, I never looked at it that way before.
    Thanks Ophiolite.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    (That's worth saving on my hard drive).
     
  9. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    Thank you for your support. I shall wear it every evening.
     
  10. coberst Registered Senior Member

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    It appears to me that our culture and our dictionaries disregard the value of meaning as accentuated by SGCS. Therein lay the rub. Our culture cannot deal with the essential problems of our society because our Western tradition dismisses the values that are necessary for the comprehension of those types of problems.

    I think that we have two major difficulties. Our children are never taught to become Critical Thinking citizens. Secondly we are not taught how to reason together regarding matters beyond that encompassed by the natural sciences. To reason together regarding human relationship problems requires the ability to reason dialogically.
     
  11. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913 and won the Nobel prize three years before his death in 1960. His mother was deaf, his first wife was a morphine addict, his second a mathematician, and his father died at the Battle of the Marne. This obsession with the letter M was not the only reason contemporaries labelled him an existentialist and was certainly unrelated to his hanging around with Jean-Paul Sartre on the Boulevard St. Germain in the late 1940s.
    For a fuller account of his life there is absolutely no point in going to this link:
    http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...serid=10&md5=3acc579410fbd08f13f3be246423b3e4
     
  12. Simon Anders Valued Senior Member

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    Coberst's response
    Xelios:
    Do you think he responded to your post? Does his response seem to address the issue you raised?
     
  13. Simon Anders Valued Senior Member

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    I spent a little time trying to determine if it was his support you would wear or his hard drive? I enjoyed both 'images'.
     
  14. Xelios We're setting you adrift idiot Registered Senior Member

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    Sounds more like he used it as a weak springboard for some totally different issue. Although I agree with him about children not being taught enough critical thinking.
     
  15. nietzschefan Thread Killer Valued Senior Member

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    Wow. Sure glad you are posting again...
     
  16. designationlocutus Registered Senior Member

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    It think that it is one of those words that is defined by the individual as they take their own meaning from things around them. So I think if you try to escalate meaning to more than an individual, then there is no meaning.
     
  17. Tnerb Banned Banned

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    Your gonna jinx it!!!
     
  18. Ophiolite Valued Senior Member

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    I'm not posting, I'm positing. As you can see the latter is 100% more egotistical.
     

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