THE SUBJECTIVE ACCUMULATION OF MEANING

 Actually, I am writing this write up again. This is at the same time, boring and interesting task for me. I came up with this concept yesterday when I was studying Environment and Ecology, and the word "Habitat" came up. It will be interesting to see, how I will develop the concept once again after this blunder.

Human beings, since the advent of modernity, have sought to understand the universe and the meaning in things objectively. Modern Scientific method is an attempt to understand things precisely as they are. But, the nature of objectivity and subjectivity and how much objective or subjective things have been, has always been a matter of debate for centuries. I am also going to approach this question but through the angle of Language and meanings that we associate with words. 

Why am I so interested in language is that it is precisely the field (other than Philosophy which is actually study of everything), which dares to ask the most relevant question of philosophy, "What do you mean by this?" 

Since Socrates, this has been our concern. Look at the Socratic method. Why Socrates is greater than any other Pre-Socratic philosopher? It is because, he started asking these questions, "What do you mean when you say Love?" What is virtue? What is character? Socrates was the first philosopher not because he asked so many questions rather, he is the first philosopher precisely because he was the first one to be interested in meanings of words. Since he knew, whatever be the objective truth, the comprehension of this truth has to be in words and unless we know what we mean by things, we cannot know the truth. 

Thales is interested in what the world is made of. So is Anaximander, so is Protagoras. But Socrates is interested in, "What do you mean by "World is made of"?" Why this is such a genius question, is that it always asks the underlying assumptions behind framing of a question or statement, in other words, it asks what are you already knowing before it tries to answer what you should be knowing. 

Coming to the "Subjective Accumulation of Meaning". Contrary to "Historical accumulation of meaning", which was how historical processes shape meanings of words in different contexts, Subjective accumulation deals with an individual's or collective's process to accumulate an understanding of a word. How do we try to understand something? Do we have a reference point? Do we just grasp something as it is? or do we need some correlations that help us know the meaning of a word? If yes, does not the initial reference of the meaning always act as a bias in our mind about the meaning of that word? 

Let me give you a very good example. The word is, say, "Waves". Now, everyone of us, most of us, instantly would have seen Rivers and oceans and tides when they read this word Waves. Why? Isn't this image of a river or water flowing first reference of waves taught to us by teachers? So, consider you are a student of Physics in college, and you are being taught Mechanical waves in class. The reference meaning will act as a guide to your further understanding. Then you will correlate this moving to and fro with the mathematical versions of this, that is, a travelling sine wave or a cosine wave. So far so good, although your image of river flowing is already outdated and this is replaced by a mathematical expression, Sin(kx-wt). 

So far so good. But now, every other quantity is oscillating in Physics. The biggest, bizarre example of this is in Quantum mechanics. Probability of existence is oscillating in space. Now, how will your initial understanding of a river wave and later accumulated understanding of mechanical wave, that is, literally a picture of Sine wave, explain this shit?  What image? What correlation? What reference? Are you feeling an uneasiness. This uneasiness is felt by almost all Physics undergrads when they read Quantum mechanics. 

What I am saying is, the reason this uneasiness might come to most of us in our daily lives, is because we have some limited number of initial references that we use throughout our lives to correlate different things and then comprehend their meanings. Meanings are thus, I assert, limited to a few templates which we copy and paste to different contexts and try to fit the words in it. That is why, we feel uneasiness about concepts that do not fit in our templates of meaning. 

Human beings are, thus, Subjective in this sense that they have a limited number of references that they have accumulated in their childhood or may be some in adulthood which is actually their map of guidance in this world to know more. Subjectivity is, thus, just different sets of templates of meanings that each one of us have. 

Since, we are socialized and disciplined in common institutions like School etc. Our maps and references of meaning will not be much different from each other. Hence, we can talk and sometimes feel that we are on the same page and hence, a sense of objectivity comes up. 

But, is there an objectivity in the first place? For this, we will have to take a Socratic turn and ask, what do we mean by objectivity and subjectivity? 

Objectivity, in my opinion, is when a common consensus along with a testable method verification can take place about the meaning of something. Sometimes, common consensus alone can do the job, for example, in social sciences, whereas sometimes we need testable methods to verify like in hard sciences.  Subjectivity on the other hand, is when we agree that only one common consensus can be drawn about the meaning of something and that is it is open to many related meanings. 

If we understand these things well, we will see, Objectivity is a consensus on the references of many people that they use to understand something. Subjectivity is when such consensus cannot be drawn. 

Human beings are subjective beings with an objective existence. Subjective in the sense that their understanding of the universe and things in it depend upon the initial references that they could get from their surroundings. Objective existence means, a common consensus about what "being alive" feels like, is almost the same among all humans. 

I give my final hypothesis. By Subjective accumulation of meaning, I mean, that however objective the meaning of a word or a thing or a phenomenon or the universe is, the objectivity remains inaccessible to humans in its entirety since we accumulate knowledge and grasp meaning of that thing through our sets of references that we have accumulated since childhood. So, since our mode of accumulation of meaning is subjective, there is no way to ever accumulate an objective understanding of the world. In some sense, "Noumena" remains a Noumena, and phenomena are only that we can describe. 

The difference between Kant's description of Noumena, is that he posits that there is a Noumena to start with and it is inaccessible to humans. I say, I do not know, if objectivity exists or is it just an evolved emergent property of meaning, which depends on consensus. The only thing that can be said is that Human beings are subjective, and his knowledge is subjective where he tries to draw lines of objectivity. But this line is always blur. 

But, why this sense of existence of an objective meaning arises? Hegel says the fall creates its own cause. Fall of Adam creates an illusion of God and Eden's garden. I, in some sense, agree with Hegel. The uneasiness to understand the meaning of a word creates an illusion that a concrete meaning exists in the first place. 

Let me give another example. If I tell you, that there is an animal which no one has ever seen. And I try to describe it to you, and you try to paint a picture in your mind. My description will depend on my references that I employed in attempting to understand that animal, may be his mouth look like that of eagle but not as tapering but wide like a Tiger. His back is hard as a crocodile but has feathers on it and have flower like feathers. Now, the flower reference, tiger reference and all other, is a known thing to me. But here is a thing, your painting will look like the tiger you have seen, the flower you like, the feather you have touched. 

This is the status of us while trying to comprehend the meaning of words and in general the universe. The subjective accumulation of meaning affects our understanding of words and words affect our understanding of the world we live in. This double subjectivity occurs and then we put it in common knowledge and from people to people, different variations of the same truth is created. They may not be entirely different, might in some cases by carbon copies of each other. But I was just hoping to give a view that comprehension itself is not that objective. 

All examples of objectivity of meaning are experiential. How do we resolve this dilemma? Experiences have an element of original objectivity, but all comprehensions and accumulations are subjective. We are all intellectually like a blind person, left alone in a dark room full of things and the only way to know what what is and what is where is through touch. For once, the person is blind, first subjective accumulation and second, the room is dark, so second subjective accumulation. This is an allegory of a dark room if you say. 

I stop here, I will develop this and the earlier idea of historical accumulation of meaning further if an idea comes to me.