At some point in your life, you may have wondered what “meaning” means.\u00a0 Truth be told, it can mean a number of different things.\u00a0 This post aims to help you understand some basic differences among the various meanings.<\/p>\n
Implications<\/strong><\/p>\n First of all, when talking about the word “meaning,” it is very helpful to throw the word “mean” out the window.\u00a0 I prefer to use the word “imply.”\u00a0 That is, when we refer to the meaning of something, we refer to what that thing implies<\/em>.\u00a0 We call that implied thing an “implication.”<\/p>\n Verbal Implications<\/strong><\/p>\n Many times when we talk about the meaning of a word, we talk about verbal implications.\u00a0 In layman’s terms, a verbal implication<\/strong>\u00a0is another word, another phrase, a dictionary definition, etc., implied by the word.\u00a0 So, for the word “human,” one possible verbal implication of that word is the phrase “featherless biped.”\u00a0 (This is also called an intension<\/em> of the word–with an s<\/em>, not a t<\/em>–but that word doesn’t invoke the notion of implication.)<\/p>\n Non-Verbal Implications<\/strong><\/p>\n But not all words imply other words.\u00a0 The meaning of a word can be non-verbal.\u00a0 In fact, probably most meanings are non-verbal implications.\u00a0 In layman’s terms, a non-verbal implication<\/strong> is anything implied by a word that is not other words<\/em>.\u00a0 For the word “human,” one possible non-verbal implication of that word is yourself, or me, or Aristotle, or Jackie Kennedy, or Barack Obama.<\/p>\n However, there are plenty of other kinds of non-verbal implications outside of representative examples for the word.\u00a0 Another type of implication is a concept.\u00a0 For the word “human,” the implication may be smart.\u00a0 It may be polluter.\u00a0 It may be subject to error.\u00a0 Each of these are concepts that may be implied by the word “human.”\u00a0 A concept<\/strong>, in layman’s terms, is a notion or thought implied by the word.<\/p>\n But even a feeling can be a non-verbal implication.\u00a0 A feeling is something conceptually different from a concept, though at times they may\u00a0be decidedly overlapping.\u00a0 In layman’s terms, a feeling<\/strong> is a physical experience implied by a word.<\/p>\n This means that what Alfred Korzybski called “semantic reactions”–total-body responses to words, etc.–counts as non-verbal implications.\u00a0 If I\u00a0say the word “lemon,” and your mouth starts to water, your watering mouth is an implication of the word (a semantic reaction).\u00a0That implication is non-verbal.<\/p>\n Non-Verbal Impliers<\/strong><\/p>\n In truth, words aren’t the only initiators of meaning.\u00a0 You can find meaning in non-verbal events (i.e., non-words<\/em>) and thus experience implications.<\/p>\n If you think of, say, a tragic family event, this is a non-verbal event.\u00a0 You will perhaps have thoughts and feelings related to the memory; these are non-verbal implications.\u00a0 You might tear up; this is a non-verbal implication.\u00a0 You might say “It was hell”; this is a verbal implication.<\/p>\n This is to say that both verbal and non-verbal impliers have implications, and that nearly anything you experience–fact or fiction–can have implications.\u00a0 This is to say that nearly anything you experience can have a psycho-somatic effect on your body, even if it is just the submicroscopic level below your sensitivity.\u00a0 You might never be aware of the implications of verbal and non-verbal events on your mind-body.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At some point in your life, you may have wondered what “meaning” means.\u00a0 Truth be told, it can mean a number of different things.\u00a0 This post aims to help you understand some basic differences among the various meanings. Implications First of all, when talking about the word “meaning,” it is very helpful to throw the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[94,283,307,306,10,304,308,57,181,305],"class_list":["post-1175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-semantics","tag-alfred-korzybski","tag-implications","tag-impliers","tag-lemon","tag-meaning","tag-non-verbal-implications","tag-non-words","tag-semantic-reaction","tag-semantics","tag-verbal-implications"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1175"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1180,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175\/revisions\/1180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}