Plausible theory: Words gain meaning by association with concepts, which have meaning.
For example, it wouldn’t do to recall all examples of people saying “ball” when I’m trying to think about what “ball” means. It’s just too much work. Perhaps I can recall a few key examples. But even then, there’s significant interpretative work to do: if I recall someone pointing at a “jack-o-lantern” I have to decide what object they’ve pointed at and decide what relevant similarities might make other things “jack-o-lanterns” too.
So it will usually make sense to distill out & remember a concept, and in many cases I’ll already have a concept and I’m merely learning words to associate with it.
Indeed, this phenomenon seems so common that it seems plausible to insist that if I don’t understand a word that way, even if I use it correctly in context, I’m merely parroting (if imitating others) or doing RL (if I learned ‘mama’ by babbling and seeing what got me what I want), and not actually properly understanding words at all (so in some important sense, not fully participating in the dance called meaning).
To an extent, this suggests that words are simply the wrong place to look for meaning. The interesting question is how concepts have meaning. (I am a little bit trolling with that suggestion.)
Plausible theory: Words gain meaning by association with concepts, which have meaning.
For example, it wouldn’t do to recall all examples of people saying “ball” when I’m trying to think about what “ball” means. It’s just too much work. Perhaps I can recall a few key examples. But even then, there’s significant interpretative work to do: if I recall someone pointing at a “jack-o-lantern” I have to decide what object they’ve pointed at and decide what relevant similarities might make other things “jack-o-lanterns” too.
So it will usually make sense to distill out & remember a concept, and in many cases I’ll already have a concept and I’m merely learning words to associate with it.
Indeed, this phenomenon seems so common that it seems plausible to insist that if I don’t understand a word that way, even if I use it correctly in context, I’m merely parroting (if imitating others) or doing RL (if I learned ‘mama’ by babbling and seeing what got me what I want), and not actually properly understanding words at all (so in some important sense, not fully participating in the dance called meaning).
To an extent, this suggests that words are simply the wrong place to look for meaning. The interesting question is how concepts have meaning. (I am a little bit trolling with that suggestion.)