Communication of meaning, signaling of truth. I’m not sure what essential difficulty remains if we merely make sure to distinguish between communicating ideas (which in this role are to be made clear, not yet compared against the world), and providing evidence for their relevance to the discussion or for their correspondence-to-the-world truth. Fireflies won’t be able to communicate ideas, only signal truths, so this analysis doesn’t naturally apply to them. But language can communicate ideas without implication of their truth, and at this point signaling helps if truth is to be extracted somewhat directly from other actors and not evaluated in other ways.
we assume the remark is relevant to the conversation
For example, in this case the assumption is part of how meaning is guessed, but is in general unrelated to how its truth (or truth of its relevance) is to be evaluated. The intermingling of the two aspects of communication is mostly shorthand, it can be teased apart.
Are you making a hypothetical claim that if we could differentiate between communication of ideas vs their truth, then we could distinguish connotation from denotation? Or are you claiming that the implication holds and we can distinguish clearly between those to things, so we can in fact distinguish between connotation and denotation?
I don’t (currently) see the argument for either part—I don’t get why the implication would be hypothetically true, and I also don’t see how the signalling analysis of meaning helps us establish the distinction for your premise.
I don’t see the distinction between connotation and denotation as an effective way of carving this muddle. The problem with signaling theory of meaning is that it explains communication of meaning as communication of truth, mixing up these different things. But meaning is often communicated using the whole palette of tools also used for signaling truth. In particular, communication of meaning (that is the kinds of things used to construct models and hypotheses) with utterances that look like vague reasoning by association shouldn’t in itself make it more difficult to reason lawfully and clearly about that meaning.
So the method I’m proposing is to consider any utterance in either capacity in turn, with separate questions like “Which idea is this drawing attention to?” and “What weight is implied for relevant assertions about this idea?” But at this point I’m not sure what the essential difficulty is that remains, because I don’t perceive the motivation for the post clearly enough.
Communication of meaning, signaling of truth. I’m not sure what essential difficulty remains if we merely make sure to distinguish between communicating ideas (which in this role are to be made clear, not yet compared against the world), and providing evidence for their relevance to the discussion or for their correspondence-to-the-world truth. Fireflies won’t be able to communicate ideas, only signal truths, so this analysis doesn’t naturally apply to them. But language can communicate ideas without implication of their truth, and at this point signaling helps if truth is to be extracted somewhat directly from other actors and not evaluated in other ways.
For example, in this case the assumption is part of how meaning is guessed, but is in general unrelated to how its truth (or truth of its relevance) is to be evaluated. The intermingling of the two aspects of communication is mostly shorthand, it can be teased apart.
Are you making a hypothetical claim that if we could differentiate between communication of ideas vs their truth, then we could distinguish connotation from denotation? Or are you claiming that the implication holds and we can distinguish clearly between those to things, so we can in fact distinguish between connotation and denotation?
I don’t (currently) see the argument for either part—I don’t get why the implication would be hypothetically true, and I also don’t see how the signalling analysis of meaning helps us establish the distinction for your premise.
I don’t see the distinction between connotation and denotation as an effective way of carving this muddle. The problem with signaling theory of meaning is that it explains communication of meaning as communication of truth, mixing up these different things. But meaning is often communicated using the whole palette of tools also used for signaling truth. In particular, communication of meaning (that is the kinds of things used to construct models and hypotheses) with utterances that look like vague reasoning by association shouldn’t in itself make it more difficult to reason lawfully and clearly about that meaning.
So the method I’m proposing is to consider any utterance in either capacity in turn, with separate questions like “Which idea is this drawing attention to?” and “What weight is implied for relevant assertions about this idea?” But at this point I’m not sure what the essential difficulty is that remains, because I don’t perceive the motivation for the post clearly enough.