Open Meaning

In earlier posts (e.g. 'More Meaning' I've argued, perhaps sketchily, that there is an irreducible openness about meaning - that for a statement/expression/word to be meaningful, there must be something about it that is 'still to discover'; that once the use or a term is entirely captured in explicit rules, its meaningfulness, far from being elucidated, actually disappears.

This may seem a perverse position to take, and contrary to some of the main currents in the analytic tradition. However, that tradition has run up against intransigent confusions with the respect to what we might take to be 'the meaning' of a linguistic expression - Moore's paradox of analysis being one, and the persistent ambiguity of fundamental categories such as reference being another.

Yesterday, it occurred to me that the open question paradox associated with meaning really makes all of this inevitable. I've had a look through some earlier posts, and I think this idea is in them, but it's worth spelling it out:

When I explicitly ask you what you mean, I am generally looking for a contextual elucidation, not a complete account. That we can never give a complete account is a consequence of the systematic ambiguity of 'mean'. In other words, not only is the meaning of  'mean' undecidable or incomplete, this ambiguity is inherited by its uses - when I ask you what you mean by an expression, you can legitimately ask me what I mean by 'mean'.

We negotiate these things tacitly, and either arrive at a satisfactory way to go on, or silently leave the arena of enquiry.