1.3 Communication: meanings

Kinds of meaning

Meaning is more difficult to get a handle on than form, and there is still a lot of controversy concerning how to describe it or even what it is. For a simple communication system, the meaning of a signal could be something that we might translate into English as "there's a hawk!" or "run for cover". That is, it conveys the presence of something of interest or an action to be taken in response to the current situation. Human language is obviously much more flexible. We can talk about things that were or will be present as well as those that are present now. We can even talk about hypothetical things that could not exist, like "the man in the moon" or "what I'd do if I were the richest person in the world". We can also talk about abstract concepts that cannot be directly perceived, like "government", "price", and "confidence". Finally, we can talk about complex relationships among things, for example, "how the rise in prices has led to a gradual decrease in the confidence of the citizens in the power of their government to keep the economy in line".

Meanings in MiniLing

Meanings in MiniLing will take the form of situations in an artificial two-dimensional world. As in our world, MiniLing's world contains objects belonging to different categories and appearing in particular relationships to other objects. So that you won't be biased by what you know about our world, the categories of objects and the relationships between them in the MiniLing world will be unfamiliar to you.

Exercise 1.3

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