On the Meaning of Meaninglessness

Gangadeanians often talk about meaninglessness. Well, they don't quite talk about it if by that we mean that they explain it. However, they mention the notions meaning and meaninglessness. For instance, they suggest that if some things are not clear, then meaninglessness follows. But by 'clear' they mean absolute epistemic certainty. There's a lot packed into their notion of epistemic certainty, too and as a corollary into their notion of clarity and thus their concept of meaning/meaninglessness. As I've mentioned, one can push back on each of these notions. Perhaps, something can be clear without it being clear in the manner in which Gangadean and his people privilege. After all, they don't have a monopoly on our concepts or words. They need to earn such a status. Suppose I started announcing that the nature of God is one that is finite temporal and changing in much the same way that Gangadean claims that God is infinite, eternal and unchanging. You might think that my concept of God is just mistaken. At the very least you're going to want me to motivate my concept over that of alternative conceptions. I can't just tell you that from here on out, the nature of God is one that is finite, temporal and changeable or at least I can't make it the case via my pronouncements. In the same way, Gangadean can't just assert that reason is the laws of thought, or that for something to be clear, the opposite of it must be impossible and make it so. Just like he can't merely assert that knowledge is maximally justified true belief, or that the kind of knowledge that matters as it pertains to God is the kind that consists in absolute certainty. I mean he can strictly speaking say those things, but it doesn't make them true or believable solely in virtue of the fact that he's said those things. Moreover, he can't merely tell you that if nothing is clear (under his understanding of the concept of clear) that meaningless follows. He's got to argue for each of these points and he's got to provide knockdown deductive supports for each of them if he's being consistent with his own system.

It recently occurred to me that the common Gangadeanian line that if nothing is clear, then all is meaningless, is just another assertion that people tend to accept because it has the feeling of truth or seems, intuitively, correct. But the question remains whether we have good reasons to accept such a thing. Actually for Gangadean, the question is whether he's proven such things. I don't see it. One issue concerns the notion of meaninglessness. It isn't obvious what Gangadean means by meaninglessness and I've already discussed before how the word 'meaning' has various different meanings. There's the meaning of words and expressions which may be the sense and reference of a word/expression or to use contemporary terms, their intension and extension. There are the truth conditions associated with words and expressions which are standardly thought to be somehow connected to their intensions. But these are difficult matters that linguists and philosophers working in semantics have had great trouble (and minor success) at capturing. Suffice it to call this sort of meaning, linguistic meaning. Is Gangadean claiming that if some things are not clear, then we are without linguistic meaning? If so, what could justify that kind of claim other than raw intuitions? Sometimes it sounds like this is the kind of meaning that Gangadean intends. For instance, he says that meaning is more basic than truth and that you can't determine whether a sentence is true without knowing what it means. Since he's dealing with sentences and truth, it seems like he's talking about linguistic meaning. But he also seems to reach beyond sheer linguistic meaning when he speaks of meaninglessness.

For example, I take it that there is also a sort of existentialist notion of meaning which has to do with life purpose. This is the sense in which, in ordinary language, we say things like, "life has no meaning". Indeed he speaks of nihilism when rational justification is not possible in some domain of philosophy. This captures the sense in which meaning is a property of life or perhaps events. But once again I don't see how absolute epistemic certainty is required for this kind of meaning. Why can't a person live their lives with purpose without absolute certainty? Where is the argument that this is utterly inconsistent? I take it that the questionable inference is taken for granted by the Gangadeanians because it seems intuitive to them.

Finally, there's perhaps a third kind of meaning which is something very general like intelligibility. This one is a bit difficult to separate from meaning in the linguistic sense or perhaps even from the existentialist notion. After all, presumably a sentence can be unintelligible in which case we're inclined to say that the sentence is meaningless. But there is also a sense in which epistemic inquiry could be meaningless or futile. If we can't form rational beliefs, no matter how hard we try, then forming beliefs with the aim of forming them rationally might be futile. You might even say that the aim of forming rational beliefs under such conditions is meaningless. And I get hints of this from Gangadean's general system.

This makes me think that for Gangadean, meaning is a very broad, catch all notion which has aspects of linguistics, life purpose, and general intelligibility. It is this kind of meaning that we are without if some things are not clear according to him. Notice if meaning captures all three of these senses, then his claim that meaningless follows from the lack of clarity is much stronger than we initially thought. That is, meaning in the way that he thinks of it, is a conjunction of linguistic, existentialist and general intelligibility conditions. So by calling into question the link between clarity and meaning in any one of the three senses, a fortiori, we call into question the link between clarity and the conjunction of all three. Indeed I've called into question all three independently so in essence have called into question the stronger claim.

It isn't obvious to me why we need absolute certainty about anything, in order for us to have intelligibility in the world. Just like it isn't obvious why some things must be clear in order for our words to refer to things and/or propositions. Similarly, why do we need absolute certainty about things in order for our lives to have purpose?

In the end, on Gangadean's high standards for what counts as clear, it isn't clear to reason that we need clarity to begin with.