Psychons and Intentyons, Part 3: The Dictionary Theory of Meaning

There is a naive theory of meaning which holds that words have meanings, and if you want to know the meaning of a word, you can look it up in the dictionary.

This theory comes with a ready objection.  Definitions themselves are made of words.  If you take a sentence and substitute each word with its dictionary definition, you will just get a longer sentence with many more words.  If you take each word in your second sentence and substitute it with its dictionary definition, you will get a very long sentence, and you will be no closer to “meaning” than when you started; perhaps, much further away, since you have many more words to interpret.

There is a simple response to this objection, which is almost as naive as the original theory.  Maybe there is a base case to stop the recursion.  Maybe some words are not really defined by their dictionary definitions.  Maybe some words (such as “good”, “evil”, “pleasure”, “pain” and “consciousness”) are primitive, or irreducible, as David Chalmers would say.  These special words have meanings that are pure meanings, disembodied concepts, almost like elementary particles: intentyons.

There is a straightforward recursive function from a sentence to a proposition: for each word, if it has a dictionary definition, replace it with the dictionary definition.  If it has a characteristic intentyon, replace it with the intentyon.  Eventually, you reduce the sentence to a string of intentyons.  The reverse function, natural language generation, is more difficult.  It’s easy to replace each intentyon with a word, but then you get a very long, very unnatural sentence.  The hard work of natural language generation is compressing the long sentence into a shorter, natural sentence that would reduce to the same intentyonic string.  (Or at least, a sufficiently similar intentyonic string.)

There are a lot of intentyons, but it’s possible that each one has its own physical signature, that is, its own unique structural pattern of interaction with the GOEPs.  The computational and sensory equipment of the brain has no access to, or appreciation of, the intentional properties of the intentyons, but when the brain learns a natural language, it can build a kind of map between the intentyons and the words.

When the soul receives (or generates) a stream of intentyons, it experiences understanding.  When the client program running in the brain sends a request to the soul that includes the information about the auditory signature of a sentence along with the string of intentyons carrying the meaning of the sentence, the soul understands the sentence.

So maybe Chalmers’ soul doesn’t know English.  Maybe the thought that originates in Chalmers’ soul is not the English sentence “Consciousness is the biggest mystery”, but the meaning of that sentence as a stream of intentyons.  Perhaps the stream of intentyons is picked up by the intentyon receptor in Chalmers’ brain, and it is the brain that generates the English sentence.  Once his brain generates the sentence, Chalmers can “hear himself think”.