The sources of meaning: Remarks on M.H. Bickhard and R.L. Campbell, ‘Some foundational questions concerning language studies’

Abstract

In their forceful and stimulating article (this issue), Bickhard and Campbell discuss the fundamental issue of what I would call meaning in language, and criticise the ‘standard empiricist view’ that perception encodes the world into the mind, that cognition processes these encodings, and that language is thus entirely based on cognition through encoding. This ‘encodingism’ is rejected as incoherent in an essential way, and an alternative view is presented, in which encodings are admitted, but not as foundational, and a non-encoding, functional, interactive ground for cognition, a ‘truly foundational’ level of representation, is proposed. Focus changes from the cognitivist view to a pragmatic view, but in a way that profoundly and directly affects central linguistic issues such as the principles and the domains of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The epistemic agent is passive in the encoding framework, whereas this agent is active in a functional framework. In fact, aliquid stat pro aliquo, something is encoded and decoded as a representation of something else, insofar as it actually ‘represents’ it to an epistemic agent and in some respect, as Peirce would add. Therefore, the encoding is constituted as a representation by the agent’s knowing what it is that it represents. Either this knowing is based on another encoding, an eventuality which leaves us, and the epistemic agent, with a regress or a mere vacuum something encodes or represents whatever it encodes or represents, and nothing more can be said or it is based on a foundational representation which is not an encoding and therefore needs no interpretation or ‘knowing’ by other representations. As the regress and the vacuum are non-foundational foundations, encodingism is incoherent. The non-encoding ground, on the other hand, can be found in the epistemic agent’s active and dynamic representation of his or her own functional involvement in a situation, in a very broad sense, i.e. in an interactional