Day 27 — Last day of National Blog Posting month.
I would have all 30 days had I started on November 1st. Lewis Carroll was a topic for many of those days. Since there are no rules, especially on the last day, I’m going to copy a part of Cosmic Rapture’s What does mean mean? because it refers to Alice’s encounter with Humpty Dumpty in Chapter 6 of “Through the Looking Glass.”
Words are labels that language-users apply to elements of reality. Words are signs with which language-users point to elements of reality. Every language statement is metaphorical, to a greater or lesser degree. There’s no direct, seamless connection between language statements and “bedrock reality”. Words have no meaning of their own, no intrinsic meaning, only the meanings assigned by language-users and language-makers. As Humpty Dumpty says in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
Disagreement is what happens when language users have different points of view about which labels apply to what.
NOTE: I hope Mastery Mistery doesn’t mind that I didn’t include his Gödel’s incompleteness theorems analogy. It’s a bunch of crap.