In my recent post "What questions are worth asking?" I made some implicit assumptions, which I would like to clarify here, because as always with these things, the length got out of control..
These are my personal opinions. I don't claim them to be true, they are just the best ones I currently have, and I will be happy, if you challenge them and I encourage you to do so, because that's the best way how to learn.
Our perception of reality is subjective
- it naturally follows from the fact that we observe only a fraction of the whole reality, thus the rest must be inferred/reconstructed/imagined, if we need it. Also our senses are noisy, which means we are sampling the reality, which results in our subjective perception of it. We can only guess, what the true state of the world really is.
What is meaning?
- reality can be described by a graph of objects and their relations. For example spatial relations - the cup is on the table, the table is to the left from the window (in some given coordinate system); or temporal relations - I cleaned my hands before the meal and washed the dishes afterwards.
- here the objects correspond directly to specific parts of the world
- the graph is not the reality, it just represents it. It is a description of the reality. The description is useful, because it allows us to store parts of the reality in our memory and because we can share those parts with other people.
- but this graph is able to represent also abstract objects and relations. These are the things like love, fear, knowledge, right/wrong, better/worse, rules, liberty, etc., things that can't be directly mapped 1:1 to reality. They can never be sensed and their meaning is defined only by their relations to other concepts.
- so I would define meaning of a concept as it's relation to other concepts in the graph of our representation of reality. Some concepts are grounded, because they can be mapped to the reality, while others are almost freely floating in the space of our representation of the world, only loosely constrained by other concepts.
- from this it naturally follows that the meaning is always subjective, because it is based on the representation of the world, which is subjective, because our perception is subjective, because it's partial and noisy.
What is a question?
- question is an action. In it's core it's an action as any other - you query the reality (ask a question / take a look / measure temperature / ...) and observe the response (hear the answer / observe a scene / read out the thermometer / ...). Questions are specific in that the query is usually aimed at particular parts of the world - people (but not always)
- actions are represented in our graph of reality as grounded concepts. When I'm thinking about raising my hand, I know how the world will respond to this action - a specific part of the world, which happens to be my hand, will change it's position relative to the rest of the world. Such knowledge is represented in my memory.
- thus questions are subjective, because they are (series of) actions, which are concepts in our memory, which are subjective, because they are based on our subjective experience.
- so what does actually happen, when person A asks another person B a question? Person A generates a sequence of actions based on A's subjective representation of the reality. This sequence of actions is observed by person B, who has a different subjective representation of the reality, and thus tries to map the observed actions to B's own concepts. The result quite often is that B interprets A's actions in a completely different manner than A intended. But if they are both rational (Epistemic rationality), they should converge after a discussion to common interpretation of the other's actions, and thus to mutual understanding.
