a ruminative polymath.

Meaning-Value, A Theory of Meaning

(The skeleton for a theory of meaning, i.e. how to approach the task of creating a theory of meaning that is both explicative and pragmatic.)

A meaning-value can be assigned to any object. That is, every object contains a certain quantity of meaning. Of course, the meaning-value is relative to every person. On the surface, this small attribute would make it seem fruitless to study objects based on the meaning-values assigned by people. It would appear similar to attempting to measure the heat of an object based on how hot each person thinks the object is. However, it’s important to keep an open mind to the possibility of measuring something that initially does not seem measurable (luminescence and piquancy come to mind as seemingly immeasurable things).

Yet, there are ways to approach this concept. For one, there doesn’t seem to be any way to deconstruct meaning into units of measure. However, things can be measured relative to one another. One such example would be to discover that a chair has a lesser meaning-value than a car.

Alright, pretty obvious, and no doubt contains roots in economics. It does reveal that meaning can contain an economic basis. But what if the chair is an heirloom from your mother? Would it have more or less value than the car? The task of measuring the meaning-value of each object becomes much more difficult, as more variables are taken into account. So far, we at least are able to create a list that comprises of types of values that objects contain:

- economic

- emotional

- aesthetic

- utilitarian

This list will remain short for sake of simplicity. Now that we have an idea of things that comprise the meaning-value of an object, these things can be separated into quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative: economic, utilitarian

Qualitative: emotional, aesthetic

The task for any scientist, pure or social, would be to determine how to transform the qualitative into something quantitative. Yet, there’s no need to tackle the task now, as it is too great to capture for the time being.

Let’s return to comparing the chair and the car. We’ll keep the relative values hypothetical for sake of argument.

The value of the chair is much less than that of a car. Perusing through various auction reveals the chairs a century old can vary in price from $100 to $500$, while new cars don’t seem to go below $12,000. Easily enough, in terms of economic value, we can determine that

That was easy enough. Same goes for utilitarian value. The chairs function is trivial, while a vehicle is much more useful (it can even be a chair!). Therefore, we can also determine that

This is why it is a powerful move to be able to reduce measurements to objective, quantitative terms. Qualitative comparisons are much harder, but they can be done.

The century-old chair is quite beautiful and restored, while the new car doesn’t look that great (come on, nice car for only $12,000). In this case, since I think the chair is more aesthetically pleasing than the car, so

The last one left is emotional. While I would feel many emotions if I were told that I had lost the car, I’d feel a greater emotional pain for losing the chair. For this one, I shall present an example of transforming a qualitative measurement into a quantitative one. See, my basis for measuring this is the objects is their commutability, that is, how easily I can replace the object. While it would be pretty difficult to gather the money to replace the car, it would be impossible to replace the chair. The chair is one-of-a-kind. No other chair has been a family heirloom, even if they look similar. Commutability is a great way to measure the emotional value of something because the values overlap. Counterexamples to this measurement are often trivial and unrealistic, such as the value of a snowflake (unique and irreplaceable, but having no qualms in losing it). Yet, it is pragmatic enough to use for the purposes of measuring objects that have a greater than marginal emotional value. So, since the chair is irreplaceable and means a lot me

If you’ve kept score, you’d know that it stands at 2-2. Since it is a tie, there are two things that can be done. We can compare the objective and subjective values of the object, in terms of comparing the qualitative and the quantitative, or we can attempt to include more value to our list of types of values. For now, it’ll remain as is for the purposes of this exercise.

The usefulness of the meaning-value goes beyond just measuring objects. The types of measurements reveal many things about humans. For example, the fact that humans have measurements for time and distance is evidence that humans think spatio-temporally. Similarly, the components of the meaning-value reveal not only what we value, but which values have more value. That means that the chair would have won if you totally didn’t add any value to the utility of the object, or the car would have won if you didn’t care about the aesthetics. And this is the entire point of exploring such a concept as measuring value: even if no objective is discovered, at least something will be revealed about the world or human nature.

So, the theory of meaning could have a few components: how value is assigned, what types of values exist, what does meaning and value mean, and why value is important.