I watched the first eight minutes of the video. (Up to the start of the viewer feedback.) It brought back memories from my grad school semantics class, most of which I fear I have forgotten.
A couple of things that I do remember:
1) A lot was made of the sentence "The morning star is the evening star." (Both refer to the planet Venus.) Since this is the L&C board, I can make the exact same point with the sentence "Clark Kent is Superman." If the meaning of a word or phrase is its referent (that is, the object in the real world to which it refers), then the sentence would always be about as interesting as "a rose is a rose"; that is to say, it would be a straightforward tautology. But as Lois Lane's reaction in the vast majority of Revelation fics would attest, that is clearly not the case.
2) There was a lot of discussion about how, and the extent to which, communication is possible. For example, suppose I were to tell you, "I had a dog growing up." What kind of dog would you envision? A chihuahua? A Saint Bernard? (In point of fact, I had had a miniature schnauzer.) The word "dog" brings to mind vastly different images to different people.
So, from these two examples, we can see that neither the idea of word/phrase meaning as a representation of an actual real-world referent nor the idea of the meaning as one's inner vision of a Platonic representation of an abstract referent are sufficient. (My apologies if I have mis-represented the concepts; I haven't thought about these things since I took the class about three decades ago.)
As I recall, there were quite a number of other hypotheses that were brought up and struck down, but no conclusion was ever reached in the course.
And KSaraSara, for what it is worth, that class was one of the more challenging ones I took; you have company. It might also have helped if the video had been slowed down by about half.
Thanks, Terry, for sharing this video.
Joy,
Lynn
