Meaning

In my last blog I referred to my distinction meaning 1 / meaning 0 which I had used in older blogs. However, now I realize that I have never well explained here this important distinction. Therefore, let me do this now.
Let me repeat Stoutland’s example of the person who nods her head, used last week. We can take this movement sometimes as just physical (the person nods because she is falling asleep) and sometimes as an action (the person greets someone). But why is it sometimes just physical and sometimes an action? This becomes clear when we ask the person why she nodded. If she says, for instance, that she wanted to greet a friend, we call it an action. But if she nodded while falling asleep, she cannot give a reason for it: the nodding movement happened to her. We can say it also this way: the nodding of greeting, unlike the nodding of falling asleep, has a meaning for the agent.
However, the idea that physical data, unlike mental data, don’t have a meaning cannot be upheld. Like for instance Mary Hesse showed, every empirical assertion, also pure descriptions of observations, contain interpretations ‘in terms of some general view of the world or other ... There are no stable observational descriptions, whether of sense data, or protocol sentences, or “ordinary language”, in which the empirical reference of science can be directly captured’. It is true also for natural science that ‘what counts as facts are constituted by what the theory says about their interrelations with one another. … [M]eanings in natural science are determined by theory’ (Hesse 1980, 172-173). So both natural data, like the nodding of a person falling asleep, and mental phenomena, like the nodding of greeting, have a meaning. They don’t differ in this respect. However, Hesse neglects here that there really is a difference between the meanings we give to physical (natural) phenomena and those we give to mental phenomena: Mental phenomena are given meaning by the agent him or herself; physical phenomena get their meanings from us from the outside. Both the agent and the onlooker from the outside, like a scientist, interpret what an agent does. But as Anthony Giddens made clear, the (scientific) interpretation from the outside is double: the onlooker has to reckon with both with the way s/he sees what the agent does and with the way the agent him or herself sees it. This made Habermas distinguish two levels of meaning: level 1 and level 0. Level 1 is the level all sciences – and onlookers from the outside in general – are faced with when interpreting their objects. Moreover, there is a level 0 that is characteristic for those sciences that study objects that has been given a meaning by the people themselves, such as a nodding that the agent sees as a greeting (Habermas 1982, 162-163). This insight made me distinguish two kinds of meaning: meaning 1 and meaning 0. Meaning 1 is the meaning used on level 1. It is the meaning a scientist gives to an object, either physical or social in character. It refers to the theoretical interpretation of reality by the scientist in a scientific theory. Meaning 0 is the meaning on the underlying level 0. It refers to the meaning the people themselves who make up social reality give to their own reality, experiences and doings. It refers to the interpretation of their own lived reality. The existence of this double meaning from the scientist’s perspective does not imply, however, that the interpretation of reality by the people themselves is different in character from the theoretical interpretation of it by the scientist. It says only that the interpretations of the social reality by the agents themselves are single and that those by the scientist are double.
Since the matter is complicated, I want to illustrate the difference between both kinds of meaning yet with the help of the example of studying grammar as grammarians do. As native speakers of a language, we have in our heads a (usually implicit) knowledge of what are correct and incorrect sentences, forms, etc. in our language. We can call this our ‘implicit grammar’. Grammarians try to make this knowledge explicit and to systemise it. The ‘explicit grammar’ so made seems to be a reflection of our implicit grammar. In a certain sense it is but there are differences. The explicit grammar has been formulated in terms and rules native speakers will never use as such. For example, such a grammar distinguishes between substantives and adjectives and it indicates when inversion is applied, things native speakers usually are not aware of when they speak. And though it is correct to say that the explicit grammar is a reflection of the implicit one, the reverse is not true. If a native speaker no longer keeps to the current grammar and more native speakers begin to speak in the same deviant way, after some time we no longer say that these speakers make grammatical mistakes but that the language has been changed. If, on the other hand, the explicit grammar does not correctly reflect the implicit grammar, the language of the native speakers does not change, even if the grammarians maintain that they have described it correctly. If the native speaker does not want to conform to the rules of the explicit grammar, then the latter just describes the implicit grammar in a wrong way and it must be adapted. The language as spoken by the people themselves, so the implicit grammar, is the reality that patterns the explicit grammar. In the same way we can say: The way agents see their actions is the reality that patterns the way onlookers must conceive these actions.
The upshot is that interpretations from the outside, including scientific interpretations, always depend on the agent’s interpretations if we want to investigate what people do. If we don’t see this, in the end scientific explanations of what people do cannot be more than physical and chemical explanations of material stuff labelled “man” or “society”. 

Sources
- Giddens, Anthony, Studies in social and political theory, London: Hutchinson of London, 1977.
- Habermas, Jürgen, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Band I, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982.
- Hesse, Mary, Revolutions and reconstructions in the philosophy of science, Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980.
Weg, Henk bij de, “The commonsense conception and its relation to philosophy”, Philosophical Explorations, 2001/1, pp. 17-30.