The Meaninglessness of Meaning

[bennyboy]

Intended as playful more than critical, but if you must know...

I liked the idea of context; however, I thought the analogy given by your last two sentences to be an unnecessary oversimplification.

Okay

I intended that to be boorish.  Meaning doesn't have to be some elusive gossamer from an abstract fairy dimension; it can simply be a statement about the human experience, i.e. the human context.  Asking if the human experience itself "really" has meaning is, to me, like asking if the universe is a thing.  I'd say the universe cannot be a thing, because it is the context by which thing-ness is judged.  In the case of the capacity for experience, I wouldn't say it has meaning, exactly, because it is the context in which meaning is defined.

Simply put, things have meaning for us because we are agents which see meaning in things.