LANGUAGE AND VISION : VISUALIZATION IS THE ONLY DIFFERENTIATOR IN MEANING

Consider these 2 sentences - Bill drives a truck. Bill stays at Campbell. Are these 2 sentences saying the same thing or different? Answer - Different. Why? Firstly it is clearly naive to say that if the words in 2 sentences are different, then those 2 sentences mean different things, since that is clearly not true. One would say that they “MEAN” different things - their meanings are different. How do you know their meanings are different? What is the meaning of the meaning of theirs in the first place? Also, you cannot do an algebra of it by expanding the constituent words into their definitions and then cancel the same words on both the sides (i.e. in the 2 sentences) and see if nothing remains on either side. One would say that the “stories” conveyed, or the relationship between the constituent entities conveyed by each sentence (which is what meaning broadly is) are different. One says that there is a man Bill and there is a truck and Bill drives that truck. The other says that there is a man Bill and a place called Campbell and Bill stays at that place called Campbell. But then this is recursive. How do you know that the meanings of “there is a man Bill and there is a truck and Bill drives that truck” and “there is a man Bill and a place called Campbell and Bill stays at that place called Campbell” are different? They may mean the same thing. The only way out of this is our visual machinery. The visualizations of these 2 sentences or of the respective sets of words in quotes just above LOOK different. It is equivalent to seeing 2 different pictures. Why is a computer mouse different from a pen? Because they mean different things. Why? Because they LOOK different or the visualizations of the functions (if you want to differentiate them by their functions) of each - “controlling the pointer on the screen” and “writing on something with a hand” - LOOK different. What makes “different” different? Why is a Compaq mouse different from a Logitech mouse which looks exactly the same? Because one is manufactured by Compaq and the other is manufactured by Logitech. Why is “manufactured by Compaq” not the same in meaning as “manufactured by Logitech”? Because they are different companies i.e. those 2 companies LOOK different from each other, or at least are at different places from each other (which makes their visualizations distinct from each other). That’s the only differentiator in meaning - VISUALIZATION.