I've been thinking about your response to my set of questions for almost two
weeks now because (1) I really appreciated your straightforward dealing with
my questions, (2) I was still puzzled and felt that the central problem
hadn't been addressed.
The reason for (2) is that it seems you have equated "thought" and
"meaning", at least implicitly, when you wrote:
"Yes, just as thought exists independent of language. Language expresses
meaning and spoken and written texts have meaning potential but meaning
is not in the text. In that sense every reader or listener constructs
his/her own text parallel to the speaker/listeners text."
Thinking about this led me to wonder exactly how you understand the term
"thought" (and also led me to wonder what I myself understand by this term).
Since the time of your post I've looked at a number of basic sources to try
to get some kind of a handle on what the relation between the way the term
"thought" is used and the way the term "meaning" is used. It's still rather
unclear to me. Could you tell me how you understand the difference between
"thought" and "meaning", if in fact you see any difference at all.
Certainly, one does say "she expressed her thought poorly/well/brilliantly",
in which case thought and meaning seem to be identical, but it is my feeling
that we think of thought as more inclusive than meaning. Further, the
notion of "expressing one's thoughts" seems to be the opposite of assigning
meaning to linguistic utterrances. Also, we can at least entertain the
notion of thoughts devoid of meaning, meaningless expressions, etc. If one
adopts the position that "meaning is use" it becomes difficult to see what
it is that gets assigned.
In any event I'm curious how you see the difference and hope this doesn't
seem like just a semantic quibbling.
Paul Dillon