What is Meaning?

[whitefork]

Good reference on CS Peirce, one of the founders of Pragmatism. I've read him but it's been years. Time for another visit maybe.

 

[Dymanic]

originally posted by whitefork

I've often contemplated sending suspicious looking emails containing nothing but pseudo-random junk, to see if they'd catch the attention of the NSA, and let those folks spin their Crays trying to decode them. Of course, there's a risk in that - you never know what might be hidden in the junk.

Maybe some stuff like this?:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF8&th=ae62bd76e462858c&rnum=10

Wtf is that stuff?

I've always been interested in the way messages can be embedded in other messages so that you think you understand what is being said, but you don't understand what's really being said. It's one of the things that can make learning a different language difficult--one tends to focus on the more literal, top-level meaning, overlooking the subtler, more important embedded meaning. There are often cultural frames of reference that make it even trickier to grasp the subtleties in double-entendre. One of the things I enjoyed most about the book Shogun was the way the most significant things that were being communicated were never spoken about directly, yet everyone knew what was being said.