• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
• /
• v.116
• /
• pp.59-78
• /
• 2010

The main purpose of this paper is to show how the notion of the language-experience correspondence is ill-grounded, and that the notion of 'literal meaning' based on it accordingly goes nowhere. Drawing on the experientialist view, I observed that language itself is a system of signs, and thus is given meaning only by way of symbolization. According to the experientialist account, the meaning of a signifier is given by means of "symbolic mapping." in which a certain portion of experience-content is mapped onto the signifier. And since symbolic mapping is partial by nature, there must come in some breach between the signifier and the experience-content mapped onto it. The partial nature of symbolic mapping repudiates the very notion of correspondence, and accordingly the notion of literal meaning. Rather, meanings are produced by means of the varied distances between the signifier and the mapped experience. In this perspective, the inquiry into the nature and structure of meaning should become part of one into that of symbolic experience. Such an inquiry may not be expected to reach the objectivity of linguistic meaning. Instead, we may be content with the relative stability in communication, which seems to be grounded in the commonality conspicuously observed at the bodily level of human experience.