3 - Comprehending meaning

Summary

Theories of most kinds, but particularly the kind which propose a definitive explanation of phenomena, are now in disrepute. We have settled, instead, for an ongoing process called ‘theorizing’, for series of pictures of reality, for an achievement of the best account of things we can manage. In the previous chapter I drew some possible pictures of meaning: the human biosphere, or a platform we construct beneath us. In this chapter I explore another picture: in this case a picture not so much of what it is we construct, but how it is that we construct it, whether by way of proposal (‘this is what I mean …’) or in its apprehension (‘Oh, I see what you mean’). The act of meaning, I shall say, is one in which we ‘grasp together’ conceptual elements, bits of awareness, significations or factual data which we had hitherto not seen as linked, but which, in the generation of meaning, we do now so see. To give it its latinate name, it is the act of comprehension.

This way of characterizing our human capacities for meaning is to be credited, to the best of my knowledge, to the theorist Louis O. Mink. Significantly enough, Mink belonged to a group of people, at about the third quarter of the twentieth century, interested in moving beyond the then still regnant positivist theories of history-writing gaining emblematic status in Carl Hempel's ‘covering law’ model of historiography.