The greater part of formal cognition, that is, stuff dealing with concepts, language, scope, identity and so on… is associative.

Young children find language extremely strange for a simple reason. Words are ‘defined’ with other words. This should have alerted us to the fact that definitions »cannot explain what words ‘mean’ or what identities declared in language ‘are’.

The reason? Meaning requires ‘clouds’ of associations and connotations. Prior to establishing these, the words are ‘just pointers’. One of the root elements of meaning is ‘mother’, because the nominatum of this word is known »viscerally and relationally. So the ‘word’ doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t grant information that isn’t already staggeringly surpassed by relationship. It’s one of the most primordial roots of meaning and identity in human cognition. Because it comes first. Even before ‘me’.

The formal aspect of cognition is deceptive, and, in common habit, often attempts a kind of coup against meaning, by declaring that the only thing that matters (mothers, actually – Greek »mater) is the words. The words tell you what they mean. This sort of catastrophic nonsense. In fact, however, the word is like a buoy floating over a specific patch of ocean. And what the buoy ‘means’ is invisible from above the waterline. Beneath the buoy, complex societies of organisms and histories are interacting, exploring, reproducing… learning. That’s where the meaning is.

It’s become the tragic habit of our people to think that ‘words mean things’, when something rather stranger is true: humans use words to mean things »to themselves and each other. Words never tell us ‘what they mean’, and pretending otherwise breeds a fertile nest of pain, as we can see from some of the bizarre recent experiments in pretending that words declare identity.

Without associations, without context, without connotation, words ‘mean’ simply what is written in the list of their senses in the dictionary. Actually, they do not even mean that. Because that dictionary is a context. And a tree of associations. Connotations.

Now if you limit or mutate the root meanings, all the other meanings change, due to the associative and connotative relationships that language requires. Similarly, if you are able to correct such limitations and (undesirable) mutations… whole new landscapes of meaning and potential emerge.

What I wish to say requires a longer text. But, essentially, we can locate the root elements. And modify them. On purpose. Ancient people did this all the time, though not in the way or for the reasons we might. The things that are presently sitting at the position of the roots in our lexicons are … skeletal, at best. And since they are this way, we render the word, each other and relationships in their image. That’s something we’d do well to amend. Before it ends us. And everything our actions can affect…