"Meaningless" is Meaningless

"Meaningless" is meaningless.

When someone like Richard Rorty argues that the concept of "truth" is meaningless, what does this mean?

What does it mean to say that that X is meaningless?

Does it mean that it's impossible to mean anything when you use the word "X"?

Well of course it's possible to mean something when you utter X.  And what you mean by it is up to you.  You can stipulate: "When I say X, I mean Y."  Different people will mean different things when they say "X," and that's fine.

A word or phrase or utterance only has meaning within a specific context.  Meaninglessness only implies that something has been taken out of context, or that we have not, as yet, established a given meaning within a specific context.  A blue dot is meaningless until I tell you that the context is Instagram, where a blue dot signifies that an account has new images you haven't seen yet.  Red octagons don't mean anything until I tell you that I am driving in America, at which point we know that a red octagon means stop.  There's no such thing as "absolutely meaningless."  Present me with something that is meaningless, and I can give it a meaning.

Therefore, does "truth" have meaning?  Of course it does.  Or at least - of course it can.  It can mean whatever we want it to mean.  In some contexts, it may mean one thing.  In others, it may mean something else.  

If I like, I can say, "When I say 'truth,' I mean an eight-legged furry arachnid."

A Rortian Pragmatist might reply, "No, that's not what I meant when I said 'truth' is meaningless.  I didn't mean that it's impossible for truth to have meaning.  I meant that it has more than one meaning   (It is polysemous)." 

...To which I retort that that seems to indicate that it's a very meaningful word. 

What does it mean for a word to "have" a meaning?  Only that I have meant something by it.  I can give it a meaning, or not.  It's up to me.  

And "Truth" is almost always an extremely useful word.  

When Rorty asserts his silly pronouncements, he is doing little more than wishing - wishing that "truth" were not a useful word.  But it is.  And the evidence that it's a useful word is the fact that people use it all the time.  Not just specialists in epistemology and ontology, but most people, in their everyday lives.  Of course it's a useful word.  Otherwise people would stop using it. 

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