Article 8: Time and the Stability of Meaning

Framing

A word means something. The word "apple" means a certain kind of fruit. This meaning seems stable. You can look up the word in a dictionary and find the meaning. You can teach someone else the word and the meaning will be communicated.

But if you examine the word historically, the meaning has changed. The word "apple" has referred to different things at different times. In old texts, "apple" sometimes refers to what we now call different fruits. In some contexts, "apple" refers more broadly to any round fruit.

Moreover, the meaning continues to change. New uses of the word emerge. People speak of "apples of the eye" or "apples of discord." These are not apples at all. The word has acquired metaphorical meanings.

Yet at the moment you read this, the word "apple" has a meaning. You understand what it means. The meaning feels stable and fixed.

This is a paradox: how can something have a stable meaning when the meaning is always changing?

The question is not merely about words. It applies to all meaning. A person has an identity. You know who you are. Your identity seems stable, continuous over time. Yet you are different now than you were ten years ago. Your beliefs have changed, your values have changed, your relationships have changed. In what sense are you the same person?

Institutions have identities. A university is the same university even though all of its students graduate and are replaced, even though its faculty change, even though its buildings are rebuilt or renovated. What makes it the same institution over time?

The question is: how is stability maintained in the face of constant change? What creates continuity when everything is in flux?

I. The Continuous Flux

Change is continuous. You are not the same person from moment to moment. Your cells are dying and being replaced. Your thoughts are arising and passing away. Your relationships are shifting. Your environment is changing.

Yet you experience yourself as the same person. The change is gradual enough and continuous enough that there is no moment where you become a different person. The continuity is maintained even though everything is changing.

This is true of meaning as well. Words are constantly acquiring new uses. New metaphors emerge. Old uses fall out of favor. Yet at any moment, a word has a meaning. The meaning can be communicated. It can be understood.

The question is: what makes this possible? How is continuity maintained?

One answer is that change is gradual. The change is small enough and slow enough that continuity is preserved. You can ask "at what point does an apple become something else?" and the answer is "never, because the change is continuous and gradual."

But this answer assumes that there is some underlying thing that is continuously the same, changing only in details. Is that true? Is there an "apple-essence" that remains constant even as the particular apples in the world change? Is there a "self" that remains constant even as everything about you changes?

In medieval thought, this was the idea of a substantial form or essence. The apple has an essential nature—apple-ness—that makes it an apple. As long as this essential nature is present, the apple remains an apple. Details can change, but the essence remains.

But modern thought tends to be skeptical of essences. It seems that what we call the "essence" of something is just the properties that we attend to. There is no hidden essence beyond the observable properties.

Yet without an essence, without some underlying continuity, how is stability possible?

One possibility is that stability is not a fact about things themselves. Stability is something we impose. We decide to treat something as the same over time. We maintain the convention that a person is the same person even though they have changed. We maintain the convention that a word means the same thing even though its uses are changing.

From this perspective, stability is not discovered. It is constructed. It is created through acts of choice and maintenance, through treating things as the same despite their changes.

II. The Narrative Construction of Continuity

Identity over time is often maintained through narrative. You tell a story about yourself. The story connects who you were to who you are now. It explains how you got from there to here. It creates a sense that you are the same person even though you have changed.

The narrative is not false. It is a true story. But it is also a selection. You are selecting certain events and omitting others. You are highlighting certain causal connections and ignoring others. You are constructing a narrative that makes sense, that creates coherence.

A different selection of events would create a different story. A different narrative would create a different sense of identity.

For instance, you might tell a story of personal growth. "I was immature, and through experience and reflection, I became more mature." This narrative creates a sense of continuity—you are still you, but you have developed. The past is connected to the present through a logic of growth.

But you might also tell a different story: "I have changed fundamentally. The person I was is no longer. I have become someone different." This narrative creates a sense of discontinuity. It acknowledges that you have changed so much that in some sense, you are no longer the same person.

Both narratives could be true. Both could be selections from the same set of events. But they create different senses of identity.

This is true of institutions and cultures as well. A nation tells a story about itself. "We are a people with a long history, continuous traditions, and shared values." This story creates a sense of identity. It makes the nation seem like a continuous entity over time.

But a different story could be told: "We have changed fundamentally at many points. We are not the same people as our ancestors. Our traditions have been reinvented multiple times. Our shared values have shifted."

Both stories could be accurate. But they create different senses of national identity.

The question is: are these narratives merely subjective stories that we tell ourselves? Or do they capture something real about how continuity is actually maintained?

The answer seems to be both. The narratives are constructed—they are selections and interpretations. But they are also functional. They do create continuity. They do enable coordination and action. They do make meaning stable enough to be communicated.

So narrative is not false, but it is not simply true either. It is something else: it is a way of organizing reality that makes certain things visible and other things invisible.

III. The Role of Memory

Memory is the mechanism through which the past connects to the present. You remember who you were. This remembering creates a sense that you are the same person as the one you remember.

But memory is unreliable. It is constantly being rewritten. When you remember something, you are not retrieving a record. You are reconstructing. You are using current knowledge, current perspectives, current emotions to fill in gaps and make sense of what you remember.

This means that who you remember being is partly determined by who you are now. Your past is being constructed in the present.

This is not to say that memory is false. Something happened in the past. You did certain things. You believed certain things. But what that past means, how it connects to the present, what it says about who you are—all of that is being constructed through the act of remembering.

Similarly, societies remember their past through historical narratives. But these narratives are constructed in the present. What the past means to a society is being constructed by the people living in that society now.

This means that the past is not fixed. The past changes as the present changes. Not in the sense that what actually happened changes, but in the sense that the meaning of what happened changes.

An event that was seen as tragic in one era might be reinterpreted as necessary in another era. A person who was remembered as a hero might be reinterpreted as a villain. A tradition that was seen as continuity might be revealed as a recent invention.

This is sometimes called the "invention of tradition." It is not that the tradition is false. It is that the tradition is being constructed in the present, even as it appears to come from the past.

The same is true of meaning. A word means what it means because of how it has been used in the past. But the meaning also depends on how it is being used in the present. The present is constantly rewriting the meaning, even as the meaning seems to come from the past.

IV. The Sedimentation of Meaning

Meaning accumulates over time. Every use of a word adds to the history of the word. The word carries this history with it.

When you speak a word, you are not creating meaning from scratch. You are participating in a web of meanings that has been constructed over generations. The word comes with a weight of past uses, past associations, past contexts.

But this weight is not always visible. It sinks to the background. You use the word without consciously thinking about all of its history.

This is what might be called the sedimentation of meaning. Layer upon layer of meaning has been deposited. The current meaning is the accumulated result of all these layers.

Sometimes, through poetry or scholarship or philosophy, these layers are excavated. A word is shown to have meant something different in the past. A meaning that was forgotten is recovered. The depth of meaning in a word is revealed.

But most of the time, we use words without being aware of this depth. The word means what it currently means, and that is all. The layers are hidden.

This sedimentation creates stability. Because there is so much accumulated history, because the meaning is embedded in so many contexts and uses, it is difficult to change the meaning. The word has inertia. It resists new meanings.

But this also creates a kind of invisibility. The meaning seems transparent, obvious, natural. We do not see the historical process by which the meaning was constructed. We do not see the choices that were made, the meanings that were rejected, the alternatives that might have been.

If we could see the full history of a word, we would see that its meaning is contingent. It could have been different. But because the history is hidden, the meaning seems inevitable.

V. The Problem of Meaning Change

Words change meaning. This is undeniable. But the change is mysterious. How does a word gradually shift its meaning? At what point does a new meaning replace the old meaning? Are there two words now, or is it still the same word with a new meaning?

Consider the word "gay." For much of its history, it meant "happy" or "carefree." It acquired new meanings related to sexual orientation in the twentieth century. Now the old meaning is rarely used.

Did the word change, or were there always two different words? Are people using a different word when they say "gay" now, or is it the same word with new meaning?

The answer seems to be that it is both. It is the same word, and it is different. The continuity is maintained through the material vehicle of the word—the sound, the spelling. But the meaning has shifted.

This is possible because meaning is not intrinsic to the word. The word itself—the sound, the shape—has no intrinsic meaning. Meaning is bestowed on the word by the community of speakers.

A word changes meaning when the community changes how it uses the word. This can happen gradually or suddenly. It can happen through deliberate choice or through accidental drift.

But once a meaning has taken hold, it is difficult to dislodge. The sediment of accumulated uses resists change. The word carries the old meaning with it even as it acquires new meanings.

This creates ambiguity and tension. A word might be used in multiple ways by different speakers, or even by the same speaker in different contexts. The word is pulled in different directions. Its meaning is unstable.

Yet communication is still possible. People manage to understand each other even when words have unstable meanings. They use context to disambiguate. They negotiate meaning in conversation.

The question is: what allows this? How does communication remain possible when the meanings of words are unstable and changing?

VI. The Timing of Meaning

There is a temporal structure to meaning that is not always visible.

A word means something in the moment it is spoken. But the meaning depends on the context—on what has been said before, on what is expected to follow, on what the situation is.

Meaning is not just a property of a word. It is an event. It is something that happens when the word is spoken and understood.

This means that meaning has duration. A meaning is not instantaneous. It takes time to understand a word. It takes time to grasp the context and the intention.

Moreover, meaning is not static over the course of a conversation. As new information is provided, as the context shifts, the meaning of earlier statements can shift. A sentence that meant one thing at the beginning of a conversation might mean something quite different at the end.

This is why rereading is revealing. When you reread something you wrote long ago, you understand it differently. Not because the text has changed, but because you have changed. Your context is different. Your knowledge is different. The meaning emerges differently.

This temporal structure of meaning raises a question: when do we understand something? Is it when the word is spoken? Is it later, when the full context is clear? Is it never, is understanding always partial and provisional?

The answer seems to be that understanding is a process that unfolds over time. It is not a discrete event but a continuous negotiation with meaning.

This is especially true of complex meanings. Understanding a philosophical argument, understanding a work of art, understanding another person—these are not instantaneous. They unfold over time. They are provisional. They can be revised.

This is also true of meaning at the level of society. A society gradually comes to understand its own values. A culture gradually understands what it believes and what it cares about. This understanding is not given. It is constructed over time through reflection and conversation.

VII. The Stability of Meaning as Achievement

Meaning seems stable. A word seems to have a fixed meaning. But this stability is an achievement. It is something that must be constantly maintained.

In order for meaning to remain stable, there must be constant work. The work of teaching children what words mean. The work of correcting misunderstandings. The work of negotiating shared meanings in conversation. The work of institutions in standardizing meanings (dictionaries, technical definitions, legal terminology).

If this work stopped, meaning would drift. Words would acquire new meanings. Old meanings would be forgotten. Communication would become increasingly difficult.

This is what happens when a language dies. When there are no more native speakers to maintain the meaning, the language becomes a dead language. The words are preserved in texts, but their meanings are understood only through study, through archaeological work, through inference.

So the stability of meaning is not natural. It is something that the community of speakers actively maintains.

But this maintenance is not always transparent. Most people do not think of themselves as "maintaining meaning." They simply speak the language. But in speaking it, they are maintaining it.

This means that stability is fragile. It depends on continued participation. It depends on people teaching and learning, on people negotiating and understanding.

It also means that stability is not complete. Even as people work to maintain stable meanings, meanings are drifting. New uses are emerging. Old uses are being forgotten.

So there is a kind of dynamic equilibrium. There is stability, but the stability is constantly being disrupted and then reconstituted. There is change, but the change is gradual and continuous enough that a sense of continuity is maintained.

The question is: is this equilibrium sustainable? Or is there a point at which change accelerates and stability is lost? Is there a point at which a word becomes so changed that it is no longer the same word?

The question may not have a determinate answer. There may be cases where it is genuinely unclear whether a word has changed so much that it is a different word. The fact that the question is unclear may itself be important.

Closing: The Perpetual Creation of Stability

Meaning does not persist on its own. It must be continuously created, recreated, negotiated.

This is true of individual words, but it is also true of larger systems of meaning. A culture maintains itself by continuously recreating its meanings and values. A person maintains their identity by continuously reconstructing their narrative.

But this recreation is not arbitrary. It is constrained by the past. The meanings that are created in the present must be continuous with the meanings of the past, at least to some degree. The narrative that is reconstructed must be compatible with what is remembered.

Yet there is always a gap between the past and the present. The past is not fully present. It is available only through memory and records, and these are always incomplete and always subject to reinterpretation.

So the present is always free to recreate the past in new ways. And the past is always constraining the present, requiring that the new creations be continuous with what came before.

This creates a kind of dance between continuity and change. Meaning is constantly changing, yet it is recognizable as the same meaning. Identity is constantly shifting, yet it is experienced as continuous.

Whether this dance can be maintained indefinitely is an open question. Whether meaning can become so destabilized that communication fails, whether identity can become so disrupted that continuity is lost—these are genuine possibilities.

But for now, in the normal course of things, this dance continues. Meaning is maintained. Identity is reconstructed. Stability emerges from the constant work of people maintaining and creating meaning over time.