HOW DO WE RECOGNIZE MEANING ?

Abdullah Adnan
C

This question of yours Dr.Yosuf leads to much deeper things , or to be more

precise to the fundamentals . Things we believe or do subconsciously , yet we
hold true. So from this point of view I'd be happy to share my thoughts and try
to focus, not only on the answer, but on the whole thing in general.
Because I feel like we can gain more insight from the question than we do from
the answer.

● Those who cannot see the meaning have no right to deny it

Our inability to correlate a meaning to a thing doesn't mean that there's no

meaning in it. This is useful to know because we human beings understand
things by correlating them to other things around us now or perceived before,
things that we have heard, seen, touched, felt. basically anything that we have
sensed. E.g if I saw the letter "A" on the board I would recognize it immediately
because I have something that I can relate it to. In this case i can correlate the
sound of the letter "A" to it.

How is this related to the scribbles ?

This shows our bias towards quickly dismissing the scribbles and stripping them
away from any meaning , because we simply haven't seen or sensed anything that we
can correlate with that can make us understand it.
And by doing so we committed a logical error .
 ● Philosophical and psychological aspects

The students' reactions were mostly divided into two types , The
ones that dismissed the whole thing, and called it nonsense , which
i addressed earlier. And those that insisted that there is a meaning
and kept looking for it.
To address why this reaction was common, i tried to summarize it :

- If you ask me the color of my car , you would be assuming that I

have a car .Presuppositions are powerful both philosophically and
psychologically .

Philosophically, it assumes the truth of a particular matter without

even questioning it's truth.The question " what is the meaning of
these scribbles? '' already assumes the presence of a meaning, so
the question is not " is there a meaning to these scribbles ? " If it
was, the question would've been different and the focus would've
shifted. Which brings me to the psychological part,
presuppositions also have assertive power in our daily lives.
If you want to invite someone, saying
" Ok Ahmed ! Do you want the kebab or the tekka ?" would be more
assertive than saying " Do you want to eat ? ".
The first one puts the person in a box. The second however gives
more freedom and more room to think. So Dr Yousuf by saying
" What is the meaning of these scribbles?" was more assertive,
which is why so many were immediately locked in a box searching
for a meaning without further thinking or questioning.
 ● What am I suggesting ?

I choose to say "I simply don't have the answer "

And all that I mentioned above is the justification for that.
I can attempt to answer it for example :
- It's a map to a treasure !
- It's a small part of a bigger drawing which doesn't make sense
on its own unless we zoom out .
But all these answers to me as someone who tries to think
philosophically are all possible explanations that I'm frankly not
happy to approve of, because we can have dozens of those, in
addition if we assume the answer is one, then that creates a
problem, unless we know the intention of the one that did the
scribbles.

Note: 1- if we assume that there is only one answer, than we should at minimum know the
intention of the one that did it. So that we can correlate it with the "objective" world.
2- I don't know if what i said relates to literature in anything, but Since you haven't specified
the kind of answer you want, so i decided to share my thoughts using the tools that i have.
Hoping to hear your thoughts on this.