An entry today into the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is that of two-dimensional semantics. It's an interesting entry since I have recently been reading Eco's book 'Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language'. I also have an interest in Quine's works such as 'Ontological Relativity'. So it is easy enough to regard language meaning and the signs to represent it as one dimensional, two-dimensional or multi-dimensional in regard to addresses or locations for the word unit or meaning unit components.
Apparently two-dimensional semantics is a way of charting words or phrases-perhaps signs-with multiple meanings, contingent meanings and etc. One obviously can use a bi-conditional context for an example of a word having one meaning or another. If A then B equals C...
Words are themselves signs, and signs seem to have an even more basic existence. Words can be reduced to simple codes-one letter or one number as an example of their nature as signs in many-lettered words with phonemes and morphemes.
One of the reasons for semiotics and semantic researches is that in areas such as Europe where many languages are spoken making a chart of the inter-language values and structures in regard to past and present use and origins such as in ancient Ukrainian, Sandskrit or German is that the levels of meaning for words within their context of use inevitably needs becomes formalized in translations. If there were just one global language perhaps the work on formal logic, semitotics and semantics might not be so plentiful.
My belief presently is that words as units can be reduced to any sign such as in computer logic of o's and 1's-binary code, or in Samuel Morris' code, and that the language signs exists within an architecture mapped by linguists and philosophers of language. It can have a multi-dimensional structure perhaps in order to create an inter-language context more simple to structure, yet any construction of word-unit meanings becomes meaningful only to those using it with their own meaning-content interpretation structure that may be standardized or not.
Words seem to be addresses for meanings that exist within a given ontology. Meanings like words are phenomenal and of value for live users. The philosophical questions about the reality of reference objects such as 'green leaves' is another field for itself. Green is a color created in the human mind by the neurological atomic structure that prefers wavelengths making green, blue and yellow psychological phenomena when given wavelengths of photons impacting things regarded as 'green leaves' bounce off and hit the eye and optic nerve of an observer of 'green leaves'.
If human brains were changed so that 'green' stimulus was changed to red and the ability to make the phenomenon of 'green' appear in the human mind no longer existed then the meaning of green would not exist in the same way within the ontology of human users.
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