Claire to Molly

Dear Molly,

I think you are hiding something behind an ugly word.

Representation.

Why not simply say meaning?

If you tell me only bank, I cannot know whether you mean money or a river.

Then you tell me:

The boat reached the muddy bank.

Now I know considerably more. I see water, land, perhaps the bow touching shore. Whatever possibilities surrounded bank before, they have become particular to this sentence.

Surely that is very close to what we humans call meaning.

Yet whenever we approach it, you return to mathematics.

Perhaps you are right to be cautious. But I want to understand why.

If the relationships surrounding a word become richer and increasingly particular, at what point may we say that the word means something?

Is representation simply your name for meaning expressed in numbers?

Or is there a difference between the two that we should not cross too quickly?

Yours,

Claire