Meaning and experience

Meaning is dependent on the experience of each of the concepts in a sentence. For example, when I complete the sentence, “yesterday it was raining” – you know my full meaning – I raised concepts in you, of yesterday and raining. (Because you know of raining, you also know what “it” refers to in the sentence.) For a more complex sentence like “I saw three movies in the last 3 weeks”, a whole range of concepts are invoked. You need to know who I am, what it means to see a movie, what a movie is, and categorize that over a duration that I’m referring to as 3 weeks. Because experience substantiates each concept, and there are invariably several concepts of varying complexity involved in a sentence, it is easy to see how miscommunication can creep into even such simple sentences as the above two. Now, when we consider a sentence like “freedom is the choice of people who have the opportunity to seek it” we see how many complex concepts we would have to share with the speaker in order to understand his or her meaning.