Introduction

In this chapter, I describe how attributing meaning involves cognitive processes that take time and effort. Meanings are also retained in memory for limited and differing periods. I suggest that such processes, and the gradual absorption of textual meaning into patterns of belief and attitude, must be taken into account in deciding which aspects of meaning text-producers should be held responsible for.

Meaning in the mind

In Chapter 5, a spatial metaphor was used as a way of exploring the different kinds of meaning that seem to exist. The metaphorical schema I adopted allowed meanings to be thought of in terms of their ‘proximity’ to the words or signs from which they are derived or their distance or ‘range’ from those words or signs. Extending the spatial analogy, I visualised a ‘lower edge’ of repetition or close paraphrase of the utterance or text and an ‘outer edge’ of cognitive effects that are still typically recognised as meaning, before responses shade off into general belief or attitude. The spatial image (of distance and range) is a variant, I suggested, of a long-established trope: that of ‘levels’ of meaning. As with the image of ‘levels’, my spatial metaphor begs the question of what exactly is represented by ‘distance’ or ‘range’. Is relative distance a matter of complexity of the meaning produced: a sort of layering of meanings, one level superimposed on another in tiers of complexity (as thinkers in what might be called the ‘Ogden and Richards’ tradition, with its origins in the psychology of Wundt, seem to have believed creates meanings of increased significance)?