The problem of the nature of experienced "meaning" is indeed complex and only now beginning to interest the psycholinguists and linguistic philosophers. Some of the entrenched and misleading notions about how we think about the meaning of words are being dispelled. For example, the "picture" theory of meaning is being discarded, as indeed is the idea that the word think points to a single activity.* Such questions are mentioned here only to indicate awareness of the complexity of the process involved when one talks, as I have so blandly, of the reader focusing his attention
"on what the linguistic symbols have called forth within him." Still, is it not becoming generally accepted that when we speak of the reader's sensing the meaning of words from their context, we must broaden the scope of that term? Usually it is the verbal context that is referred to-the lexicographical clues present in the text that indicate which of the alternative dictionary meanings of the words should be selected. And of course the verbal context functions also to indicate to the reader what should be his appropriate stance in relation to this text.But the context is not limited simply to the interlocking pattern of verbal symbols. The reading even of initial cues, we have seen, is a function of the reader as well as of the text, the result of a two-way process. We can say that the text leads the reader to order segments of his past experience; but it is equally necessary to say that the reader is dependent on past experience, both linguistic and life experience, for the sense of possible modes of order that he brings to the text. (Consider the implications of even so simple an illustration as the following: the sign pain will be made a different linguistic symbol by the English and the French reader. Within a common culture and language, individual differences, no matter how subtle, still enter into the process of
interpretation.) Hence we cannot even assume that the pattern of linguistic signs in the text gives us knowledge of the exact nature of the stimuli acting upon a given reader. The living organism, Dewey (1896) pointed out decades ago, to a certain extent selects from its environment the stimuli to which it will respond, and seeks t organize them according to already-acquired principles, assumptions, and expectations. Hence the "meaning" of any element in the system of signs in the text is conditioned not only by its verbal