Possibilities and impossibilities of meaning : A study in semantics

0. Mission Impossible: Meaning is fugitive in nature though we are continuously creating meaning out of the utterly nonsensical reality. We engage ourselves with each other in discussing either the recent earthquake in Kashmir, an economically hard time, a popular movie, or so many other things, which range from the micro-world to the macro-world of the giant heavenly bodies. The delicacies of human emotion, the subtleties of the material world – whatever may be the topic – rest on the belief that language conveys meaning, though any effort to systematize the theory of meaning will always be considered a mission impossible, since language is vague, ambiguous and, most interestingly, it is not about the precision but about the imprecision – it is not about the exactness but about the approximation – it is not about the certainty but about the uncertainty! This kind of unsystematicity and irregularity is not at all a product of the ‘historical accident’ (as it was generally believed by the logical positivists, in contrast with the ordinary language philosophers), but the very essence of life – the essential ingredient of human existence or an absolute necessity to reign over the universe, a pre-condition for the survival and creativity, not in the mechanical sense of ‘generation’. It allows us to assimilate new information by opening the immense panorama of possibilities.