I saw one of these on a seat today and thought I wonder who it is reserved for. But then realised it was a pile of reserved signs that were being stored on a seat. Isn't this a great example of use and mention.
But it can be sold because in this culture we have this concept of "reserved" (in quotes) which is linked to ownership. We can own a seating or table space before we actually take our seat by reserving it. Really we should send a model of ourselves ahead to occupy the seat in lieu of ourselves. But we have this neat idea of "reserved" and the sign which serves this purpose.
Now how does someone know whether the sign has been "activated" and is actually reserving a place, or whether it has been left there accidentally? We have to look at the context. In my case it was easy, I noticed there was more than one sign, which is not the normal way to reserve. But even if there was just one, the seat didn't look particularly special "why would anyone show preference for that seat?"
Normally this becomes an issue only when we are looking for a seat ourselves and we are in competition. Chances are we notice the sign when we want to sit there. And often if no one is sitting there and we won't be long we can actually ask to use the seat as long as we leave before the reserved customer arrives.
The world is so very much more complex than the symbols that we have for it. As Suzanne Vega sings "These words are too solid, They don't move fast enough." See how complex the situation surrounding an individual reservation can get.
Now there are people who like to "stick to the rules" and enforce exact interpretations of the law. While Godel's theorems have many loose interpretations, they exactly show the problem with too strict an adherence to the rules.
SRH's original form was to do with the context not being codifiable in the syntax. More neatly Tarski shows that semantic features like True/False cannot be encoded within the logic.
It leaves us with the Wittgenstein insight that words gain their meaning from their use. Indeed meaning lies in the use of symbols, and objects.
And for that to be true, "use" must not be encoded within the words. You cannot work out whether something is reserved just from seeing the sign, else that storage chair was reserved. You wouldn't be able to quote a word either like "reserved" has 8 letters. That part of the sentence would be reserved! Or perhaps this whole page, or your computer screen. The word itself does not even tell you what is reserved.
If "Reserved" intrinsically has meaning then that meaning applies no matter where the word occurs. The context has no bearing on the meaning. I can just drop that word into a sentence Reserved and everything would make sense. It doesn't.
Obviously this is not true. "Reserved" does not have any intrinsic meaning. It exists in a context and combined with the context it gains meaning. This suggests that Reserved is nothing. Well in a way obviously it is just 8 letters, or scores 12 in the context of Scrabble; how can 8 letters be anything important, altho a score of 12 is more important. "Hwebbfyl" is 8 letters and it has no meaning just like "reserved." If we want "hwebbfyl" to gain meaning we might use it to refer to the type of light we get on an overcast day. Now suddenly it gets meaning, as easy at that. Tho we might want to see it used a few times to get clear on the subtleties, like can we use it to refer to a room dimly lit by a single bulb? we might also want to hear it spoken to understand what it sounds like. That isn't often clear from the letters. The culture of spoken language is outside the writing in many languages. How do you pronounce the place name "Shrewsbury." If the British had all died out no archaeologist or linguist would ever be able to find out. Its commonly recognised to be pronounced like this.
So its not that words "do not exist" but alone they are nothing. The soul and meaning comes from context. But context alone is not enough. It must have symbols to manipulate. It is a dialectic or synergy between the parts from which springs magically Meaning just as a tasty cake magically emerges from the otherwise not to tasty ingredients. This is a critical part of Buddhism where the Buddha identifies all phenomena to not exist in themselves but to emerge from "causes and conditions" (Pratītyasamutpāda) thus meaning they have no intrinsic permanent essence. The opposite of Plato!
It means that translation is a subtle thing. It depends upon us knowing the culture and society that used the language. And a society changes too. "Sick" normally means unwell, but became to mean excellent through irony. Imagine an archaeologist reading a British text where a kid says, "the goal was sick" - an casual inspection might think it was a bad goal! But it helps a lot that we only need to translate languages spoken by humans on planet Earth. That means that all sorts of things are the same, and change in predictable ways. Pottery for example is so ubiquitous across almost all societies that Egyptologist Petrie was able to set up a layer dating system that has been extended all over the world. But for all the similarities, there are differences and to understand the language we first need to understand the context and without the society to live in that may be lost. People still argue over the meaning of Stone Henge in the UK. With just vague clues to the society its extremely hard to get a meaning.
This is linked to Self also. The "I" we think has intrinsic meaning. But actually it depends on social context in the exact same way! So not only is there is complex game being played to work out whether something is reserved and exactly what is reserved, but even to work out "who" it is reserved for.
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