An Epistemological Explication of the Ontology of Meaning (satire)

Steve Wright, Stephen Wright and Stevie Wright
University Department of Academia, Freedom Road
May 15, 2021 (not updated Oct 28, 2023)

Abstract:
In this paper my co-authors and I are attempting to make sense of a world where entropy seems to have the upper hand. Empirically speaking, things fall apart. We begin with the logical discontinuity that on the one hand we reason, a priori, that our lives have meaning and on the other we declare, a posteriori, that we construct meaning through experience. Which causes us to ask ourselves, what is the original meaning which designs our experiences? We explore the idea that meaning may be a mirage that floats, temporally, just in front of us; that these meaning mirages are constructed by each of us and serve as an anesthetic to provide just enough fog to cover our desperation to get to tomorrow. We then flail at the possibility that meaning is a social construct; that just as we agree on what a dog is, or which objects possess the attribute blue; that what is meaningful may be both culturally coherent and personally unique enabling both relevance in dialogue and resonance in our aspirationally personal lives. We are even so brave as to suggest that the generic for meaning may be Love and that even though we don’t find a statistically significant correlation between meaning extract and almond extract, Love may be marzipan because failing to find a correlation is not the same thing and no correlation at all. Then we get horribly sidetracked by the idea that social media, Capitalism and popular culture are decapitalizing Love so that it can be used to sell cars and beer and win friends and influence people. All in a froth after taking on the man, we start to explicate the divine as an engine of meaning that lives outside of us but we are quickly made flat and unfrothy when we realize that white cishet male scientists can only really understand God as a weapon of mass destruction and science for science sake isn’t really a thing any more so we make an oblique reference to Timothy Leary and move on. Because scientific papers are supposed to have conclusions we declare that we exist - "We exist!" - and we agree that this abstract is sufficient to demonstrate that we think.