The non-immediacy of meaning is that meaning in its totality is not usually available all at once. We have polysemy, but we do not have the multiple meanings of polysemy in play all at the same time. We do have encapsulation as a means to reduce the polysemy to a single term in that we are able to index this multiplicity, but this index does not itself encapsulate the polysemy of experienced meaning. Such experience is serial and thereby disjoint as it is available as a narrative, not usually as a single moment, as an encapsulated instant.
Perhaps this desire for encapsulation of meaning drives our love of memes, a smiley, simple and complete.
And why we should seek the totality of a moment is a question in itself.
Yet, for some reason or another, we have chosen to call this multiplicity an illusion, most often an optical illusion, as in the case of the duck-rabbit image or the my wife and my mother-in-law image (old lady-young lady) ... .
But where is the illusion?
The illusion seems to be in the bias that experience and the representation of experience is not true if it is not singular as related to image processing. But why should we believe that our reading/processing of images is (always) instantaneous? We usually do not expect a reading of a text to be instantaneous so why not extend this understanding of textual processing to other types of processing as well? The mechanics of our sight and of our mental processing interpret/produce meaning serially, but this serial construct is not an illusion, just a limitation of our capacity for processing.
The Poly-Variance of Pronunciation
Thanks to Diana Magallón for the link.
