Those motives, emotions and ideas that do not find expression in the results of an individual’s activities remain forever hidden in the depths of his mind. They do not exist for society and do not constitute meaning. They remain mental facts or mental processes that exist only for the subject of these motives, emotions and ideas. This is one extreme at which meaning disappears. The other extreme is when meaning degenerates into a dead result, detached from the society of people, their motives, emotions and ideas. In this case, it turns into a material abstraction and loses all meaning, becomes an empty artifact, an incomprehensible archaeological find. For example, any written symbol has meaning only when it is involved in human activities, that is, when it has a subjective side. Since the symbols of the Minoan Linear A script cannot be “involved” in our activities, in our context, they remain undeciphered.
Mental facts and artifacts are extreme points at which all meaning vanishes. They point to two fundamental properties of meaning: determinateness (certainty) and direction. Where one of these properties disappears, the meaning itself is lost.
Depending on the direction (towards things, people or ideas), three sides of meanings can be distinguished: (1) material action, or making; (2) social action, or communicating; (3) abstract action or thinking. The identification of these three directions in human culture is in itself the result of the accumulation of meanings, of cultural evolution. Each direction has its own function: making is translated into technology, communicating into organization, thinking into psychology.
Depending on the determinateness, three planes of meaning can be detected: content, expression and norm. Meaning is inextricably linked to natural language. As Roy Harris said, a language community is not a congregation of talking heads, a tongue cannot be considered in isolation from the physical actions of humans. Humans are not just language-users, but language-makers (Harris 1980, preface). If humans make language through their actions, the opposite is also true—they define their actions through language. The idea of distinguishing between the planes of content and expression in languages comes from Louis Hjelmslev’s