Thank for the definition, dragonman. But I am still confused for the reasons Caroline just gave.
And I don't think CI have a meaning. They are just a piece of technology.
DrPhils posts jump around too much for me. One minute they are too literate, the next they are illiterate, like someone who is either pretending to be more educated or less educated than they really are.
At first I thought DrPhil was joking, but I can't find any humor in the posts unless just getting a reaction to random crap is amusing to the poster.
As to the bolded part:
You are right. In and of themselves they are just a piece of technology. Not only are you right -- You have a very healthy attitude towards them.
But oddly, anything and everything has meaning to somebody -- and sometimes the meanings are unexpected.
Meaning, and there is an entire study: Semantics (A branch of Linguistics) that does nothing but study meaning.
One of the complications in the study of meaning is that of agreed meaning --By that I mean what is generally accepted by an entire culture, group of cultures, or even most of humanity will agree upon.
An example might be "babies are cute".
But then you might have this statement:
To a working man a car is a tool to get back and forth to work -- But to a teenager they are FREEDOM!
Where the meanings are not agreed upon even by people in the same culture.
To one person a CI can be just a tool to help them get through life easier. To another it might mean surrender to the demands of a hearing world. Yet to another it might be an admission that the wearer is not 'perfect'. Yet to another they may mean the difficulty of trying to hear over the ease of using ASL.
How an individual, their family, and their friends view CI's will effect how they see -- And treat -- Themselves and people they see wearing them.
Unfortunately people often do not realize that cars, CI's, etc are "just pieces of technology". Most people tend to ascribe meanings to these things and then they treat the "meanings" as
real.
The world needs more healthy minded people such as yourself -- Or at least people who recognize that "what it means to me, or to others, is not THE meaning."
Or: Meaning is in the mind of the beholder.
Bottensi