No reference is truly direct — every reference depends on some kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is.
Interpretation
References are influenced by underlying structures or codes, whether obvious or subtle.
Douglas Hofstadter's quote reflects on the nature of references and communication, suggesting that no reference exists in isolation. Instead, each reference is shaped by a system of understanding— a set of codes or conventions that may be either explicit or hidden. This highlights the complexity of language and meaning, emphasizing that much of our understanding is mediated by shared knowledge and frameworks that influence how we convey and interpret information.
In practice
In a lecture on semiotics, this quote can illustrate how meaning is constructed through reference systems.
You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.
For 13 to be unlucky would require there to be some kind of cosmic intelligence that counts things that humans count and that also makes certain things happen on certain dates or in certain places according to whether the number 13 'is involved' or not (whatever 'is involved' might mean).
I would proclaim that the vast majority of what [say, Scientific American] is true-yet my ability to defend such a claim is weaker than I would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast?
What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?
Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.
Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be unbelievable hocum, and relatively few are concerned with or thrilled by the astounding-yet true-facts of science, as put forth in the pages of, say, Scientific American.
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.
One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness – in communities, in institutions, among friends.
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
What the universal Church holds, not as instituted [invented] by councils but as something always held, is most correctly believed to have been handed down by apostolic authority. Since others respond for children, so that the celebration of the sacrament may be complete for them, it is certainly availing to them for their consecration, because they themselves are not able to respond.
Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided.
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