If word processors could know the words meanings...

If complex content get be built out of atomic pieces (of content?), how should the complex content become clear, ever?

I think about a word processor. The whole document becomes built out of words, and these out of letters. There is no machine understandable content attached to the words; the words remain just strings of letters. The machine has no idea about the meaning of these strings of letters nor of the sequences of words forming sentences and the whole document.

If at least the words had concepts attached, for a machine it might become much more simple to figure out the content of the whole document. Also since the words theirselves are somewhat related to each other by the underlaying grammar.

To get at least the content of the words accessible, an approach could be to integrate a request for explanation mechanism into the spell checker framework: If the content of the word typed-in is unknown, the user should explain it.

      
Updates: none so far

[Merged from (the now removed) ia: organizing notions:]

Many linguists consider words to be the building blocks of concepts, many philosophers think that concepts are built from constituent senses. But, still, we can go further, to the neurological basis of our understanding. At this point we have abstracted away from the meaning" — Source

First of all I think, that going to "the neorological basis" is not a step further from the senses, but a step back. I think, the senses are the base, since they connect a brain with its environment.

Secondary, i am not sure, whether that's really an abstraction of meaning, since: What's meaning. Have a look at Hilary Putnam. -- I thougth that for a while as well, but i am not sure on this anymore.<<

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Updates: 20070624: Tagged the posting. Updated the posting style (layout) to my current style, such as using blockquotes when appropriate. May/May not have removed my workaround for backlinks blogger.com didn't support in earlier times. Now, backlings are there, therefore the bypass can be dropped.