Your original statement means that someone (DBT in this case) cannot convince you that you meant something other than what you meant. You were referring to him trying to convince you that you meant something other than what you meant (although you formulated the statement in the present, which allows a bit of ambiguity and equivocation, but what you meant was that he could not convince you that you meant something other than what you meant). However, it is not necessarily true that DBT cannot convince you that you meant something other than what you meant.
No, agreed, it is not a necessary truth. That doesn't mean it isn't true though, merely that it isn't a logical necessity.
So the concept that you intend to convey is the concept you intend to convey. What about in situations in which the concept you intend to convey is slightly nebulous to you?
Say you mean something or someone, but can't exactly form the concept, either because you forget a piece of information (referent) or the concept itself is ill defined.
Then the intended meaning is something ill-defined. There's nothing particularly wrong with ill-defined concepts, and they see common usage. Indeed, once you get into some of the humanities, it becomes clear that some communication is intentionally not precisely defined, so as to communicate multiple concepts through its very ambiguity. A pun is the most obvious example, but you can get all sorts of double or triple meanings that are entirely intentional. e.g. From Shakespeare's
As You Like It
And hour by hour we ripe and ripe
And hour by hour we rot and rot
And thereby hangs a tale.
Whereby the speaker (a jester) is delivering a monologue on the evitable decay of humanity, commenting on the transitory nature of joy, but also trying to bring down his companions high spirits, and also making a joke about sex that actively undermines his own point (hour is pronounced whore, ripe is pronounced rape, rot is pronounced rut, and tale is pronounced tail - Elizabethan slang for the penis).
The point here is that the ambiguity is not a problem of poor definition or a shift in meaning, it's the entire point of the communication, and was intended, shifts in meaning over time and all, from the start.
However their very different senses of the mountain have the same reference - they are referring to the same physical object.
Know they aren't. They receive different photons, which have been emitted from the mountain at different times* in the mountains existence, when the electrons, protons, etc. that form the mountain have changed position ever so slightly. In fact, they are definitely looking at atoms that are in slightly different positions relative to that of the other observer (since observers have to be about 6 inches or 15 cm apart, which means that at the same point in spacetime, the 2 observers will be observing unique, albeit very similar, mountains). ....
That only holds true if you define an object in terms of your personal sensory experience, and reject the idea of an object existing independently of your observation of it. Given that this is an entire topic in itself, I'm reluctant to discuss it in detail, but it suffices to say that you can no more demonstrate a paradox in referring to objects by denying the existence of objects than you can demonstrate a paradox in intended meaning by denying the existence of meaning. You seem to be trying the same trick over again, and it doesn't work now any more than it worked before.
It's not a trick- it is physically impossible for 2 individuals to observe the exact same mountain.
That doesn't stop it being a trick. Irrespective of whether you consider two observations of, say, Mount Etna, to be observations of the same object, or observations of two different objects, you're still stuck with either objects being constant over time, or objects inevitably changing over time. If it's the former, there's no inconsistency in regarding objects as constant. If it's the latter, there is still no inconsistency - you've simply defined objects as being singular events. Someone referring to a constant object ('Look! There's Mount Etna') isn't being logically inconsistent - simply mistaken on the facts, and if the mountains somehow was trapped in a time bubble or otherwise insulated from the effects of entropy, then there would be nothing logically inconsistent in their referential world.
Again, you can't demonstrate that a sense/reference distinction with regards to objects is conceptually inconsistent by defining objects as never in practice being constant, any more than you can demonstrate a sense / reference distinction with regards to meaning being conceptually inconsistent by defining meaning out of existence. It's the same trick in each case, and it doesn't work in each case, because all you're really doing is playing with definitions until the object of the distinction disappears.
Like you said, it's another topic, and it might be more in the realm of natural science than philosophy.
I wouldn't have thought so. It's just a variation on Heraclitus' contention that you can't step into the same river twice. The mechanism and speed by which the natural world changes would be a matter for natural science, but whether this does or does not result in the mountain being classed as a different object each time you look at it is simply a matter of definition, and the meaning of terms.
I'm not particularly convinced by the idea that because objects changed, they can't be said to be the same objects. If nothing else, applied consistently, this would undermine the practice of science, since by the same token experiments can not be repeated - something will have changed between trials, no matter how small and insignificant. It would also render physical laws obsolete, since every set of conditions would be unique. In practice, if you adopt this view, then people would just grumble a bit, stick in something about all propositions laws and experiments to be subject to ignorable variations, and both scientists and philosophers would then carry on exactly as before.
Or, meaning can be relied upon in some cases, and not in others. Say, for example, that your thought that you mean what you mean is an illusion, but meaning itself is not. Don't think it's a pragmatic way of looking at things, but..
It's also not what 'relied upon' refers to. If it sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't, it's still not reliable. Unless you have a means of telling the two scenarios apart?
I don't. I don't see a problem with the following: I can rely upon my hammer to pull and pound nails, I cannot rely on it to connect to the internet, the hammer can be relied upon in some cases.
Sure, and I'm saying the reason the hammer remains reliable is that you can usefully distinguish between nails and an internet connection. If you couldn't, and you regularly came home to try and connect to your ISP by banging on your modem with a big hammer, you'd likely come to the conclusion that the hammer was an unreliable tool, and might even stop using it altogether.
In your suggestion of thought being an illusion, but meaning itself not being an illusion, you are creating a distinction between illusion (my thoughts) and not-illusion (meaning in the abstract). I'm a little concerned by this at first glance, since it would appear to set up a possible contradiction. What happens if I think about meaning in the abstract? In general I prefer to avoid the term 'illusion' like the plague, because it's got a lot of baggage and embedded assumptions in it, and often crops up as a place-holder for a category that doesn't make sense in practice.
Well no, of course not. That's why philosophy concentrates on how particular arguments are structured, and the logical constructions used, and pays less attention to the actual conclusion. Because the fact that conclusions are different is largely irrelevant compared to how it was you arrived at them, and whether the logic that brought you to that point is valid, sound, and based on agreed premises.
What about premises that either correspond to reality or not? What about ambiguous premises? Doesn't philosophy also encompass determining which premises are true?
Yes, but it's more concerned with what really follows from adopting particular premises, less so with definitive statements about what those premises are. It's more concerned with how you get there then what the answer is. It's like mathematics in that respect. The point is to come up with established tools and equivalencies that can be used to answer questions.
Obviously, along the way you may get some interesting ideas about what premises are true. The reason why philosophers and scientists often have differing views on what are likely and workable premises is because they tend to be faced with very different questions. For example, scientists tend to be impatient with Dualism, because it appears to divide the world into examinable and examinable categories for no good reason, and doesn't help them in any way with the problems they tend to deal with. Philosophers have a lot more time for it, in part because it allows a differing treatment of physical objects and mental constructions, which gives you a lot more flexibility when sorting out your categories and definitions.
But ultimately, a statement of whether mental events are the same or different from physical events is a matter of classification. It's only interesting in terms of the difference it makes to put them in the same category or different categories.
