Is "Meaning" the Ghost in the Machine?

Is it the case that while words can be arbitrary, meanings - or propositions - can never be arbitrary?


"Meanings", it seems to me, are developed, constructed or drawn from "truth" in the sense that "truth" is the "conformity of the mind" to what really is "the case." (Which is an Aquinas meets Wittgenstein mashup.)

So, meanings are "discovered" outside of the "meaning being," which means that they are not invented by the "meaning being" and so cannot be arbitrary.

But meanings - or propositions - are not material entities. They can't be measured, weighed, scanned, seen or tested by the methods of science in themselves. As Etienne Gilson notes in "From Aristotle to Darwin & Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution."

"Since he himself is a material being, the knowledge of the scientist is assuredly tied to matter, but it is not matter.We have seen the face of Einstein, but have we seen his knowledge (savoir), his thought ceaselessly moving between two or more possible physical universes? We have heard his voice, which was sensible, but how is it that we have perceived the sense of the words he pronounced? If there is that which is knowable, and that which is known, then there is that which is immaterial, and since it is tied to our body, which is sensible, the knowable then exists in the sensible. There is a fact which constitutes one of the oldest constants of philosophy. The inevitability of Platonism, in its own right or mediated through Aristotle, comes visibly to the surface here. Since only knowledge could have conceived these things, matter then has the immaterial in it. Centuries, millennia of philosophical speculation have puzzled over the source from whence this immaterial could come. Aristotle replied before them, "From without." Translated: scientifically speaking, we do not know." (Gilson, 149)"

Without meanings or propositions, we couldn't do science. But, it seems, that (a) the most important aspect of science as a human enterprise is immaterial and (b) that most important aspect is an immaterial, metaphysical - perhaps even, supernatural - element planted right in the heart of our material universe.

Which should be a weird thought for anyone who believes that they are pure materialists.