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.
I ask no risen dust to teach me immortality; I am conscious of eternal life.
It seems to me that a man who can think straight along for forty-seven years without changing a single idea ought to be kept in a cabinet as a curiosity.
Art thou angry with him whose armpits stink? Art thou angry with him whose mouth smells foul?
When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.
Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore; Plain living and high thinking are no more.
I've come to the conclusion that mythology is really a form of archaeological psychology. Mythology gives you a sense of what a people believes, what they fear.
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