All meanings are by spoken or unspoken convention, by agreement and – being that every word or mind and context is foundationally dynamic – exist as saliences in distributed fields of communication. In the first few pages of “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”, Bertrand Russell raises an irreducible spectre (or is it an angel?) of circularity – where all definitions are made in terms of other definitions, endlessly and without closure or epistemological and ontological anchor or certainty. Language, any language, is indefinitely extensible – internally hyper-inflating as a consequence of this endemic, intrinsic extensibility.
At an abstract philosophical level, all words and shared concepts are what they are as a function of where (and how) they sit in a broader adaptive and reflexively self-defining, resonant abstract field of meaning and reference. Dignity as an innate human freedom and property or characteristic of self-determination is what it is and foundationally important in life, not because it is uncertain or of essentially fluid and representational entropy, but because it is precisely in those endless acts of self-definition and regenerative semantics that both we and our languages acquire purpose and freedom.
Daedelus Kite 