It has been the life-long ambition of A. J. Greimas to analyze the nature of meaning, and in his work he has consistently described meaning as a felt experience, what he calls the "feeling of understanding." This essay examines the Greimassian investigation of meaning as experiential - which is to say sensational - as well as cognitive by analyzing, by means of Greimas's "semiotic square," P. M. S. Hacker's recent exploration of the relationship between sensation and cognition undertaken in terms of the semantics of ordinary-language philosophy. That is, the essay subjects what it calls " the illusion of immediacy" in ordinary-language philosophy to the systematic analysis of the " semantic formalism" of the semiotic square in order to demonstrate that the seeming "given" of ordinary language theory - the "logico-grammatical terrain and ... the conceptual landscape" that Hackers describes - can be profitably analyzed in terms of the interaction of semiotic constraints. It concludes by touching on the ways Greimassian semiotics is congruent with - and perhaps supported by - recent neurological understandings of sensate experience.
