Christophe asked:

Why are questions about "meaning" addressed mostly by analysis of words and sentences?

It may be a consequence of the linguistic turn, but I believe that "meaning" does exists at levels of
evolution where there is no language.

(If you are interested, I had a try on a systemic approach on "meaning". See my short paper at
http://www.short-theory-meaning.fr.st/.)

============

Well, you're in luck! Bermudez just came out with a book on non-linguistic thinking: Bermudez, J. L.
(2003). Thinking without words.New York, NY, Oxford University Press. So there's a real treatise for
you to read. However, the idea of non-linguistic thought is actually not a new one in psychology, only,
for some bizarre reason, in philosophy (I think that it's because philosophers are almost exclusively
verbal thinkers and so literally cannot conceive of non-verbal thinking... I've had problems with that
attitude for a long time). Anyway, there's quite a lotabout nonverbal thinking in non-philosophical
arenas:

Arnheim, R. (1974). Art and visual perception: a psychology of the creative eye.Berkeley, CA,
University of California Press.

Clarke, E. F. (1993). "Generativity, mimesis and the human body in music performance."
Contemporary Music Review9 (1/2): 207-219.

Derrida, J. (1993). Memoirs of the blind: the self-portrait and other ruins.Chicago, The University of
Chicago Press.

Dienes, Z. and J. Perner (1999). "A theory of implicit and explicit knowledge." Behavioral and Brain
Sciences22 (735-808).

Goodman, N. (1976). Languages of art.Indianapolis, IN, Hackett Publishing Company.

Goodman, N. (1988). Ways of worldmaking.Indianapolis, IN, Hackett Publishing Company.

Herz, R. S. (1998). "An examination of objective and subjective measures of experience associated to
odors, music, and paintings." Empirical Studies of the Arts16(2): 137-152.

Kozbelt, A. (2001). "Artists as experts in visual cognition." Visual Cognition8 (6): 705-723.

Robinson, J. (1997). Music and meaning.Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.

Tsur, R. (2000). "Metaphor and figure-ground relationship: comparisons from poetry, music, and the
visual arts." PsyART: A Hyperlink Journal for Psychological Study of the Arts4.

and

Gendlin, E. (1991). Thinking beyond patterns: body, language, and situations.B. den Ouden and M.
Moen. New York, NY, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. 7: 22-152.

Gilovich, T., D. Griffin, et al., Eds. (2002). Heuristics and biases: the psychology of intuitive judgment.
New York, NY, Cambridge University Press.

Allen, C. and M. Bekoff (1997). Species of mind: the philosophy and biology of cognitive ethology.
Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press.

Midgley, M. (1995). Beast and man: the roots of human nature.New York, NY, Routledge.

Bickerton, D. (1990). Language and species.Chicago, IL, The University of Chicago Press.

Armstrong, D. F., W. C. Stokoe, et al. (1996). Gesture and the nature of language.Cambridge,
England, Cambridge University Press.

Grandin, T. (1995). Thinking in pictures: and other reports from my life with autism.New York, NY,
Vintage Books.

McNeill, D., Ed. (2000). Language and gesture. Language, culture and cognition.New York, NY,
Cambridge University Press.

These should indicate to you that you need not at all consider yourself in isolation.

Steven Ravett Brown