A Linguistic Puzzle

Where, in ‘my tabletop is flat,’ is the meaning of that string of letters? Any meaning that it has must be read into it (it is not a string of magical sigils). You read those words, which are about the flatness of the table at which I am sitting, and perhaps you think of something like the tables that you know. You might think of such a thing being flat, and it being my table (whoever I really am). You get that string of letters, and you put your meanings into it. But the meaning of that phrase is, I think, the thought that I expressed with it, my thought that my tabletop is flat. And that is not the only mysterious thing about reading, of course. When we read something truly meaningful—e.g. a great novel—we do not seem to be getting out of it some rearrangement of what we already know. We seem to learn something about the world around us. Are we fooling ourselves?